I know it’s wrong to laugh at this, really I do. I know it’s cruel, bad Karma, and just downright mean. But it’s also incredibly funny.

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My favourite quotes from the dippy reporter, who is clearly engaging mouth before brain:

Can you reverse?

Yeah, she’s climbing on the roof for nothing.

…six feet of water that she could be stuck in…

Do you think you’d be able to see her if she was in six feet of water?

And then the multi-angle split-screen… it’s fab!

If you’re worried about the poor lady, the Sky News website says she was rescued shortly afterwards by someone in a 4×4.

Please, somebody tell me that this is joke.

We have a country bursting with fantastic artists and graphical designers – with even more young talent, who could have been employed to widen the scope of the benefit of the Olympics. There are, of course, also people who couldn’t design their way out of a paper bag and struggle to recolour an existing logo without it looking crap at the top of a blog post.

But instead of employing either of those sets of people, we seem to have plumped for Fun House’s graphics people, having sent them on a fact-finding mission to China. I assume that this means that the Olympics are to be ‘wacky’, involve lots of messy gunge, and will be presided over by the inimitable Pat Sharpe.

There’s no other explanation.

Edit: Over on the PM Blog, Ian comments that it looks like somebody giving oral sex. It’s so true, and so reminiscent of this.

There’s something worthy but slightly disturbing about this… A group of OAPs, lead by a nonagenarian, assaulting the pop charts to make the point that they, too, are people whose existence and emotions should not be forgotten.

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You can pre-order the single at sjhoward.co.uk/shop: It’s released on Monday – the same day as we’re all to be subjected to “A Song for Madeleine”, at 8am, on all commercial radio stations. I’m sure that’ll help.

Daytime soap Neighbours is moving from BBC One to Five – Quite a coup for the latter. But when I posted about this a while back, Lawrence reckoned it’d lose a lot of viewers if this happened. Will it?

Classic FM now has over half a million teenage listeners. Not all teenagers are heavy-metal pumping goths stalking the streets late at night with knives under their coats looking to jump old grannies.

Would anyone like to break the news to Mr Dacre? It’s have Mrs Lee-Potter turning in her grave.

A pretty unreliable source which is known for reprinting tabloid gossip without credit claims that the BBC has pulled out of negotiations to keep Neighbours after its latest offer was rejected. Will it work outside of its cosy BBC home, though? I’m not so sure.

Richard Littlejohn in last week’s Daily Mail:

How long before the ludicrous Faye Turney pops up on Celebrity Fat Club? I bet they didn’t let her get in the dinghy first. This is a woman who is capable of capsizing the Ark Royal if she shifts her weight to the wrong cheek.

This is the newspaper, remember, that claims to have endless respect for our armed forces and says they deserve nothing but the best.

The day Faye Turney sold her story to The Sun and Tonight With Trevor McDonald was the day the Navy died of shame.

Presumably, it wouldn’t be so shameful if she’d sold her story to the Daily Mail, who made her a huge offer for it.

How on Earth is this vitriolic rag one of Britain’s most successful ‘newspapers’? And what on Earth does that say about us as a nation? I dread to think.

Have you ever stayed in a cheap hotel and thought that the sheets didn’t seem quite as fresh and clean as you might hope? Well, under the great leadership of Mad Pat, you might get the same feeling in hospital.

The Times reports today that cleaners at Good Hope Hospital in Birmingham have been ordered to top-and-tail used sheets instead of using clean ones, to save 0.275p per sheet. Infection control clearly isn’t at the top of the agenda.

The NHS is crumbling. Florence Nightingale provided clean bedding for every patient over a hundred-and-fifty years ago. Yet, in the 21st century, the NHS can’t afford it. Patients are being put at unacceptable risks to fund NHS managers and bureaucracy, yet news programmes are more interested in the love life of a 24 year old socialite.

Only in Southport could a £154 inflation-beating year-on-year increase in pension payments be met with a full page complaint from a pensioner.

“Give me your channels!” / “No, you’re not having them!” / “I’m telling mum!”

For those of you who’ve been living on the moon for the last few months, Sky’s channels have been removed from the Virgin Media platform recently because the two companies have been unable to agree terms under which the channels should be carried. Virgin says that Sky’s requested price is too high, and is refusing to pay it. It also says that Sky ‘forced’ them to accept a low offer for carriage of it’s channels on Sky’s platform.

Now, Virgin is taking Sky to court over the dispute.

My solution? The judge should get Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch in the court, slap their legs, make them apologise, and sort out their differences.

This is the most ridiculous argument we’ve heard in a long time. This sort of dispute just wouldn’t happen in any other business sphere? Can you imagine Tesco refusing to stock Heinz beans because they were making too many demands about product placement in the store? No. Heinz beans, like Sky channels, are popular, so not selling them would damage Tesco. Equally, Tesco is an important retailer, as Virgin is an important platform, and not having their beans on sale there would damage Heinz. In psychology terms, it’s a simple choice between a vicious circle or a virtuous circle – and Virgin and Sky appear to be choosing the former.

This has not worked well for either of them. Virgin Media is unable to offer it’s customers the best service, and people have cancelled as a result. Sky’s channels are getting far fewer viewers – in fact, they’ve fallen out of the multichannel top five – damaging their advertising income. Both of them are being in terms of PR, and a court case will also be damaging to both of them – why on Earth would either of them want an investigation into a highly uncompetitive industry?

They need their heads banding together.

I no longer care whose fault this is. Just grow up and sort it out!