Yorksheather

Another lovely Gareth pic

Thanks for you report Maria . I could see you were in heaven while you were watching Gareth's performance . :smile: Great report and pic Sharon, thank you

Thanks for your report Khelda . Gareth certainly was awesome . I wondered who Cheryl was , as Gareth thanked Cheryl when he was on stage and said he loved her to bits .

Gareth was absolutely brilliant last night . He was full of confidence and speaking well , and as you can see from the pics he was looking good. Gareth's voice was amazing, very strong and rich, he sounded very different. I loved all the songs , which were all quite different , I hate albums where all the tracks sound the same. Some of the songs had a heavy guitar sound , I think there were three guitars , I liked the sound very much. Angel Over My Shoulder made me cry . Wendy is very lucky to have a son like Gareth .

I was very pleased you won Janice, and are taking me with you ( to cheer me up ) Thanks you and congratulations to everyone who has won the tickets

Brilliant, I'm glad you are going

I think the lights are usually the week before , on the Thursday prob the 16th November this year. Children In Need is the 17th this year . Bournemouth 's the week after .

Do you know I have had a feeling all day we were going to hear something , and have been checking the news section Great isn't it ?

A very Important Message has been posted on Gareth's Official Site Dear Gareth Fans, After much anticipation , patience and constant support from you all, we are thrilled to be able to report some very exciting news which you have all been waiting for . Gareth will be back on your TV screen in 2006 ! Not only that , but his new Album will be ready to release very soon too! Until now , we have had to keep these projects under wraps in order that they could be developed and worked on privately but we always promised that as soon as there was any concrete news . you'd be the first to know. Whilst it is a little too early to confirm dates and more details , these projects are almost ready and we thought we should let you be the first to know the great news ! More announcements in the very near future will be made here on Gareth's website so please continue to check here for the latest formation . Thanks as always for your support. Gareth is very excited and can't wait to be back :w00t:

I have read on The Zoe boards that Zoe is currently in rehearsals for a new show she will be starring at The Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas . Noel Sullivan ( ex Hearsay ) will be joining Zoe in the shows starting on October 7th http://www.zoebirkett.net/phpbb2/index.php

I agree about Suzannes' pink top being very girly , that thought came into my mind when I saw the pic, I know that Gareth likes 'Girly' females

Why ? :no:

Thanks , it's nice that another new pic has been found

It was great to see the latest pics of Gareth and Suzanne in Spain, he does looks relaxed

Thanks Snowdrop , I recieved my replacement dvd's yesterday

Thanks Maggie and Snowdrop , I've sent my order in

I was very pleased that Wendy wrote a letter to Anita,and Gareth sent a very special card to Anita offering this condolences on the death of Tracey , I'm sure she appreciated it.

Just had to look at Tracie with Gareth , she did enjoy that day

Thanks for letting us know Jill, I am really upset to hear of Tracie's death.Tracey was such a lovely and brave young lady , and a huge Gareth fan.Anita her mum is also a very remarkable lady,I am so sad for Tracie's husband and all the family. Heather xxx

