Cries & Whispers

AS CHAT-SHOWS go - which is not very far these days - Aspel and Company is not at all bad. Or wasn't, until last weekend. Seldom can the nation have had such an urge to kick in the television set as it did on Sunday night. Aspel's guests, announced in one salivating trailer after another, were Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis. It was only to be expected that they would have something to plug. Hollywood stars don't go on British chat-shows to talk about the weather. But in this case the plugging hit a new low.

The three men are backing a chain of theme restaurants whose name escapes me. They all came dressed as billboards. Stallone was wearing a logoed baseball jacket and carrying one too, which he immediately handed to Aspel, who accepted it with sad enthusiasm, evidently subscribing to the principle of better the bribe you can see than the one you can't. Schwarzenegger had a different logoed jacket, and a Hawaiian shirt which had been embossed with several of his establishment's pizzas. Willis wore a boiler suit, perhaps in order to feel part of all this plumbing of new depths, but still managed two logoes, one on his baseball cap, the other, winningly, on his left breast.

Celebrity interviews now routinely involve a contract. I don't know if Aspel and co signed one, but if he did, it wasn't hard to work out what it must have said. 'I promise to ask each man solemnly about the restaurant. I promise to laugh at his lame jokes. I promise to ask him about his next film. I promise to show a clip from said film, and if there is none available, I will be happy to show a trailer instead.' This happened in two cases out of three. So much for independent television.

On Monday a viewer lodged a complaint about the show with the Independent Television Commission, on the grounds that it had been 'surrreptitious advertising'. There was nothing surreptitious about it. And the show was a bore.

THE ARTS COUNCIL - dread words, as my colleague Wallace Arnold would say - is looking for a chairman, to succeed Lord Palumbo. It is reported to be having difficulty finding one. Lord Gowrie is believed to have said no. These lords are well and good, but I wonder if they are what is needed. Let's have a man, or woman, of the people. My nomination is Ian Botham. He's a proven entertainer, of prodigious energies, with wide experience of provincial theatre (Jack and the Beanstalk, The King and I), national television (A Question of Sport) and international relations (Australian sports crowds, Barbadian beauty-queens), and from the middle of September he'll be at a bit of a loose end.

NOW THAT the Monopolies and Mergers Commission has been called in, the Campaign may have achieved as much as it is going to. But there is always abroad. One of the music industry's defences of the pounds 15 CD was that it might cost you even more elsewhere in Europe. This is not much of a defence, but it is certainly true of the Irish Republic, where the typical full-price disc is nearer pounds 17 than pounds 15. Happily, Fianna Fail, the ruling party, is on the case. A spokesman rang to let me know that one of the party's TDs (MPs), Owen Ryan, is launching a campaign about it. There's always someone worse off than yourself. Even so, please don't pay full price if you can help it.