Newsnight Review

Someone's accessed my dream blog by searching for Michael Owen Penis. Not Michael Owen's penis, but Michael Owen Penis. Ok, I did a post about Michael Owen, but not about the Michael Owen Penis, one of a range of FA approved vibrators. The Michael Owen goes down in the box, the Wayne Rooney shoots on sight, the David Beckham curls in from the right, the John Terry comes up from the back...

No, I have never mentioned Michael Owen and Penis in the same breath. Michael is affectionately known to us as 'little shit', ever since Cup Final Day in...oh who cares? We were sitting in the back garden and we heard our neighbour who doesn't talk to us loudly exclaim "You little shit!" as he scored for Liverpool against Arsenal. How we laughed. And now, when he plays for England, he's our little shit.

My cold's getting worse. I'm coughing uo what look like small baby frogs. And I'm back to work on Monday so I'm in a bad mood. So there'll be less for you to read here and less of my embarrassing comments on your blogs.

I know I was going to write about Status Quo's visit to Coronation Street, and their meeting with Les Battersby. But I now see the meeting for what it really is, a double anniversary celebration. ITV are 50. The Quo are 60. The Quo were delisted by BBC's Radio 1. ITV didn't get where they are today by delisting The Quo. So they cock a snook at the BBC. And ask Corrie's writers to somehow fit The Quo in during all the Shelley/Charlie business. To lighten things up. Ha Ha. I still love you Corrie, but please don't bring any more real life 'celebrities' to the Street. You're better than that.

So, Newsnight Review. Our favourite Friday night half-pissed wine goggles programme. Pretentious, nous?

This week's is a music special. The Scorcese Dylan documentary (no, not the Magic Roundabout one), an atonal opera version of Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, an updated version of the musical Hair, transplanting hippies to 2005...

And Franz Ferdinand. Who do not belong on Newsnight Review. They are a Pop Group. Mark Lawson, Grayson Perry, Paul Morley do not like Pop Music. They like Dylan, Cohen, and Joy Division. Pop Music belongs on Channel 4's Popworld. Where nothing is taken seriously. Which is how it should be.

But we're watching this programme mainly to see the novelist Lionel Shriver, whose name has been mud in our house for the past week. In last Saturday's Guardian, she was feeling guilty. White, middle class women of European ancestry like her, women with gene pools to die for, have let down the future of the human race by living in the present and not giving birth to extremely intelligent, white middle class children of European ancestry.

I want to see this intellect, this genetic superwoman, at work. What does she say about Franz Ferdinand?

"If you had played that album for me in 1972, uh, I don't think that I would've said, oh, you know, wow, is that from the future? I mean, it it it would've fit right in, and I, it wouldn't have especially stood out, either. It sounds so, you know, it's got elements of The Clash, but not so iconoclastic, it's obviously got strains of the Beatles...I've heard it."

1972? The Beatles? The Clash?
The Beatles? The Clash?
The Beatles? The Clash?...Franz Ferdinand?

Lionel, Lionel, Lionel. Stick to your books, you iconoclast, you.