E4 Music:

The week ended in the Soho Hotel interviewing the cast of Guy Ritchie’s new film RocknRolla. I checked my public school accent at the door and swaggered into the hotel lobby, slipping an eel into the receptionist’s pocket and generally calling people ‘darlin’, ‘sunshine’ and ‘twinkle toes’. 

Upstairs Guy Ritchie was sweating, he’d heard Sarah Jane was in the building, which meant hard-hitting questions were on the way. Like Paxman in a dress she set about Ritchie with all the candour of Mike Tyson on a first date:

Have you ever bathed in anything other than water? BANG.
Have you ever used someone as furniture? BANG.

Ritchie didn’t know where to look, but SJ did…into his soul.  5 minutes later it was all over, Guy ran out of the room, broken. Reportedly his next project is a documentary on 5 likely lads breaking their way into the tea-bag industry, it’s called ‘Chamomile Nightmares.’ Look out for it.

Check out next week’s thrilling instalment of the E4 blog. Expect tea-drinking with the Pussycat Dolls, getting Estelle into bed and chatting to musician, poet and philosopher, Basshunter. I’ll leave you with some of his more thought-provoking lyrics from his seminal piece ‘Now You’re Gone’:

There’s an empty place in my heart
It won’t alarm me, it will break apart,
It won’t heal, it never fades away,
I’ll be thinking ‘bout you everyday.

Touché Basshunter, touché…

Fresh from their mauling at the hands of Russell Brand, the Jonas Brothers brought their purity rings to London for the opening of their film ‘Camp Rock’. Rather than being an ode to marble, [surely the campest of all the rocks] the film turns out to be a schmaltz-fest which makes High School Musical look like an edgy David Lynch number. 

Confronted by Grimshaw and a barrage of questions about marble [I wasn’t going to let the questions go to waste], the boys turned their phasers to ‘charm’ and by the time the interview was over I had a promise ring on each finger [9 in total, owing to a threshing mis-hap] and a Camp Rock T-Shirt knotted around my midriff. Expect to see a lot more of the Jo-Bro’s.

It’s amazing what a suitcase of cash and some incriminating polaroids will get you, this week it was the Kings of Leon. Caleb, Nathan, Matthew and Jared descended upon the studio in a blur of skinny jeans, stacked heels and incomprehensible accents. Our presenter Sarah Jane wo-manfully guessed at vowels and phonetics and picked out the following gems:

• THEIR MUM CUTS THEIR HAIR
• CALEB IS DATING LILY ALDRIDGE (“a plus size hand model” – Caleb Followill)
• CALEB AND NATHAN ARE VERY CAPABLE GOLFERS – as proved when they took on the E4 course and won.

Just as all good things must come to an end, the opposite is also true, and so we find ourselves at the beginning of another joyous E4 season, glistening with hope, promise and still glowing with pride having given 'Police, Camera, Action' a good kicking in the ratings.  

The new season kicked off in fine style at a warehouse in Hackney, the venue for our E4 reunion party. The boys standing at one end of the dancefloor, looking nervously at the girls at the other, whose hands were quietly locating the mace in their handbags. The smell of scotch eggs and sexual tension hung in the air.

AND THEN THE BANDS ARRIVED.

McFly, We Are Scientists, Cage the Elephant, Iglu and Hartly, Noah and the Whale and The Automatic all swaggered through the door, wearing hats, trousers, shoes and all the other trappings of being a band. I looked down at my purple and white dungarees (the E4 colours) and wondered whether my Mum had been entirely truthful when she said I had looked ‘cool’ that morning.   

One of the girls I had been entertaining with one of my anecdotes about sugarbeet, deliberately shut her hand in the door and excused herself so she could go and get some bandages. I saw her make a bee-line for Lemar who had just arrived, her already red hand throbbed as she laughed at one of his gags, probably about corn-rows.