There’s a classic episode of South Park which revolves around a simple observation: while racism against African Americans, or Latinos, or Native Americans has become firmly unacceptable, mainstream US culture can be surprisingly tolerant of discrimination against people who happen to boast a foreign nationality.

I was reminded of this satirical trumph (which you can watch here) when I heard that Rupert Murdoch’s Fox TV had suspended two veteran pundits who commentate on the LA Clippers basketball team, after they made astonishingly offensive comments about a Minnesota player called Hamed Haddadi.

The duo, Ralph Lawler and Mike Smith (pictured), spent several minutes of a game last week riffing about the “Eye-ranian” star and comparing him unflatteringly to the Sacha Baron Cohen character Borat – who of course hails from Kazakhstan, many miles from Haddadi’s native Iran.

You can read a full transcript of their comments here, and make up your own mind about whether Lawler and Smith deserve to be suspended or fired. For my money, their attitudes towards Arab culture are pretty near the knuckle.

Racism, real or perceived, is of course a particularly hot potato in basketball because of the disproportionate number of black players in the NBA, and the sports connection with urban culture. So Fox has little choice but to take this matter seriously. If only they could adopt a similarly hard line against the occasional excesses of their right-wing news pundits...

Mr Michael Moore is a very great documentary maker; possibly the best that Hollywood has ever seen.  His Oscar-winning ability to weave heart-rending anecdote into a multi-layered narrative is enhanced, to my mind, by a truly admirable concern for the common man. He stands for fairness; for political and social justice. His films, without exception, advance the belief that all men were created equal - and should be held up to common, identical standards.
 

Or that’s what I thought. Right now, though, I’m not so true. Earlier today, I wrote about a piece for our news pages about a bizarre incident in which Mr Moore appeared on a late-night US television chat-show to promote his new film Capitalism, and proceeded to tell what now appears to have been an entirely fabricated anecdote about meeting Hugo Chavez at the recent Venice Film Festival.

You can read the article in question here. The segment of interview which sparked it is streamed above (the crucial bit can be found about 4 minutes in).

Less than hour after that article had appeared on our internet site, I got an email from Mr Moore’s office. It is printed below (with email addresses and phone numbers redacted). My reply to that email is also carried in full.

"Hamdan, Basel" <*****@michaelmoore.com> 28/10/2009 00:49 
 To: "g.adams@independent.co.uk" <g.adams@independent.co.uk>
 cc: "Weinrib, Eric" <*****@michaelmoore.com>
 Subject: Michael Moore

 
Hi Guy,
 
I’m Basel Hamdan, a producer in Michael Moore’s office.  There is something inaccurate in the below piece:
 
The long meeting did, in fact, occur extremely late in the evening.  I’m not sure who told you otherwise (daytime), but they are wrong.  I was present, as was my colleague Eric Weinrib (cc’d).
 
Could you please correct the piece, if not retract it, as you use the time of day to question the veracity of the story.  Please get back to me soon – we don’t want this falsehood to spread…
 
Thanks,
Basel Hamdan
 
---------------------
Basel Hamdan
Dog Eat Dog Films
Producer
231-922-**** X240

 Guy Adams/Editorial/Independent News and Media 28/10/2009 02:02 
 To: "Hamdan, Basel" <*****@michaelmoore.com>
 cc: "Weinrib, Eric" <*****@michaelmoore.com>
 Subject: Re: Michael Moore
 
 Hi Basel

It feels a little rich to be castigated for a very minor inaccuracy, given the extent of the whopper that Mr Moore has apparently told!

I will, however, happily clarify that element of the piece - on one condition.

In the interest of giving our readers a full and accurate picture of what actually went on, I would like either Mr Moore, or someone in his office, to offer an on-the-record explanation as to why he went on the Jimmy Kimmel show and claimed to have both drunk tequila with Mr Chavez and written a significant portion of his speech to the UN.

Provided you're able to do this (and it would surely represent staggering hypocrisy if you were not) then I will of course make the correction you desire.

