The timbre in the voice of Frank Sinatra is instantly recognisable. So it was rather disconcerting to hear a disc-jockey tell us that he was looking all over the record sleeve for the person dueting All the way with Celine Dion, and, not finding it, hazarding a guess (and getting it wrong).

This was a week of weird happenings in the local media (so what's new?).

Someone called me to find out personal details as well as what I think about the State of the Nation (and, again, for whom I voted in the recent general election). Someone else sent me an e-mail with the picture of someone's child sitting in front of someone else's grandchildren but not interacting with them, in a puerile attempt at character assassination.

About the only bright spot was a press release about a new programme, brainchild of Rachel Cachia and Martina Zammit and their team, who told me that basically, it will be a series of football-related programmes as experienced by fans, rather than technical consultants and sportscasters.

The young ladies told me they were printing the word "akkaniti" at that precise moment. This will be stuck to the side of a bus which will bear said fans to different venues, from where they would watch Euro 2008 matches.

The general idea was to weed out Men Behaving Badly by showing them the red card; and this would not necessarily be because they lack team spirit. Towards the end of the series, the cream of the crop would be treated to a stay in a hotel while the jury would be out to discover who would be deserving of the "Best Fan" award.

The first trip of this bus was last Friday, but you can catch a 20-minute ride on this bus twice daily, during Euro 2008, at 5.40 p.m. and 8.25 p.m., right before each match commences, on One.

And after much speculation and suspense, and a couple of leaks, the members of the new PBS board of directors have been announced in a legal notice. There's a pleasant amalgamation of talents and pizzazz in the list that augurs well.

Meanwhile, one hears that interviews are under way for new additions to the PBS newsroom. The Station of the Nation, being a public company and therefore not bound by the rules of the Public Service Commission, is not obliged to select the people who were next in line the last time interviews were held. So I understand that among the handful of hopefuls (fewer than last time) the people who nearly made it last time are not included.

I just hope that the new selection includes people who actually have facial muscles and spectacles they would not hesitate to use when the need arises - as it does.

Culture Minister Dolores Cristina had been quoted as saying in Parliament that it was the view of the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts that Malta should continue to participate in the Eurovision Song Festival, despite, well, everything.

The Malta Song Board has been dissolved - but will not be reinstated. All Eurovision-related work will now be done in-house at PBS. How this will be done will be charted out in a meeting to be held as soon as possible. Will the next step be amalgamating the PBS editorial board as a sub-committee of the board of directors?

The process for short-listing programmes for the new PBS schedule is also under way. Producers are ever-hopeful that last year's debacle will not be repeated, and that the process will be on a fast track. Even flagship programmes have been asked to produce a demo.

I assume that this is being done so that there will be less of the vapid talk one hears at watering troughs and birthday parties.

I caught up with Chrysander Agius at one of the latter, in fact, and asked him what he had meant (he had been a guest on Bla Aġenda) when he was talking about humour. Clarifying again that it was Zoo which had opted out of continuing Tele Tubi (again, contrary to innuendo), I agreed with all that he said.

There is a knife's edge between irony and sarcasm, and it takes a wise man to delineate it. The same may be said for funniness and slapstick - and some of us don't find the latter funny at all.

Mr Agius is primed and ready to go with stand-up comedy; but he thinks that we, his public, can only take it in small doses as yet. And he may be right.

Suffice to say that most of those present at this wonderful event were people in the public eye - and yet nobody actually volunteered to take part in Zoo's act.

It is a joke of sorts that people feel safe with me, at least when mosquitoes are around. Jane Clark, however, sees things differently. Claiming to have been bitten thrice by bugs in the carpet at the New York Fox Radio Studios, between October 2007 and April 2008, she has left her job and is allegedly suffering from PTSD... to the extent of saying that has nightmares, and that she keeps a torch at her bedside so she can check for bugs at night.