The album news literally NOBODY wants to hear

DEAD DUCK! The Nokia Green Room, Channel 4, Sunday, 1.10pm

If you reckon you can drag yourself out of bed by the crack of lunchtime this Sunday, you’re in for a treat – Tara Palmer-Tomkinson pops up on The Nokia Green Room to talk about HER NEW ALBUM. No, your eyes are not deceiving you (although you might soon hope your ears are) – the worst TV singing competition winner in living memory has a whole album of musical misery, all ready to unleash.

At lease she can laugh about it, eh? Let’s hope anyone who actually buys the thing can say the same.

Tara’s old mate Duncan “From Blue” From Blue is also on, making the not-particularly-astonishing revelation that, by the end, none of them could really be bothered being in Blue any more.

Other guests include the lovely Jonas Brothers, three wholesome, clean-livin’ American boys who sing Busted-style pop songs, and make quite a good job of it really. They’ve been promoting their wares in the UK recently, but have been faced with some slight language barrier problems.

“The accents are great here though,” says Joe. “I was walking down the street and I saw a pretty girl, so I thought I’d say hey, and they said something so cool, it was like hiyo or heya or something. That’s like a karate noise, I thought I was going to be hit in the face.”

If this happened in London, it’s probably quite likely that the girl was about to hit him in the face, but let’s not shatter his illusions.

Anyway, they get the Brothers to do a bit of singing, and also knock a few lumps out of each other. Boys, eh?

Christmas with The Inbetweeners

JAZZY! The Inbetweeners, E4, Thursdays, 10.00pm

It’s Christmas! No, really, it is. Well, not really. But it certainly is in this week’s episode of The Inbetweeners, which is now officially our favourite new sitcom.

This week, and the boys are charged with organising their school’s Christmas prom, so it features the most tinsel you’ll see on telly this May (unless you watch BBC3’s umpty-fourth repeat of that Doctor Who Christmas special with Catherine Tate in it this Friday at 9pm, of course), as well as the usual jokes about wanking’n’stuff.

It’s the last one this week and, while the second episode was by far the best, it’s been a pretty impressive debut run and lowculture readers seem to have been enjoying it, so let’s hope we get some more next year.

Sure as eggs

Back in the day, I used to work at Top of the Pops Magazine, and someone there had the hilarious idea to get popstars to decorate hard-boiled eggs as themselves. Most of them told us to get lost, but no less a personality than Rachel Stevens HERSELF stepped up to the paints, and laid us a beautiful egg in her own image.

It then fell to me to photograph these eggs to go in the magazine, so they were gingerly handed to me with the immortal instruction: “DON’T DROP THE FUCKING EGGS!”

Of course, the very first thing I did was let Rachel Stevens The Egg roll off the table and shatter into pieces. Not to be deterred, I took a photo of her anyway and just touched up the cracks in Photoshop – which is probably not a million miles away from what actually happens to most popstar photos before publication. Apart from Rachel’s, of course – we’re sure she has a skin like purest alabaster.

Anyway, this rather long and not-especially-interesting anecdote came to mind when I heard about E4’s E4.com’s Egg Fight, in which eggs done up to look like celebs must face trial-by-microwave to see who pops first. It’s probably the closest you’ll ever come to seeing Jordan, Jodie Marsh and Kerry Katona being boiled alive on the internet, and that has to be worth two minutes of anyone’s time.

There’s a load more web-exclusive stuff to look at too, including two young Scots travelling the world performing 101 Challenges set by E4 viewers. Most lowculture readers will probably think they’re a pair of idiots, but they do seem to get their kit off quite a lot, so that’s something at least.