[Game publisher] EA decked out the Last Stop garage, which lies between Stroud Green and Finsbury Park, in military camouflage material and parked an army jeep on the forecourt. Assistants dressed as soldiers carried mock machine guns as they doled out [free] petrol to the customers.

Hmm. That’s all very well but I guess it wouldn’t have gone down too well among local residents and I’d be amazed if it hasn’t angered politicians.

But the stunt caused fury amongst local residents and has angered politicians.

Liberal Democrat MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, Lynne Featherstone, said: “Trying to recreate Venezuelan-style fuel riots on the streets of London is completely irresponsible and downright dangerous.

“Whilst a lucky few might have got some free petrol, hundreds of local residents have faced misery on their daily journeys this morning. They deserve an apology for being the victims of such an ill-thought out media stunt.”

And perhaps an apology from their MP for blindly contributing to the free PR the stunt has generated.

I use the word “supposedly” because nobody can truly know whether it will live up to the various adjectives used above (which, like any good journalist, I lifted from the La Machine website) until they see it. Before that happens, the whole thing is surrounded in secrecy for the entirely understandable purposes of hype and PR.

North West Tonight has bought into this hype by running a series of stories on La Machine that say absolutely nothing about the project because the programme’s “08 correspondent”, Jayne Barrett, is “sworn to secrecy”. One report featured some taxi drivers looking at the “thing” off camera and saying stuff like “It’s amazing”. I mean, seriously.

The Sunday Telegraph is also at it. Its correspondent helpfully reported this weekend:

Moments after arriving at the workshop, I come face to face with the Liverpool machine, suspended on its mechanical float, not quite completed. Smaller than the elephant, it is none the less a mega-scale version of an animal. It is also less hefty and will not plod so much as prance or pounce. As many as 16 operators will manage its multi-directional movements, and it looks intricate enough to suggest that these will be impressive.

So, er, what the fuck is it? I appreciate that we aren’t dealing with WMD or Watergate here but what happened to the basic journalistic premise of finding something out and then telling your audience about it? If, as a reporter, you are “sworn to secrecy”, then where is the story?

I’m not a total news purist - there’s a place for fluffy stuff in a regional news programme - but even fluffy stuff should say something. This obviously isn’t news and, thanks to an almost complete lack of content or insight, it isn’t a feature either. It’s just pure, unadulterated hype.

Perhaps after the event has happened there will be some great pictures of what will probably be an entertaining show. It might have made sense to wait until then before covering it.

(PS It’s a spider isn’t it? It’s just a big bloody spider.)

Update, 4 September: Fancy that! It really is just a bloody big spider. And a bloody terrifying one at that. Remember, I half-heartedly guessed it here first.

Firstly we saw Justin Moorhouse’s show, Justin Moorhouse’s Ever Decreasing Social Circle. It’s got elements of that slideshow comedy popularised by Dave Gorman, although this is more northern and foul-mouthed, with fewer slides. Essentially it’s about Moorhouse’s Facebook friends (See? Zeitgeisty) and his attempts to whittle several hundred hangers-on down to one true friend by way of questions such as “Do you hate Morrissey” and “Do you like motor sports?” (The answers to these are no and no if you want to be in Justin’s gang.) It’s all rather pleasantly done and gives Moorhouse a chance to hang a show around a coherent theme while entertainingly venting his spleen on a wide range of personal prejudices.

Subsequently, we managed to get tickets for a John Shuttleworth show. At five quid a pop we thought this was a bargain until we got to the venue and realised it was a test screening of Graham Fellows’ new Shuttleworth film, Southern Softies, with no actual live show attached.

Our initial thought as the comment cards were handed out was that Fellows should have been paying us a fiver to watch it. But we soon came round because, even in rough-cut form, Southern Softies is very funny indeed. It was especially charming to have a sandal-wearing Fellows bellowing stuff out from the back, such as “we need to sort out the sound on this bit”.

The film is a follow-up to It’s Nice Up North and follows Shuttleworth as he attempts to decipher whether southerners are “softer” than people from the north. The Sheffield-born “versatile singer/songwriter” starts his quest in the Channel Islands but ends up getting side-tracked by producer and neighbour Ken Worthington who vanishes early on. In the end, Shuttleworth doesn’t actually escape the Channel Islands and ends up financing the film via a series of local product placement agreements.

My favourite bits were where Shuttleworth goes for a walk at a country fair and ends up wandering through the middle of a marching band, a recurring joke about noddy-shots and a scene in which Shuttleworth takes to the stage to entertain some bemused hotel guests.

