all aboard the torture porn express!

Can you believe that there's an amusement park ride based on the Saw movies? Do people really leave the cinema after seeing Saw V thinking: 'Well, I enjoyed that, but what I really want to do is repeat the experience in rollercoaster form'? Apparently they do. I don't even like the Saw movies. They're exactly the kind of films that give torture porn a bad name.

Speaking of torture porn, Lionel Richie has a new album out. I don't get to hear so much new music on the radio now because Smooth Radio exercises thorough quality control when it comes to new tracks, and nothing of any quality is allowed to get through. Lionel Richie makes it though. 'He always brings a new album out in time for Mother's Day', said Lorraine in the office. 'He's crafty.' Not as crafty as Ronan Keating though, who released an album called Songs For My Mother a couple of weeks ago. The whore. I heard him talking to Mark Goodier, giving an account of how he and his producer had worked for ages on a track, 'trying to get it to sound like me.' Eh? But it is you, Ronan. Isn't it? Ronan?

What are you, Ronan?

Smooth as it is, this station does offer up the occasional grotesquerie to wake you up, mainly during the ad breaks. For example, the woman who, in an ad for breast augmentation (!) encourages us to 'speak to My Breast'. And then there's the advert - for what I can't recall - where Theo Paphites introduces himself at the beginning and I always mishear it so that it sounds like he's offering a service called 'Feel A Foetus.'

But perhaps this says more about me than it does about Smooth Radio.