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Diary: All Wight on the night

High Street Ken
Tuesday 15 June 2010 00:00 BST
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The celebrity old guard was busy anointing its successors at the Isle of Wight Festival this weekend. Fresh from his undignified spat with Sir Patrick Stewart, James Corden found a fan in another ageing knight. Sir Paul McCartney asked the young comic to introduce his slot at the festival, only to find Corden too busy monopolising print and TV World Cup coverage to attend. He recorded a video instead. Elsewhere on the Wight site, our celebrity mole – yes, we have one of those – witnessed Florence Welch's shock at being accosted by Beyonce Knowles, who was keen to inform Flo that she's her biggest fan, and "honoured" to meet her. (Presumably the feeling's mutual.) Finally, Kate Moss flung herself in front of a cameraphone to capture her meeting with Dappy of N-Dubz, who somehow earns himself more mentions in the diary than anyone else. Kate missed the England match to see her favourite hip-hop controversialists play. So she even likes their music.

* Names of Bon Jovi bandmates we can recall: Jon Bon Jovi (easy); Richie Sambora (expert). Now add to that David Bryan, unassuming keyboard-tinkler and founder member, who this week missed his first Bon Jovi gig in three decades. Bryan took a day off from the band's 12-date residency at London's O2 on Sunday evening to jet home and accept three Tony Awards for Memphis, the musical he recently scored, including Best Original Score. Who'd have thought a Bon Jovi band member would have the camp credentials to pen a Broadway show? Oh.

* Ed "Bruiser" Balls continues his charm offensive with a Daily Mirror interview revealing he was bullied mercilessly at school. The words "bullying" and "Balls" already yield a selection of Google hits: one Tony Blair biography claims an abrasive encounter with Balls left the former PM feeling like "an abused and bullied wife", while Labour backbencher Barry Sheerman last year branded the then-Schools Secretary "a bit of a bully". The bullied becomes the bully: classic psychologicial cliché, no? "If you've been bullied, you wait for the day you can throw your weight around," says Phillip Hodson, Fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, who has worked with the Bruiser (and found him "charming"). "Ed has qualities that can be mistaken for bullying. He's very energetic, and insanely competitive. He's sometimes more concerned about winning than about the bigger picture, and gets up some people's noses because he's not aware he's irritating. If he's with people who don't stand up to him, he may not respect them; that's a trait of dominant type-A personalities. Robert Maxwell was the exemplar of that, but then he was a functioning psychopath." Balls also seems to suggest Labour would have won the election had Mr Darling listened to him about VAT, and Mr Brown taken his advice on immigration. Narcissistic personality disorder?

* Internal BBC management-speak proves impenetrable to its foreign staff, writes "World Desk Newsgathering Editor" Chris Booth on the corporation's College of Journalism blog. So the BBC Baghdad bureau has begun compiling a lexicon; some edited highlights follow. "Best practice": sometimes, but not always, a synonym for "common sense". "Cross-departmental stakeholders": interested parties, rather than annoyed vampire hunters. "Focused conversation": a bollocking, delivered with a thin smile over a cappuccino. "Contextualising sequences": library footage.

* Happily, it emerges this column has actual readers. Sadly, those readers have made themselves known only in order to point out a glaring error in Friday's edition. Writing a needlessly mean-spirited item about 72-year-old Gordon Banks – former England goalkeeper, Independent on Sunday columnist (whoops) and face of restaurant chain Gourmet Burger Kitchen – I described his famed save "from the boot of Brazil legend Pele". Said famed save was, of course, from Pele's (less alliteratively satisfying) head. Our most astute correspondents suspected this Robert Green-worthy linguistic fumble made me either too young to remember 1970, or a non-fan. At least one of the above is true.

highstreetken@independent.co.uk

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