Money, Money, Money

Listen up folks because I’m going to give you a sure fire tip this week on how to make money. Guaranteed!

But first, say what you like about the X Factor, and I frequently do, it does turn kids on to great songs they would otherwise know nothing about. I’ve just walked in on my sixteen year old daughter downloading Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse Of The Heart. The last time Bonnie was fashionable Moses was giving swimming lessons in the Red Sea, and I guess modern poseurs would rather own up to downloading naked photos of Alan Tichmarsh than her tunes.

But thanks To the X Factor, according to my kids their dad’s record collection is hip again, apart from my Stars On 45 albums which will have to wait a few years yet – say till hell freezes over or Simon Cowell shops in Primark.

On X Factor in the past two weeks they’ve been singing Bonnie’s songs alongside Bob Dylan’s stuff as done by Adele, and even some tunes by Kim Wilde. I’ve never met Bob Dylan, though I have met Adele, Bonnie Tyler and Kim Wilde, so whenever an oldie becomes fashionable again my kids ask if I have a personal anecdote about the singer they can take in to school. I’m their own Google for embarrassing stories.

I wasn’t sure whether to share with them the true story of meeting Bonnie Tyler in a busy club where she greeted me by lifting up her T shirt up to show the bare chest she was so proud of. I later discovered she did this a lot as her party trick. I wondered whether to tell them about Kim Wilde believing in flying saucers, or that Adele told me the songs she wrote after her last big album were so bad she won’t ever let anyone hear them? In the end I made up some harmless stories and my kids went away happy.

I’m pleased that they seem to have a healthy distrust of celebrity hype and know a PR stunt when they see one. This week I overheard one of them expressing surprise at all the publicity surrounding Prince William and Kate Middleton’s engagement. To them it’s just a balding bloke marrying posh totty, and they genuinely can’t understand why it makes the newspapers. Sure, they were excited when Cheryl Cole said recently that she’d passed her tests at school, but they’re also cynical enough to say it was probably eye tests.

So, when we all get that public holiday for the new royal wedding, my youngsters, and I guess millions more, will be ignoring the marriage of the pretend pilot and the unemployed girl with the long hair and instead spend the day downloading songs.

Which is fine, but I’d rather they were out earning money. And this brings me to where we started. A cast iron way of earning money.

William and Kate are getting married in a hurry because they’ve been told London cannot cope with a third major event in 2012 as we already have the Olympics and also The Queens Diamond Jubilee to contend with. And here’s another thing, there’s going to be a real shortage of something. Is it public transport? Police? Security barriers? No. It’s mobile toilets.

Seriously, London does not have enough toilet facilities to cope with the tourists who will flock to see the Games and the Jubilee in two years’ time.

So, if you want to make money, buy up every single Portaloo you can find, or start making some in your back garden now. Maybe Blue Peter can do a piece on how to make one out of washing up bottles and doilies. In two years time you will be able to charge whatever you want for them and make a fortune.

Mind you I’m not sure what we do with a mountain of portable toilets after the festivities. Perhaps a belated wedding present for the happy couple? That’s a lot of thrones to sit on.

I Go Ape

I sang a duet with multiple Grammy award winner Neil Sedaka this week.

As he has a new musical about his life story being premiered I was lucky enough to meet and interview him again and, as we chatted afterwards, I mentioned a favourite song of mine that he’d written years ago. Unfortunately it’s not a song he sings often and he’d forgotten the words, so I sang them for him and his eyes lit up as he joined in. Of course I should have told him to butt out, one singer one song and all that, but I figured “well if he’s enjoying it let him have his moment”. Having duetted with Elton John, Carole King and others, he probably saw this as something his career had been building towards.

Over the years many have fought to sing with me – at least I think they have as fighting usually breaks out when I sing - and I’ve lost count of the number of times folk have shouted at me the title of that classic Joe Dolce song “Shaddup Ya Face”, presumably expecting me to burst in to song with them. Simon Cowell even told me I could win the X Factor and he rated my voice. Actually, what he said was “your voice is X rated”, but I knew what he meant.

Whoever is behind the publicity for Cowell’s various money making projects is doing their job too well just now as I’m suffering from Cowell fatigue every time I look in the papers or on television. Even his partners in crime are so horribly over exposed that I find myself wishing Piers Morgan would join all the other great British piers and catch fire before falling in to the sea.

Then there’s Cheryl and Ashley, toughening it out in their Cole bunker and only coming out when there’s an emergency like an album to plug or a party to attend. As journalists try to unearth ever more dirt on them they make it impossible for me to go anywhere without wanting to scream for sanity, and I cannot bear Brat King Cole and his missus any more.

That’s why I was delighted this week to come across a web site called Happy News Dot Com. It sets out to show only the good news from around the world, and this week it featured the warming tale of Grace Groner, an American lady who died aged 100. She had lived all her life in a tiny house and bought all her clothes from car boot sales yet, in her will this week, she left her former college a surprise seven million dollars.

Then there was the story of two eight year old boys in Australia who saved a man from drowning, a diver who wrestled a Frisbee ring from around a suffocating shark’s throat, and the tale of a dog collar and lead, billed as “once belonging to Charles Dickens”, being auctioned off for twelve thousand dollars. I’m hoping that it actually belonged to Charles Dickens’s dog rather than to the writer himself.

But no matter how hard I looked amongst the good news stories, I couldn’t see any sign of my duet with Neil Sedaka. I should email them with the background and suggest an uplifting headline like “Old Man Made Very Happy”.

Or perhaps I’m being selfish. Maybe the headline should be about Sedaka instead of me.