Capello cojones

How to puncture a media storm with a few chosen words without being ruthless in 12 short minutes.

Fabio Capello has shown that the appointment of an international football manager is still more important than the allocation of a captain's armband, even in a media age where celebrity seems more often than not to trump experience.

Signor Capello has demonstrated who's in charge of Team England to the media, too. In the manner of his cooling with a tricky sexual imbroglio, he has defanged the wilder elements of the tabloid press; and England chances of doing well at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa have significantly improved as a result.

And John Terry is also very fortunate in his choice of mistress: Vanessa Perroncel has apparently come to the view that she will not sell her side of the story to the baying newsmob. Instead, given the range and scale of tabloid accusations (including the claim she has accepted money from Mr Terry for not kissing and telling), she has reportedly hired libel lawyers. The press may soon be receiving a red card send-off for an early bath.

The story has subsided back to a private family saga that John Terry and his wife, Toni, will have to negotiate, and a similar treading on eggshells for Mlle Perroncel and the father of her son, Wayne Bridge.

And Mr Terry's been beaten to the punch in launching a fashion label: one of his potential earning opportunities to be knocked on the head.

Me and my shadow

Celebrity lookalikes have gone viral on Facebook recently.

The next trend might be to post photos of people you don't look anything like, but have been taken for it the past.

I'll start the ball rolling: someone once thought I was Dennis Waterman (no chance); someone else took me for Christopher Walken (no, really); and a passing American tourist was once convinced I was actually Michael Douglas (huh).

But I did have a passing resemblance to Hazell actor, Nicholas Ball, when I was younger.

Gone and soon forgotten

It's not just creatures that become extinct, languages die too. Boa Sr, the last person fluent in the Bo language of the Andaman Islands, has died, taking with her -- believe it or not -- a verbal cultural history spanning 65,000 years of human existence.

Maybe languages need their own version of the IUCN Red List of threatened species to promote the transcribing of endangered mother tongues. Culture is the poorer for the dominance of a few world languages; the internet doesn't make this trend any easier to tackle.

And tourism to beautiful locations helps to shove indigenous language to the edge of the cliff.

The Clueless generation candidates

Exam cheating is up: various gadgets are being smuggled into exam rooms to give performance-enhancing boosts to test scores.

Mobile phones, Blackberrys and iPods are all being pressed into service in the cause of getting better grades.

But why penalise creative use of technology? Why not provide laptops, mobiles and the like to everyone -- like educators do in Finland -- to assess candidates' abilities to analyse, argue points of view and write coherently, rather than distill the exam experience down to an exercise of memory.

The internet instantly makes available more knowledge than any one person can ever know; we are all relative dunces in the digital age. Only Google can be a polymath. Communication of ideas, not parroting of the facts, is the real transferable skill for the 21st-century marketplace.

I've started, so I'll finish ...

The media reaction to Kajen Thuraaisingham's record low score on Mastermind of 5 points in total in two rounds has been interesting.

Along with Exeter University's 15 points in the 2009 series of University Challenge, Chase Simpson first question failure in the US version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and various Liverpudlian 'unintentional geniuses' on BBC Radio Merseyside's Hold Your Plums, Mr Thuraaisingham represents how Everyman might do on the show.

All are preserved for posterity, on YouTube and elsewhere, and are doomed to be remembered for their disastrous brushes with fame.

We laugh on the one hand at the quiz players' ineptitude; but realise, were we under the same spotlight, we may crumble with stage fright and achieve even lower scores. 'Rather them than me', we say to ourselves, while congratulating ourselves that we are not as stupid as they are.

The rise of the NITBY: Not In Thy Back Yard

Reigate farmer, Robert Fidler, is going to have to knock down his fortress and his mock-tudor house, built without planning permission on his green-belt farm.

A case of an Englishman's castle no longer being his home.

But think of the chaos that would result without urban planning laws. There would be no green space left for all the extensions, vanity mansions and second holiday homes. A cross between Los Angeles, Manhattan and Las Vegas, perhaps?

When the shui hits the feng

Tony Chan needs a consultation with himself after a devastating court judgment in Hong Kong. He'll need all his Feng Shui schtick to extricate himself from the deep doodoo of making a fraudulent claim on the £2.7 billion estate of his former lover, the property tycoon Mrs Nina Wang.

It's a case of 'the Dragon-King's temple being flooded' and 'a person needing a face as a tree needs bark': roughly translated, 'it's over' and 'his reputation's gone down the tube'.

Casting couched

Colin Firth has bemoaned the fact that openly gay actors don't get a proper look in. Straight thesps get to play central gay characters (e.g. A Single Man, Capote, Philadelphia, The Birdcage), but it's never the other way around.

Where actors have had successful careers in the theatre, film roles are however offered (e.g. Ian McKellern, Anthony Sher, Alan Cumming, Nathan Lane). Female actors tend to describe themselves as bi-sexual, perhaps as defence against the phone never ringing again (e.g. Drew Barrymore, Megan Fox, Angelina Jolie).

But casting a gay man as a heterosexual romantic lead would be tricky: not because of homophobia, rather movie economics. Not enough women would suspend their disbelief to imagine themselves in the arms of an openly gay actor.

In earlier times, before the tabloid press was quite so intrusive, gay stars could thrive. The likes of Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift, Dirk Bogarde, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich all benefited from a certain media deference to the stars.

The death of Rock Hudson from AIDS in 1985 marked a watershed. His career was reassessed in the rear-view mirror, and all those films with Doris Day etc. took on a different, more worldly complexion.

Somehow, hard though it is, it seems to be easier to be accepted as having a homosexual lifestyle as a singer, comedian or talk-show host (e.g. k d lang, Tracy Chapman, Rosie O'Donnell, Rhona Cameron, Sandi Toksvig, Ellen de Generes).

Going full circle, will straight actors give up gay roles without a fight, especially when Oscar nominations often seem up for grabs for such roles.

The Richard Thingummy Lecture

Sir Terry Pratchett delivered the 2010 Dimbleby lecture via his trusty sidekick, the actor Tony Robinson.

The irony of the speech was that although the content was Alzheimer's disease and assisted death, while Mr Robinson spoke for an hour from memory -- or at least no discernible autocue.

Sir Terry might soon go the whole Warhol/Hirst Factory route and get stunt scribblers to write his Discworld novels?

It's all a long way from Dimbleby senior's spaghetti harvest hoax, but maybe if you have Alzheimer's you would think it was true.

Westenders: Notting Hill on a screen near you

The real lives of ten 'contestants' living in Notting Hill, West London are to replace Big Brother in the Channel 4 schedules. The show, uncreatively enough, is to be called Notting Hill.

The gap between commissioning the series and broadcasting the programmes might feel like a victim of the economic crisis. Who will want to be watching the minutiae of a bunch of bankers, rich playboys and trophy wives, except to perhaps through rotten tomatoes at the screen.

Maybe it would be more authentic to film such a series elsewhere? Moss Side, Brixton and Handsworth have a ring to them, especially after the unrest of the 1980s that threatens to return with economic crisis at the present time.

But that would mean camera crews insurance premiums going through the roof, everything would have to be stapled to the ground (even in Notting Hill stuff may go missing) and production company executives would actually have to commute to work rather than roll out of bed to start filming.

Notting Hill could be an El Dorado experience rather than an Eastenders or Coronation Street. In fact, why don't they call it Westenders instead?