There appears to be one factor and one factor only in dictating chart success in Britain at the moment, and that factor is X.

Alexandra Burke, last year’s winner of the talent TV contest, performed her new song “Bad Boys” recently on the popular show and stormed to the top of the UK charts with the fastest-selling single so far this year. The 185,000 copies sold was more than twice the total shifted by Robbie Williams, who is making his long-awaited comeback.

Williams also showcased his new song “Bodies” on the X Factor, but the magic failed to rub off after a disjointed performance during which the former Take That singer appeared nervous. Still, one of British pop’s biggest names clearly felt the need to appear on the programme in order to reach an audience that can peak at nearly 15 million viewers.

And now there is Cheryl Cole, a judge on the contest and member of girl band “Girls Aloud” who is launching her solo career. Needless to say, she was invited to perform her new single “Fight For This Love” on the show, and, despite a performance many viewers would describe as mediocre at best and possibly something much worse, looks set to top the charts when they are announced on Sunday.

The Official Charts Company, which compiles the weekly music ratings, says the singer is on course for a tally close or even higher than Burke’s.

Tom Ford has branded as “disgusting” the ban on gay marriage in parts of the United States and elsewhere in the world.

The designer, who is openly gay, used a Venice press conference for his feature film debut “A Single Man” starring Colin Firth to criticize decisions like that in California in November banning same-sex marriage. He did, however, add that his movie, which is in competition at the Venice film festival was not about being gay at all, but about the human condition in general.

“It is, I have to say, quite disgusting that in America and in other countries you cannot have a civil union or something equivalent to marriage,” said the 48-year-old.

“I have someone I’ve lived together with for 23 years. Recently he was in hospital for something. I had to carry papers on me at all times that he had signed saying that I could visit him in his room and make medical decisions for him if anything happened. Our taxes, by the way: if I died tomorrow my estate would be completely taxed and then the remainder go to him whereas if we were a couple his life wouldn’t have to change and my entire estate would move to him. There are things that are wrong with our legal systems in a lot of countries.”

We’re off.

After weeks of planning, the Venice film festival finally launched today with a lengthy, sentimental Italian entry as the opening film, “Baaria.” It is the first home-made movie to start the annual festival in around 20 years, and, if the budget is anything to go by, it should do well. The movie, which is more than two-and-a-half hours long, cost a whopping 25 million euros to make.

Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (of Oscar-winning “Cinema Paradiso” fame), “Baaria” is set in Sicily and spans the 1930s to the 1980s. It tells the story of Sicily, and more broadly of Europe as a whole, through three generations of the same family.

Critics are divided. One I spoke to hated it, another I have just read liked it. Venice could do with an Italian hit, after so many have failed to impress in recent years.

I’ve just come out of a screening of “The Road”, starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron, in an interpretation of Cormac McCarthy’s grim novel about a man and his son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. The father-son relationship at its heart is tough to watch for a dad of two young boys like me, and it’s not what I would call an easy watch. But then the acclaimed book was not an easy read either. I’ll be interested to see what the critics say about the movie, and how Mortensen found the shooting when he speaks to us in an interview.

Lead singer Liam Gallagher has issued a typically blunt rebuttal to rumours and speculation that Oasis, arguably Britain’s biggest band of the ’90s, had played their final gig.

The rumours began after Liam and his older brother Noel, the band’s guitarist and songwriter, announced they had fallen out and were communicating via the band’s website or on Twitter. Then, when Oasis cancelled a gig at the last minute over the weekend, the doomsayers went into overdrive.

The reason for the band’s pullout was actually Liam contracting viral laryngitis, but that did not stop the columnists rushing to fill their columns. Liam, who thrives off his bad boy, rock’n'roll image, was clearly not impressed.

“Reports in the smartarses column about Oasis last british gig ever. The kids talking out his arse.” Lax grammar aside, the message was clear, although could Gallagher really be that annoyed at all the free publicity?

The website further explained that Oasis, behind hits like “Wonderwall” and “Champagne Supernova”, would complete its world tour and then take a break before thinking about recording another album.

As the film industry looks ahead to box office business after “Harry Potter,” with the lucrative franchise due to wind up in the summer of 2011, one person in as good a position as most to offer an opinion on what may be the next big film series suggests that the “Twilight” vampire romances could fill the void.

“Harry Potter” 1-5 have amassed $4.5 billion at global box offices so far, and with HP 6, otherwise known as “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”, due to hit cinemas this week, the cash tills look set to go on ringing. HP 7, the final book in J.K. Rowling’s boy wizard series, has been split into two movies, meaning that at the current rate, the 8-movie series could take a cool $7.2 billion.

Last year’s first outing for the “Twilight” series, based on the Stephenie Meyer books, made $380 million worldwide, according to www.boxofficemojo.com, a far cry from HP 1. But the word — and more to the point, the hype — appears to be spreading beyond U.S. shores, and with heartthrob lead actor Robert Pattinson causing hysteria wherever he breathes, the momentum could grow.

Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry in the “Potter” pictures, knows how Pattinson feels.

“The thing that’s interesting for me is that it’s the only other franchise really which comes close to ‘Potter’ in terms of the mania that surrounds it and the attention that the leads get and how global it is,” he told reporters in London recently. “So part of me doesn’t actually want to have an opinion on the film.”

Underlining the pressures superstardom can bring, Pattinson was hit by a taxi in New York last month while trying to flee a crowd of hysterical teenage fans. He was not seriously hurt.

Radcliffe is under no illusions about why the girls scream when they see him.

