She checked into the Betty Ford the next day

She checked into the Betty Ford the next day.”Sweeney, I feel sure, will never succumb, as Minnelli has done, to the hazards of fame (albeit lesser) and fortune (albeit smaller). She is, and will forever be, a product of her working-class Walton background – down-to-earth, gregarious, funny, and as far as is possible in showbiz, without an inflated ego Unlike many rising stars, she makes time to natter. Indeed, my allotted hour is over and she has long since finished her chicken, sans “allee-olee”, but we sit for ages discussing the football team we both support, Everton FC, and listing our five favourite films Hers are defiantly non-cerebral. “My all-time favourite is The Way We Were, Barbra Streisand,” she says. “Then I’d have The Wizard of Oz, From Here To Eternity, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels which always makes me howl laughing, and The Sound of Music… just for the sheer, the sheer doh-re-mi of it.”I ask, finally, whether she will ever forsake her native Liverpool to live in London? “I’ll always keep my flat in Liverpool,” she says. “It would be nice to have a place in London, too, but you know, my friends and me still get dead excited before a night out in London, and we get all dolled up, and halfway through the night we look at each other and say, ‘we have a better time back in Liverpool, don’t we?’”‘Challenge of a Lifetime’ starts on 6 October on ITV.

Deflecting an asteroid approaching Earth could be more complex than just blowing it up, new research suggests. Deflecting an asteroid approaching Earth could be more complex than just blowing it up, new research suggests.
There is also a chance, though, that the interplanetary rocks’ strange structure will one day make it easy to mine precious metals in space with almost no effort – except getting there. Data and images from Eros, a 21-mile-wide asteroid that is the second-largest “near-Earth object” (NEO) known, show it is made up of a loose mass of rocks and covered in “pools” of dust, grains of which are the size of a few atoms.To predict what would happen if Eros had to be diverted from a collision with the Earth is nearly impossible. The risk of Eros hitting us was 5 per cent but, said Erik Asphaug of the University of California at Santa Cruz, “not anytime soon”.There are reckoned to be hundreds of asteroids in our solar system that could at some time be heading for Earth. An object just a few hundred yards wide could destroy a city; one as big as Eros could wipe out all life. There are international schemes to discover and monitor such NEOs, but no clear plan on how to deal with them.The favoured theory for diverting an asteroid was to set off a nuclear blast near the surface, to push it off its orbit. But that might have no appreciable effect – or it could be unpredictable because its internal structure was so irregular.The data emerged after Near, an unmanned spacecraft built by Nasa, was intentionally crashlanded on Eros in February, after a five-year mission during which it spent one year orbiting the asteroid taking photographs and readings.The vista there was stranger than expected because the surface of Eros appeared eroded.

Joseph Veverka, an astronomer at Cornell University writing about Eros in today’sNature, said: “It continues to surprise us, and to add to our amazement about how diverse the surface of an asteroid can be.”The mystery of the erosion and the pools hinders planning how to deflect asteroids heading for Earth. Professor Asphaug said the layer of dust could pose a problem for exploration. But it could also make relatively easy the mining of asteroids for their abundant metals, including precious metals such as gold and platinum. “They’ll be making soda cans out of platinum if they’re successful,” the professor said.. “The Shuttleworths Christmas Special” was quite possibly the funniest thing on the air last year.

It certainly knocked the stuffing out of everything else in the seasonal schedules. So fans of the fictional South Yorkshire couple who for years have been delighting Radio 4 listeners with details of their dreary domesticity were only too happy to wait up last week for the very first episode of Brian Appleton’s History of Rock’n'Roll on the same station. “The Shuttleworths Christmas Special” was quite possibly the funniest thing on the air last year. It certainly knocked the stuffing out of everything else in the seasonal schedules. So fans of the fictional South Yorkshire couple who for years have been delighting Radio 4 listeners with details of their dreary domesticity were only too happy to wait up last week for the very first episode of Brian Appleton’s History of Rock’n'Roll on the same station.
This new six-part series (at 11pm on Wednesdays) is also penned and performed by Graham “Jilted John” Fellowes. Remember “I’ve been going out with a girl/ Her name is Julie/ But last night she said to me/ While we were watching telly”? Yes, that was him back in 1978. Since then the one-hit wonder hasn’t stopped meddling in music.

He’s been churning out cheesy tunes in various guises and this time he’s a “rock musicologist and part-time lecturer in media studies at a college of further education in the Newcastle-under-Lyme area”.Another cleverly conceived character full of comedy potential? Well, almost. Brian Appleton is a bitter and twisted Brummy (from Selly Oak to be precise) who opened his monologue to the studio audience by explaining that he was about to reveal the “certain events” which would prove how he “helped to shape rock history in a very big way” That’s a very big premise – and so full of promise. But one he couldn’t actually keep.The Shuttleworths is a hard act for Fellowes to follow It’s subtle, realistic, convincing and hilarious Its characters are nondescript, but normal and nice. They are likeable because they have such low expectations of life without being losers Appleton, however, is simply a no-hoper A nerd He’s aggressive His dreams have been dashed and he’s angry. Every single successful pop star has nicked his ideas and owes everything to him That’s the gag. The real joke is that in the first episode it just wasn’t that funny.Appleton’s account of rock history, he told us, would not start with the great blues men of the Twenties or even with Bill Haley or Alan Freed, the DJ who coined the phrase “rock’n'roll” No.