Marina Hyde studied English at Oxford before starting in journalism as the secretary on the Sun's showbiz desk. She has worked at the Guardian since 2000 and formerly wrote the paper's Diary column. She currently writes three columns a week for the paper: one general comment, one on sport and one on celebrity.
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Last updated: 02/11/10 at 07:57
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He's an Oxbridge classicist, she's a gal from Wasilla – but their political strategies have much in commonTo the untrained eye, Boris Johnson doesn't appear to have the most enormous amount in common with Sarah Palin. The former Alaska governor's habit of littering her public orations with classical references throws the London mayor into somewhat gauche relief, while Boris's continual emphasis of his down-home roots makes the Tea Party's darling look quite the Woosterian metropolitanista. But discount such superficial differences, because Boris is going rogue.You may prefer to call what he is doing "firing a shot across David Cameron's bows"; you may favour some wishy-washy euphemism such as "startling intervention in the coalition's proposed housing benefit cuts". But Boris is indeed going rogue, as the John McCain campaign team once observed darkly of their spectacularly malfunctioning vice-presidential pick, only for Palin to perform one of her trademark rudimentary inversions and co-opt the insult as the title of her autobiography. (Have you read the opus? The bit where she explains that the New Deal caused the Great Depression is quite spellbinding.)Admittedly, one suspects Boris's tea party would take place at Fortnums and involve some uncommonly good cucumber sandwiches. But it is a testament to the looking-glass world of British politics that this Oxford-educated classicist is our nearest analogue for the gal from Wasilla who regards a near-limitless supply of leaden hockey-mom jokes as a more than adequate substitute for being able to locate an emergent superpower on a map. Like Palin, Boris has long presented himself as the maverick politician to whom normal rules do not apply – and beneath his studiedly intemperate language lies the same belief that he can circumvent a party system that doesn't sufficiently appreciate his charm, and appeal directly to the voter watching or listening at home.Inevitably, it was during a media appearance on Thursday that Boris reacted to the government's plan to cut housing benefit by declaring that "we will not accept any Kosovo-style social cleansing of London". Downing Street merely underscored its palpable fear of him by issuing an immediate rebuke, allowing the faux-shambolic Johnson to enliven the afternoon by announcing his remarks had been taken "out of context". "I do not agree," he twinkled, "with the wild accusations from defenders of the current system that reform will lead to social cleansing."This may appear the sort of weaseling you'd expect from an intellect of the calibre of Glenn Hoddle – but something rather different is afoot. Boris is at once extremely clever and calculating, yet his shtick is what the Telegraph's Benedict Brogan describes brilliantly as "drive-by politics". It amounts to knocking on the door of No 10 then running away.No, this is not sophisticated politics as we know it, though you can't help but smile at the contortions being performed by some on the left just because on this occasion Boris happens to have given such incendiary voice to an opinion with which they have sympathy. "I never thought I'd say this but I'm starting to respect Boris" looks set to become the new "I agree with Nick", and those parroting this view should prepare for disappointment accordingly.None of which is remotely to defend the policy at which Boris has affected to take such umbrage. As Matthew Norman so neatly observed in the Independent this week, at the age that David Cameron and George Osborne were smashing up restaurants in their Bullingdon regalia, Alan Johnson was stacking shelves in Tesco and living with his sister in a Battersea flat from which he would have been driven out under the government's housing reforms.For those of us who have benefited from every educational advantage – and, far more needless to say, those who haven't – it should feel shameful and repulsive that Johnson A's eventual journey to the cabinet table would be impossible now, in an age where, as Alan Milburn conceded, social mobility has gone backwards.As for Johnson B's journey, he doubtless has a variety of exquisitely hand-inked maps that he believes will guide him to the treasure he so desires. But if anything would constitute uncharted territory, it is surely the notion that the country would care to be led by two Bullingdon Etonians in a row. After all, despite this week's amusing decision to affect the pose of a brimstone-spouting GLC-era Ken Livingstone, it is worth remembering that the young Boris was also given to smashing up restaurants, and for all the millimetres of clear blue water he is currently trying put between himself and his fellow former smashers, rational observers must ask themselves whether he would be voicing so much as a pip of disapproval of the policy if he weren't trying to win a London mayoral election, and were instead a senior cabinet minister.He isn't, of course – and thus can position himself as a Palin-esque outsider. Just as madam chucked in the Alaska governorship, so Boris could probably walk away from the mayor's job and retain a huge and significant political profile – but there, one feels, their potentials diverge. How far Palin's approach could take her remains unclear: we'll wait and see how Palin's Pets perform in Tuesday's midterms.But in a country without primaries, whose party system is far more restrictive than America's, the limits of Boris's strategy will surely prove more immovably prescribed.Boris JohnsonSarah PalinHousing benefitLondonLiberal-Conservative coalitionHousingSocial exclusionMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/29/boris-johnson-sarah-palin-mavericks-tea-party
