Beeb tries in vain to lance Manuelgate Boyle

Doesn’t the licence-fee payer deserve Friday night entertainment without the disgraced Jonathan Ross?

Shamed by its tardy response to Manuelgate, the Beeb offers a compromise. Ross’s BBC One show will be replaced by a new series of the comedy showcase Live at the Apollo for the duration of his suspension. As a coup, the Beeb has signed up Frankie Boyle, the popular Scottish stand-up, to be the star guest on the first show.

Hang on, is this the same Frankie Boyle whose “disgracefully foul” joke about the Queen on Mock the Week sent moral guardians into a furore? And whose savage one-liners about rape, incest, paedophilia and disability offend sensitive audiences?

We try to call Frankie to ask how he plans to negotiate the censorious climate, but find that the BBC may have a new problem on its hands. “It doesn’t really suit Frankie to go on the first show,” says a source close to the star. “It’s something we will have to talk to the producers about.”

Wouldn’t it be easier just to get the newly penitent Wossy back?

Christopher Ciccone, Madonna’s less successful brother, has offered his analysis of big sis’s impending divorce. “I thought it wouldn’t last,” he tells tonight’s Five documentary Where Did It All Go Wrong?. “I thought it was an English thing she was going through. [Guy Ritchie] was generally a miserable guy and he got worse. The wedding was very scripted and very unpleasant and very big.”

Worryingly, he predicts that Madge will throw herself into a directing career to spite Guy. Say it ain’t so.

Could James Naughtie nab the Christmas No 1? The Today inquisitor has lent his sonorous tones to a new album by the platinum-selling pipers, the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards. Naughtie reads For the Fallen, the First World War poem penned by Laurence Binyon in 1914, over a musical background of a piper playing Flowers of the Forest. With the Guards still detained in Iraq, the piper was recorded at sunset at the end of the runway at the British military base in Basra. It’s Jim v The X Factor for the Yuletide hit.

The Face: Damon Albarn

It must be galling for the Gallagher brothers that each fresh venture dreamt up by their former nemesis is greeted with widespread acclaim. Tonight Damon Albarn launches a 30-show run of Monkey: Journey to the West, his Mandarin “popera” in a Chinese-themed big top next to the O2 Arena in East London.

Bored after Britpop battles with Oasis, the Blur frontman now directs his musical passions from the wings. The animated “virtual” group Gorillaz sold 15 million albums, while a visit to Mali led Albarn, 40, to create Africa Express, a rolling group to which the Londoner occasionally adds melodica.

Albarn hopes to take his Monkey yarn to China, and a film about ballet has been mooted. Fans wait in vain for a reunion of Blur, whose era-defining Parklife chronicled suburban British life.

Postscript

— Is there a limit to what you can do for charity? Apparently not. Katie Melua told fans in Bournemouth that Children in Need had received a £20,000 bid for a Melua-penned love song. She’s keen to have a stab at it but fears that she would struggle for inspiration because the bidder wants it to be about his business, a flooring company. More worryingly for her record company, perhaps, the song also has to be her next single.

— Mavis Staples, the Gospel legend, sends a reminder to Obama. “Staples has performed at inaugural events for John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter,” says a press release. We think she is free on January 20.

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