Morgan takes a new tumble

As many will recall, the Daily Mirror under Piers Morgan’s watch was no fan of President Bush. The paper, particularly after the invasion of Iraq, took pride in casting him as an imbecile, once memorably lambasting him for falling off a Segway - a two-wheel buggy designed to be idiot-proof.

“You’d have to be an idiot to fall off, wouldn’t you Mr President?” ran the headline on that occasion, adding underneath: “If anyone can make a pig’s ear of riding a sophisticated, self-balancing machine like this, Dubya can.”

It is thus with a straight face, but only just, that we bring you news of Piers Morgan falling off a Segway.

The former Editor apparently hit a kerb near a beach in Los Angeles and has broken two ribs. At the time of writing, he is still bravely intending to appear on the live final of his show America’s Got Talent (it was last night) on which he is known for shaming contestants to tears. We do hope none has been briefed.

— The Sopranos won’t be coming back. Props from the New Jersey strip club that doubled as the Bada Bing are being sold on an internet auction.

The glitterball and pole-dancing poles are expected to be particularly popular. A must for any living room.

— Try to stay awake for this one: the Smith Institute, the charitable think-tank, is under investigation by the Charity Commission. Some are concerned at the many close links between the institute and Gordon Brown, and question whether it deserves its charitable status.

With this in mind, we set out to confirm rumours that Konrad Caulkett, a former Smith Insitute employee, is now a special adviser at No 10. “Yes,” replies the press office. “And it is all entirely in accordance with the rules.” Later they call back a second time to clarify carefully that he is working for Sarah, not Gordon. Not a worry at all, evidently.

— We are told that Richard Burton is to host this year’s Classic Rock Awards, his death in 1984 seemingly being no hindrance.

Organisers say that they are planning to create an 11ft (3.5m) hologram of the actor’s head and suspend it over the stage.

Surely too weird to be true.

— Disgruntled academics get in touch about the widely covered report, released by the Taxpayers’ Alliance yesterday, which examined “noncourses” - “university degrees that lend the respectability of scholarly qualifications to nonacademic subjects” and their cost to the taxpayer. Ninety-one academic insititutions were listed, in order of culpability.

“You may note,” says one frowning don, “that Manchester Metropolitan University appears at both number 23 and 25 and Salford University at both number 84 and 89. I feel some new BA in proof-reading may be in order.”

Postscript

Pity Kenneth Branagh. His latest stab at Shakespeare, a film of As You Like It set in 19th-century Japan, went straight to television in the US. Then again, it’s not so hard to see why. “The play is so much about the impact that nature has on the characters,” he tells TV Guide. “They all go off into the woods, and I found myself responding to the time when that happened to me, spectacularly, which was in a stone garden in Kyoto.” The film will appear in British cinemas on September 21. Hooray.

— “I may be jumping the gun,” says Harvey Weinstein, speaking to The New York Times about his forthcoming film I’m Not There, in which Cate Blanchett plays a young Bob Dylan. “But if Cate Blanchett doesn’t get nominated, I’ll shoot myself.”

— Fans tell Keira Knightley how they, too, would like to be rich. “You know what?” she replies, according to Radio Times. “Go and work on the stock market.”

— Producers of the film Black Sheep (plot: killer ewes terrorise a farm in New Zealand; genre: presumably comedy) have hit a snag in their plan to herd a flock of faux blood-stained sheep in to Leicester Square to publicise the film, as they have done in Los Angeles and Toronto. In London, we hear, foot-and-mouth regulations kept the killer sheep out. Central London’s multitude of cattle farmers must be deeply relieved.

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