We start today blog update with some AI figures, dear blog reader. Because, yer actual Keith Telly Topping knows how much you all love those. Doctor Who's latest episode, A Town Called Mercy, had an audience Appreciation Index score of eighty five on Saturday evening. 
That's a slightly lower figure than the first two episodes in the series (an eighty nine and an eighty seven, for Asylum of the Daleks and Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, respectively), but still puts the programme into the 'excellent' category. For those who've forgotten any score over around eighty is good. Anything above eighty five excellent and anything above ninety exceptional. The highest scorer on the two main channels was Casualty, with eighty eight, whilst the most positive figure of the day was Coast on BBC2 with ninety.
Meanwhile, moving onto ratings, here's the final consolidated figures for the Top Thirty shows for week-ending 9 September:-
1 The X Factor - ITV Sat - 8.98m
2 Coronation Street - ITV Mon - 8.90m
3 New Tricks - BBC1 Mon - 8.08m
4 EastEnders - BBC1 Tues - 7.95m
5 Doctor Who - BBC1 Sat - 7.57m
6 Emmerdale - ITV Tues - 6.41m
7 Paralympics 2012: Closing Ceremony - Channel Four Sun - 6.03m
8 A Mother's Son - ITV Mon - 5.79m
9 Inspector George Gently - - BBC1 Sun - 5.64m
10 Mrs Brown's Boys - - BBC1 Fri - 5.46m
11 Ten O'Clock News - BBc1 Mon - 5.12m
12 The Great British Bake Off - BBC2/BBC HD Tues - 5.07m
13 The Bletchley Circle - ITV Thurs - 4.99m*
14 Countryfile - BBC1 Sun - 4.96m
15 Who Do You Think Your Are? - BBC1 Wed - 4.86m
16 Holby City - BBC1 Tues - 4.51m
17 Waterloo Road - BBC1 Wed - 4.47m
18 Accused - BBC1 Tues - 4.27m
19 Mrs Biggs - ITV Wed - 4.31m*
20 Good Cop - BBC1 Thurs - 4.17m
21 Miranda - BBC1 Fri - 4.00m
22 England World Cup Football Qualifier - ITV Fri - 3.91m
23 ITV News - ITV Sun - 3.81m*
24 Six O'Clock News - BBC1 Thurs - 3.79m
25 Cash Britain - BBC1 Fri - 3.77m
26 Formula One: The Italian Grand Prix Highlights - BBC1 Sun - 3.67m
27 Red Or Black? - ITV Sat - 3.62m*
28 The ONE Show - BBC1 Thurs - 3.60m
29= Dallas - Channel Five Wed - 3.58m
29= BBC News - BBC1 Sun - 3.58m
Those programmes marked '*' do not include HD figures which are unavailable. Stuff to look out for here; Corrie getting within a fraction of beating The X Factor will, no doubt, add some fuel to the fire of those tabloids with an agenda to pour of the talent show's falling ratings. Doctor Who pulled in a spectacular two million plus timeshift to add onto its 5.5m overnight figure and end up as the fifth most watched programme of the week (it also beat the Thursday and Friday episodes of EastEnders into the bargain). And, look at The Great British Bake Off go! 4.71m watched this episode on BBC2 with a further three hundred and fifty eight thousand viewing the BBC HD simultcast.
Channel Five's decision to purchase the Dallas revival looks to be a good one, the opening episode pulling in more than a million more viewers than the Celebrity Big Brother final (2.41m) Notorious risible ITV game show flop Red Or Black? continued to plunge the depths with just 3.09m watching the first episode on 8 September. Albeit, that was still four hundred thousand more than braved the wretched Fool Britannia. But, least we be too hard on ITV, it is nice to see three dramas from the broadcaster - A Mother's Son, The Bletchley Circle and Mrs Biggs - doing quite well. It's also worth remembering that the audiences for Mrs Brown's Boys and Miranda are for repeats. One wonders how many will watch them when they've actually got new episodes to show?
