World Exclusive! England on song, on Newsnight
- 7 Jun 06, 09:37 PM
Stand by for a genuine world exclusive on Newsnight (Wed 2230GMT). Never mind our 24 hour news colleagues who have been hanging around a hospital worrying about some bloke and his metatarsal - we have vintage footage, never seen before, of the classic 1966 England Cup Winning Team singing a, characteristically awful, football song. Plus we have decided to have a go at the West Lothian question - our colleagues on Newsnight Scotland are threatening to come and dig up our turf and swing from our goalposts. And I'll be number crunching the NHS deficit (or as the Audit Commission calls it, the NHS England).
I was at the Orange Prize ceremony last night to see Zadie Smith win for her new book "On Beauty". The crowd was young, trendy, not particularly metropolitan and - this being a women's fiction prize - mainly female. It struck me, and some of my acquaintances in the book trade, that fiction has managed to do what so much in high culture has failed to do: revitalise its audience. 