As the creator of Wallace & Gromit, Nick Park deserved his invitation on to the UK radio chat show Desert Island Discs. After all, this stop-motion animator has won no fewer than four Oscars for his beautifully crafted, madcap tales.
It was a matter of when, not if, he would appear on the world's longest-running factual radio show, which has asked everyone from George Clooney to Sir David Attenborough what songs would give them succour as a castaway. And Park's selection, broadcast at the back end of last year, was very much what one might expect from a music fan in his fifties: Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel, Elvis Costello, Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Van Morrison all featured. But the very last song was something much more surprising; a track called Plain Song by the unknown - and unsigned - musician Joe Rose.
Except he isn't unknown to Nick Park. Joe Rose is, in fact, the son of close friends of his. And after a few eyebrows were raised, Park was moved to deny that he had used the prestigious slot to plug a family friend.
"It was a great honour to be on Desert Island Discs and I would not have used it to make a conscious promotion of someone's music," he told The Daily Mail last week.
Whatever his intentions - and it would be rather dispiriting if someone famous for innocently joyful films were "playing the game" in this way - the exposure did the trick. Visits to Rose's MySpace and YouTube pages soared, as did sales of the song on iTunes. Plain Song is a nice enough tune - reflective, contemplative and gentle. But if you can only choose eight songs to take to a desert island, then this is an odd pick.
Nevertheless, the fuss Park's selection caused was representative of a larger issue. Before the internet, when radio programmes were broadcast once (barring repeats) rather than archived online and available at the click of a mouse, Plain Song's very public airing would probably have passed relatively unnoticed. But now that Desert Island Discs has its own website - on which Joe Rose sits alongside Van Morrison in perpetuity - it's a much bigger deal. Everything is a marketing opportunity.
Rose now boasts on his own website that he's "as heard on Desert Island Discs", which is why it becomes less easy to believe Park chose it simply because he liked the song, even if that was the case. The internet, in a way, has made us more cynical, less trusting. And for proof, you just have to visit Amazon.com.
Last year, a number of savage book reviews appeared on the site. Rachel Polonksy's Molotov's Magic Lantern was "dense" and "pretentious" and Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher was "not nearly as good as prize judges think". This was strange for two reasons: first, everybody else seemed to like them; and second, the mysterious reviewer only appeared to rate work by Orlando Figes, one of Britain's leading historians. "I hope he writes forever," said one memorable entry.
It didn't take the sleuthing skills of Sherlock Holmes to deduce there was something rather familiar about this reviewer's online profile, which went by the name of Orlando-Birkbeck. Particularly as Figes's place of work was, er, Birkbeck College, University Of London. He had been caught red-handed and, after first denying responsibility, then blaming his wife, ended up having to pay damages and costs to the maligned authors. Whoops.
The Figes case wasn't the first fake Amazon review and it won't be the last. For an author, it must be tempting to get friends to ramp up the star ratings. Indeed, the first allegations about Orlando-Birkbeck were made by Polonsky herself on Facebook, and social networking has undeniably made spiky reviews of the sort she was complaining about less a guide to a book's failings and more an entertainment in itself.
In June, for example, Philip Kerr also took to Amazon to deride a book by the noted historical novelist Allan Massie. "When I pay 20 quid for a 'nuanced' history of the Stuarts, I don't expect to be served up a slab of cheesy prose," spat the crime novelist, whose latest book had been the subject of a poor review… by Allan Massie.
It might have ended there had the journalist and author PD Smith not tweeted its presence to his 10,000 "followers". Before long, broadsheet newspapers across Britain were reporting this online feud.
While the Nick Park Desert Island Discs controversy hasn't quite reached that kind of fever pitch on Twitter, poor old Park probably wants, in the words of his much loved creation, Wallace, to "have a nice cup of tea" and pretend it never happened.
