Slackhurst Broadcasting

Having difficulty with the heatwave, apparently. She'd be all right here.

He didn't tell the truth in that interview? Hold the front page!

The BBC are laying the mental health angle on a bit thick. I think eventually the story will go from being scandalous to being laughable in the public mind.

I wouldn't mind escaping Britain for France myself, but Milan Kundera's best-known books were those he wrote in Czech and which dealt with events there. It's natural he should be thought of as a Czech writer.

Can't find anything about it on the BBC website, where the top story in "Culture" is Jeremy Vine saying the BBC presenter should come forward and fall on his sword, presumably tripped up by having his trousers and underpants round his ankles. But here's a song inspired by Milan Kundera...

These things are relative in many ways. To a 17-year-old anyone over 30 seems middle-aged. But objectively, how many BBC presenters aren't more or less middle-aged, especially the male ones?

Apparently there are pictures of the presenter en déshabille, and the mother learned what was going on when the kid showed them to her. That's a very strange relationship too. What kind of teenager who has a sexual encounter with a middle-aged man shows pictures of it to their mother? Re them meeting up, they might have got into contact online, but if it had just stayed online, it seems improbable that the presenter would have handed out £1000 at a time for the kid's virtual company.

That is more likely than them being photographed in the same room together, I guess. And if the Sun had pictures of say Huw Edwards in his underwear (a ghastly enough thought in itself) with a teenage boy, would they need to avoid naming names? But if the presenter didn't actually meet the kid at some time, how did the whole thing begin?

The BBC are now referring to the presenter as "he." Also he was in the pictures himself, apparently in his underwear and "ready for my child to perform for him," as the Sun quotes the mother.

That might be the least of his worries.

The question now is will Patricia Krenwinkel get parole in a few years?

Isn't the guilty man supposed to be closeted? Imagine if it came out that Graham Norton was secretly heterosexual. I'm puzzled as to why anyone would pay thousands of pounds for nude pictures of some teenager. Who's the kid? How did the presenter come to know them? In the pictures, is some kind of sexual deviation being catered for? The kid's supposed to be a drug addict, did the presenter share/introduce them to it? When the name comes out, will our presenter be going to jail?

Monte Cazzaza, American performance artist and associate of Throbbing Gristle.

I thought her mum died at 62? But might be wrong.

I wonder if it's true about the bacterial infection. There have been stories that she's become heavily reliant on painkillers. She's also about the same age as her mother was when she had cancer.

Very probably she felt like a prayer.

That the Sun stories he won a libel action over in the Eighties were true, or something like it?

With John Romita gone I think that leaves Roy Thomas (b.1940) as the last survivor from Marvel's "Bullpen" of the Sixties. Later: I was wrong about that. There's still Jim Steranko (b.1937) who took over Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD and turned it into a key example of Sixties psychedelic excess. Also Barry Windsor-Smith (b.1949), whose early Marvel work as "Barry Smith" also verged on the psychedelic, but where Steranko was highly polished, Smith was crude. (Early on, he tended to draw people as though their skulls were shaped like lightbulbs.) He was very young at the time though.

Suppose a thread was moved off topic and the subject died the next week?

Gary Lineker was also a top footballer, which goes with the point about others not having evident talents.

The presenters of these shows all seem to be horrible people who hate each other. It sits oddly with the shows' intended image:

I once heard that Grant Bovey's wife, who he ditched to go off with Anthea Turner, had been telling people at a party that Anthea was a hermaphrodite.

Margit Carstensen, German actress, dead at 83. One of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's regular players.

Network closing is depressing news, but it's been on the cards for some time. But they had a long run and put out a ton of worthwhile stuff - indeed I think part of the problem of the last few years was that they'd already done so many of the best-remembered 60s-70s shows, so there wasn't the former space for a balance between likely sellers and more obscure titles.

Pretty sure Jean-Luc Godard is the only deathlister who's committed suicide, and that was assisted suicide rather than the overdose or shotgun kind.