There's a superb post-Hillsborough piece by the BBC's Tom de Castella entitled The time when football fans were hated which I urge all dear blog readers to read. In a side-bar piece, Mark Jensen, editor of the Newcastle fanzine The Mag, talks about a particularly notorious fifth round FA Cup tie between Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle in 1987 - two years before Hillsborough - which I alluded to on this blog a few days ago and which, with hindsight, was a fraction away from producing just such a disaster. Yer actual Keith Telly Topping was there, dear blog reader and, for a few minutes shortly after the game kicked off, genuinely, feared for his life. But, as noted, I'm sure most football supporters in this country will have a memory of a 'near-Hillsborough' or two on their travels. As Tom writes: 'The 1989 image of football fans as scum - anti-social, violent young men who'd drunk too much - perhaps goes some way to explain the egregious behaviour of some of the emergency services and others after Hillsborough. The police, a Sheffield Conservative MP and the Sun newspaper among others, shifted the blame for what happened to the fans.' Word.
News International is now facing almost two hundred fresh phone-hacking claims with legal action now confirmed from individuals including the former Labour party leader Neil Kinnock, former cabinet minister Stephen Byers and Louise Woodward, the former nanny jailed in the US for killing a baby. According to papers lodged with the high court in London ahead of Friday's deadline for new lawsuits, the publisher of the now defunct. disgraced and disgraceful Scum of the World is facing another fifty three civil actions for invasion of privacy, on top of more than fifty filed earlier last week – bringing the total expected to go to trial next year to one hundred and seventy four. The late flood of new phone-hacking claims includes lawsuits from former Big Brother presenter Davina McCall, EastEnders actor Jessie Wallace, Russell Brand, Katie Price and her ex-husband Peter Andre, Christopher Eccleston - at last, the phone-hacking scandal reaches the world of Doctor Who. My work here is done! - and ex-Cold Feet and The Fast Show actor John Thompson. The list features former Conservative MP Neil Hamilton and his wife Christine, former This Morning presenter John Leslie and film and documentary maker Christopher Terrill, who was going out with Heather Mills before she married Sir Paul McCartney. Tommy Sheridan, the former Scottish Socialist party leader, is also suing News International over alleged phone-hacking. Sheridan was convicted of perjury in 2010 over his evidence in his successful libel action against the Scum of the World in 2006, but released in January after serving twelve months of his three-year sentence. 
Kinnock, who was a regular target of tabloid vitriol and dubbed 'the Welsh windbag,' is claiming damages with his wife Glenys. Woodward, the au pair convicted of manslaughter of a baby in the US in 1997, is making a joint claim with three other individuals including her mother and father, Sue and Gary. Byers, who served as trade secretary and transport secretary under Tony Blair, is taking action in a joint claim with another individual. The new claims include one from a former Scum of the World show business reporter, Lee Harpin, who left the paper in 2003, and went on to be news editor at the Sunday Mirra. Celebrity agent Sue Ayton is also suing. She has acted for a string of top news presenters, including Peter Sissons, Michael Buerk, Moira Stewart, Jon Snow and the BBC's former royal correspondent Jennie Bond. The fifty three claims were made public on Monday and were submitted in time for the 14 September deadline set by Mr Justice Vos, who is managing the second tranche of legal cases being taken against News International over phone hacking. They bring the total number of claims that may go to trial next year to one hundred and seventy four – the remainder of claims had already been submitted and made public, including legal action being taken by Cherie Blair, Wayne Rooney and David Beckham's father Ted. Last week, more than fifty other claims were submitted, including cases being launched by Sarah Ferguson, Joanne Leese, the woman whose boyfriend was murdered in the Australian outback and Uri Geller. Earlier this year, fifty eight individuals won payouts from News International, including former culture secretary Tessa Jowell who won two hundred thousand smackers, and the singer Charlotte Church who was awarded three hundred thousand knicker for her family and a further three hundred grand in costs. It transpired last week that her parish priest was also allegedly hacked along with her former boyfriend, Steve Johnson, both of whom are suing News International. The publisher is also dealing with one hundred and twenty four other claims submitted to its own phone-hacking compensation scheme.
