Steve Penk deploys the Osmonds

Steve Penk's The Revolution radio station isn't just there to encourage suicidal people to kill themselves.

Now, it's also the home of Donny Osmond.

Penk sees this as quite the feather in his cap:

Penk added that research on social media sites, such as Facebook, illustrated that Osmond has firm fans in the region - “the data clearly shows the people of the North West are the most passionate about Donny and his amazing forty-plus year career,” Penk opined.

Perhaps, Steve, but I think you'll find that's North West Utah, not North West England.

You have to wonder what the "data" Penk gathered from Facebook was - did he set up a 'People of Oldham who bought Crazy Horses page', counted up all the likes, and then compared it with 'People of Winterbourne Zelston who bought Crazy Horses'?

Still, while Penk might have searched Twitter to, uh, prove the business case, he's lucky that it doesn't look like Donny Googled 'Steve Penk'. Or his radio station, come to that.

Donny Osmond: It's alright, if you don't touch

With the Mormon church having poured money into getting gay marriage somehow illegal in California, you might be wondering what the highest-profile Mormon celebrity might be feeling. Naturally, Donny Osmond isn't going to upset his church, is he, opening a page on his website to explain his stance on gay people who consider themselves to be married. (Nice to see him approaching the question with an open mind.)

Don't run away with the idea that just because he feels he has the right to tell them what to do, he's in any way homophobic:

There are many gay individuals that are members of our church. I know many of them. In fact, some of my best friends are gay.

Of course some of your best friends are gay, Donny. We all know you're not having a go at individual people, just an amorphous 'other', right?

But how can you have gay people in church: doesn't that somehow threaten all that is holy?

You ask how I react regarding their marriages. Well, I do support our Church leaders who say that we can accept those with gay tendencies in our church as long as they do not act upon their temptations.

Aha! How generous. Providing you don't actually be gay, you're fine.

Everyone has tenancies to succumb to temptation, but we all have the same standard given to us by our Father in Heaven. Whether we may be tempted to be immoral with members of our own sex or of the opposite sex, we are expected to live chaste lives. This is very well explained not only in the Book of Mormon, but in the Bible as well.

Right. But let's say that someone chooses to live their lives by their own moral code, rather than a book that you might find in a drawer in a Courtyard by Marriott; what then, Donny?

We all determine for ourselves what is right and what is not right for our own lives and how we live God's commandments. I am not a judge and I will never judge anyone for the decisions they make unless they are causing harm to another individual. I love my friends, including my gay friends. We are all God's children. It is their choice, not mine on how they conduct their lives and choose to live the commandments according to the dictates of their own conscience.

That - although not actually answering the question about gay marriage - seems fair enough. Except Donny arrives at this conclusion after running this extract from a Mormon executive:

We warn that individuals who violate covenants of chastity, who abuse spouse or offspring, or who fail to fulfill family responsibilities will one day stand accountable before God. Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.

We call upon responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society.

So he seems to be saying if people want to get married, that's great, it's up to them, providing nobody else gets hurt... oh, which they will, because it will bring down calamities on the nations.

It's not so much that Osmond is happy to pretend he's friends with gays while actually suggesting that for them to fall in love is a security risk, it's that he tries to seem like he's reasonable while doing the equivalent of writing a post that says 'up to you' underneath a photo of a man holding a 'sodomites will kill us all'.

An uneven thing: The Diana concert

There were two signs that, for all the claims it was a 'prefect tribute', that the Diana concert fell short of capturing the imagination.

The first was that it was so short of top-grade talent Elton had to be dragged in to open and close it; the second was that the anchoring was done by Jamie Theakston and Claudia Winkelman. Clearly, the BBC felt that shunting an entire day of programming off BBC1 was its duty done, but it sent neither Huw Edwards, so it was an event of national significance, nor Jonathan Ross, so it wasn't a major entertainment event, either. They did have Fearne Cotton deployed to stand backstage going "wow... fantastic", like Cassie from Skins; but Cotton, for reasons we still don't understand, seems to be on every live TV event telling us how "amazing" everything is - she did the final of Make Me A Supermodel, so her presence hardly confers gravitas.

We're only human, so couldn't stand the whole thing, just dipping in across the day. With each peek, there was something totally different from what was going on before - some Classic FM style opera-light; Tom Jones beating up the Arctic Monkeys; Donny Osmond, Jason Donovan and that Lee bloke from Any Dream Will Do having a Hartnell-Troughton-Pertwee momen; Rod Stewart - who we missed, but did see Fearne attesting to to how "fantastic" he was. It's not an unprecedented mix - it's reminiscent of Radio 2's Sunday playlist from about a decade ago - but nobody was expected to sit through that lot from start to finish. And even they get Jonathan Ross to do presenting duties.

The end fell astonishingly flat - the delightful piano-playing princes came on and demonstrated all the ease and comfort when talking to the masses shown by their father (you'd better get used to this, William - you're going to be doing the State Opening of Parliament in a few years) did some mumbling and then, instead of a big finish, there was, erm, some cine film of Diana doing handstands as a child. "This is how she would want to be remembered" - flashing her knickers for the camera, apparently. I know the idea was to make us think of what a terrible waste such a photogenic and energetic life was snuffed out in such a terrible way, but I'm afraid the effect was more "private swimming pools and high-quality cine cameras in the 1960s - didn't exactly have a hard life, did she?" It was noticeable that people were filing out of Wembley before the end.

They didn't even give her brother a chance to do a reprise of his funeral rabble-rousing; instead, he was tucked away, far from the microphones. It was a miracle they didn't have him sitting in a cage of visual metaphor. He didn't look like he enjoyed it, either.