Live Aid and false memory syndrome

I see that Freeview have compiled a list of people's most memorable TV moments.
The collapse of the twin towers comes top, ahead of the moon landings and Diana's funeral. At number five is Bob Geldof asking people to "give us your fucking money" during Live Aid.
It really is remarkable that this event looms so large in people's memories because it never happened. I know because I was there. Let me take this opportunity to place on record the true facts.
Geldof wanted Live Aid to be a fundraiser. The BBC didn't. There were details of how you could give money. You could send it by post, you could pay at a Post Office or you could ring up and pledge a donation. The captions came up in that order: address, PO details, phone number.
I was anchoring that part of the broadcast, up in the boiling hot perspex box in the roof of Wembley, and, following one of Geldof's finger-pointing rants, went to the appeals procedure.
"Here's the address," I said.
"Fuck the address," he said. That was quite a moment.
I've never looked at a tape of that incident since the day but I was amazed to watch the "give us your fucking money" myth blossom. People who had watched it told me with great certainty what had happened, as did people who hadn't.
When Mark Ellen was preparing a 20th anniversary piece for Word he spent a day going through a tape of the whole thing. I asked him to let me know what Geldof had actually said.
"Fuck the address," he reported back.
I was relieved that it was the world that was deluding itself and not me.
I was thinking about this this week when weatherman Michael Fish was on BBC News24 explaining the real story of his notorious hurricane forecast. It turns out that the hurricane he was referring to was a tropical cyclone in the West Atlantic. He told his story but you could tell from the expression on the interviewers face that they weren't remotely interested in the disappointing truth.
Every time I read somebody's memoirs or hear about somebody giving evidence in a courtroom about events that took place many years earlier, my thoughts turn to Live Aid and the things we are capable of "remembering".

Hannah Montana, Led Zep and the madness of crowds

In the states district attorneys are getting involved in the controversy over tickets to see Disney teen star Hannah Montana. There's dark talk of software that can jump Ticketmaster's digital queues and lots of articulate middle class mothers who are determined to satisfy their desperate daughters and are not going to be fobbed of with talk of supply and demand. As head teachers and hotel managers all over the world have the scars to attest, these people have a habit of getting what they want and in this case they're not above picking up the phone to local officials.
Meanwhile, closer to home, Harvey Goldsmith is at daggers-drawn with eBay over the resale of Led Zeppelin tickets, which are being advertised at ten times their face value. The government meanwhile blandly holds to the view that pretty much anything that can be bought can also be sold, which sounds about right. In the past these were the kind of problems you only came up against when you camped outside Earls Court. These people didn't have credit cards and rarely got indignant. When they didn't get what wanted they muttered "bummer" and went to the pub. But now they hold the reins of the economy in their hands, they feel very differently and the audience for live rock and roll has grown from a passionate minority to an hysterical majority.

Fame: still a cruel mistress

The new issue of Word contains a story about Colin Larkin, the author of the Encyclopaedia of Popular Music, which is in its 5th edition. I was most intrigued to see the list of acts who had been dropped from the previous editions to make room for the Arctic Monkeys and Amy Winehouses of today. This includes: Carmel, Curve, King, Menswear and the Godfathers among others. They've been dropped because it's been concluded that they were neither successful enough to be included for the sake of historical record nor good enough to have any prospect of being rediscovered by future generations. What's the opposite of the Hall of Fame?