I SAW the most astonishing American TV show on Channel 4 on Saturday. It was called Pamela Anderson Comedy Roast and saw Pam sitting on a stage while comedians ripped her personality, career and looks to pieces.

Imagine This Is Your Life, but with every third word having four letters and beginning with 'f'.

It must have been filmed a while ago, because there was a young, healthy-looking Anna Nicole Smith in the audience.

It was the most offensive and crude thing I've seen in a long while. Yet while I watched it with my hand over my mouth, I couldn't help giggling my way through it.

There was no insult left unsaid, no stone not thrown and no reference unmade to the infamous sex tape of her and Tommy Lee.

And all the while, Pam sat there smiling her way through it all.

Channel 4 are to do a British version now, but you can bet a million dollars that it will be no where near as bold, brash and brazen as the American one.

I love Whitney for her bravery, but I'm not surprised she stank on stage. She's had it

I REMEMBER my mother and father going to see Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli and Sammy Davis Jnr, in the RDS in 1989.

As they listened to the three old crooners gasp their way through hits such as You Make Me Feel So Young (oh, the irony) my father said it was like watching the cast of Cocoon doing karaoke. Unfortunately, the trio, unlike the film's characters, were not lifted into space.

One must be very careful when going to gigs of people you once admired. Whitney Houston played Dublin over the weekend and, I'm sorry to say, she too should have been whisked away into outer space.

The one-time global superstar sang around 11 songs. And "sang" might be overstating things. She did what has become my absolute pet hate at concerts. She turned the microphone towards the crowd and let them sing.

Now, there are two reasons why artists do this -- they cannot believe people are singing their songs, or they are crap.

Or maybe both.

I remember walking out of a Frames gig when they were performing at Electric Picnic a few years ago. As Glen Hansard sang 'Star star, teach me how to...', he went silent, and a hulk of a fella beside me, who stank of two-day-old beer and sweat, shouted his way through the song, along with a couple of hundred other people.

So, Whitney couldn't sing.

Are you surprised? Did you really think that the woman who has possibly had the most traumatic decade of any entertainer, would be any good?

We've seen pictures of her looking like death. We've heard about the horrendous marriage to Bobby Brown -- who is now going to court to reduce his maintenance payments to her. We heard the allegations of drug abuse.

But it was the reports from her UK gigs last week that meant we should have known that Houston's concert was probably only going to be bearable at best. In Birmingham, she was booed. She was kooky to say the least. During Saving All My Love For You, she stooped to moisturise her ankles and on several occasions appeared to be singing to her shoes.

But her Dublin gigs seemed more a mass support group than concerts. While struggling through one number she turned the mic to the audience and asked the crowd for help with a song. There was a sense of "let's get through this together" -- before the poor woman dies with the embarrassment.

There were lots of incoherent mumblings from the stage, and she repeatedly told a picture of Michael Jackson, "I love you, I love you".

Unless Whitney had had a brain, lung and nose transplant, this show was going to stink. But what did people expect?

I love her bravery and her commitment. I even love that she got the ferry over from England. Perhaps she just got into too much of a sing-song in the ferry bar.

I will always love you, Whitney Houston, but you can't turn back the clock.

I've already had this out with Nasty Nick on BB. Being gay does NOT make you a paedophile

So, paedophile priests are homosexuals? So says the Secretary of State in the Vatican, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. And I can only presume that the Pope goes along with this.

I remember when I was in the Big Brother house, there was a huge argument between myself and Nick Bateman. We were talking about George Michael's shenanigans in a toilet in LA when he had tried to pick up another man.

Whatever you feel about that incident, Bateman's biggest concern was that George Michael might have encountered children in the toilet and lured them in.

What Bateman, and other ill- informed, small-minded, homophobic people seem to think is that if you are gay, you are also a paedophile. Being gay is about being attracted to someone of the same sex, not children.

If you are a man and you abuse a boy, you are a paedophile, not a homosexual -- in the same way that if you are a man and you abuse a young girl, you are a paedophile, not a heterosexual.

The sooner the Church stops trying to deflect its problems on to innocent people and takes responsibility, the better. Paedophilia is a disorder where someone is attracted to pre-pubescent children. Where an adult is attracted to a child. Where someone who has no power, no say, no knowledge of sexual matters is controlled by someone who wants to dominate.

It must be so embarrassing for Catholics who hear these words from the Vatican, yet are friends and family of gay people. Listen, I don't mind being offended. As the wonderful writer Philip Pullman said this week on Radio 1, you can't expect to go through life without being offended. Pope John Paul II didn't like gays. In fact, which Pope did? But this is far more serious.

This is laying the blame of serial child abuse on gay people. Whereas it is sick, ill, controlling, manipulative people who have caused all this damage. And don't let the Church try to tell you otherwise.

- Anna Nolan