I wasn’t an offensive, obnoxious child: I was precocious in a very gorgeous and humble kind of way.” This last statement is made with a Dame Edna-like grimace.At nearly 16, she went back to school – “I went `great, TV’s over: school, my friends: excellent’.” – graduated, and then ran up against a brick wall at 19. After that, she joined the regulars as Tiny Tina Arena, and stayed for nearly 10 years.Which came as a bit of a shock to her Sicilian parents. Her mother, a dressmaker then, and now a nurse, and her father, a printer, weren’t exactly classic showbiz parents “They were bewildered They were more shocked than I was. They were aware that I was getting myself into something pretty complicated, but I didn’t know. It was singing, dancing, variety, with a regular team of four boys and four girls. There was a segment where they would have three contestants competing against each other. Tina, 29, has been famous for over 20 years, starting out singing and dancing on Young Talent Time, a sort of junior version of Friday Night at the London Palladium with a dash of New Faces thrown in for good measure.”It was live, at 6.30pm every Saturday night, with an audience of between five and eight million,” says Tina.

I appeared the first time at the age of six, and was on four times over a year and a bit, and won three out of the four times against 12, 13, 17-year olds”. My Australian friends say: “You’re meeting Tiny Tina? Ask her about Young Talent Time!”.You’ve got to admire it. Anyone who can start their life as the Aussie equivalent of Lena Zavarone and, instead of succumbing to emotional problems in later years, pulls herself together and becomes Australia’s biggest- selling female singer is a pretty determined individual. Had the woman who imitated her on Stars In Their Eyes last year had the misfortune to win, she would have been hard-pressed to find a follow-up song. If you’re gay, you might well own the single, or even the album Don’t Ask.

My gay friends have voiced objections that I should get to meet her. It could be irritating, this matchless confidence, except that, combined with that blaring Melbourne accent and a cheerful, sweary laissez-faire, it is rather disarming. And you’ve got to admire it: anybody would have to have an iron-clad sense of self to come out of the Tina Arena experience unscathed.
If you’re British, and heterosexual, chances are that, if you are aware of Tina at all, it’s as someone who charted in 1995 with the ballad “Chains”, and then disappeared. I’ve been tempted many times.” Tina Arena has a fierce certainty about herself. She gives the impression of having absolutely no doubts, and sod anyone who thinks differently. Titchy, with a big bouffant mane of Southern European hair and big, mobile Joan Crawford lips, she lounges in a white vest-top and black bra, snapping the filters off Silk Cuts and holding forth about her career with blithe certainty and no hint of humility.

The photograph is there, and thrusts the moral choice at us: to do nothing is to collude with the murderers, and that, rather more than what we spread on our toast, will affect our souls.Paul Handley is editor of The Church Times. “IF I wanted to make a really good living,” says Tina, “I could drop out of my pop career and make an extraordinary living in musical theatre. Nor can we see the hurt caused to innocent Serbians by military action, trade sanctions or political destabilisation. But although it should make us cautious, the possibility of making a mistake should not para-lyse us. We cannot look, at the moment, at what harm might be caused by the dangerous power struggles simmering within the ethnic Albanian community.

In Kosovo, then, the atrocities committed by Milosevic’s militia have been frozen in the light, and that clarity might well last until Western military action has begun.But what happens next is still obscure. For the theologian at the breakfast table, the flickering of moral choices creates merely a greyness, a drab battle of minor good versus minor evil which we cease to notice as it works its way into our character, one or the other eventually predominating.On the international stage, though, a more accurate image is of a strobe light, freezing the action at points of high tension, exposing acts of wickedness, say, but seldom giving a smooth enough picture to enable action to be taken with any confidence. If our military leaders can manage this, and if because of it our politicians engineer a just and humane peace afterwards, we can judge the bombings to be mostly a good thing.It is no wonder that Western governments are hesitating, hoping that the sabre-rattling will spare them from having to make choices and act on those choices. Or, more precisely, on people of mostly darkness; or, more precisely still, mostly on people like us, caught up in a system of mostly darkness. He carried a poster with no words on it: just the photo taken in the woods near Kosovo, showing the butchered infant. Spirit of William Blake, fill us with your anger: this was a deed of darkness, an act of experience visited on a creature of innocence.Until that photo appeared in the British press towards the end of last week, the general opinion here about the Balkan states, among those who could distinguish them from the countries round the Baltic, was that each was as bad at the other If they were victims now, they had been aggressors before. But an 18-month-old boy cannot be an aggressor, and so we are called from the generalising and the trivial concerns of the breakfast table, and must go on the trail of the evil-doers.When our bombs fall, although the Kosovo throat- slitter is unlikely to be walking underneath, they will nevertheless fall on people of darkness.