Google's co-founder and chief executive Larry Page has topped the Gruniad Morning Star's media 'hot one hundred for 2012,' in a list shaped by the fallout from the Leveson Inquiry. As if anyone is actually interest in what those Communist lice have to say, about anything. The annual list sees Page oust Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, from the top spot in the opinion of some nobody of an importance at the Gruniad, while there are also places in the one hundred most powerful people in the media for Wee Shughie McFee, the sour-faced Scottish chef off Crossroads, Jezza Clarkson, yer actual Lord Sugar-Sweetie and new BBC director general George Entwistle. This, apparently, constitutes 'news'. Despite vast changes in the ways people access media, particularly on digital platforms, it is a judge-led inquiry into media standards and ethics that has most dictated the make-up of the list. Lord Justice Leveson, who has heard testimony from leading media figures and former prime ministers in his inquiry over the past year, joins the list at number ten in 2012. He is just one place ahead of billionaire tyrant Rupert Murdoch, who appeared before him at the Royal Courts of Justice inquiry over two days of landmark evidence earlier in the year. Murdoch has topped the list three times previously, and has never fallen outside of the top ten until now, suggesting that his influence is waning in the UK, particularly following the phone-hacking scandal at his UK newspaper publishing group. His son James Murdoch the small clings onto the list in one hundredth place, but has seen his media stock fall dramatically after he had to resign from his posts as chairman of News International and pay-TV giant Sky following major public pressure. However, Elisabeth Murdoch has seen her profile rise following a well-received MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh last month, and now stands in eighteenth place. She sold her Shine Group production company to her father's News Corp and has remained relatively untainted by the hacking scandal, but recently ruled out replacing her father at the head of the media empire. Google's Page is named the most powerful media figure after a year that has seen major growth at Google - from a search engine to a fully integrated content and hardware giant - including a multi-billion purchase of smartphone maker Motorola Mobility.
Page, who took over from Eric Schmidt as Google chief executive in April this year, has also seen Google's Android mobile operating system become the most popular mobile OS in the world, running on around sixty eight per cent of smartphones. He bumps Facebook's Zuckerberg from the top spot, after the social network suffered something of a disastrous stock market debut, including concerns over its long-term growth prospects leading to a near halving of the share price. However, Facebook is still represented on the list by Joanna Shields, its vice-president and managing director in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, who is the highest-ranking woman in 2012. The former Google, AOL and Bebo executive was praised for transforming Facebook into a 'key marketing platform for businesses in Europe.' The top ten also includes Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo in second place, followed by the BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten in third, just ahead of the corporation's new boss George Entwistle, who started his challenging new job on Monday. Apple's design chief Sir Jonathan Ive, the man responsible for the look of products such as the iPhone and iPad, is in fifth place, while the top ten also includes the Daily Scum Mail's odious louse Paul Dacre, WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell and The X Factor boss Wee Shughie McFee, the sour-faced Scottish chef off Crossroads in seventh, eighth and ninth respectively. Other high-profile media figures in list include Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson (twenty seven), Labour MP Tom Watson, power to the people! (thirty six) and Graham Norton (sixty), who recently sold his production company So Television to ITV for a deal that could be worth seventeen million smackers, along with BBC Radio 2 breakfast host Chris Evans (seventy five), the Lord Thy God Steven Moffat (eighty seven: 'To have one hit BBC1 drama may earn you a place on the Guardian 100. To have two on the go seems a bit like showing off') and Lord Sugar-Sweetie (ninety).
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have launched a criminal complaint in France in relation to the publication of pictures of the duchess topless. In a separate civil case later, the royal couple will seek to have an edition of the French magazine Closer withdrawn after it printed the images. The images have appeared on foreign websites, the Irish Daily Lies and most recently Italian gossip magazine Chi. Chi said it was merely exercising its right to 'chronicle reality.' Whatever the hell that means. BBC Paris correspondent Christian Fraser said there was no name listed in the criminal complaint. He added that most lawyers seem to agree that, under strict French law, the pictures represent an undisputed breach of privacy - an open-and-shut case. An injunction, if granted, would lead to the magazine being withdrawn from shelves immediately but the tribunal's judgement will only relate to the distribution of the photos in France.