Now you can share Madonna's latest 'vision' – a worldwide chain of gyms 'merging fitness with entertainment'Expansionist news from Madonna, now, who this week announced that she is to open a global chain of gyms. Or, more accurately, "a one-of-a-kind experience merging fitness with entertainment"."Our goal is to create an environment inspired by Madonna's vision and high standards of what the ideal gym would be," trilled her business manager, who added that the first branch will open in Mexico City next month. "Hard Candy Fitness will be a reflection of Madonna's point of view and will reflect her input on every detail including music space, light and other design cues. Madonna's touch will be everywhere."Well, of course it will – after all, there is nothing to which this renaissance woman cannot turn her hand. It wasn't so long ago, you might remember, that Madonna was badgering the UK government for facetime, explaining that she was "working with a group of scientists" who had solved the problem of nuclear waste (apparently, they'd poured some £4-a-bottle Kabbalah water into a lake within the Chernobyl exclusion zone and it had neutralised all the radiation). Downing Street and Whitehall were too blinkered to see the light, of course – but we must wish milady luck with this subsequent project. Nuclear science's loss looks to have been aerobics's gain.CelebrityMadonnaFitnessMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/oct/28/madonna-opens-gym-chain
Lauren Booth and her sister Cherie Blair are becoming the sort of spoof characters who can no longer be covered in the serious parts of the paperAn enormously proud day for both this column and the country, as the Blair-Booth family make their official Lost in Showbiz debut, being the sort of obviously spoof characters who can no longer be covered seriously elsewhere in the newspaper.The former PM's kith and kin-by-marriage have made what can only be the most audacious bid for the ITV2 slot vacated by Katie Price's nuclear family (Chernobyl edition), who you'll recall have hauled their cocktail of staged drama over to Living TV. An argument with Peter over childcare? A bit of seepage from one of Mummy's eyebrow implants? How tame those plotlines now seem, when this week alone Cherie Blair has attempted to collapse global capitalism using only her eBay account, while her half-sister Lauren has announced she has converted to Islam.Truly, they are the Osbournes for the post-Osbournes generation: madder, more grasping, and now with added geopolitics.By now you may be aware of news that Cherie sold a bookplate signed by her husband for a tenner on eBay, having slashed the price from £25 after bidding failed to ignite. But have you luxuriated in her publicist's explanation for this thrifty bit of business, in which we learn madam was merely making some Cnut-like philosophical point?"Cherie Blair was cross that people were selling Tony Blair's signature," this spokesman claims, "when you can get one for free." Can you? Seems out of character, considering that last year the former PM was charging fans £180 to have their picture taken with him. But go on. "She was trying to undermine the market," explains the spokesman, "and as soon as someone bought it, she refunded it straight away to make the point."Ah, the classic "undermining the market" defence – a strategy first floated by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, with the canny Scot predicting that the entire edifice of western capitalism could one day be brought tumbling down by a principled eBayer acting alone.Yet it is somehow eclipsed by the latest twist in The Life of Lauren, who has followed up critically misunderstood stints on the Gaza flotilla and I'm A Celebrity by announcing her conversion to Islam. Currently employed by the Iranian news channel PressTV, Lauren now wears a hijab, says she hasn't had a drink for 45 days, and gets to her local mosque "when she can" – causing the Daily Mail to demand: Why are so many modern British career women converting to Islam?How many d'you reckon they know of? Two? Three makes a trend, of course, so we'll give the paper the benefit of the doubt, while observing that Lauren's entire existence appears to be a conceit calculated to interest the commissioning editors of the Mail and Mail on Sunday.Once upon a time, Lauren's decision to move en famille to a French farmhouse was enough to land her a bi-weekly commission from Associated Newspapers, with her sub-sub-sub-Peter Mayle drivel about chopping wood, vin