Like most recovering addicts I’m pious but easily swayed. I quit watching Big Brother some years ago, cold turkey, just after the C4 Big Brother “Funeral”.

"The night's most enduring band – with Le Bon in Union Jack jacket – enter after a brief, bracing deluge"

Duran Duran are to represent musical talent from England at a concert marking the start of the Olympic Games.

“Man, I’m nervous,” admits Green Gartside, the notoriously stage shy Eighties pop star, before a faultless rendition of his perky paean to hip-hop “The Boom Boom Bap”, from 2006’s White Bread Black Beer.

Status Quo are swapping gold discs for the silver screen - by launching a movie career.

This is going to take some explaining, so bear with me. Pippin is a musical of bouncy, Seventies pop vintage, the score and lyrics by Stephen (Godspell; Wicked) Schwartz.

Duran Duran have postponed their European tour due to frontman Simon LeBon's ongoing voice problems.

Well, there I was finally planning my long-awaited Royal Wedding Special, when old misery guts himself Mr Morrissey has to go and bloody well stamp all over it!

Nick Valensi, guitarist for The Strokes, recently told Pitchfork (ind.pn/fQYH7L) that the fractured process of making the band's new album was "awful – just awful".

Eminem and Arctic Monkeys will headline this year's V Festival.

Economic forecasting has its place, of course, but for a more accurate guide to what is likely to happen in the year ahead, abookmaker can often be evenbetter. So to Paddy Power and its odds on the events of 2011. It has China at 10/11 favourite to be the world's fastest growing economy (followed by India, Russia and Brazil) and will offer you asgenerous a price as 6/1 on the eurozone managing GDP growth of more than 1.8 per cent this year. Note, too, that it is backing News Corp to get the go-ahead for the Sky takeover at 2/5 (or you can gamble on it getting a knock-back from regulators at 7/4).