Fellows is putting the whole thing together himself and apparently wants to get it finished by next year. I’m not sure of when/how it will be released and I’m not sure if he was joking when he said the film has been selected for the Channel Islands Film Festival.

The first time I really came across Peter Kay was in That Peter Kay Thing, where he did a series of one-off half-hour docu-soaps, including an especially brilliant pilot called The Services, in which he starred as the service station manager, Pearl Harbour (”One word, Terry: job club!”). I’m not sure why but I find Kay exceptionally funny when he’s playing middle aged women. In BGTPFAPANJCSSOI, as it will no doubt come to be known, he’s playing a talent show contestant called Geraldine McQueen, so I’m hoping amusement ensues.

While that is undoubtedly a daft suggestion aimed at stirring up controversy, the fact remains that Liverpool is a city in a place where, in the 21st century at least, nobody really needs a city. I love Liverpool (some of my close relatives are Scousers) but it’s out on a limb and can’t compete with Manchester. Until the day when the docks make a comeback, that isn’t going to change.

As the report’s co-author, Dr Tim Leunig of the London School of Economics puts it:

People in Liverpool are better off than ever before. But they have only got better off at the same rate as the rest of the country, so Liverpool is not catching up with London or the south east. It is not because people [in Liverpool] are lazy or feckless. It is because Liverpool is less well-placed to do business. The chance of Liverpool catching up with the UK average in the foreseeable future is close to zero.

Predictably, the Liverpool Echo doesn’t quite see things that way. Grabbing enthusiastically at the bait, it dismisses the “boffin” and focuses on Liverpool’s new shopping centre (which, incidentally, lost its developer £190m before it opened), concert arena, cruise liner terminal and “Capital of Culture-led rebirth”.

How these projects benefit the city’s deeply deprived outer areas is not explained. They may lead to economic uplift on some level but the uncomfortable truth is that competitor cities like Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Birmingham and Glasgow have made equal or superior attempts at city centre regeneration during the last ten years, putting Liverpool back at square one.

Anyway, if you are an irate Scouser with nothing better to do, the Echo has printed speccy Tory boy Leunig’s e-mail address, so you can tell him what you think of his poxy little report.

The ad says “22,850 steps to gold”, which I can’t help but think comes across as a bit presumptuous. Like all Radcliffe has to do is turn up, complete the route and the gold medal will be hers. Let’s hope she doesn’t finish twelfth or collapse halfway round (she wouldn’t, would she?), or else everyone concerned is going to look a bit daft.

However, I feel the sequence doesn’t quite live up to this 1970s effort from Brazil. There seems to be some doubt as to whether or not it’s genuine. I hope to God it is.

For those who may have missed it, one group, called United City (geddit?), is in favour of the TIF funding package and subsequent c-charge. The other, calling itself Greater Manchester Momentum Group, is against. You knew this though, didn’t you?

I use the phrase turf war but in fact the two sides’ chosen method of attack is a strategy known Press Release Saturation. Several times a week for the last couple of months I’ve been getting “statements” from those involved, each reacting to what the other side has said at public meetings or in the press.

No sooner has one side voiced an opinion then the other has bombarded the inboxes of the region’s journalists with the opposing view. Sometimes, as happened yesteday, I get a “response” from United City’s PR company about some utterance by GMMG, having not actually been aware of GMMG’s position in the first place.

Can anybody win this war of attrition? We may never know. What I will say, however, is that United City clearly has a nicer logo.

I’m happy to be in the midst of so many Asian babes. In fact, I’m happy that the podium covers me from the waist down.

Which is surely enough to put one off one’s petits fours. Perhaps he thought it could be laughed off. Unsurprisingly - considering the audience was a load of journalists - the speech got reported and the video released. These Asian babes have no sense of humour, do they Martin?

His character was, perhaps inevitably, supposed to be a tad overweight. But in a terrifying stab at either humour or attempted realism, producers thought the 18-year-old he was playing should be seen with posters relating to McDonalds and “bangers and mash” on the wall of his bedroom. You know, in the same way as normal 18-year-olds have pictures of girls, this fat guy fantasises about junk food. Understandably, Corden thought they were being “disrespectful”.

He now says (and perhaps stop now if four-letter words beginning with ‘c’ offend you because this contains some truly heroic swearing):

I’d actually rather die than go back. It’s fucking awful. I can’t tell you the sheer disdain I have for the place and the people. I met a couple of really good friends there but it’s 20 per cent nice people and 80 per cent cunts. It’s a programme made by cunts and full of cunts. It just breeds pricks - all these people walking around with this chicken-in-a-basket fame, talking about going to LA, you know?

Fancy. I never would have thought it.