rouge and quaint locals proving the most inexplicably rich editorial goldmine since the saga of Derek Draper and Kate Garraway's roof extension.Alas, I'm afraid Lauren became a victim of the Mail on Sunday's internal self-absorption market. With stablemate Liz Jones offering ever more preposterous confessional fare – in the paper, Liz explains she's got her eye on £1,200 Bottega Veneta handbags; in the magazine, she weeps that she and her vast menagerie are literally starving – Lauren was forced to resort to increasingly degrading ways to make the features pages. There really is no better way to give you a flavour of these outings than to list merely a few weeks' worth of headlines and allow you to fill in the gaps yourself. So here we go:"Our French dream is over . . . and now I fear for our happy marriage, says Lauren Booth.""Lauren Booth: I changed my Facebook profile after a row and now my husband is in a coma.""I asked him: 'Do you know who I am?', reveals Lauren Booth as her husband emerges from a coma.""Lauren Booth thanks God her husband survived a horrific motorbike accident but confesses: The man I loved is dead.""Lauren Booth wrote about dumping her husband on Facebook and his terrible road accident but now her mother-in-law asks: Why can't we keep this in the family?""Lauren Booth: why I hate my mother and never want to see her again.""Lauren Booth: I'd be begging Katie Price to give it a rest, if I hadn't been raped too" . . .There's more – so much, much more – but by now you'll appreciate the constant struggle that is Keeping Down with the Joneses, and perhaps understand why Lauren has to create a new drama every second week. The only surprise with the Muslim business is that she didn't do it years ago, though in fact it's never hard to predict the next term in a Booth sequence of headlines. In expectation of her presumably inevitable parting of company with PressTV, bookmakers are offering short odds on "I converted to Islam in a haze of peace and love, says Lauren Booth – but what I discovered should be a warning to all women."Having said that, Lost in Showbiz would really like to see her doubling down on this one. This column has suddenly realised that all it wants for its atheist Christmas is: "Last week I was trafficked to one of the smaller emirates as 13th wife to some profoundly disturbed princeling – and I've never felt happier, says Lauren Booth."CelebrityCherie BlairMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/oct/28/cherie-blair-ebay-lauren-booth-islam
A pre-election version of Osborne's desperately compromised Lib Dem lackey might wonder at the rewards of selling outWhat was in the note passed to Danny Alexander during the chancellor's spending review statement to the Commons on Wednesday? Did you clock the vignette, as Newsnight did? A fold of paper was handed along the government frontbench to the chief secretary to the Treasury, who opened it, read it, then promptly budged up behind George Osborne. Perhaps Danny was trying to ride in George's slipstream. Perhaps a spin doctor monitoring events had decided that even the affluent chancellor's shoulders weren't broad enough to carry the burden of obscuring his desperately compromised lackey from public view.Admittedly, the contents of the note are not the greatest mystery of that day – but we shall come to how on earth it took a mere five months since the election before certain Liberal Democrats had assimilated so totally into the Tory party that they were walking on two legs and cheering the most misery-inducing cuts, even as the electorally suicidal nature of this position became clearer by the day.When Jeremy Paxman asked about the missive, Danny affected to have forgotten what it contained. Allow me to float a theory. Last year, Stephen Fry wrote a published letter to his 16-year-old self – a sort of "if only you knew what I know now" exercise designed to offer reassurance and guidance to a floundering soul. Alas, though Fry's letter was typically charming, its popularity inspired considerably less eloquent public figures to pen their own versions, with everyone from Patsy Kensit to Simon Cowell offering their younger selves a hindsighted arm around the shoulders.Clearly, the format needs refreshing – an end best achieved by means of a simple reversal. So may I suggest that on Wednesday, Danny Alexander was the first public figure to be in receipt of a letter from his younger self. Think of it as "out of the mouths of babes"; or rather, "out of the mouths of grownups who barely five months ago appeared in possession of at least the odd principle, but who have since embarked on a political journey of such staggering speed and distance that it makes the rightward lurches of some New Labour ministers now seem minuscule".In this idle fantasy, what was being passed along the frontbench during Osborne's speech was a note not from the 16-year-old Danny Alexander, but from the Danny Alexander who roamed the Earth in early May 2010."Dear Danny," this letter from his younger and wiser self might begin. "As you read this, you are sitting next to the prime minister, while behind you MPs wave their order papers to salute painful cuts. Please take a moment to absorb the magic."In a minute George will sit down, and David and Nick are going to smirk and thump him on