It's a great site with lots of lovely Gareth's videos to watch

Thanks for making the great new logo Rachel,I love it

This is from today's Scotman online news ( Sunday 27th November ) another interesting read. It's never simple when Simons fall out PAUL STOKES ONE IS a ruthless, ambitious, super-rich, music industry mogul who is not afraid to trample on other people's feelings to get to the top. The other is a ruthlessly ambitious, super-rich, music industry mogul who is not afraid to trample on other people's feelings to get to the top. So it should come as little surprise that pop impresarios Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell should find themselves on opposing sides in a £100m legal battle. Yet while they are rivals, they are also old pals and colleagues who have known each other for more than 20 years and who, apparently, remain good friends despite that multi-million pound writ. At the heart of the legal battle are two rival smash-hit television formats, Pop Idol (and its US cousin American Idol) and The X Factor, both of which are alleged, as the lawyers might say, to be talent shows. Most right-minded people, on hearing the dispute involved an argument over who really created The X Factor would assume it was a libel case, with each man trying to blame the other for bringing the show to our Saturday night television screens. Of course, it is the other way around, with both Fuller and Cowell claiming it was all their own idea. In artistic terms, the row could easily be dismissed as two bouffant-haired men arguing over a bunch of coxcombs. However, the tremendous income generated by the 'pop factor' format means it is a lot more serious than that. Both Fuller, who is said to be worth as much as £200m, and Cowell, whose wealth is set at a much more modest £50m, owe most of their fortunes to these television shows. Fuller, while the wealthier of the pair, is the least well known. His first major foray into the public eye was in 1997 when he was sacked by the Spice Girls, his first major experiment in transforming the mildly talented into international money-making machines. The precise nature of his role in the girls' rise is indicated by the fact they rejoiced in the nicknames Posh, Ginger, Sporty, Baby and Scary, while he was known in the industry as Svengali Spice. He began his career running discos before becoming a talent scout for a record company. He made his first million managing the DJ Paul Hardcastle, whose Vietnam-inspired hit '19' is recognised in the names of Fuller's companies 19 Management and 19 TV, which makes Pop Idol and American Idol and is the company suing Cowell. As well as first hitting the jackpot with the Spice Girls, the band also demonstrated Fuller's early grasp of the fact that music is the least important element of the modern music industry. "With the Spice Girls we created a global entertainment brand," he said, in one of his rare interviews. Even his friends have described him as "cold and clinical". According to one: "His business is his life, and nothing gets in the way. There is a ruthless element." He once told another of his creations, the bubblegum pop band S Club7, "I could put cardboard cutouts of you on the stage and it wouldn't make any difference." Those who saw them live might struggle to say whether he ever carried out his threat. While the rest of the industry fretted about falling CD sales, Fuller went after alternative sources of income. "CD sales are declining, but you can make up for it in merchandising. It occurred to me that music as entertainment is as powerful as it has ever been, but the way people consume it is changing." The figures certainly back up this analysis; in terms of sales, the pop industry in Britain has been in serious decline for well over a decade. Last year, Swedish DJ Eric Prydz scored a UK number one single with 'Call On Me', despite selling 21,749 copies in one of the weeks he was at the top. He would barely have reached the top five with that sale in the 1990s or bothered the top 40 in the 1960s. In fact, the combined sale of all top 40 records is now typically about half the 500,000 weekly sales it was a decade ago. The signs are that even the recently lucrative teenage market is in decline. Only a third of all 12 to 19-year-olds bought a single in 2001 - a proportion that is said to be falling further as a result of the increase in popularity of music downloads. And yet, despite the decline in CD sales, the pop music industry itself is still incredibly lucrative, partly as a result of cashing in on downloads, TV tie-ins and other innovations. The industry is now worth an estimated £40bn a year worldwide, with British acts accounting for around £8bn of that. The 'pop factor' phenomenon, in fact, has injected a bit of renewed vigour into the UK sector, with Will Young, Gareth Gates and the various other contenders adding millions of sales in the last three years. It is Fuller who has been credited with driving this part of the evolution of the pop industry, having hit on the idea of creating a brand - as opposed to a band - that would carry on, even as the pop stars it manufactured fell into obscurity, as virtually all the winners of either format eventually have. At the time it first hit our screens back in 2001, Fuller and Cowell were seen as the co-creators of Pop Idol, and, to a degree, they shared out the spoils. Cowell picked up a big cheque for his high-profile role as the Mr Nasty on the panel of three who judged the would-be idols, endearing himself to the nation with such well-phrased put-downs as "that was distinctly... average". Cowell also made money from his rights to put out CDs by the winners, who were virtually guaranteed one hit by their television exposure. However, Fuller's ownership of the show itself meant he took the lion's share. A couple of years after launch, Pop Idol alone was earning more for Fuller than his bands, and his television earnings easily outstripped those from traditional music sales. The genius of the pop factor is its ability to generate millions in revenue from advertising and phone voting lines before even a single CD is sold. The shows are less a talent contest than a