Martha Kearney's week

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By Martha Kearney Presenter, BBC Radio 4's World at One

The Wire moved from the TV pages to the news pages this week

I am writing this from Edinburgh where I am attending the television festival and hoping to slip in a bit of proper culture too.

In fact, I have just seen the hilarious opening session entitled TV's Got Talent.

The idea was to see if the executives who book the talent have any themselves.

Ant and Dec have just presented the award to a woman who sang Thank You for the Music while keeping her mouth closed and blowing her cheeks out like a puffer fish.

You had to be there.

And then you would also have seen a middle-aged man in a glittery top doing Riverdance with a chorus of young girls behind him.

It all seems pretty fitting for the last week of August, the traditional "silly season" for news.

That has meant that we have been able to include a few lighter items this week. I talked to Natalie Carter, the 16 year old from a small dance school in Watford who has just won a place at the Bolshoi dance academy in Moscow.

He said he was very pleased to become a political football and to have come from the entertainment pages into the news ones <a class="" href="/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8219482.stm">Parts of Britain 'like The Wire'</a> <a class="" href="/2/hi/uk_news/8219693.stm">Is Britain really like The Wire?</a>

Only three other Britons in 230 years have had that honour. Natalie was a breath of fresh air.

A more controversial musical story this week was the Burry Port Town Band from Wales who found themselves on the way to Libya.

They did not expect to find themselves in the middle of an international controversy after the Megrahi homecoming.

But the band leader told me that music was a way of bringing people together so he felt they were right to go.

And then came the words I never thought I would say on The World at One: Do Wah Diddy Diddy.

The woman who co-wrote the song, Ellie Greenwich, died this week. She won many awards for a string of 60s' hits. We invited Paul Jones from Manfred Mann to talk through why Do Wah etc was such a big hit for him.

Of course there were many more serious stories this week too - the death of Ted Kennedy, the first set of election results coming from Afghanistan, the Middle East peace process, GCSE results.

There was also a speech by the Conservative politician Chris Grayling who compared parts of Britain to scenes from the American TV series The Wire.

I have just been watching David Simon, the programme's author at the Edinburgh TV festival.

He said he was very pleased to become a political football and to have come from the entertainment pages into the news ones.

Perhaps that's another August phenomenon.