the back and stop just shy of ruffling his hair in what will look like a goal celebration as performed by the type of public schoolboys who don't really understand football. Danny, you disappoint me. Given that you're not the only former publicist in the government – the prime minister's only job outside politics was in PR – you might have managed the staging of today's announcement more tastefully. You could have got the chancellor to lift up his shirt to reveal a vest bearing the slogan, Just Did It."Later, you will tour the TV studios, where you'll repeatedly declare that you didn't get into politics to cut public spending. I hate to break it to you – you used to know this stuff – but you and the Liberal Democrats are enabling people who got into politics precisely for that reason, which is why the benches behind you were cheering."Tomorrow, the Institute for Fiscal Studies will explain in detail why your plans are regressive, and the deputy PM will be foolish enough to pronounce this 'distorted and a complete nonsense'. I honestly can't imagine it now, Danny, when people are warming to Nick and not David in the televised election debates. But by the time you read this, Cameron will insist on making joint appearances with Clegg, because they throw him into sympathetic relief."As for you, I must remind you that you have risen without trace. Five years ago, you were the press officer for the Cairngorms national park. This week, the Cairngorms launched the world's first national park iPhone app, and it's funny to think that had your life continued on that path, you would have spent today explaining how easy visitors would now find it to locate cafes and loos among the peaks. As it was, you passed it filling Osborne's water glass."You've come a long way, baby … Yours, regretfully, Danny."Odd that people should eulogise hindsight, when principled foresight is a far more wonderful thing. Indeed, watching the week unfold, restless Lib Dems whose core beliefs have a rather longer half-life than Danny's must have reflected that the thing about selling out is that people tend to do it to gain something. Selling out to virtually guarantee his compadres a loss would seem an idiosyncrasy too far, even within a party as traditionally Bizarro as the Liberal Democrats.Danny AlexanderSpending review 2010George OsborneLiberal DemocratsLiberal-Conservative coalitionHouse of CommonsMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/23/dear-danny-alexander
Jacko and Macaulay Culkin both signed the sheet, so Jedward were only too happy to fork out £3,000 for itExciting entertainment property Jedward are a pair of hyper-quiffed innocents abroad in a confusing world. The former X Factor contestants now claim to have £2m in their bank account, but as a rule, say they don't like to spend it. However, it seems that the young Grimes brothers recently persuaded their financial carer to let them withdraw £20,000 – a full £3,000 of which they spent at auction on a piece of so-called pop memorabilia that Lost in Showbiz can hardly believe exists.It is a bedsheet, autographed by both Michael Jackson and his erstwhile child-buddy, Macaulay Culkin."It's really good stuff," Edward explained this week. "Nobody else in the world has it." One imagines they don't. In light of subsequent events, Michael probably stopped co- autographing bedlinen with minors – or at the very least, any other works in the series would remain under his former lawyers' lock and key.So Jedward must be congratulated on their shrewd eye. The purchase represents a canny first acquisition for what will doubtless one day be regarded as the world's leading collection of aberrant celebrity relics.CelebrityMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/oct/21/jedward-michael-jackson-macaulay-culkin
Bosnian politicians and women's groups are not impressed with Jolie's directorial debutAngelina Jolie's directorial debut has run into a little local difficulty. Madam is currently shooting a love story set during the war in the former Yugoslavia – but alas, her efforts do not appear to be meeting universal acclaim. Or as one Bosnian official reportedly told the Daily Mail: "With one film, Angelina Jolie is in danger of restarting the war all over again by herself."Goodness. As someone who makes much of her work with the refugees of various conflicts, it makes sense that Angelina would eventually wish to backward integrate and begin causing conflicts herself. But that doesn't seem to have been the aim in this case. Apparently, Bosnian politicians and women's groups are not charmed by suggestions that the movie's plot features a Bosnian Muslim woman who falls in love with a Serbian soldier who raped her during the conflict."Among thousands of testimonies by women raped during the war," fumes the Women Victims of War association in Sarajevo, "There is not a single one that tells of a love story between a victim and her rapist."Well, that's the sort of romance people go to the movies for – or as Angelina responds: "any dramatic interpretation will always fail those who have had a real experience." Which is fair enough. I know a lot of real-life husband-and-wife assassins felt totally let down by the way Mr & Mrs Smith cheapened their profession.Meanwhile, there is also Serbian disquiet, with one tabloid