“I go to Japan and they all scream and it all goes mad and it happens all over the world, but that’s a different type of me, that’s the me that’s on red carpets and stuff and that’s who a lot of people seem to be attracted to and fancy and stuff. But the me who sits in a darkened room for eight hours watching cricket with a big bowl of pasta in my socks and underwear is not nearly as appealing to women.”

Celebrity heiress and businesswoman Paris Hilton is back in Cannes to drum up some interest in the documentary “Paris, Not France”, which follows her as she goes about her daily life being rich and famous.

The 28-year-old tried to prevent the film, directed by Tom Petty’s daughter Adria, from reaching the big screen, but now sees it as a  kind of set-the-record-straight exercise for someone whose portrayal in the media is not always flattering.

“I was a little scared,” Hilton told reporters at the Cannes film festival, where she said she was partying hard. “I filmed it over three years ago so it was a different period of my life.”

“It also shows how it is living in this life and how much pressure there is. It definitely shows a different side than the media portrays me as.”

You can read about the documentary here, from a story we did when it screened back at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2008.

Asked why she thrust herself into the limelight as much as she did, Hilton replied: “I have a brand, I have a business … I always have something to promote. I love doing it, it’s fun. I always loved Marilyn Monroe and she loved the camera and the camera loved her and I just think of her as one of my idols.”

Plus ca change…

The Cannes film festival IS different from recent editions, but not radically. For me, the most noticeable difference between 2009 and 2005/6/7/8 is the absence of stars, be they genuine cinema greats or headline-grabbing celebrities who people care about, however fleetingly.

Sure, there are famous people here — Quentin Tarantino, Penelope Cruz, Mariah Carey, Brad Pitt, (a little later on) and Bill Clinton (in town soon for a charity dinner). But there are significantly fewer than we in the press are used to. In one sense that’s a good thing in that reporters can concentrate more on the film festival itself rather than the red carpets and celebrity-driven stunts. On the other hand, any major festival, and particularly the world’s biggest in Cannes, needs the glamour that star power brings to generate interest around the world.

So that’s what is different. But what is the same is the sunshine, the extortionate prices, the yachts in the harbour occupied by scantily-clad women and not-so-scantily-clad men, the parties (albeit fewer) and that “Cannes attitude”, in other words, “put-on-your-Sunday-best-even-if-it’s-Monday-because-you-never-know, someone-important-might-notice-you.”

After recently speaking to Kate Winslet about “The Reader,” (click here) we remembered this small item about the British star who is favorite for a best actress Oscar at the weekend for her portrayal of a former concentration guard in “The Reader”.

In an episode of the spoof TV series ”Extras” in 2005, the 33-year-old played an actress playing a nun in a Holocaust drama. Asked why she had accepted the role, her character – and it should be said Winslet was playing it firmly tongue-in-cheek in keeping with the spirit of the show — replies: “I’m doing it because I’ve noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust, (you’re) guaranteed an Oscar. I’ve been nominated four times. Never won. The whole world is going, ‘why hasn’t Winslet won one?’”

“The Reader,” which recalls the Holocaust, now brings Winslet up to six nominations. As yet, there is no Oscar statuette. Was the scene on Gervais’ “Extras” just a coincidence? Or, was it part of a cunning Oscar campaign plot hatched all those years ago?

(Okay, it was a comedy, but you never know).

The real question is, will ”The Reader” land her the big prize in the face of tough competition from Meryl Streep in “Doubt”?

Swedish director Lukas Moodysson might not be the happiest of filmmakers at the moment. It’s hardly surprising, given that his latest movie “Mammoth“, starring Gael Garcia Bernal, was roundly booed by reporters and critics after a press screening at the Berlin film festival.

Critics have panned the examination of globalisation and economic migrants. The film’s average mark in Screen International’s informal poll of reviews is 0.9 out of four, or below a poor rating. Five out of eight critics deemed it plain “bad”.

It must be a crushing blow for someone who has invested so much time and effort in a project, only to have it dismissed with a few strokes of the critics’ pen.

Still, it could be worse. Sally Potter’s ultra-minimalist fashion send-up “Rage” scored even lower in the poll, notching just 0.8 on average. Not even the sight of Jude Law in drag was enough to stop dozens of audience members walking out of its press screening. At least Potter won’t be too badly out of pocket. The movie cost less than $1 million to make.

The overall quality Berlin’s main competition lineup in recent years has come under fire, but I can’t remember seeing two such low-scoring entries, and both premiered on the same day.

On a happier note, well-crafted low-budget dramas from Iran and Uruguay are faring better and are favourites – as we approach the festival’s halfway stage — to take the Golden Bear for best film.

U.S. pop star Madonna has won a bid to move her children to the United States from Britain, ending a battle in her brutal divorce with British director Guy Ritchie, London’s Evening Standard newspaper reported on Friday.

The paper reported that Ritchie had wanted the couple’s biological son Rocco, 8, to be educated in Britain, but that Madonna’s lawyers argued he should not be split up from his siblings, Lourdes, 12, Madonna’s daughter from a previous relationship, and David, 3, who was adopted from an orphanage in Malawi.

“Everything is going to be resolved in the next couple of weeks. Everything is going well. It’s pretty amicable at the moment. Things are progressing,” a source close to the negotiations told the Evening Standard.

Liz Rosenberg, Madonna’s longtime spokeswoman in New York, declined to comment on the report.

Madonna and Ritchie announced their split in October, nearly eight years after their wedding at Skibo Castle in Scotland, and were granted a “quickie” divorce in November.

Ritchie is a British film director who is making Hollywood blockbuster “Sherlock Holmes” starring Robert Downey Jr. as the Victorian-era super sleuth.

The couple’s combined wealth has been estimated at about $525 million, but Madonna accounts for most of it.