Well, at least we now know who is writing the lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new song for Eurovision: Grammy-award winning American songwriter Diane Warren, author of so many hit songs for Celine Dion and Michael Bolton that I can’t remember a single one of them.

This is all very confusing. I thought this was a patriotic exercise. So what has Diane Warren got to do with a British entry for the contest? Surely Andrew could have drafted in Don Black or Charles Hart or, failing them, Tim Rice.

ALW still doesn’t know what sort of song he’s going to write, though I would put good money on us ending up with a power ballad for Jade, sexed up with dancing girls and a big fruity orchestration.

Saturday’s episode of Your Country Needs You whittled out the lounge singer, Damien, which was rather a shame, as he had a nice sand-papered voice and a modestly louche manner that could have been developed.

Which leaves us with the ingratiating Emperors of Soul, the cry baby twins from Sheffield, smiley Mark from the Bromley pantomime and sweet seventeen year-old Charlotte whose pronounced lisp magically disappears when she sings. Yes, it’s gonna have to be Jade, folks, but I hope she doesn’t turn into Shirley Bassey in a couple of weeks.

Andrew was joined on the expert sofa by Arlene Phillips — who’s doing more judging these days than a full-time critic — and Lulu. They made a somewhat terrifying trio with their dyed hair and face lifts, but everything they said made good sense.   

And the programme itself was brilliantly produced, well up to the standard of the previous BBC audition shows. Nigel Wright is once again the superb musical director, and the staging of the contestants’ numbers in a studio arranged to combine elements of arena theatre and Top of the Pops was terrific.

There’s a big challenge looming for ALW this week when they get to the all-girls and all-boys items. As Mark is now left to slug it out at that point with the Emperors, the show must not make him look like a fifth token white Emperor, nor the Emperors look like his backing group.

The Ian Dury show, Hit Me! — which incidentally reveals the hitherto unknown fact that ALW asked Ian Dury to write lyrics for Cats (new one on me, squire; I thought the lyricist was T S Eliot) — has run into big trouble before opening tomorrow.

Jud Charlton, who played Dury to some acclaim at last year’s Edinburgh Festival fringe, has been replaced by the brilliant RSC actor Adrian Schiller, after a huge row about the involvement of Chris Langham as a script doctor on Jeff Merrifield’s play.

That play was generally thought to be thin, so to have Langham, an old friend of Ken Campbell acolyte Merrifield on board for some fine tuning sounds like a sensible idea. But acrimony entered, Jud was sacked and he’s now made things worse by running to the media via the loathsome Max Clifford to stir up a row over Langham’s status as a registered sex offender after being prosecuted for downloading child pornography.

It is a grisly little storm in a teacup and matters haven’t been made any better by two national critics breaking the embargo and publishing reviews of the show at the weekend in advance of the opening.

The proof will be in the pudding, and I feel sorry for Jud Charlton. But I feel a lot sorrier for Chris Langham, and it was dismal of Jud to start mud-slinging when the disgraced comedy genius has served his term and paid a heavy price. Dury would not have been amused by all this, as the jejune Observer pop critic remarks; he would have been appalled.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 10:06 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.