Yours

Guy

Guy Adams
Los Angeles Correspondent
The Independent

+1 310 396 ****

So, what happened? Well it may not surprise you to hear that I am still waiting for Mr Moore to agree to my request.

He is, we must therefore assume, happy to broadcast what appear to be substantive lies about someone, without ever explaining, apologising or issuing proper clarification.

However journalists who write about him are expected to immediately correct any slight - and, I might add, alleged - inaccuracy in their piece, however minor.  They are even invited to retract the entire article.

Mr Moore expects, therefore, to apply one rule for himself, and another for everyone else. This is surely the essence of hypocrisy. I can't speak for what this tells us about his journalistic technique, or the reliability of his very moving documentaries. But (at risk of sounding like a tosser) I fear that it speaks volumes about his sense of entitlement.




UPDATE - Wednesday, 2pm GMT

Mr Moore's office have emailed with what journalists among you will recognise as the "Alastair Campbell" response...



"Hamdan, Basel"  *****@michaelmoore.com> 28/10/200902:18 
To "G.Adams@independent.co.uk"<G.Adams@independent.co.uk>
 cc
 SubjectRE: Michael Moore
 

You are clearly not a journalist, so we will take the matter up with your editors.

Whichever way you look at it, the past few weeks have been tricky for the Church of Scientology’s normally-smooth PR machine.

First, a trial in the Bahamas reignited public controversy over celebrity member John Travolta’s late son Jett, whose death was connected to autism – a psychological condition that the Church claims doesn’t actually exist.

Then hatchet-merchant Martin Bashir mounted an investigation into the organisation for the US news organisation ABC. It ended with Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis storming out of an interview (see clip above).

Now one of the Church’s highest-profile Hollywood followers, the Oscar winning film director Paul Haggis (below), has resigned in somewhat explosive circumstances.



Haggis, whose CV includes Million Dollar Baby, Crash, and Valley of Elah, disclosed his reasons for quitting in a letter published here. It’s safe to say that it hardly portrays Scientology in a flattering light.

Though the Church has some attributes of a cult, I’ve always previously been inclined to defend its right to exist, on the grounds that many core beliefs of Scientologists - however bizarre they might seem - are no more fanciful than those of supposedly “mainstream” US religions, such as Mormonism.

However, Mr Haggis may reposition the debate. He makes some frankly disturbing claims about Scientology’s role in the recent ban on gay marriage in California, its behaviour towards “ex-communicated” members, and its general trustworthiness.

I fear at least some of these may hit home. In future, it will of course be interesting to see whether the fallout affects the ability of Mr Haggis to work in Hollywood again.

If you fancy a jaw-dropping insight into the paranoid excesses of both the Hollywood PR machine and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, try reading this account of journalist John Ortved’s dealings with the channel behind The Simpsons.

A few years back, Mr Ortved wrote about the hit cartoon series for Vanity Fair. More recently, he authorised an unauthorised history of the show, Now, in a piece for The Daily Beast website, he has detailed the TV network Fox's long-running attempts to gag him.
 

Some details of his  account may sound absurd, or at least exaggerated. Lawyers letters were sent. Dozens of people were warned-off speaking to him. Offence was taken, at the very highest levels, when Mr Ortved quoted a former colleague of Simpsons founder Matt Groening describing him as: "a fat fuck"

But from where I’m sitting, Mr Ortved's account has a very clear ring of truth about it. For I experienced a similarly-bizarre run in with the Fox PR department earlier this year.

It happend in May, when I wrote a lengthy article that looked, in part, at Glenn Beck, the eccentric "shock-jock" who is the latest big thing on Fox News, the popular right-leaning TV station that forms part of the Fox empire. You can read the piece here.

A few paragraphs from the end, I quoted a revealing, if somewhat unsurprising series of statistics about the fogeyish profile of listeners and viewers of the channel, and its competitors in the conservative news market.