The action has not stopped Closer's Italian sister magazine, Chi, from publishing the same photos but the speed with which the royal couple have acted may deter others from publishing the pictures. Chi has printed a special edition featuring more than twenty pages pages of the photographs. It carries a picture of the duchess, topless, on its front cover with a headline that reads: The Queen is Nude! In an editorial the magazine's director, Alfonso Signorini, attempted to justify the decision to print the images by saying he considered them to be 'normal and up to date with the times.' He said: 'Why, I wonder, Kate Middleton, for now Duchess of Cambridge but future Queen of the United Kingdom, should be different from girls her age? Never has a situation managed to renew the English monarchy, with its obligations and its rigid protocol, more than this one.' Signorini claimed the series of pictures were 'not particularly sensationalistic nor damaging to her dignity' and 'surely makes her more likeable' and 'less distant from all of us.' Closer and Chi are both part of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's Mondadori media group. Under French law the damages related to legal proceedings could run into tens of thousands of Euros and, in theory, the magazine editor and photographer could also be sent to jail for a year. The co-owners of the Irish Daily Lies - Richard Desmond's Northern & Shell group and the Dublin-based publisher Independent News and Media - condemned the decision to publish the pictures and said they had had no prior knowledge of it. Desmond, chairman of Northern & Shell, said he intended to withdraw from the Republic of Ireland and had begun steps to close down the joint venture. 
An alleged 'source' allegedly at the Irish Daily Lies claimed the belief within the publication was that Northern & Shell would pull out of the publication on Tuesday, when a board meeting of the paper is scheduled to take place. Independent News and Media has described plans to close the publication as 'disproportionate', while at the same time acknowledging that the paper had made a 'poor editorial decision.' No British newspaper has dared to print the pictures, with the Daily Scum Mail saying it had been offered similar pictures last week but had rejected them and the Sun saying that 'no responsible newspaper would touch them with a bargepole.' This is the same Sun which, you may recall, happily printed candid photos of the Duchess of Cambridge's brother-in-law less than a month ago. A palace spokeswoman said: 'We can confirm that a criminal complaint is to be made to the French Prosecution Department. It concerns the taking of photographs of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge whilst on holiday and the publication of those photographs in breach of their privacy.' The photographs were taken while the duchess was sunbathing on a private holiday with her husband at the French chateau of the Queen's nephew, Lord Linley, in Provence. Meanwhile, the royal couple have been in the Solomon Islands representing the Queen on their nine-day Diamond Jubilee tour of South East Asia and the South Pacific.
Simon Amstell, Milton Jones and Miles Jupp are among the nominees for this year's Writers' Guild Awards. Amstell and his Grandma's House co-writer Dan Swimer have been shortlisted in the TV Comedy category, alongside PhoneShop creator Phil Bowker, and Tony Roche for the Monty Python biopic Holy Flying Circus.
In the radio category, Jones and his Another Case of Milton Jones co-writer James Carey are up against Jupp for his sitcom In And Out Of The Kitchen, about a cookery writer, and Matt Berry for his surreal Radio 4 series I, Regress. The Horrible Histories team are up for an award in the children's TV category, alongside the writers of Four O'Clock Club: Maths and The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Curse of Clyde Langer. Black Pond, the film which starred Chris Langham and featured Amstell in a cameo role, won a nomination for best first feature for writers Will Sharpe and Tom Kingsley. The winners will be announced on Wednesday November 14 at the Tabernacle in Notting Hill.
England's women's football team manager Hope Powell has praised the BBC following the announcement that the Euro 2013 qualifier will be screened live. The game between England and Croatia will be live on BBC2 next Wednesday from 5.00pm. A win will take England to the top of their group and secure automatic qualification for Euro 2013 in Sweden. Women's football coverage was prominent on the BBC during the Olympics as Team GB - also coached by Powell - managed to attract large audiences for the games as they reached the quarter finals.
