If you didn’t see White Diamond last night, you missed it. In the cinema at least. It was a one-night-only showing of the film that documents Kylie’s return to the stage after winning her fight against breast cancer. It will be out on DVD in time for Christmas.

In the two hours it took to tell the story, the behind-the-scenes movie followed the diminutive singer across countless stages, whisked us around the world in private jets, took the audience with her as she met kids with cancer, and documented the strange husband and wife relationship she shares with the film’s director, William Baker, her stylist for longer than many real-life marriages last.

To say it gives you an insight into a Kylie we’ve not seen before would be taking things a little too far. There are no dirty secrets, no shocking revelations; nothing but more of the bubbly, endlessly endearing personality we know from countless hours of TV and stage appearances.

And perhaps that’s why The Times gave it two stars, claiming that Baker’s relationship with Minogue was too close for the film to be truly revealing. It’s right, of course, as you can’t help but come away with the feeling that the director was far too close to his subject for the film’s own good. So close, some times, that it could more accurately be described as ‘Will Baker: My Life with Kylie’.

Those points aside, it remains an entertaining and highly watchable film, particularly if you overlook Baker’s terrible interview technique, and the time passes quicker than you’d ever imagine. You come out feeling a little bit lifted, and slightly dazzled by the curious glittery, yet restrictive world in which she lives her life; slightly envious of her success, yet at the same time finally understanding the torment and isolation that fame can bring.

Two greats of radio and TV died yesterday, but while one received tributes on Radio 4, and will be highlighted in a special show tonight at 18h30, the other’s passing seems to have gone by relatively unnoticed.

Ned Sherrin, who died following complications with throat cancer, was probably better known for presenting Loose Ends for the last 20 years than he was for That Was The Week That Was, Up Pompeii or his theatre work in the west end. In that role he broke new talent across pretty much every field, and many big names should be grateful for the lucky first break he gave them.

But it was Ronnie Hazlehurst, who died in Guernsey following a stroke, who provided the soundtrack to so many a 70s and 80s childhood, and whose work will be best remembered and longest surviving.He was three times musical director of the Eurovision Song Contest, conducted the UK entry seven times (and the German entry once), and was responsible for some of the best-known theme tunes on British TV, counting Last of the Summer Wine, Blankety Blank, Are You Being Served, To the Manor Born, The Two Ronnies and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em to his name.

A name frequently tagged on to the end of a long run of programme credits, he rarely received the public recognition he deserved for the brilliance of his compositions. They may have sounded like nothing more than cheerful introductions, but they often had a hidden depth, as explained by the BBC:

The composer said he always tried to make the music fit the title of the programme - using a piccolo to spell out the title to Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em in Morse code. (Source: BBC News)

There’s only one thing you can say to that:

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Technorati Tags:bbc, ned sherrin, ronnie hazlehurst

The BBC has bought Lonely Planet. Not just a single guidebook to help research a coming series, but the whole lot. Books, websites, TV shows and all, though its commercial arm, BBC Worldwide. Reuters reckons it cost about £100m, which roughly roughly equates its profits last year.

It’s a logical fit, and great news for all involved. Both organisations pride themselves on their independence, and each has a great track record in producing the best in travel content (Palin and co from the BBC, and the only guides I ever trust from LP). It gives the BBC a hefty size-ten in the door of a market it has yet to exploit. For Lonely Planet it guarantees a future free from the advances of less appropriate suitors, and sees this multi-language publisher team up with an even more linguistically talented all-media champion.

The one who will benefit the most, though, is surely the end user. Both organisations have back catalogues second to none, and reputations to match, yet of greatest interest is their complimentary, non-competing activities. The BBC’s news gathering activities could (and should) revolutionise travel writing, bringing these guides the kind of geopolitical relevance to which they have always aspired, but somehow never quite attained. Lonely Planet’s enviable knowledge of local culture, meanwhile, will enrich the BBC’s online sites, broadening the appeal of its news content by placing stories within a context that simply can’t be conveyed within a 200-word report.

The challenge will be in deciding the extent to which the two content streams should be merged, if at all. BBC Worldwide is, after all, a commercial entity charged with making a profit. It can’t do by simply giving away Lonely Planet content. It is also quite distinct from the BBC’s domestic news and broadcast services, which are funded by the license payer, or the BBC World Service, which is funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

It’s early days, of course, and getting the two companies to work hand in hand, if that is indeed the plan, will take some time. It would be a missed opportunity if this was a purely financial transaction, but as a Brit who has grown up with the noble aims of the non-profit BBC it’s sometimes difficult to remember that BBC Worldwide is a semi-distinct entity with very different goals.