“Right-leaning talk's audience is dying off,” it read. “A recent profile of [Rush] Limbaugh by Vanity Fair claimed that the average age of his listeners is 67 and rising. Fox's average viewer is said to be in their seventh decade. In a changing world, against a President catapulted to power with a staggering majority of the youth, they may (in the long term) turn out to be onto a losing bet.”

No sooner had the piece been published, than I received an angry call from the Fox PR department. The paragraph above should be removed from the piece, claimed the caller. It was inaccurate. I had claimed that Fox News's average viewer is “in their seventh decade." In fact, I was told, the channel's average viewer is aged just 65.

As you may imagine, I took a deep breath. Then iI politely informed the dunderheaded PR hack that they were mistaken: a 65-year-old person is in their seventh decade. The comment in my piece was therefore accurate. The caller went away.

Five minutes later, my phone rang again. It was a different, more senior Fox News PR man. He wanted to know why I'd chosen to use the term “in their seventh decade.” It was, he said, a misleading and manipulative use of language, which put a negative spin on a statistic. It was not, as Fox likes to say, "fair and balanced."

This struck me as rich. First, a US news organisation was attempting to lecture a British newspaper on the subtleties of the English language. Secondly, as I informed the  caller, I was being accused of using loaded terms by a TV channel that regularly employs phrases like “enhanced interrogation technique.”

This did not put Fox News off the scent, however. Instead, for the rest of the day, I was bombarded with complaints by progressively more senior members of their PR department, accusing me of being a propagandist, and threatening to tear into me, and my publication, in the public arena, They even demanded the details of both my editor and features editor, promising to take their complaint “right to the top.”

All of which brings us back to Mr Ortved. For if Fox was prepared to go to such extraordinary lengths to (unsucessfully) prevent The Independent from quoting a statistic that suggest its viewers are a little bit elderly, then it speaks volumes for their sensitivity.

Who are we to doubt - as Ortved claims - that the same company would pull out every stop, ethical or otherwise, to protect the cuddly reputation of The Simpsons?

Another day, another distasteful attempt to extract cash from Michael Jackson’s death ends in the hands of lawyers.

Not 24 hours after they released his new, final single “This is it,” the late singer’s estate has been forced to admit that the song isn’t actually new. And it wasn’t entirely Jackson’s work either.

Instead,the track was co-written with the former child star Paul Anka some time in the early 1990s. It was released in 1991 by the now-obscure Puerto Rican singer Safire, under the title: “I never heard.”

Upon discovering this inconvenient truth, Jackson’s estate and Sony, the record label behind the track, spent today in amusingly-frantic negotiations with Mr Anka.

They have just announced that Mr Anka will receive 50 percent of the publishing rights, and have apologised for “ripping off” the Canadian singer-songwriter’s work.

All of which means that he song – which you can listen to here – may not, therefore, represent the cash cow that Jackson’s various associates were hoping for.

I hope to explore the implications of this in tomorrow’s newspaper. It’ll be particularly interesting to see how this affects the forthcoming film This is It, which is pegged to the song, includes footage of Jackson’s final rehearsals, and is being voraciously marketed.

If previous form is anything to go by, it will soon, like everything else the late singer touched, spark further rounds of exotic, and somewhat unpleasant litigation.

It’s an article of faith among the collection of Hollywood liberals and French people lobbying for the release of Roman Polanski (above) that the film director only skipped the USA prior to sentencing in his 1977 child sex abuse trial because he had been the victim of a horiffic mistrial.
 

Central to their argument is a documentary made by HBO, and released last year, which centred on interviews with former Californian prosecutor David Wells. Crucially, Mr Wells claimed to have had improper contact with Polanski’s judge during the trial, showing him how to renege on a plea bargain.

This film was cited by Polanski’s lawyers this year when they tried – and failed – to get an LA judge to hear their appeal against his conviction, for drugging and sodomising a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson’s home in the Hollywood hills.

Today, Wells has changed his story. In a lengthy and potentially-important interview with legal journalist Marcia Clark (read it in full here), he now says he lied to HBO in order to “make a better story.” He’d been under the impression that the film would never air in the USA.

