Hey! Here’s someone who is fat and old – Meat Loaf. He’s always been a big fella, but now he’s getting on a bit, you’d think he might slow down the pace a little in case that heart of his gives up under the strain.

Because he wants to peddle his preposterous operatic stadiums blues to the very last he should carry on?

Well, his body nearly put the scuppers on that, treating him to a nice asthma attack while on-stage in Pittsburgh. Of course, once his crew revived him, he carried on, cheered on by people who think its funny to encourage a needy old man to the point where he dies on-stage. And yes, we’re joining in this macabre spectacle by sharing it with you in the form of a video.

The ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ singer (we’re legally obliged to mention that as well as a joke that ends with “but I won’t do that”, which will come later) was left sparko on his back after fainting during his gig.

He was helped to his feet (presumably by very strong men), which saw him bellowing at his audience:

I fucking fainted. I have asthma, I can’t breathe. And then – oh wait, I forgot – I got poked by a pin and bled half to death and then I got slapped in the face and my tooth is loose.

It seems ol’ Meat will let his body give up on him, but quit a gig? He won’t do that. (See? We told you it was coming).

Anyhoo, watch him looking very sick while doing one of his terrible, terrible songs. Next week, we get to publish the obituary we’ve already written about him.

Possibly.

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Expect the wrath of the media and parental groups to go in to overdrive with the announcement that BBC Four are planning to screen an opera based on the life of Anna Nicole Smith. Despite the channel screening most of its content late at night and sadly having fewer viewers that its God awful sister station BBC Three, a lynch mob will be formed.

But why? What could be so disgusting about the prospect of a balding composer writing some uplifting music whilst some people sing along?

Well, we have to think of the children you see and we can’t expose them to a late night channel they’d probably never watch about a former Playboy model. It’s not like young boys and tits go together like jelly and ice-cream. Operas are usually about people falling in love and other mushy stuff. Not tit models who marry pensioners. Perhaps BBC Four want to expand their audience?

So here’s the guff to make this sound like a traditional opera that wouldn’t make anyone change their opinion on it. After all, Lady Gaga doesn’t feature, and there isn’t a shit drum and base remix in the works by Pendulem:

In a collaboration between BBC Productions, the Royal Opera House and Olivier award-winning composer Mark Anthony Turnage, the title role will be sung by Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek. The librettist is Richard Thomas and the director is Richard Jones, with Antonio Pappano on the podium.

No numpty, that isn’t Danielle Westbrook, just in case your eyes momentarily developed dyslexia.

But just before you all head home to join a Facebook group about “loving it when buttered toast doesn’t fall butter side down,” this opera might get you interested. Even though it’s something more up Channel 4’s alley, The Guardian tells us that the Anna Nicole Smith opera will:

“Dramatise the life of Smith, who married oil tycoon J Howard Marshall, more than 60 years her senior, in 1994 and then after his death the following year was drawn into a lengthy legal battle over the settlement of his estate. Smith died of a prescription drugs overdose in 2007, aged 39.”

In a nutshell for anyone who isn’t aware of the story, she got her boobies out for old man pervert Hugh Heffner whose wrinkly fingers and hairy ears must have turned Anna Nicole Smith right on. From there, she moved in to the creative world of stripping where she saw another old man called J Howard Marshall. Breaking the strict code of the stripper, she did more than just make us cock hard, but married him.

If this was a Disney film, the two would have married and lived happily ever after. But this is brutal real life where dreams don’t come true. The strange thing about this relationship was that J Howard Marshall was a decaying old man and Anna Nicole Smith was sixty years younger. The haters in all this will argue that love conquers all, but he was an oil tycoon worth millions, she just gave handjobs on the side.

We will be watching this, not just for the way of seeing boobs, but how they vaguely try and make it look sophisticated.

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Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, ancient artifacts, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

Frederick Baker was an opera singer – and he loved his job. He enjoyed it so much, in fact, that he still shows up for work even though he’s been deceased for over a century. He died during a performance, you see, and opera house visitors who’ve never even heard of him claim to see his ashen figure still lurking about.