As such, the usual rules don’t always apply. More’s the pity.

The Eiffel Tower

Apple seems to take the Paris show far more seriously than London. I remember last year how there were Apple people here prowling the smaller stands to see what people were talking about. This year they’re even patrolling the press room. Admittedly not closely enough to see what you’re writing, but it’s interesting to see them there.

Unrelated to that, I also got offered £100 cash to attend a briefing today, taking place next month. That has to be ethically questionable. Fortunately it’s not core to what we cover, so it’s quite justifiable to turn it down on the grounds of relevance, rather than pointing out to the would-be briber than cash offers can only bring impartiality into question.

Paris has turned quite chilly, and I’ve pulled out the jumper I almost didn’t pack. I walked up to the Butte past M Collignon’s grocery to look out across the city, and acted as interpreter between a couple of Americans and their waiter. They were grumbling about the quality of their food, even though she was only having onion soup with chips, perhaps for dipping.

They did thank me, but they were intensely irritating so I had to leave, and ended up riding the metro down to Trocadero to try and take some pictures of the tower for something Al is working on back in the office. Unfortunately the keyring sellers were so proficient at walking into the shot that I couldn’t get the kind of pictures I needed and the image above, while entirely unsuitable, is the best of the bunch.

I’ve been to more than my fair share of launches over the last 12 years. Some lavish (first-class flights, a week in Japan, and dinner with a geisha); some not so (four journalists and two dozen product pushers at the London Dungeon - somewhere you don’t even want to head on a day out, never mind for work). There are few companies, though, who can put on a low-budget event in a nondescript location and have everyone - everyone - turn out to hear what they have to say.

At the moment I can think of only one. Apple.

Yesterday’s iPhone launch took place at the Apple Store on Regent Street. A shop. No being flown off somewhere exotic. It was as low-key as any Steve Jobs keynote, with just him and the CEO of O2 sitting on stools at the front of the room. No intro, either - Jobs just walked in, wearing his trademark black top and blue jeans, and started talking.

And no real news, either. That O2 had bagged the iPhone was the worst-kept secret in IT. All we really needed to know was the launch date and price, and we could have got that by email.

Yet everyone - everyone - was there. All the national newspapers. All the magazines and websites, no matter how tenuous their connection to all things Apple. Ranks and ranks of TV cameras, and even outside broadcast trucks so they could report back live to the studio that yes, as everyone knew, the iPhone is coming to the UK, and actually it’s not all that expensive.

There were even members of the general public outside the store (closed for the morning) pressing their cameras up to the windows to take pictures of us inside.

That Apple has achieved this is impressive and laudable, but I’d be surprised if anyone - even Apple itself - could really say why or how it’s happened. The company isn’t known for courting the press, and indeed it often seems that its interest is in maintaining a healthy distance than it is in keeping chummy.

For the moment, though, it makes it an exciting time to be working for a magazine whose main focus is that company’s products and customers, but the concern is whether Apple can maintain the momentum. Apple is undergoing a renaissance. These are its modern glory days, its second coming, but having seen the great players like Palm and Creative lose their one-time magnetic appeal, you have to wonder when - or if - the same thing will ever happen to Apple.

Under Jobs I doubt it will.

Ultimately, the Bourne Supremacy was a superior film.

A Year in the Merde was one of the funniest ‘Englishman abroad’ books for years. It started as a word-of-mouth self publishing project in Paris, that eventually found a publisher and then went word of mouth through the UK two or so years ago. I must know four people who have read it, which for anything other than Harry Potter is pretty good going.

So it was predictable that there should be a follow-up. Merde Actually it is.

The title is a pun (apparently) on Love Actually, the film, as it’s all about the fictional Paul West’s attempts to find love while opening his English tea room in a Parisian suburb. It’s an obscure link. Nonetheless, things start out well. His tales of courgette and fruit picking in the south, bad French driving and overbearing mothers in law are laugh out loud, but as he leaves the south and returns to Paris, things start to go awry. And not only in his fictional life.