If you believe what Wells says – and his integrity is admittedly nothing if not open to question – then his version of events would almost certainly drive a coach and horses through the defence Polanski will use should he eventually be extradited to Los Angeles.

It would also raise serious questions about the methods employed by the HBO documentary’s director Marina Zenovich, who won an Emmy for it, but now stands accused of manipulating her interviewee (who may or may not have been paid for his pains).

Either way, the case continues.

The weekend's US box office figures provide a very topical illustration of the harsh financial realities that lay behind the recent cloak-and-dagger sacking of Disney’s studio head Dick Cook (above left).

Making $15m, the Bruce Willis sci-fi film Surrogates came in at second place in the charts, failing to take the top spot from the digital animation Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

Normally, this wouldn’t be such a disaster. But Surrogates, which was made by Disney during Cook’s reign, had an $80 million budget. When you factor in the cost of marketing it, that means the film will lose the so-called Mouse House a substantial whack.

Mr Cook’s departure, which I reported here a week ago, still hasn’t been formally explained. But the gossip-mill suggests that it was in part due to the frustration of boss Bob Iger (above right) at his failure to control the cost of flicks.

Surrogates provides a case in point. If Willis had been told to forego a chunk of his multi-million dollar salary, and director Jonathan Mostow ordered to work with a budget of, say, $50 million (which was, after all, what the brilliant District 9 was made for) then Disney would actually be looking at a small profit.

But Cook was never one for cracking a financial whip. Despite his geniality, and the inspiring nature of his career path (he joined Disney 40 years ago as a theme park monorail operator) he had a very public weakness for the demands of a celebrity employee. Some said he was simply too chummy with then.

Like most Hollywood journalists, I was often invited to events where Cook would appear on-stage with a selection of A-list stars he counted as close friends, who would then pledge unshaking allegiance to his studio.

It was no doubt heartfelt. Indeed, on the day Cook was fired, his chum Johnny Depp went so far as to phone the Los Angeles Times and express outrage at his sacing, threatening to pull out of Disney's next Pirates of the Caribbean film in protest.

Yet while a celebrity's loyalty can be a wonderful thing, it won't make a film profitable. To do that exotic financial and artistic demands must sometimes be flatly refused. The cost, and box-office performance of Surrogates suggests that Mr Cook wasn't inclined to say "no" to his celebrity friends nearly as often as he should have.

Fascinating documents were unsealed in Los Angeles today revealing affidavits that have been filed in evidence against two of the doctors who treated Anna Nicole Smith in the run-up to her death.

The quacks, Khristine Eroshevich and Sandeep Kapoor, stand accused of illegally supplying Smith (reality TV star, model, and widow of octogenarian oil baron J Howard Marshal) with prescription drugs that eventually killed her.

According to testimony unearthed by the LA Times, at least one pharmacist warned the duo that large stocks of methadone, sedatives and other heroin substitutes they wanted to supply to Smith, pictured, might prove fatal

The LA supplier was so concerned that he refused to give Erosevich and Kapoor the medicines, declaring that for anyone to take them in the quantity demanded would represent “pharmaceutical suicide.”

In the event, Anna Nicole Smith got the drugs elsewhere. Weeks afterwards, she died of a grisly overdose in a Florida casino-hotel, in February 2007, at the age of 39.

The forthcoming case will see Erosevich, Kapoor, and Smith’s boyfriend and attorney Howard K Stern in the dock. They have all pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to supply illegal drugs.

Aside from the prurient interest it will prompt in former Playboy model Smith’s final days, the trial will serve to highlight some of the excesses of the private healthcare industry that has dominated American politics in recent months.

In addition, it'll offer an indication of the sort of case we can expect to be compiled against some of the doctors and pharmacists who have been blamed for Michael Jackson’s death earlier this year.

According to evidence compiled by the LA County Coroner, the late King of Pop was, like Smith, pumped full of enough sedatives to stun a small rhino. The result was similarly conclusive.