headline raging: "Angelina Jolie portrays Serbs as evil."So although her ban on filming in Bosnia has now been overturned, Angelina is on the defensive. "There are many twists in the plot that address the sensitive nature of the relationship between the main characters," she stated this week. "My hope is that people will hold judgement until they have seen the film." Yes, this touchiness doesn't become anyone. Fortunately, the movie's producer Edin Sarcik is miles less wishy-washy. Branding the emotional debate "unnecessary", he points out: "It's a big thing for Bosnia that such a mega-mega-star is coming to Sarajevo."Indeed. Don't look a celebrity angle in the mouth, Bosnia! The ingratitude of some countries is quite astounding, and we look forward to Angelina dragging the artless yokels up to speed.CelebrityAngelina JolieBosnia and HerzegovinaMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/oct/21/sarajevo-angelina-jolie-love-story
In 2004, George Bush used the national team as a symbol of hope. Six years on and Fifa is threatening to suspend the FAWho could have known, when Bill Shankly came to make his famous assessment of the relative importance of football and matters of life and death, that it would one day appear the most quaint of understatements?We live in an age where bombastic public figures regularly make far more outlandish claims for football's place within the great scheme of things. It is perfectly normal to cast football as the ultimate symbol of national hope, or an agent of social change, or a geopolitical pawn essential to mining stability in the Urals – anything, really, so long as it's not the desperately prosaic fact of two teams of 11 kicking a ball around.New stadiums are talked about less as places to watch football, and more as tools of urban regeneration. There exists an organisation whose sole aim is to use the game to bring an end to conflict in the Middle East and elsewhere. Many like to think the 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras was fought because of football – in fact, it had that little bit more to do with land reform and immigration than the 1970 World Cup qualifiers – while elsewhere the game is expected to be an agent of world peace.It was not ever thus. Consider that legendary kickabout during the 1914 Christmas Day truce in the first world war – a lovely story and all that but, given the years of mass slaughter that followed, you'd hesitate to argue that it was a transformative event. Had it taken place today, however, some blowhard would have cast it as immensely significant before the first letters about it had reached home. Certainly before the subsequent telegrams about most of the participants' senseless deaths had arrived, anyway.And so to Iraq, where initial American crowing about the country's football renaissance continues to backfire informatively. Quote of the week comes courtesy of one Khaled Tawfic – five times head of Iraq's national athletics association – who laments that the disarray in the Iraqi Football Association is such that Fifa may yet again have cause to suspend it. There are allegations of political interference, members have been physically threatened, armed men claiming to be officials have raided its premises with a warrant for the arrest of its president …"Of course democracy is preferable in theory," Mr Tawfic explains tartly to the Times, "but interference and bribes began affecting the committees."Swings and roundabouts, innit? Back when Saddam was in charge, he claims, things ran infinitely better. "Honestly, it was more successful than now," Tawfic declares blithely, "because they selected qualified people."By happenstance – we'll rule out the possibility of a coordinated attack – it was this very week that Bernie Ecclestone reiterated his distaste for democracy, and took the trouble to cite Iraq as an example. Saddam Hussein, he reminded the Guardian, made Iraq a more stable country. "Absolutely," quoth Bernie. "It's been proved, hasn't it?"Where you stand on that point is up to you. But what we can say for sure is that if ever there were a tale to make one consider the wisdom of hijacking football as a symbol, Iraq would surely be it. Even as coalition forces limbered up for their second, immensely bloody assault on Fallujah in 2004, George Bush was co-opting the Iraqi national side as a symbol of hope for his re-election campaign adverts, underscoring that football is not just more important than life and death from white phosphorus, but far more "symbolic" than things such as water and electricity. "The ad simply talks about president Bush's optimism and how democracy has triumphed over terror," a White House spokesman insisted.If only the players had seen it that way. "He can find another way to advertise himself," snapped the midfielder Salih Sadir."How will he meet his God having slaughtered so many men and women?" another player asked. "He has committed so many crimes.""What is freedom," demanded the despairing coach, "when I go to the [national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?"Six years on and there hasn't exactly been progress – though these days the exploiters prefer to quack that the power vacuum at the Iraqi FA holds a mirror to the instability in the government itself.How any game in Iraq manages to bear the weight of expectation and layers of supposed symbolism placed upon it one can only guess. But if, in the coming weeks, Fifa does decide to suspend the country, others should use the opportunity to reflect on the exploitative folly of declaring Iraqi football's every move symptomatic of events way beyond its proper concern. Let the players play, or don't – but let them well alone.IraqMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/oct/21/football-life-death-iraq