Yer actual Demba Ba his very self twice equalised for Keith Telly Topping's beloved (though unsellable) Newcastle as the Magpies earned a draw in a frantic Monday night game against the top team in Liverpool, Everton. Leighton Baines fired home to put the Toffees ahead and, later, cleared off his own goal-line. Ba levelled with a left-foot strike before Marouane Fellaini and Anichebe both had goals controversially disallowed for the home side. Anichebe thought he had got the winner with an angled strike two minutes from time only for Ba to again equalise for Newcastle after great work by substitute Shola Ameobi.
For today's Keith Telly Topping's 45 of the Day, here's a choice slice of yer actual boogie from that there Blackfoot Sue. Skill.
That's a slightly lower figure than the first two episodes in the series (an eighty nine and an eighty seven, for Asylum of the Daleks and Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, respectively), but still puts the programme into the 'excellent' category. For those who've forgotten any score over around eighty is good. Anything above eighty five excellent and anything above ninety exceptional. The highest scorer on the two main channels was Casualty, with eighty eight, whilst the most positive figure of the day was Coast on BBC2 with ninety. Meanwhile, moving onto ratings, here's the final consolidated figures for the Top Thirty shows for week-ending 9 September:-
1 The X Factor - ITV Sat - 8.98m
2 Coronation Street - ITV Mon - 8.90m
3 New Tricks - BBC1 Mon - 8.08m
4 EastEnders - BBC1 Tues - 7.95m
5 Doctor Who - BBC1 Sat - 7.57m
6 Emmerdale - ITV Tues - 6.41m
7 Paralympics 2012: Closing Ceremony - Channel Four Sun - 6.03m
8 A Mother's Son - ITV Mon - 5.79m
9 Inspector George Gently - - BBC1 Sun - 5.64m
10 Mrs Brown's Boys - - BBC1 Fri - 5.46m
11 Ten O'Clock News - BBc1 Mon - 5.12m
12 The Great British Bake Off - BBC2/BBC HD Tues - 5.07m
13 The Bletchley Circle - ITV Thurs - 4.99m*
14 Countryfile - BBC1 Sun - 4.96m
15 Who Do You Think Your Are? - BBC1 Wed - 4.86m
16 Holby City - BBC1 Tues - 4.51m
17 Waterloo Road - BBC1 Wed - 4.47m
18 Accused - BBC1 Tues - 4.27m
19 Mrs Biggs - ITV Wed - 4.31m*
20 Good Cop - BBC1 Thurs - 4.17m
21 Miranda - BBC1 Fri - 4.00m
22 England World Cup Football Qualifier - ITV Fri - 3.91m
23 ITV News - ITV Sun - 3.81m*
24 Six O'Clock News - BBC1 Thurs - 3.79m
25 Cash Britain - BBC1 Fri - 3.77m
26 Formula One: The Italian Grand Prix Highlights - BBC1 Sun - 3.67m
27 Red Or Black? - ITV Sat - 3.62m*
28 The ONE Show - BBC1 Thurs - 3.60m
29= Dallas - Channel Five Wed - 3.58m
29= BBC News - BBC1 Sun - 3.58m
Those programmes marked '*' do not include HD figures which are unavailable. Stuff to look out for here; Corrie getting within a fraction of beating The X Factor will, no doubt, add some fuel to the fire of those tabloids with an agenda to pour of the talent show's falling ratings. Doctor Who pulled in a spectacular two million plus timeshift to add onto its 5.5m overnight figure and end up as the fifth most watched programme of the week (it also beat the Thursday and Friday episodes of EastEnders into the bargain). And, look at The Great British Bake Off go! 4.71m watched this episode on BBC2 with a further three hundred and fifty eight thousand viewing the BBC HD simultcast.