Given that the case surrounding Smith's death taken two-and-a-half to actually reach a court, however, today's development doesmake you wonder how long it could take for anyone responsible for Jackson's fatal cardiac arrest to get their "trial of the century."

It’s been a while since Scientology sparked much tooth-sucking in celebrity circles, so thank goodness for blogger Roger Friedman – who has just unearthed and published part of Will Smith’s latest tax return.

The actor and his wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith, pictured, turn out to have last year donated just over $70,000 to groups linked to Scientology (see the tax filing here).

Of the total, $60,000 went to the World Literacy Crusade, a non-profit that employs study techniques devised by L Ron Hubbard, who founded the Church of Scientology. A further $10,000 went to an organisation called ABLE International, which boasts a similar remit.

It seems like a peculiarly generous move, given that Will Smith and his wife have both strenuously denied being members of the self-styled religion.

The couple of course caused a furore earlier this summer, when it emerged that their charitable foundation has started a private school in Calablasas which uses a curriculum based on the teachings of the same L Ron Hubbard.

No doubt the fresh revelation will prompt a similar brouhaha.

In the long run, it'll be particularly interesting to see where they will leave Friedman – a well-regarded show-business correspondent who claimed recently to have been sacked by Fox News for criticising Scientology (I covered the row here).

Friedman was re-hired this Summer by the Hollywood Reporter. I trust his new employer will be more tolerant than Rupert Murdoch's TV news channel, and afford him full freedom to cover what is one of the entertainment industry’s thorniest topics,

IT HAS been an article of faith in Hollywood this summer that topsy-turvy box office returns are being increasingly driven by the sudden emergence of the micro-blogging website Twitter.

This theory cites the success of “sleeper” hits like The Hangover and Inglorious Basterds, which apparently gained massive audiences thanks to an instant tidal-wave of positive coverage from users of the site.

It also has been used to explain the poor showing of (very bad) films like Kate Beckinsale’s new flop Whitehout and Eddie Murphy’s bomb Imagine That, which were supposedly been sunk by negative “tweets” from viewers.

There’s a problem though: it isn’t true. Or at least not according to a forensic investigation of the issue by the Hollywood Reporter columnist Carl DiOrio.

Loook at the numbers, and you'll see that Basterds actually made less money on its second night in cinemas than its first.

The Hangover meanwhile took four or five days to truly capture the public imagination, suggesting that any overnight endorsements it garnered on Twitter had little effect on box office returns and that old-fashioned word of mouth was behind its success.

The article – which you can read here –  quotes recent surveys suggesting that only 12 percent of US cinema audiences say their viewing habits any way influenced by Twitter. It also references a recent New York Times article suggesting that the site has little influence on anyone outside of the (for want of a better phrase) poncey media elite.

For avid “tweeters” like me, this is a somewhat instructive revelation. For a film industry investing heavily in the world of social networking and micro-blogging to promote its titles, it will also make sobering reading.

Pieces like this, incidentally, are a big part of what might be lost if today’s reports of the Hollywood Reporter’s imminent demise are to be believed.

There was high excitement in the press bleachers at Placerville Court in California yesterday, when Phillip Garrido was informed that Jaycee Lee Dugard will give evidence when he’s tried for abducting, raping and holding her hostage for 18 years.
 

Quite aside from the potential courtroom drama it heralded, Dugard’s decision to appear on the witness stand meant the world will finally get to see the face of the woman it knows only from the “missing” posters circulated after her abduction in 1991.

Sadly, for the assembled press pack, at least, that particular “exculsive” now seems to have been scotched. America’s National Enquirer magazine today published what it claims is a recent picture of Jaycee Lee. You can see it above.

It is purportedly taken from the business card of Printing For Less, the firm Garrido ran from his home in Antioch. The magazine was given it by local barber Wayne Thompson, who met Dugard when he brought his own business cards from the firm.

The million dollar question, or course, concerns whether the picture is real. The Enquirer has in the past had an iffy reputation for accuracy, though I have come to admire its string of recent scoops about – among other things – the love life of one-time Presidential candidate John Edwards.

