The British Motor Corporation – did it secretly want to be General Motors? – became British Leyland. Then came the rise of the marketeers, which meant calling the company and its mainstream products Rover because it was the most respected brand they owned at the time. (They’d pretty much killed off the reality of independent, innovative Rover by then.) A lot of un-Roverish cars were renamed.Then on to the witching hour when Rover met BMW – all documented in that BBC programme that showed the wild culture shock when Hans and Dieter went to clanking and rusting factories and were met with bunting and fancy cakes (would we have done that if the War had gone their way?).Then the humiliating decision that they’d made a terrible mistake: we were clogging up the German balance sheet and the stakeholders’ audit. Then the sense of a residual bit of Rover being passed around the City as a play for venture capitalists.And then what happened? Is it still there? I mean really there, for the long haul? Not just to turn out 75s (rather a nice car) and 25s, but to design new models and launch them? Car making is such a pressured business now, with such huge over-capacity (and Ford and Fiat humbled), you can’t really imagine how it can do that as a poor little residual Brit manufacturer.So any Rover ad has to contend with a lot of baggage and a lot of questions before any particular message has a hope of getting through. As it happens, they’re perfectly all right, if understandably unambitious on the branding front. Rover is selling its smaller car, the 25, using a vaguely Sixties crime caper movie sort of style and music.

And the story is space: “The rather roomy Rover 25 feels bigger than it is.”In a linked commercial, they’re offering you free petrol until 2004 when you buy any Rover or MG – “Make incredible savings with our unique offer”. But what it is doing is shouting so loud, I can’t hear a thing it’s saying.peter sru.co.uk. Uri Geller, the spoon-bending psychic who persuaded Michael Jackson to agree to a television interview with Martin Bashir, has spoken of his fear that producers have turned tomorrow night’s eagerly awaited programme into a “freak show”. He said he would be “very angry” if the documentary, which he persuaded Jackson to film after a personal approach from Bashir, failed to depict the singer as a “down-to-earth” person.Geller, who two years ago startled the picturesque Berkshire village of Sonning by inviting Jackson to be best man at his wedding, said: “Michael liked Martin, and he was happy to have him around. I said to him, ‘Michael, maybe it’s time to open up to the world.’ But now I’m slightly worried, because it seems sensationalist.”There are three possible scenarios I can see coming with this programme: 1) it’s really nice and balanced or positive towards Michael; 2) it’s just a freak show; and 3) it’s very negative and derogatory and not fair.”The 90-minute film, Living with Michael Jackson, is another coup in Bashir’s headline-grabbing career. The 39-year-old broadcaster first came to public attention in 1995, when he secured what, at the time, was the ultimate TV scoop: a face-to-face interview with Diana, Princess of Wales.

Since then, others including Louise Woodward, the British nanny accused of murder in the US, and the entertainer Michael Barrymore have had the Bashir treatment.Stressing the fact that “no subject was off-limits”, Granada has devoted huge ads in national papers to single questions about Jackson’s past, including the disintegration of his face and the child abuse allegations that blighted his career in the early 1990s.In one TV trailer, the singer is shown bottle-feeding his 11-month-old son, Prince Michael II, and bouncing him vigorously on his knee. Only three months ago, the star was pilloried for dangling the baby from the window of a Berlin hotel room, an incident said to feature heavily.Jacko will be shown teaching Bashir to “moonwalk”, and the film will also feature the first ever report from inside Jackson’s Neverland Ranch home.Criticising the programme’s producers for failing to send him an advance copy of the finished interview, as he requested, Geller said he would feel personally betrayed if the film was not “fair”.”I’ve brought Tonight the scoop of the century, and I will be very angry, extremely angry, if they betray that, because I will feel that I, as Uri Geller, have been tricked.”A Granada spokesman confirmed the film would be “mind-blowing stuff”, but declined to comment on Geller’s remarks. While he waits to find out how sympathetic the film is, Geller is planning a new venture for Jackson that would overshadow the singer’s past eccentricities. The psychic, who claims to have been visited by aliens, is masterminding Jackson’s bid to walk on the moon. “I’m getting very positive responses from an aviation agency in America The estimated cost will be $5bn.”. President Bush is impatiently clamouring for war. At his press conference with Tony Blair, he bluntly declared that diplomacy had a “matter of weeks” to run its course.

The two leaders have decided on a course of military action – they probably decided months ago. The Prime Minister continues to play word games, but he is increasingly unconvincing He says that “war is not inevitable”. In which case why not give the inspectors more time to complete their job? It would be better to have them in Iraq for months if there was any chance of avoiding a war. As long as the inspectors carry out their work, lives are not being lost in a conflict. Tragically for all of us, there is no sense that George Bush and Tony Blair regard war as a desperate last resort.