It seems that Paris sucks all of the comedy out of the piece. The prose remains flowing, but the scenarios are plodding and dull, and although there are asides aplenty that do just enough to keep you wondering what might be coming up next, they are rarely delivered upon, and soon your interest in the central character is gone. For a book written in the first person, that’s a fairly serious problem.

I plodded to the end of it. My 20-page-a-day habit slowly declined to 10 and then five as it became little more than a time-filler while waiting for tubes, and by the last page I wasn’t sad to be putting it down for the last time.

Paul West should have been a one-book character, and Stephen Clark, his creator, should have turned his attentions to a new project rather than a follow-up or, if the money was too good to turn down, at least left his character out in the countryside where he was funnier and more endearing.

But then Mayle’s already done that one.

I’d give it two out of five, and that’s for the first third of the book. If it had been like the second half the whole way through it’s unlikely I’d have read it at all.

The BBC launched the iPlayer today. After months of user testing (or non-testing in my case, since I was sent a beta test invite some months back but have yet to take it up), it reckons it’s ready to go. Roll-out will be carefully managed, and ramped so that progressively more applicants gain to the service over time.

It’s already been well publicised (and well debated and well criticised) that the system needs Windows XP to run. Open-source advocates, Mac users, Microsoft critics and Vista users have bemoaned the fact that for the moment they’re all locked out, despite being license fee payers, and the BBC has promised to include one and all just as soon as it can.

But what about those of us who have no licence at all? I don’t have a TV in the house to which I’m moving, which annoys the fee collectors no end, to the extent that they sent out investigators to bang on my door and check I wasn’t lying.

They went away disappointed.

So if the iPlayer blocks access to viewers outside the UK, who can’t possibly have a licence, should it also block access to me? Am I any different to an Australian, who can listen to BBC radio, but shouldn’t really be watching BBC TV?

Maybe.

But what I’d rather see is a levelling of the playing field, whereby anyone, anywhere in the world can buy a licence and watch TV through the iPlayer. It would provide a massive, welcome boost to the BBC’s coffers, which could be ploughed back into programmes like Coast, How We Built Britain and The Proms.

Programmes like these would the iPlayer an invaluable asset in an online world otherwise dominated by the 30-second frippery of YouTube.

Jane Austen would have trouble finding a publisher today, says Reuters, completely missing the fact that, actually, she has plenty of publishers, as her books have probably never been more easily available than they are today.

But you can see their logic. Struggling writer David Lassman sent copies of several Austen chapters to 18 different publishers, changing nothing but the book titles and character names. 17 of them rejected it out of hand. The 18th told him to try writing less like Jane Austen.

You can read what you want into the first 17 rejections, but they prove nothing beyond the fact that Austen just isn’t what publishers want these days. I’d guess that at least half of the rejections were on that basis alone, and the other half were probably thrown on the slush pile because the guardians of our nation’s literary output recognised them for what they were: poorly-disguised plagiarism.

18 out of 18 rejections, 17 of them out of hand, proves that our nation’s publishers are serving their employers - and us, the reading public - well. There was a time and a place for Austen. Roughly from the day she was born to the day she died.

Yet her body of written work lives on, as it teaches us as much about the social mores of the times during which it was written as it does about the kind of people who used to read it. But expecting a modern-day publisher to pick up and run with with Emma or Northanger Abbey is naive at the least, and could well show why Lassman’s own book remains unpublished.

What a shame. As a 10-year publishing phenomenon reaches its climax it’s been turned into nothing more than a supermarket price war.

This morning, or just after midnight last night to be accurate, the final volume in the seven-book Harry Potter saga went on sale, and his journey came to what Rowling called a pretty clear conclusion.

But the real story for media watchers is how the closing of the series has robbed publisher Bloomsbury of the clout it once had with the retail outlets. Throughout the life of the series it has been able to dictate on-sale dates and apply strict embargoes to which the publishers would stick. They did it ostensibly for the good of the reading public and avoid spoiling kids’ enjoyments of the fairly predictable surprises, but we all know that the real reason they’ve complied is that they’ve been terrified they might be robbed of the chance to sell the next instalment.

Well now there is no ‘next instalment’, and while nobody has broken the embargo - on this side of the Atlantic, at least - they are playing dirty on the price, using the book as a loss-leader to drag customers into their stores.

Bloomsbury sells it wholesale at a little over