Dominick Dunne, the recently-deceased Vanity Fair scribe whose opinions I value, once dubbed the Enquirer: “remarkably accurate in its sensational revelations.” Either way, the blue-eyed, blonde girl in its picture looks spookily similar to the child who went missing all those years ago.

I can’t think of a better five-minute introduction into how not to get ahead in Hollywood than this brilliant article by screenwriter Josh Olson published today by New York’s Village Voice newspaper.

The author (above), who was BAFTA and Oscar-nominated for his 2005 film A History of Violence, uses his bully pulpit to explain - in plain English - why he’s sick and tired of being constantly asked to read putative scripts by young hopefuls eager to break into the film industry.

Part rant, part social comedy, Olson’s piece explains how he was recently strong-armed into reading a script proposal written by the boyfriend of an acquaintance. He spent several hours crafting an email that tactfully explained the myriad things wrong with it, only for the author to take huge offence.

“For all the hair I pulled out, for all the weight and seriousness I gave his request for a real, professional critique, his response was a terse ‘Thanks for your opinion.’ And, the inevitable fallout… a week later a mutual friend asked me: ‘What's this dick move I hear you pulled on Whatsisname?’”

In LA, where every waiter (who isn’t an out-of-work actor) has a script poking out of his back pocket, Olson and many like him are constantly being put into Catch-22 situations: if you refuse to read someone's script, you look ungracious. If you agree to read a script, and offer an honest reaction to it, you still look ungracious.

The piece is now making waves. Some readers have expressed delight that someone has at last gone public with something most film-industry power-brokers will only say in private. Others call the lengthy tirade bad form – noting that all would-be writers need a leg up at the start of their career.

Carrie Prejean, the Miss USA contestant whose opposition to gay marriage sparked a national controversy so preposterous that Donald Trump got involved, is off to the place every all-American hoo-hah ends up: court.

In a lawsuit seeking “undisclosed damages,” the pneumatic blonde claimed today that she was fired from her job as Miss California on the grounds that she announced during the televised pageant that she believed “marriage should be between a man and a woman.”

Her former employers, for their part, say that Prejean was given the boot because she missed a number of scheduled appointments in the weeks after she became runner-up in the bizarrely-popular contest.

Miss Prejean’s legal papers claim she has suffered anxiety, stress, and loss of sleep, and allege that she was the victim of: “libel, slander, and religious discrimination.”

It’s a shocking claim to make. Apart from anything else, legal experts of a cynical disposition will be amazed that Prejean is even able to spell “religious discrimination.”

Two months into the real-life soap-opera surrounding Michael Jackson’s death, the pantomime villain of the piece has finally broken his silence.

Dr Conrad Murray, the 50-year-old singer’s personal physician, today released a one-minute statement on YouTube (see above) thanking his “supporters” and insisting that he’s “told the truth” about his role in the murky affair.

Murray – whose connection with his marbles may be as tenuous as that of his late client – is facing a potential manslaughter suit on charges of giving Jackson a lethal dose of the painkiller Propofol, on the morning of his death.

He claims to now be afraid to make telephone calls or use email, and makes a good job of looking sad and vulnerable in an apparent effort to elicit public sympathy.

Like any American public figure facing an awkward meeting with a jury, Murray also makes a reference to God and the religious faith that he apparently hopes will help him survive the coming weeks and months.

For some reason, he’s disabled the “comments” section in the YouTube posting, preventing viewers from sharing their thoughts.

Elsewhere, it was today confirmed that the King of Pop will finally be buried next Saturday, on what would have been his birthday, at the Forest Lawn memorial park in Glendale. Family and friends have said they want a dignified, private ceremony, away from the public eye. I think they'll be lucky.

After the party: hangover. A fantastically vibrant UFC card was followed by a pair of distinctly defensive press conferences backstage at the Mandalay Bay last night, as the delighted Brock Lesnar and Dan Henderson discussed some of the controversial excesses of their emphatic wins.