From the doomed desire to impose order on the tide of human life comes inane journalism's zenith: compiling power listsYou're the top! / You're the Coliseum / You're the top! / You're the Louver museum / You're a melody from a symphony by Strauss / You're a Bendel bonnet / A Shakespeare's sonnet / You're Mickey Mouse / You're the Nile / You're the Tower of Pisa / You're the smile on the Mona Lisa…Those, pop pickers, were the musical stylings of Mr Cole Porter, which last week showed once again how desperately they have dated as Forbes named Michelle Obama the most powerful woman in the world. Naturally, the Forbes rankings were far from the only power list gifted to a grateful planet – Entertainment Weekly slung one out, in which Johnny Depp was voted the most powerful entertainer (sorry, Oprah), plus there was an art power list, and a Bald 100 for the follically challenged, while football commentators were able to gibber that Montenegro is ranked 40th in the world, below even Burkina Faso.Clearly, it would take all of Porter's genius to rhyme the likes of "You're the unpopular president's missus", "You're the slaphead from the Federal Reserve" and "You're Spain until the 58th minute". But much more importantly – in fact, call it seven arbitrary rankings more importantly – it would be an utter waste of his time, because the one thing we know about the modern pestilence of the "power" list is that the strain will have mutated by next week, when poor old Cole would be obliged to apply scansion to Lee Westwood, or musically digest the fact that Lady Gaga has been deemed more influential than China.May I hasten to say right from the start that this is the type of column always ghettoised with the tag "a very personal view", as this newspaper is of course no stranger to the power list format. I did enjoy the recent movie one, in which Johnny Depp was deemed to have more influence over film viewing in the UK than the bosses of Warner Bros, Disney, Fox, Universal and Paramount.I must also foreground the fact that the silliness of such lists is a theme to which I have warmed previously in this space – so, given the sheer volume of power lists that have appeared since its last outing, do consider it one of the top 10 most profoundly uninfluential themes abroad in the world of newspaper comment today, placing above even Melanie Phillips's Londonistan thesis, and stuff the ladies at the Telegraph did last weekend.Obtaining definitive figures on the allure of these endless lists is three spots above my pay grade, yet the heartbreaking assumption must be that they are an excellent way of driving traffic and selling papers or magazines. But at what cost? There must come some notional point at which publishing animal porn is marginally less intellectually compromising, and though I'm loath to make a definitive call on where that point lies, I'd guess it's about the moment you start deciding that model-turned-telly presenter Heidi Klum is the 39th most influential woman on the entire planet.Naturally, one can sympathise with the doomed desire to impose order on the formless tide of human experience. But in any civilised world, the only people who could thrill to such lists would be the 100 or so who make the cut – a journalist once sent to interview John Madejski clocked that a copy of the Sunday Times Rich List had been placed conveniently on a table nearby the charmless Reading Football Club owner, presumably to draw attention to his entry. (Note: this list is known as the Rich List simply because People With Lots of Money Who Journalists Have Heard Of is less catchy, even though its compilers are still obliged to come up with ways that enable them to print a picture of Cheryl Cole, which is why we get subcategories like Successful Singing TV Presenters Under the Age of 28).Still, as indicated, such confected "publishing events" really must draw the readers, meaning that they do provide a definitive perspective of a sort. To wit: in terms of shifting copies or garnering hits, anything I could possibly write, ever, will rank an innumerable amount of spots below the notion that Heidi Klum is the 39th most influential woman in the world.That is not, as Spinal Tap's David St Hubbins once remarked, "too much fucking perspective". It is a most seemly amount of perspective for the majority of us members of the so-called fourth estate – anyone not engaged in war reporting or campaigning for justice, basically – who should be powerfully aware that the most important thing we will ever do in our careers will be infinitely less important than the least important thing happening anywhere else in the world at the same time.Indeed, even among all the almost dizzyingly unimportant things one can ever do as a journalist, being involved in the construction of a power list is not merely up there – or rather down there – with the best of them. It is the absolute, undefeatable zenith of pointlessness – the Rupert Murdoch of inanity, the Bill Gates of meaninglessness, the Rafael Nadal of inconsequentiality, the Warren Buffett of triviality. I can only urge the serial listocrats to accept the honour – this is really no time for delusions of self-respect.National newspapersNewspapers & magazinesNewspapersCelebrityMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/15/who-will-top-our-pointless-power-list
