When I wrote last week that feel-goodery at the expense of Africa had reached its zenith with Richard Curtis's BBC1 film The Girl in the Cafe, I had foolishly not reckoned with Live 8 (Saturday 2 July, 1pm to God knows when). The concert made each of us an extra in a Richard Curtis movie. There was even a chance, if you troubled to log your name with the website, that the name would wheel past the back of the stage - and a place in the credits is more than most extras aspire to. But, as the Sun said on Saturday, all you needed to do to be part of history was "turn on the telly, tear open a few tins and have a great day".
No irony was intended, and irony was what was needed. Jonathan Ross, the current master of the art in British broadcasting, was, happily, the BBC's commentator for the event, and the only man capable of containing the swell of lachrymosity by wit alone. In his canary-yellow suit, he looked good to begin with but less than great by the time his shift ended 11 hours later. A man of limited tonal range, with a predisposition to find all foreigners funny, Ross wisely chose to treat the politics with all due respect and the performers with all due disrespect.
Dido and Youssou N'Dour's "Seven Seconds", he judged, "went on a bit at the end" (it was nearer seven minutes than seconds). Velvet Revolver's leaders came on dressed as Screaming Lord Sutch and a bus conductor; Ross said he had told them to keep the kids away from the dressing-up box. Robbie Williams, with a scarf tucked into his vest, "looked like Steptoe's son", but Ross approved of Madonna and even Pink Floyd, whose reunion after a long split provided one of the few unforced moments of emotion. At times his guest interviews were so entertaining, it seemed as if the main event was happening in his studio. This was as well for him, because his studio was a pod that had fallen off the London Eye and landed in one of the few parts of Hyde Park without a view of the stage, an accident that explained why he frequently had only a sketchy idea of what or whom he was introducing.
When the celebs got on to politics, it was harder for Ross to know what tone to adopt. He hazarded a guess that Paul McCartney must have met some of the G8 leaders, which Sir Paul was happy to confirm: Mr Putin seemed a nice gentleman but, apparently, he once headed the KGB. "Nice guy who had a couple of bad years," Ross suggested. Mandela, he later noted, had been "very big in the Eighties". As for Bill Gates: "All that money and he still can't get a proper haircut." But when his early sofa-sharers Bob Geldof and Michael Buerk, two men with competing claims to have "started the whole thing", disagreed over whether feeding Africa was or wasn't a simple matter, Ross kept out of it.
There were always his cohorts to turn to: stern but vulnerable Jo Whiley in her rock garden, and Fearne Cotton, the pubescent former CITV Diggit presenter, who wandered around backstage wide-eyed and lost. Both took the talent and the associated hangers-on far too seriously. In the panicky early moments, Whiley tried to corner Elton John, who just wasn't turning around to greet her. Presumably knowing that he is in the process of suing a couple of newspapers for reporting that he issued instructions at a ball for his guests not to speak to him until spoken to, Whiley manhandled him until he did. She was equally bossy with the intolerable Lenny Henry, who used his moments to tell us he had been at his sister's wedding, where there had been plenty of black folk (unlike here in Hyde Park). Vernon Kay announced to Cotton that he was feeling "every emotion a human being carries with him" - a horror-movie premise, surely. And Davina McCall lectured her on how smelly it was in the Nairobi slum she had visited (as opposed to the Big Brother House).
Occasionally, however, the feel-good, do-gooding masks slipped, or the stars were too big to be bothered to put them on. Macca as good as admitted that playing with U2 was as much a big draw for him as a help to Geldof's cause. Scott of Velvet Revolver owned up to experiencing "a very fuzzy warm feeling for such a jaded rock star as I am" (Cotton told him he was "so not"). Most refreshingly of all, Madonna declined Whiley's suggestion she should go off to Africa to take a peek. Madonna had friends who had gone there and told her all about it, friends who included Bill Clinton.
Overall, the BBC and Ross cleverly negotiated a fine line between reporting and promoting, showbiz and politics, but it was a precarious walk. When Geldof pulled from his hat the miraculous presence of Birhan Woldu, who, he claimed, had been ten minutes from death 20 years ago, who could not have been moved to hear that she was now at agricultural college in Ethiopia? And who could not fear that "this beautiful woman" might not become the next face of Benetton? My guess is that the concert will be remembered for decades, not for saving the continent, which, sadly, it won't, but because of the music.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