Channel Five's decision to purchase the Dallas revival looks to be a good one, the opening episode pulling in more than a million more viewers than the Celebrity Big Brother final (2.41m) Notorious risible ITV game show flop Red Or Black? continued to plunge the depths with just 3.09m watching the first episode on 8 September. Albeit, that was still four hundred thousand more than braved the wretched Fool Britannia. But, least we be too hard on ITV, it is nice to see three dramas from the broadcaster - A Mother's Son, The Bletchley Circle and Mrs Biggs - doing quite well. It's also worth remembering that the audiences for Mrs Brown's Boys and Miranda are for repeats. One wonders how many will watch them when they've actually got new episodes to show?There's a superb post-Hillsborough piece by the BBC's Tom de Castella entitled The time when football fans were hated which I urge all dear blog readers to read. In a side-bar piece, Mark Jensen, editor of the Newcastle fanzine The Mag, talks about a particularly notorious fifth round FA Cup tie between Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle in 1987 - two years before Hillsborough - which I alluded to on this blog a few days ago and which, with hindsight, was a fraction away from producing just such a disaster. Yer actual Keith Telly Topping was there, dear blog reader and, for a few minutes shortly after the game kicked off, genuinely, feared for his life. But, as noted, I'm sure most football supporters in this country will have a memory of a 'near-Hillsborough' or two on their travels. As Tom writes: 'The 1989 image of football fans as scum - anti-social, violent young men who'd drunk too much - perhaps goes some way to explain the egregious behaviour of some of the emergency services and others after Hillsborough. The police, a Sheffield Conservative MP and the Sun newspaper among others, shifted the blame for what happened to the fans.' Word.
Kinnock, who was a regular target of tabloid vitriol and dubbed 'the Welsh windbag,' is claiming damages with his wife Glenys. Woodward, the au pair convicted of manslaughter of a baby in the US in 1997, is making a joint claim with three other individuals including her mother and father, Sue and Gary. Byers, who served as trade secretary and transport secretary under Tony Blair, is taking action in a joint claim with another individual. The new claims include one from a former Scum of the World show business reporter, Lee Harpin, who left the paper in 2003, and went on to be news editor at the Sunday Mirra. Celebrity agent Sue Ayton is also suing. She has acted for a string of top news presenters, including Peter Sissons, Michael Buerk, Moira Stewart, Jon Snow and the BBC's former royal correspondent Jennie Bond. The fifty three claims were made public on Monday and were submitted in time for the 14 September deadline set by Mr Justice Vos, who is managing the second tranche of legal cases being taken against News International over phone hacking. They bring the total number of claims that may go to trial next year to one hundred and seventy four – the remainder of claims had already been submitted and made public, including legal action being taken by Cherie Blair, Wayne Rooney and David Beckham's father Ted. Last week, more than fifty other claims were submitted, including cases being launched by Sarah Ferguson, Joanne Leese, the woman whose boyfriend was murdered in the Australian outback and Uri Geller. Earlier this year, fifty eight individuals won payouts from News International, including former culture secretary Tessa Jowell who won two hundred thousand smackers, and the singer Charlotte Church who was awarded three hundred thousand knicker for her family and a further three hundred grand in costs. It transpired last week that her parish priest was also allegedly hacked along with her former boyfriend, Steve Johnson, both of whom are suing News International. The publisher is also dealing with one hundred and twenty four other claims submitted to its own phone-hacking compensation scheme.Google's co-founder and chief executive Larry Page has topped the Gruniad Morning Star's media 'hot one hundred for 2012,' in a list shaped by the fallout from the Leveson Inquiry. As if anyone is actually interest in what those Communist lice have to say, about anything. The annual list sees Page oust Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, from the top spot in the opinion of some nobody of an importance at the Gruniad, while there are also places in the one hundred most powerful people in the media for Wee Shughie McFee, the sour-faced Scottish chef off Crossroads, Jezza Clarkson, yer actual Lord Sugar-Sweetie and new BBC director general George Entwistle. This, apparently, constitutes 