Snow Patrol - Crack The Shutters - Royal Albert Hall 24/11/09

Snow Patrol - Crack The Shutters - Royal Albert Hall 24/11/09

Testing YouTube to my blog with Snow Patrol, Crack The Shutters from the magical evening at The Royal Albert Hall

The Diminishing Of A Star

A couple of weeks ago I was sat at home rather bored, monitoring Twitter when it occurred to me that Jonathan Ross who tweets under the name @Wossy had been a bit quiet of late. His wife disappeared off the face of Twitter quite some time ago but @Wossy was one of the key people, along with Stephen Fry and later Philip Schofield, in encouraging the rapid take-up amongst the UK showbiz/comedy circuit of Twitter. So I looked at his profile, spotted he had made recent posts I had obviously missed but more strangely it seemed I was not following him. This was most irregular, I must have made a false click of the mouse on a previous tweet, so I clicked the Follow button to return him to normal service. Lo and behold I had been blocked!

This was rather disconcerting. I had been a fan for years. I had praised his Radio 2 Saturday morning show in company on more than one occasion, I had stood up for him throughout the Sachsgate saga, felt his pain and defended, as much as was possible, his actions. Sheer brilliance wouldn't be sheer brilliance if it didn't go off the rails from time to time was the gist of my defence of his behaviour. I was once on the verge of tweeting him about his constant cajoling of 4 Poofs And A Piano with comments bordering on the homophobic but decided it was between consenting adults and I often guffawed at the choicer jokes anyway so that would have been pure hypocrisy.

But what had I done to offend this possible future knight of the British entertainment establishment?

Well there was the moment at Live 8 when he introduced the Italian concert from "Wome" and I immediately shouted out "Wome, where's Wome?" to the obvious enjoyment of 50 or so people around me in the enormous crowd. I could be identified from my inflatable pink pig which had later appeared with me on my TwitPic account but I suspect @Wossy never heard my joke being about a mile away from me on the stage.

I had made a couple of comments on Twitter about the appearance on every series of his Friday night talk show of Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais. Somebody on Popbitch less kind than me had suggested they were linked to the same agent but I kept this to myself.

Today it dawned on me. Back in September @Wossy launched the latest series of his chat show and included an interview with Jamie Oliver. Jamie has good comedy value for his supposed mockney character, despite being a genuine Essex boy, but equally he says some very interesting stuff. Unfortunately @Wossy was obviously suffering from being off our screens for a while and had his worst ever outbreak of interrupting the interviewee to make a gag then changing the subject, @Wossy duly laughed with, rather than allow the interviewee to continue the story that merited the question in the first place. I genuinely wanted to know the answer to a couple of questions so decided to ask Jamie himself.

There was one story he told about his daughter wanting a skateboard, so rather than just give her one he insisted she learn the names of and identify by sight all 25 herbs in a patch in his garden. Just as we were about to find out the outcome @wossy interjected, cracked a joke to further @Wossy and we never knew if Oliver Jr achieved her tough target. So I asked Jamie pointing out that @Wossy had interrupted him and, being a gent on Twitter, he later replied :

@gashead yes daisy did learn all 25 herbs from the garden by look and by smell nd she did get the skate board i have to up the anti now jox

Result, curiosity satisfied and a shiny celebrity reply, much craved by many on Twitter to validate their very existence and make cleaning other people's toilets or whatever their miserable day job entails less of a chore. So I asked another question :

@jamie_oliver What were you going to say about 15 in relation to your 19th century relative who fed the poor? @Wossy interrupted again.

and to the best of my knowledge my timeline hasn't been troubled by a tweet from @Wossy since then. What a sad, petty thing to do. I was using Twitter to enhance the viewer experience of his show by asking an interviewee to finish what @Wossy didn't let him complete. No harm in that, benefits to be derived and it was all said in fun. But maybe the world is only allowed to laugh with him, not at him, unless you're Ricky Gervais or Jimmy Carr of course.

IFPI/Cheryl Cole vs Gashead

Last Thursday I went to the most excellent Children In Need Rocks The Royal Albert Hall concert and carried on my usual habit of videoing some of the concert for fans to enjoy on YouTube. By this morning I had over 120,000 views of my videos and apart from the usual flame wars in one particular video's comments the fans were happy and grateful.

This afternoon a notice appeared against my recording of Cheryl Cole's Fight For This Love telling me it was no longer available due to a copyright breach.

Sanction 1:

Cheryl Cole - Fight For This Love - RAH 12/11/09 - (alistairburns)
Video ID: sdnl4C8a-98
Removed due to a copyright claim by IFPI on 16 November 2009

Moreover my account was no longer in good standing, 2 more strikes and I could be out! Of course there is a laughable side to this in that when Cheryl performed the same song "live" on X Factor she announced in advance that she would be performing to a pre-recorded vocal. I didn't watch my video in any great detail as it was a bit out of focus and I missed the beginning but several comments noted that this appeared to be far from a live performance. From what I know about YouTube's AudioID the soundtrack must have flagged up as an exact match to the original studio recording. Rumbled by themselves LOL etc!

However this does pose a danger to me if I ever happen to record 2 more performances using a pre-recorded music track as YouTube say "Accumulation of three strikes may result in the termination of your account."

Proper live performers seem to have no difficulties with my many recordings of their performances. Two examples. Editors' official forum asked me if I would be kind enough to let them link to my recordings of their concert at Fabric despite it being their copyright. The great Mike Tobin manager of Stackridge contacted me and asked if I could make my Glastonbury 2008 recordings available to the fans with reasonable costs paid to me, I made them available on the understanding a donation would be made to Air Ambulance.

Even megabuck stars like Coldplay, U2 and The Killers have given me no grief whatsoever for videos I have posted. In fact I posted an ENTIRE Killers concert to YouTube 4 months before it was released on DVD. I suppose I should have expected the first grief to come from the record company of an artist associated with X Factor.

p.s. Cheryl I love you! Your performance here, while it lasts on YouTube, was a very pleasant surprise. Shame your record company are threatening my sharing of live music with fans on YouTube

2-4-6-8 Motorway - Road trains get ready to roll

2, 4, 6 or 8 vehicles linked on a motorway? Who better for the job than "Tom Robinson, project co-ordinator at engineering firm Ricardo"

BBC NEWS | Technology | Road trains get ready to roll.