drama. Millions tune in for their weekly dose of soap opera as wannabes and never-will-bes have their hopes raised and dashed in the most brutal fashion by the expert panel. It is not to everyone's taste and is especially looked down on by the serious end of the music business. Chris Martin, the Coldplay frontman, once suggested Fuller should be "melted down and turned into glue for destroying people's dreams". But that was before he put out his last album, X and Y. Last year The X Factor pulled in £50m in advertising revenue for ITV. Two weeks ago the show received a landmark one million phone votes, generating a profit of around £350,000 for the phone companies and the production company. In the US, Fox is charging a record $700,000 for a 30-second advert in some episodes of American Idol, more even than ABC charges for slots during Desperate Housewives. It was the sale of the Pop Idol format around the world, and in particular to Rupert Murdoch's Fox channel in the US, which catapulted Fuller into the ranks of the super-rich. Cowell was still doing all right, he transferred his Mr Nasty act to the US, where he is now the best-known Brit in America and earning £4.5m a year for his role, but he got no share from these sales. So he did the obvious thing. Seeing the big money was in the television show, he set up his own production company, and invented his own format, The X Factor. There, of course, the similarities with Fuller's Pop Idol obviously ended. For while Pop Idol was a music talent show featuring open auditions, a three-strong judging panel, and public voting to decide the winner, The X Factor was a music talent show featuring open auditions, a three-strong judging panel and public voting to decide the winner. Only the most churlish would see the latter as a copy of the former, Cowell might argue, having branded Fuller's decision to sue him for the theft of his idea as "totally ridiculous". Cowell might be overstating his defence but industry experts have offered him support. According to Paul Sheehan, head of commercial affairs for the Scottish television company SMG, which recently acquired the rights to one of the old stagers of the TV format world, This Is Your Life, the shows might look and sound the same but it is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to prove they are the same in a court of law. "Put simply, you cannot copyright an idea. Copyright only comes into being when the idea is expressed," he says. "You can trademark a show's name, and you can try and trademark some of the elements that go into it. But that is a lot easier for something like a quiz show, like The Weakest Link, which has particular rules, than it is for a simple talent show." The fact that Pop Idol had three judges, one of whom played the role of baddie, hardly makes it unique. "You need an odd number of judges because you need a casting vote and three is easier to manage than five," says Sheehan. "The good cop, bad cop routine is also common. Anyone who remembers New Faces from the 1970s will recall that Nina Miskow and Tony Hatch played that role for many years." It is ironic this battle should revolve around two talent shows, as the only other attempt to pursue a similar case through the British courts involved another example of the genre, Hughie Green's Opportunity Knocks. Green sued the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation after it launched a talent show called, in something of a giveaway, Opportunity Knocks, which featured all the elements of the British show, from its clapometer measuring the studio audience's reaction, to Hughie Green's own catchphrase: "It's make your mind up time folks." Even so, when courts in England and New Zealand made their minds up, they rejected Green's case. Given that, the most surprising thing is not that shows like Pop Idol get copied, but that anyone bothers to buy one at all. "Everybody in the industry realises that legally there is virtually no protection for these types of television shows, yet the industry is worth billions of dollars a year. It's very difficult to reconcile," says Sheehan. "Really, what is happening is the operation of a huge worldwide gentlemen's agreement without which it would be like the Wild West." To the disappointment of all those who last week had expected to see Fuller and Cowell slogging it out in front of some judges for a change, those two gentlemen now seem close to their own agreement, out of court and out of sight. Interestingly, the main pressure for a solution appears to have come from America, where the outcome of this row is of vital interest to Murdoch's Fox. Industry insiders in the US point out that Fox is desperate to hang on to American Idol and to Cowell, the one element that makes the show stand out. If the battle had ended badly in court over here, Fox feared that Cowell might quit their show, and take The X Factor over there. Settling on the steps suits both. First, it will prevent the emergence of any potentially embarrassing revelations about their shows. And second, there has been a distinct lack of the enmity normally expected in such high-profile, and high-stakes, cases. Both men may sport super-size egos, but it looks as if they have kept them out of this battle. It has remained strictly business, never personal. According to Cowell, they have carried on talking all through the spat, just as he has carried on working for Fuller's American Idol. "I didn't take it personally when he hit us with the lawsuit," he said. "He was protecting the show, which he's entitled to do." It is still a shame that the row never made it into court, or that the pair did not launch their own new show in which to air their spat, a kind of Law Idol. Millions of us would have tuned in to watch them slug it out for the title of creator of The X Factor, and then hit the phones to vote on who we felt really was to blame - at a cost of 35p a call, of course.

They are looking good Rachel,I know you are putting a lot of hard work into this ,thanks

I like your GPG logo Rachel,it is brilliant,the one without the photo (the other is nice too )

That's great Sweetpromise,I see it was on September 15th and I have seen beneath the surface