1. It hasn‘t got a release date yet, but it‘s going to be huge." Alison Howe Co–producer: Later with Jools Holland Strikingly, the musical content of the only unsponsored terrestrial TV series dedicated to rock and pop is less influenced by its host than either of the chat shows featured here: "Sometimes I will see something I try to get on," says Holland, "but the producers do a perfectly good job, so I leave it to them." This leaves Alison Howe, a former John Peel producer and – perhaps inevitably, given her previous occupation – Fall fan, one of the most powerful figures in music TV.

2. It is not only that an armada of unseaworthy dinghies, pointlessly criss–crossing one of the world‘s busiest shipping channels in order to pick up such French enthusiasts as prefer to take the pretty way to Gleneagles, represents nothing more than a collective, unsponsored version of sitting in a bath of baked beans (although, admittedly, no one has ever got swamped and died sitting in a bath of baked beans and the intervention of coastguards is rarely required). It also forms part of an array of stunts whose effect, instead of portraying debt reduction and aid to Africa as imperatives, could just as easily be to portray these themes as the vogueish wishful thinking of some thousands of young wristband–wearers.