This year the committee chose to nominate US stand-up Bo Burnham for the inaugural ‘Act Most Likely to Make a Million Quid’ Award. Burnham’s London PR company, whose clients include a Wealth Management company and an insurance broking, risk assessment and financial services company, wrote to the Award organisers saying of Burnham: “making money is not what he’s driven by at all and (we) don’t think he’d be at all comfortable with receiving this award.”

As a consequence, the Malcolm Hardee judges have now nominated Burnham for their main Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality because “for a modern day stand-up comic not to be interested in money is entirely original”.

They have had a lot of sport with the PR company’s decision – award organiser John Fleming saying: “{Malcolm] would have admired Bo’s disregard for money. So we have asked the PR if Bo would like to lend us £500 or £1,000, which we promise to pay back. We haven’t had a reply yet, but we live in hope.”

What exactly drives people to make these decisions? Surely they know that the best thing they could have done was deflect the award nomination with wit and guile, rather than push their client right into the hands of any satirist who wants to have a go? The Malcolm Hardee awards have some serious satirical chops – let’s see where this goes and how little Burnham’s PR like it.

Burnham, being American, might have an excuse for not knowing how the Edinburgh Festival works, but his British PR ought to know better. Malcolm Hardee is surely laughing his ethereal socks off from beyond the grave at all this.

The article is desperate to get people fulminating about spoilt football players in the wake of England’s World Cup flop, on the assumption that these football “legends” are heroes and idols for the nation’s kids who are betraying their legions of fans by going out and being normal. They are doing nothing of the sort.

British football has moved far too far away from the streets to be able to be seen as the people’s sport any more, and almost nothing of the millions being poured into people like Rooney’s pockets is coming back to the street to allow a new generation of great footballers to develop.

The media, however, still need to build these ordinary, fallible, serially overpaid people into heroes. However, whereas in the past they were built up to be perpetuated as idols (just look at the 1966 World Cup team, who shall forever be used as rods to beat the backs of any English footballers with even an ounce of talent), they are now being built up to be destroyed at the first sign of feet of clay.

The media need these modern footballers to behave badly, as the stories that sell papers are the soap operas, the tales of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. These are the stories that resonate most completely with the 21st century British public; they have been created only to be destroyed for the vicarious thrill of the tabloid- and website-reading masses.

The only extraordinary thing about Rooney is the amount of money he earns for being pretty good at striking a ball towards a net – in the usual run of things, this is a man who would be down the pub most weekends, having a laugh with his mates, not buying mansions. So next time you read an article full of outrage and disappointment, please remember that the media – be it tabloid- or web-based – thrives on badly behaved sports and TV stars and will do all that they can to manufacture the conditions in which said star can fail in style so they can keep on selling you papers.

The article below was published in yesterday’s Observer, alongside a big profile of Sir Martin Sorrell. My piece hasn’t been published online, so I’m reprinting it here. To read the profile online, click here.

He has impeccable timing and, even with a British accent, has the knack of setting the media business agenda across the globe. As WPP “capo di tutti capi ” he takes the lead and is willing to place himself front and centre as an uber-ambassador for an empire that does not always inspire confidence.

Selling a smorgasbord of agencies (some better than others) to a global client hasn’t been easy. The vision of good business, as seen through the WPP prism, has been a clever refraction. Sorrell could teach BP’s Tony Hayward a few tricks.

Martin is legendarily ruthless and his business energy is boundless, making him something of an unlikely role model for the Saga generation. I defy anyone to find the Sorrell off switch. In the movie Thank You For Smoking, a power broker is asked: “When do you sleep?”. The character fires back: “Sundays!” This is very much the Martin Sorrell model.

In a past career as a theatre publicist, Martin was on my first night Sleb invite list. He turned up to the opening night of Jackie Mason’s West End season and I vividly remember a guest cornering him and telling him what a great job he’d done with his business, emphasising, phlegmatically and without satirical intent, how he really loved The Rock and The Hardy Boys, but that his kids had gone off it now and were more into spiky hair, hoodies, Slipknot logos and alienated angst. I explained to the hapless punter that Martin was the chairman WPP, not WWF. Martin took it completely in his stride.

Love him or loathe him, Martin Sorrell’s ruthless endeavour is hard to match. Hotshot start-ups trying to conjure hip corporate identities should also remember there is a something truly cool about creating an empire named after a wire plastic product manufacturer. Even if, occasionally, it gets confused with wrestling…

I’m Anglo-Saxon, I’m of German extraction.
I’m a Celt. My blood’s from the East.
I’m Norman, I’m Viking and I came hiking
to the British ethnicity feast.

Yes, I’m British, British, born of the skittish
aftermaths of empires gone.
I’m mixed, multiracial and no PR facial
can take away from the truth of my song.

I’m Muslim, I’m Gurkah, I’m a social worker.
I’m Jewish, I’m royal, I’m black.
I’m a desperate immigrant, an urgent applicant
escaping from torture, attack.

I’m a Brit, I’m a Brit and anyone’s fit
to take that name with pride as a tag.
I live in a world where one cannot stay curled
hermetically up in a flag.

In the Britain I live in, no one should give in
to hate or abuse or despair.
Whatever my creed, orientation or breed
all that matters is to be kind and be fair.

Yes, I’m British, British, born of the skittish
aftermaths of empires gone.
I’m mixed, multiracial and no PR facial
can take away from the truth of my song.