Not great Brits

In Mondays paper, I gave three cheers for the team producing the Brits, and the way they have raised pounds 300,000 for the Brits school, and sold the televised proceedings abroad. After attending the pounds 325-a-head, pounds 4-a-beer jamboree I now withdraw two of those cheers (I leave one intact for The Manic Street Preachers invigorating stage act; the one genuinely exciting moment of the night.)

But there was precious little else to cheer. The show started an hour late. My table was already full when I arrived. The acoustics were so bad one could barely hear a word that compere Ben Elton said.

I did notice however that in the pauses inserted for the next night's television commercial breaks he simply stepped aside and silence reigned (is there nothing in the comedian's code, Ben, about entertaining a 3000- strong audience with the odd joke even during the commercial breaks?).

Perhaps he was distracted by the gothic looking stage - the ridiculous design with its "moat" in front and bridge distancing the stars from the audience and, more importantly, discouraging any Jarvis Cocker-esque invasions.The only actual result seemed to be poor sightlines, though this did not bother the bunch of invited teenagers seated at the side of the stage and visibly encouraged to applaud and scream at the start of the show to give the TV audience the impression of an atmosphere electric with spontaneous excitement.

Still,there was always the party with casino, dodgem cars, ice skating et al. Alas no. One of the gruesome bouncers that these allegedly glam events now invariably employ barred my way informing me in words of one syllable and with unanswerable music industry logic that an invitation from the organisers with the word Party at the top did not actually constitute entry to a party.

At least I got to know who the award winners were. Not everyone was so fortunate even by the next morning. Paul Burger, the chairman of Sony Music, who also chairs the Brits committee, has ended the practice of giving the press an early peek at the results, which means that the early editions of national newspapers don't contain them, so music fans away from the big cities aren't able to read about them the next morning.

None of this matters, of course, because The Brits is no longer a rock event. It is a pre-recorded TV show. A top comic can blatantly watch his live audience sit in silence because the worldwide audience on the next day's TV will think he had motormouthed his way throughout the entire proceedings.

It is fashionable in the Brits set-up now for the presenters to poke public fun (Ben Elton being no exception) at the year when Samantha Fox and Mick Fleetwood hosted the event. It was a debacle they always say; the autocues failed and they introduced The Four Tops only to watch Boy George come on apologising: "I'm afraid I'm the one Top."

Good on them I say. Spontaneity used to be part of the rock ethos. But there was no spontaneity here. Not a single encore, not a single unchoreographed step. Not a Spice girl out of place.

But there was a mistake. It's just that the majority of the population didn't get to see it. Elton John failed to announce the nominations properly, swore at the organisers and was hastily re-shot getting it right. Slickness, even second take slickness, is the pre-requisite now.

Yes, I know, it's only rock'n'roll. I just liked it more before it was made for TV.