Maximum Bob

Having got rid of all the Gh+stbusters hits (by deleting an image and strategically altering spelling, I got dropped from the search indexes), I’m now getting all the Myl+en Kl@ss searches. I feel another image deletion in the air.

I sometimes give images nonsense names that bear no relation, but I have to say it’s hard work being low profile.

In other news, Damien emailed me a link to an Entertainment Weekly article concerning an apology to fans from Tim Kring, producer of Heroes, which I wrote about not long ago. Kring’s apology is about the mess he’s been making of season 2, whereas it seems obvious to me that the problems with the show have been there from the beginning. What’s incredible, in the current TV climate, is that he gets to make all these mistakes, and admit them, and yet the show is still not cancelled.

This weekend saw the BBC broadcast of the 41st annual CMA awards. I must say, I miss the days when this show was reeled out at Christmas rather than broadcast (very late at night) in the same week (but not on the same night) as the awards themselves. It made good holiday viewing, and the dresses and hair were always entertaining. In those days, Vince Gill was generally the affable host of the show. In more recent years, it has been Brooks and Dunn. It was hard to tell from the edit, but this year it appeared to be a succession of different hosts at different stages of the show.

In recent years, the awards have been all about the newcomers who have arrived through various talent shows. So you get Miranda Lambert (Nashville Star winner); Carrie Underwood (American Idol season 4 winner); and Kellie Pickler (American Idol season 5 6th placer). Meanwhile, there’s not enough room on the stage for the stars who paid their dues in the old-fashioned way. Carrie Underwood got female vocalist of the year and single of the year. This is a problem for me, as I can’t bring myself to buy records by people who came from one of those shows.

I may get hold of the Horizon Award winner Taylor Swift’s album. Her performance was the most nervous of the night, but at least she got her break in Nashville by performing in local bars, not by entering a TV talent contest.

Apart from that, the main competition this year was to see which male star could pull his cowboy hat furthest over his head. The four nominees were: Dwight Yoakam, who has pulling his hat low to hide his bald spot for years; Kenney Chesney, who not only pulls his hat over his bald spot, but seems to have disastrous fashion sense*; Brad Paisley, whose hat was pulled so low he appeared to have difficulty seeing where he was going; and the bloke from Sugarland, who seemed to have chosen a novelty gay cowboy hat from a cheap fancy dress shop.

The winner was Kenny Chesney, who intrigues me because he strikes me as being genuinely neurotic and may actually be hiding something other than the fact that he’s bald. *He was wearing what my wife called “old man trousers”: a pair of baggy pleats (sagging round his arse, no belt) which didn’t seem to go with his expensive looking shirt or his hat, which was pulled so far over his eyes that you felt a Laurel and Hardy moment was in the offing. Any lower, and he’d be wearing the brim around his neck. He was sitting near Keith Urban, who was with Nicole Kidman, and Brad Paisley, who was with his wife Kimberly Williams(-Paisley). Surrounded by all that glamour, who did Chesney have with him? Certainly not his mysteriously cancelled ex- Renee Zellwegger. No, he had his mum. In those circumstances, you would pull your hat over your face, wouldn’t you? You’d say it was sweet, but the whole Kenny Chesney thing just wigs me out.

Didn’t see any sign of the Dixies, or Tim McGraw/Faith Hill, which was weird. Then again, you never know how much BBC2 has decided to show. They often exclude stuff I’d enjoy in order to focus on “people you might have heard on Radio 2″ like Allison “Potato Nose” Krauss.

Highlight of the night was Sugarland, who won Vocal Duo of the Year (which must have been a shock for Brooks and Dunn, who usually do). Jennifer Nettles’ performance of “Stay” was incredible.