'news'. Despite vast changes in the ways people access media, particularly on digital platforms, it is a judge-led inquiry into media standards and ethics that has most dictated the make-up of the list. Lord Justice Leveson, who has heard testimony from leading media figures and former prime ministers in his inquiry over the past year, joins the list at number ten in 2012. He is just one place ahead of billionaire tyrant Rupert Murdoch, who appeared before him at the Royal Courts of Justice inquiry over two days of landmark evidence earlier in the year. Murdoch has topped the list three times previously, and has never fallen outside of the top ten until now, suggesting that his influence is waning in the UK, particularly following the phone-hacking scandal at his UK newspaper publishing group. His son James Murdoch the small clings onto the list in one hundredth place, but has seen his media stock fall dramatically after he had to resign from his posts as chairman of News International and pay-TV giant Sky following major public pressure. However, Elisabeth Murdoch has seen her profile rise following a well-received MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh last month, and now stands in eighteenth place. She sold her Shine Group production company to her father's News Corp and has remained relatively untainted by the hacking scandal, but recently ruled out replacing her father at the head of the media empire. Google's Page is named the most powerful media figure after a year that has seen major growth at Google - from a search engine to a fully integrated content and hardware giant - including a multi-billion purchase of smartphone maker Motorola Mobility.
Page, who took over from Eric Schmidt as Google chief executive in April this year, has also seen Google's Android mobile operating system become the most popular mobile OS in the world, running on around sixty eight per cent of smartphones. He bumps Facebook's Zuckerberg from the top spot, after the social network suffered something of a disastrous stock market debut, including concerns over its long-term growth prospects leading to a near halving of the share price. However, Facebook is still represented on the list by Joanna Shields, its vice-president and managing director in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, who is the highest-ranking woman in 2012. The former Google, AOL and Bebo executive was praised for transforming Facebook into a 'key marketing platform for businesses in Europe.' The top ten also includes Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo in second place, followed by the BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten in third, just ahead of the corporation's new boss George Entwistle, who started his challenging new job on Monday. Apple's design chief Sir Jonathan Ive, the man responsible for the look of products such as the iPhone and iPad, is in fifth place, while the top ten also includes the Daily Scum Mail's odious louse Paul Dacre, WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell and The X Factor boss Wee Shughie McFee, the sour-faced Scottish chef off Crossroads in seventh, eighth and ninth respectively. Other high-profile media figures in list include Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson (twenty seven), Labour MP Tom Watson, power to the people! (thirty six) and Graham Norton (sixty), who recently sold his production company So Television to ITV for a deal that could be worth seventeen million smackers, along with BBC Radio 2 breakfast host Chris Evans (seventy five), the Lord Thy God Steven Moffat (eighty seven: 'To have one hit BBC1 drama may earn you a place on the Guardian 100. To have two on the go seems a bit like showing off') and Lord Sugar-Sweetie (ninety).The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have launched a criminal complaint in France in relation to the publication of pictures of the duchess topless. In a separate civil case later, the royal couple will seek to have an edition of the French magazine Closer withdrawn after it printed the images. The images have appeared on foreign websites, the Irish Daily Lies and most recently Italian gossip magazine Chi. Chi said it was merely exercising its right to 'chronicle reality.' Whatever the hell that means. BBC Paris correspondent Christian Fraser said there was no name listed in the criminal complaint. He added that most lawyers seem to agree that, under strict French law, the pictures represent an undisputed breach of privacy - an open-and-shut case. An injunction, if granted, would lead to the magazine being withdrawn from shelves immediately but the tribunal's judgement will only relate to the distribution of the photos in France.
