You may well have blinked and missed it because the first month of the new decade has already been and gone, along with an avalanche of glad-handed trophy shows. In those 31 short days and long nights, the entertainment world somehow managed to cram in the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards and, just this past weekend, the Grammys. If you included the Australian Open, the late-night slugfest between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien and the build-up to the Super Bowl, you’d think you were present at the birth of All-You-Can-Watch T.V. Prior to broadcasting the 52nd Grammy Awards, CBS opted to play to the gallery by staging a red carpet rehearsal. Their attempt to put some extra glitter on the gingerbread amounted to industry patriarch Clive Davis being surrounded by a bevy of satin-clad nubiles. It was not a classic moment. Just as bizarre was the admission that the Grammy organizers still pamper their winners by way of a ‘gift suite for talent’. Bearing in mind that the music industry is stuck in free fall, the dishing out of buckshee beauty products and state-of-the-art electronics to the fortunate few is little short of a bonus scheme.

In advance of the big night there were suggestions in the press, that the winning performers might echo the Milli Vanilli fiasco of twenty years previous by lip-synching. This was denied by the Recording Academy, although there was some doubt on the night as to who was doing it for real and who wasn’t. Miming on television has long been a touchy subject, with the subterfuge stretching as far back as Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand”. Aside of B. B. King and Jerry Lee Lewis who liked to perform ‘live’, the guests on Clark’s show simply went through the motions whilst a record was being played. The same system was adopted in the U.K. by “Top of the Pops”, that is until a run in with the Musicians Union brought about a new set of rules. During the show’s fourth season it was agreed that everyone would have to sing ‘live’ to a pre-recorded backing track. This worked sufficiently well until the last week of March 1967 when Jimi Hendrix turned up to plug his latest single, ‘Purple Haze’. Following a spirited introduction from compère Pete Murray, a tape-op in the control room fired-up the wrong machine and on came the backing track to Alan Price’s ‘Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear’. A bemused Hendrix looked straight into the camera and said, “I don’t know the words to this one man!”

Meanwhile, back with Grammy Awards # 52, or should we say “Beyonce Beanfeast’ because that was how the programme panned out, every single performance was so extreme and over-the-top you’d think that Cecil B DeMille was back in business. If your cup of meat happens to be the iniquitous Lady GaGa, Pink stealing a march on Cirque du Soliel or those unintentional Glam-Rock revivalists the Black Eyed Peas, then this Grammy was for you. If, like me you yearned for a song that didn’t require a songwriters’ stimulus package, then it was time to look elsewhere – and fast. Fortunately there were some less shallow moments – Jeff Beck and Imelda May paying tribute to Les Paul, the 3-D film of Michael Jackson’s ‘Earth Song’ and a lifetime achievement for Bobby Darin – but overall there seemed to be a whole lotta fakin’ going on. Having attended several CMA’s in the past, I can only say that staying the three-hour course is a challenge that only a survivor from some ‘Jungle Reality’ show might get through. What the production team will strive to do in 2011, short of staging the entire affair aboard a Mars Mission space shuttle, is anyone’s guess.