Lesnar, a former WWE wrestler (pictured), marked his knockout of Frank Mir with a display of pantomime bravado that saw him announce that he'd celebrate by “getting on top” of his wife (a Playboy cover girl), before flipping the bird at a booing crowd and insulting one of UFC’s corporate sponsors, Bud Light.

That evidently resulted in a stern bollocking from promoter Dana White, who has for some time had reservatrions about the conduct of a man who bestrides UFC’s heavyweight division like a Colossus, yet can behave like a loose cannon out of the ring.

Chastened, Lesnar arrived at the press conference (watch here) sipping a Bud Light. “First and foremost, I want to apologise. I acted very unprofessionally after the fight. And I’ll leave it at that,” he announced. “You guys always ask me ‘is there anything I could drag over from WWE?’ and I guess you’ve seen a little bit of that tonight. I apologise to Bud Light. I’m not biased, I drink any beer, and tonight I’m drinking Bud Light all night. I screwed up, and I apologise…”

Dan Henderson meanwhile attempted to explain his disgraceful comments after knocking out Michael Bisping, when he told the arena that he'd decided to deliver an unnecessary and potentially dangeous punch to the already unconscious British fighter (fight report here), because it would “shut him up.”

“When you’re in the heat of the moment, who knows what’s going to happen? If he’s going to recover or the ref’s going to stop the fight.” He said in the interview (videohere) “I only hit him twice: once on my feet, once on the ground. I didn’t keep going. I didn’t go after the ref tried to stop me. I did nothing like that. It was just the reaction of mine to keep going till I was stopped. It did feel good, though.”

Bisping meanwhile spent today recovering after being rushed to hospital for a CAT scan. His future now looks unclear. Seemingly out of his depth against a true legend of mixed martial arts, his defeat will be grist to the mill of critics who have always claimed his hands simply aren’t heavy enough to pose a threat at the very highest level.

In the British fighter’s defence, he looked edgy for much of fight week, and nervous – if not overawed – in the ring with a man he’s spent months exchanging insults with. As I wrotehere on Thursday, it’s possible that his head simply wasn’t in the right place this week – meaning that, with a following wind, he can bounce back. Time, of course, will tell.
 

Las Vegas may be blessedly free of drunken Mancunians singing “on-ly one Ricky Hatton,” but as tonight’s compelling UFC 100 card creeps ever-closer, a definite Anglo-American divide pervades the casino floors of Sin City.

In one camp, our Trans-Atlantic cousins, who have blithely written-off the chances of Britain’s leading mixed martial artist Michael Bisping in his career-defining encounter with the legendary former Olympic wrestler Dan Henderson.

Their man will be too strong, too accomplished on the floor, and simply too darn good for his opponent. If he doesn’t tie Bisping in knots and ground and pound him to pieces, he’ll catch him with a big right hand that’ll knock the less experienced opponent into the middle of next week.

 Bookies have Henderson as the odds-on favourite. Most Yanks expect a stoppage within the first round, and believe that the fight represents little more than a staging post on their national hero’s inevitable journey towards a middleweight title showdown with Anderson Silva.

To which, a small-yet-vociferous contingent of Brits say: “we’ll see.”

Speaking to team Bisping, his fellow UK fighters, and the man himself over recent days, it has become pretty obvious that Clitheroe’s finest has a canny game plan that could – with a following wind – produce one of the surprises of tonight’s show.

Michael will play defence: using his superior footwork and sharp movement to step away from Henderson’s strikes, while counter-punching and jabbing his way to what he hopes will be points victory. He intends, at all costs, to steer clear of a wrestling match, and will be at pains to guard against the big man’s takedowns.

If it works, it won’t be all that pretty. More bulldog than flair. Expect plenty of the boos that marked Bisping’s arrival at weigh-in yesterday (pictured above) when he thankfully looked in far more relaxed state-of-mind than during some events of recent days.

But it will be effective. And I, for one, would love to see the red-necked crowd silenced.