The stage is a popular place for ghosts, apparently. After all – just last week we told you about Michael Jackson’s spectre breaking up a sexy children’s nativity play.

This week we’re telling you about Frederick “Federici” Baker, a famed opera singer who kicked the bucket while playing the role of Mephistopheles. He was theatrically lowered into the very bowels of hell, as the script called for, and once there he gave up the ghost. The ghost, however, couldn’t give up the theatre.

As Wikipedia explains things:

“On the evening of 3 March 1888, the baritone Frederick Baker, known as “Federici”, was performing the role of Mephistopheles in Gounod’s opera Faust . This production ended with Mephistopheles sinking dramatically through a trapdoor returning to the fires of hell with his prize, the unfortunate Dr Faustus. The audience was spellbound. As the audience held its collective breath as Federici was lowered down through the stage into this basement, he had a heart attack and died immediately.”

And while he lay down there dying, activity on the stage carried on as usual. The cast took their final bow, the audience applauded and every husband in the audience was just glad their pain was over. That’s when the first sighting occurred:

Wikipedia gives us these goods as well:

“[Federici] never came back onstage, never took the bows. When the company was gathered together to be told that Federici had died, they asked, “When?”. Being told of what had happened at the end of the opera, they said, “He’s just been onstage and taken the bows with us.”"

Through the years others have seen Baker’s ghost floating around dressed in evening attire. Eighty years later, in fact, the ghoul was captured on film. According to Justin Murphy, a man who gave an interview on Australian TV:

“When this dramatised documentary was made by Kennedy Miller in the early 1970s, a photograph of the film set revealed an ashen-faced, partly transparent observer. No-one on the set saw the figure on that day. Only the photograph revealed it. It is one of many actual sightings.”

And that’s not all – a cleaning lady had an encounter too. Her name is Trina Dimovska, and this is what happened in her words:

“Something, I felt, bad behind me. It just touched my hair and my shoulders and my body on the back. And I just, like, frozen. I know what there is, because no-one was there – no human. Only me myself, because the theatre was closed.”

And that’s that. All poor Federici wanted to do was make his descent into hell completely believable, and he did so by sending his inner demon back on stage for the final curtain call.

Now that’s dedication.

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There are strange decisions, there are odd choices and there are some things that just make you go ‘whubluh?!’ before falling on the floor and vomiting through sheer insanity.

Then there are things that initially confuse, but soon reveal themselves to be not that stupid an idea after all – like making a TV show (and latterly a movie) about shallow, image-obsessed bints with too much money and free time on their hands. Some things in the world are just meant to be.

So why not combine the homoeroticism of a popular movie with the gay-friendly world of theatre? Or to put it another way: why not remake Brokeback Mountain as an opera? Genius. This thing writes itself, seriously. Having said that, there is still going to be a writer involved in the shape of 70-year-old Charles Wuorinen. The aged scribe said:

“Ever since encountering Annie Proulx’s extraordinary story I have wanted to make an opera on it, and it gives me great joy that Gerard Mortier and New York City Opera have given me the opportunity to do so.”

See – it all falls into place now, doesn’t it? By 2013 we can be sat at New York City Opera enjoying the wonder of two men discovering what love truly is, retreating to their mountainous hideaway to explore their new-found take on humanity, all while they bellow incomprehensible garbage at us with all the subtlety of a large, clumsy warthog wearing heavy boots. Walking on eggshells. In a library. We can safely say the operatic production of this is going to be ‘interesting’.

The original movie of Brokeback Mountain was released in 2005 to much critical acclaim and starred Jake “then secretly gay, now just a prettyboy actor” Gylglylglllenhall and Heath “then secretly gay, now dead” Ledger. It got some awards, did some things, made some people think a bit, made some people forgive Ang Lee for his version of The Incredible Hulk and… look: they’re making an operatic version of the film. This strikes hecklerspray as pretty bloody weird.

What are the sex scenes going to be like? We’ll go with intense, for one. Maybe this version will prove more popular in prison though.