The action has not stopped Closer's Italian sister magazine, Chi, from publishing the same photos but the speed with which the royal couple have acted may deter others from publishing the pictures. Chi has printed a special edition featuring more than twenty pages pages of the photographs. It carries a picture of the duchess, topless, on its front cover with a headline that reads: The Queen is Nude! In an editorial the magazine's director, Alfonso Signorini, attempted to justify the decision to print the images by saying he considered them to be 'normal and up to date with the times.' He said: 'Why, I wonder, Kate Middleton, for now Duchess of Cambridge but future Queen of the United Kingdom, should be different from girls her age? Never has a situation managed to renew the English monarchy, with its obligations and its rigid protocol, more than this one.' Signorini claimed the series of pictures were 'not particularly sensationalistic nor damaging to her dignity' and 'surely makes her more likeable' and 'less distant from all of us.' Closer and Chi are both part of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's Mondadori media group. Under French law the damages related to legal proceedings could run into tens of thousands of Euros and, in theory, the magazine editor and photographer could also be sent to jail for a year. The co-owners of the Irish Daily Lies - Richard Desmond's Northern & Shell group and the Dublin-based publisher Independent News and Media - condemned the decision to publish the pictures and said they had had no prior knowledge of it. Desmond, chairman of Northern & Shell, said he intended to withdraw from the Republic of Ireland and had begun steps to close down the joint venture. 
An alleged 'source' allegedly at the Irish Daily Lies claimed the belief within the publication was that Northern & Shell would pull out of the publication on Tuesday, when a board meeting of the paper is scheduled to take place. Independent News and Media has described plans to close the publication as 'disproportionate', while at the same time acknowledging that the paper had made a 'poor editorial decision.' No British newspaper has dared to print the pictures, with the Daily Scum Mail saying it had been offered similar pictures last week but had rejected them and the Sun saying that 'no responsible newspaper would touch them with a bargepole.' This is the same Sun which, you may recall, happily printed candid photos of the Duchess of Cambridge's brother-in-law less than a month ago. A palace spokeswoman said: 'We can confirm that a criminal complaint is to be made to the French Prosecution Department. It concerns the taking of photographs of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge whilst on holiday and the publication of those photographs in breach of their privacy.' The photographs were taken while the duchess was sunbathing on a private holiday with her husband at the French chateau of the Queen's nephew, Lord Linley, in Provence. Meanwhile, the royal couple have been in the Solomon Islands representing the Queen on their nine-day Diamond Jubilee tour of South East Asia and the South Pacific.Simon Amstell, Milton Jones and Miles Jupp are among the nominees for this year's Writers' Guild Awards. Amstell and his Grandma's House co-writer Dan Swimer have been shortlisted in the TV Comedy category, alongside PhoneShop creator Phil Bowker, and Tony Roche for the Monty Python biopic Holy Flying Circus.
In the radio category, Jones and his Another Case of Milton Jones co-writer James Carey are up against Jupp for his sitcom In And Out Of The Kitchen, about a cookery writer, and Matt Berry for his surreal Radio 4 series I, Regress. The Horrible Histories team are up for an award in the children's TV category, alongside the writers of Four O'Clock Club: Maths and The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Curse of Clyde Langer. Black Pond, the film which starred Chris Langham and featured Amstell in a cameo role, won a nomination for best first feature for writers Will Sharpe and Tom Kingsley. The winners will be announced on Wednesday November 14 at the Tabernacle in Notting Hill.England's women's football team manager Hope Powell has praised the BBC following the announcement that the Euro 2013 qualifier will be screened live. The game between England and Croatia will be live on BBC2 next Wednesday from 5.00pm. A win will take England to the top of their group and secure automatic qualification for Euro 2013 in Sweden. Women's football coverage was prominent on the BBC during the Olympics as Team GB - also coached by Powell - managed to attract large audiences for the games as they reached the quarter finals.
Yer actual Demba Ba his very self twice equalised for Keith Telly Topping's beloved (though unsellable) Newcastle as the Magpies earned a draw in a frantic Monday night game against the top team in Liverpool, Everton. Leighton Baines fired home to put the Toffees ahead and, later, cleared off his own goal-line. Ba levelled with a left-foot strike before Marouane Fellaini and Anichebe both had goals controversially disallowed for the home side. Anichebe thought he had got the winner with an angled strike two minutes from time only for Ba to again equalise for Newcastle after great work by substitute Shola Ameobi.