After all, the match-up represent’s America’s final chance to save face, following the stuffing that their team, captained by Hendo, received at the hands of Bisping’s UK team in the most recent series of The Ultimate Fighter.

Either way, in just a few hours, all will be revealed...

Georges St-Pierre is many people’s idea of the best pound-for-pound fighter in mixed martial arts, and has for weeks been strong favourite to retain his Welterweight title against the hard-striking Brazillian Thiago Alves.

But straight after watching today’s packed-out weigh-in, I legged it to the Mandalay Bay’s in-house bookies, and whacked a hundred bucks on his opponent, at odds of 5/2.

The reason: there's a lump on St-Pierre’s right elbow roughly the size of a golf ball. It looks to me like the sort of swelling you might get from a nasty dislocation in training.

You can see it, though at a slightly flattering angle, it in the weigh-in picture above. (St Pierre is wearing white trunks, on the left).

UFC officials describe the apparent problem as a “build up of fluid,” and insist that it isn’t painful, and that doctors cleared him to train and fight. Certainly, he looked to be moving easily enough on-stage.

Convincing doctors you’re OK, and rattling through weigh-in is a different matter to actually going to war in the octagon though. And though Alves remains an outsider, this gives his supporters plenty more reason to hope.

By close of play tonight, the Brazilian was being backed at 2/1, and tightening.

 In the meantime, here are my picks for tomorrow night, chosen on the completely unscientific and frankly unreliable basis of who looked in better shape during today’s weigh-in.

(choices in bold)

Shannon Gugerty v Matt Grice

Tom Lawlor v CB Dollaway

TJ Grant v Dong Hyun Kim

Jake O’Brien v Jon Jones

Jim Miller v Mac Danzig

Stephan Bonnar v Mark Coleman

Alan Belcher v Yoshihiro Akiyama

Mike Bisping v Dan Henderson

Paulo Thiago v Jon Fitch

Thiago Alves v Georges St Pierre

Frank Mir v Brock Lesnar

For all the cauliflower ears and tree-trunk necks, there’s no shortage of intriguing back-stories among the stars of mixed martial arts. Who’d have thought, to pluck one example from the at random, that Mohawk-haired nutcase Chuck Liddell was a qualified accountant?

Few fighters, though, have such intriguing back stories as Brock Lesnar and Frank Mir, the two man-mountains facing-off in Saturday’s top-of-card bout, for UFC’s heavyweight belt, and pictured (above) at yesterday's press conference.

Lesnar has an improbable background in the scripted form of pantomime entertainment that is WWE wrestling. He fought at Wrestlemania, and the like, for five years.  His signature move was the “Brock-Lock” - a sort of bear hug.

He switched to the real thing in early 2008, and has enjoyed a meteoric rise, which afforded him the enormous good fortune to beat the legendary (but possibly-past-it) Randy Couture for the heavyweight belt in November that year.

With a career total of just three wins and one loss, Lesnar still has plenty to prove, particularly against Mir - who was the only man to beat him, when he delivered a textbook knee bar after 90 seconds of their bout at UFC 81 in February 2008.

A win by the enormous Minnesotan would cap one of the most extraordinary, and unlikely, marches to superstar status in modern sport.

Frank Mir, meanwhile, is the subject of a real-life Rocky story. A former UFC heavyweight champ, he was knocked off his motorbike in 2004, suffering horrific injuries that left him unable to defend his title (which was therefore stripped from him) and had doctors wondering if he would ever walk again.

He did more than that: managing by sheer force of his personality to return to the ring two years later. But it wasn’t until a year later that he returned to anything like his former self. Now he stands on the verge of one of the greatest comebacks you’ll see outside of a Hollywood movie.

So whoever wins tomorrow (since you ask, my heart says Mir and my head says Lesnar) prepare to see a few large and very tough men shedding a tear. Compare and contrast this inspiring fight with the dubious and depressing world of heavyweight boxing –and draw your own conclusion about which sport is in better shape.