The X Factor judge and the track in which she 'takes her revenge' on AshleyThis week's most overspun showbiz story is Cheryl Cole's "revenge" on Ashley, in which we are encouraged to believe that a track on The X Factor judge's new album is a vicious attack on her former husband – even though it was written by someone else entirely."Cheryl didn't write the song herself," the Sun explains breathlessly, "but she approved the lyrics."Don't you love that "approved the lyrics"? Clearly, the styling signifies a progression from the "Because we're worth it" catchphrase Cheryl has already made her own – in fact, it smacks of nothing so much as a US political campaign ad. This column simply will not be happy until every one of madam's public utterances – from individual X Factor judgments to unchallenging R&B videos – ends with her facing the camera and dimpling: "Ahm Cheryl Kerl, and ah approve this messudge."CelebrityCheryl ColeThe X FactorTelevisionEntertainmentMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/oct/14/cheryl-cole-revenge-ashley
Joan laments a lack of glamorous actresses, and fends off rumours about her own looksTime for a proper celebrity, as darling Joan Collins invites Hello! readers into the gracious home she shares with her husband Percy, a mere 32 years her junior.A preposterous urban myth has Joanie coming off stage somewhere and announcing: "I'm desperate for a fag – and I don't mean my husband", but Lost in Showbiz has always regarded the couple as entirely devoted to each other, and so they seem during an adorable interview in which Percy explains that he doesn't want to spend any time away from her, especially when "at any time, this gift of life could be taken away from you". As Joan once joked: "If he dies, he dies." (A line nicked off Anna Nicole Smith's old man, J Howard Marshall, but we forgive her.)But it is the erstwhile Dynasty star's lament for the dearth of modern glamour that has made the headlines this week, with various newspapers taking ludicrous offence at her suggestion that she "can't think of any really beautiful actresses" other than Angelina Jolie, pointing out that Jennifer Aniston is "cute" but could hardly hold her own with the likes of Lana Turner or Ava Gardner."Wrong," honked the Daily Mirror, who proceeded to suggest that Katherine Heigl was a dead ringer for Ingrid Bergman. Oh, Daily Mirror! No, no, no . . . Really, no.Anyway, all that remains is for Joan, 77, to once more refute those tired rumours of plastic surgery, when as she has repeatedly explained, she does it all with Vaseline and makeup."I'm not into Botox or 'lifting'," she declares. "Believe me – I've seen such sights, it's put me off totally."What can you say? Other than: Joanie, promise never to be a stranger.CelebrityJoan CollinsMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/oct/14/joan-collins-vaseline-makeup-botox
Parky claims Brand is 'artless, unfunny and creatively dull'Breaking the most welcome of silences this week comes Sir Michael Parkinson CBE, whose attacks on both modern talkshows and Russell Brand are immensely significant. They signify he's got a new book to promote – and according to Michael's own website, "Parky's People is witty, always perceptive, often wise and never less than compelling reading."How we've got through two full sentences without observing that Parky came from humble mining stock I do not know – Sir Michael himself would never dream of covering such a syntactic distance without foregrounding the heritage that equipped him to burrow up the backsides of a thousand celebrities, armed with only a Davy lamp and the hardhitting inquiry: "May I say you're looking beautiful?"As indicated, this week Parky took it upon himself to lament the "foolish ambition" of celebrities who think they can be chatshow hosts, as well as going on Five Live to call Russell Brand pointless, artless, unfunny and creatively dull. "I would say he has been a very lucky man," expanded Parky, so adept these days at keeping the bitterness out of his public pronouncements. "I mean, Rin Tin Tin had a very big career in Hollywood and he was a dog."Well. Lost in Showbiz admits it only saw the trailer for Russell's most recent movie Get Him to the Greek, and spent much of the ensuing main feature staggered at his apparent inability to deliver a line – for an accomplished standup to fall short of even a one-note performance would appear quite a feat. But I doubt Brand could give two hoots. He is apparently entirely untrammeled by self-doubt, affianced to a gorgeous popstar, and milking a period in which misguided folk keep giving him lucrative movie roles. Indeed, were anything to make one reflexively warm to the old chancer, it is surely his having incurred the disapproval of Britain's pre-eminent paradigm of professional Yorkshire-dullard