Strange, because according to the Manchester Evening News earlier this week, the MEN Arena in Manchester (which the paper sponsors) is the most popular… ahead of Madison Square Garden in New York.

THE M.E.N. Arena is officially the most popular entertainment venue on the planet – for the second year running.

A total of 1,245,196 concert-goers have flocked through the doors to see some of the world’s biggest acts like Take That, Kylie Minogue, Westlife and Justin Timberlake over the past year.

The latest figures from Pollstar show that Madison Square Garden, in New York, came second with ticket sales of 1,230,433 while The O2, in Greenwich, came third with 1,209,376 after it opened for business in June.

So what gives? Well, who the hell cares, frankly. I suspect the Dome is using some kind of figures projection taking into account that it was only trading for six months, whereas the Manchester venue has actually achieved – and had verified – the winning feat over the whole twelve-month period. Maybe.

Seems a bit cheeky on the part of O2 but I doubt anyone involved felt the need to question the finer detail. The PR company would presumably sell rubber johnnies into the Catholic Herald if someone wrote them a cheque, while the One Show is so desperate for items that tonight’s programme featured a whimsical item about ash trees and Lenny Henry pretending to be a Scouse wedding DJ. Seriously. So, you see everyone – and yet no-one – is a winner.

Anyway, I’m going to ring up the One Show’s researchers to tell them that the ginnel between our house and number 54 is the most popular musical venue in the world and that Jethro Tull are booked to play a 400,000-a-night sell-out show for 276 nights running to from March to December. Or, better still, employ a London PR firm to do it for me. It can only be a matter of time before the camera crew turns up.

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The author Joanne Harris was on there as a guest and Campbell was talking to her about a religious experience she supposedly once had. He reminded her of the time she fell off a horse, cutting herself. Then a dog came along and licked her, miraculously healing the injury and leaving no scar.

Pause to reflect on the idiocy of this statement for a moment.

Still with me? Good. Harris, with the understandable look of a woman falsely labelled a fantasist, appeared totally confused, remarking that she didn’t recall the incident but admitting that dog spells God backwards. Campbell said it was on the internet. Harris was definitely of the opinion that it had never happened. Everyone looked baffled and then moved on.

What can it mean?

In fact, the incident is out there on the web. It’s featured on Helium, the site “where knowledge rules”. But Joanne Harris isn’t an especially uncommon name and it’s fairly obvious that a bestselling novelist wouldn’t be contributing random articles to a site aimed at aspiring writers and amateur critics. In fact, the dog/God incident is recalled by an entirely different Joanne Harris, who appears to be an expert on “edible art cookies” but is in no way the author of Chocolat.

The cock-up has echoes of the farce involving Ronnie Hazlehurst last week, where, upon the composer’s death, several media outlets, including the BBC, the Times and the Guardian falsely claimed he had written the S Club 7 hit Reach because of a joke insertion on Wikipedia (since corrected).

The lesson? If you’re going to research a guest on a chat show, it perhaps pays to use sources other than Google. Unless, of course, you’re desperately attempting to enliven an otherwise stilted debate about religion. Here endeth the sermon.

Update, Monday 15 Oct: Someone who was in the studio during this incident has been in touch. They report that after the programme, Campbell was visibly livid and “glared” at a member of the production team before leaving the set. I’m also told that the presenter is a “complete cock”. Well I never.

As the Times reports:

Mr Fincham wrongly told a July 11 press launch that a forthcoming documentary would show the Queen storming out of a sitting with the celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz.

Mr Fincham discovered by 5pm that day that this was untrue, but the BBC did not correct it until the following morning after prominent stories had already been made public in a number of newspapers and television stations – and only issued an apology at noon that day.

The fallout comes following former BBC executive Will Wyatt’s report into the affair. An interesting snippet, reported in the Guardian, says:

Mr Fincham and his head of press, Jane Fletcher, saw the promotional tape three times, but Mr Wyatt said they failed to “grasp the potential of the news value”.

Fincham’s background is in comedy and entertainment programmes like Alan Partridge, The Day Today and Jamie’s Kitchen, so perhaps his lack of news nous is unsurprising.

Another unsurprising thing is that Fletcher has also quit, as has Stephen Lambert of RDF Media, which made the fateful documentary for the Beeb. Lambert’s earlier suggestion that the tape portrayed nothing more than a “slightly ruffled encounter” was plainly laughable, as has been previously observed.

This whole thing has been perceived as central to the “trust in TV” debate, which has sucked in everything from GMTV to the Blue Peter cat in recent weeks. It’s arguably the most giant cock-up of them all. But the important lesson for the future, clearly, is nothing to do with deceiving your audience and gobbing off about it, because that’s obviously still happening. No, it is, quite simply, don’t diss the Queen.

My regular reader (sic) will be itching for a verdict on the relaunched North West Tonight, which I almost promised the other day.

Thankfully, the temporary studio of last week has been replaced by something glistening and new that nonetheless looks reassuringly similar to what was there before. However, in accordance with the current fashion, Gordon Burns now has a co-host in the somewhat excitable form of Ranvir Singh.

One of the most unwatchable elements of the old NWT was Gordon’s spontaneous banter with Diane Oxberry, the weather forecaster, and reborn former Sunday Sport editor Tony Livesey, who covers sport. Ranvir’s appearance means each story is followed by a painful exchange of this sort. Reactive tuts, chuckles and raised eyebrows are manifold.

The presence of a new co-host has also spawned the idiotic practice of “autocue tennis”, whereby one half of the duo reads the first four lines off the autocue and the other half reads the next four. I have no idea why this is necessary.

Thankfully, a desk is retained for the main headlines. A couple of new sofas have appeared but seem to have been relegated to the back-end of the programme – stories about newborn tiger cubs at Chester Zoo and so forth. Some bloke with a beard has apparently been given the old sofa. Obviously this startling news has been milked for use as the last item in tonight’s broadcast.

The overall content is the same as usual: a story about a bloke who can’t stop coughing (gravel-voiced Gordon seemed especially touched by that one), followed by something about “the problem of anti-social youngsters”. Thus NWT viewers can maintain the same conflicting feelings of exasperation and reassurance that have been the programme’s trademark since 1732.

And now it’s The One Show: basically a regional news programme but with trivial nonsense about areas in which you don’t even live. Great.