smugness.As for Parky's wholly unwarranted slight on Rin Tin Tin, one can only conclude that having spent so long entombed in those celebrity colons, he lacks the perspective required to appreciate what F Scott Fitzgerald called "the whole equation" of motion pictures.Rin Tin Tin could open a movie, and did so time and again. For years, he was Warner Bros's most bankable star, and it was his pictures that saved the studio from bankruptcy. He was only retired after the advent of talkies, at which point his natural limitations were exposed, but until that time he could take direction and emote as well as, if not better than, most of Hollywood's humanoid silent stars.The German shepherd certainly possessed better timing than Parky, whose chief means of reminding us of his existence over the last few years has been to pop up at other people's moments of extreme distress and make some desperately called-for interjection. It was he who judged the days after Jade Goody's death to be the perfect moment to brand her "ignorant" and "puerile" and just another one of those "poor benighted people making arses of themselves".Of course, it would take a staggeringly benighted person not to see that every financially motivated moment of Jade's last days was informed by her desire to bequeath her sons a better life than the grimly abusive childhood she herself had endured. Yet preferring instead to fart out ovine observations on broken Britain, Parky missed this most tragically interesting aspect of the woman, once again proving Craig Brown's brilliantly sparse observation that "he has a complete lack of curiosity about anyone".Unable to turn that laser-like focus on himself, Parky has always failed to realise that part of the reason people embraced reality-TV contestants was because they had come to find the packaged and managed celebrity machine epitomised by his show utterly dull. A significant portion of viewers grew so fed up of watching the likes of Parky lube up celebrities for another confected anecdote that they actually preferred to watch talentless no-marks argue about blinking, if only for a bit of authenticity.Still, with his website informing us he is "now an international celebrity himself", do consider Sir Parky the last word in self-effacement. To this end, we shall play out with Lost in Showbiz's favourite passage from his autobiography, which finds him recalling his days as a club cricketer for Barnsley. Though Parky's ambition to play for England was "thwarted" – in fact he was laughed out of trials for Yorkshire – one who did make county was his Barnsley teammate Geoff Boycott, of whom Parky scrupulously observes: "He wasn't the most greatly gifted player on our team."Well of course he wasn't. Poor old Boycs, though – he only had his second-string cricket skills to make the best of, whereas you sense the real talent on that Barnsley side could have had his pick of opening for England, becoming an international celebrity, and quite possibly leading the free world, if he hadn't felt so very, very privileged just being little old him on the telly for more than 40 years and for more money than you could dream of. 'Appen there's nowt so radged as pikelets, and so on.CelebrityRussell BrandMichael ParkinsonMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/oct/14/russell-brand-michael-parkinson
Marina Hyde defends herself from accusations of Justin Bieber-based plagiarismUPDATE: I am pleased to tell you that Gawker has now decided my argument "is convincing", and "hereby renounce the suggestion that she fuck herself". This transatlantic Bieber humour war was resolved without loss of life – a situation I know would make Justin happy. Along with turkey sandwiches and the colour blue, peace is one of this favourite things.Morning kids. Lost in Showbiz is touched to find itself the subject of a Gawker post entitled: "Hey look a Guardian columnist stole our jokes", wherein Gawker blogger Adrian Chen suggests I stole three jokes of his from a piece he wrote about Justin Bieber and recycled them in my own piece about Justin Bieber. Because Adrian is probably sleeping in another time zone right now, and Gawker don't seem to allow just anyone to comment on their site, I reproduce my email response to him below in the hope that it will offer a sort of behind-the-non-music look at how I came to write the offending item. "Hello Adrian - I have just read your post and I can well see why you think there was a similarity, though I am afraid it is genuinely a coincidence. I know this primarily because I honestly did not read your blog post. I promise you. I can obviously see why you would think it similar in the three instances you have picked out, but the only similar piece I read was a Popeater post entitled "Dummies Guide to Justin Bieber - what's the fuss?". But let me address your points one by one. I agree the headline is extremely similar but because I work for a newspaper and this is the way we still do it, I don't write the headlines on anything I write, ever. A subeditor does. That was dreamed up by someone completely different after my piece had been filed to them. If you'd like I can get you their name today and you can check it with them.As for the point about Susan Boyle, my original copy read "Put briefly, Justin's story is this: he is Canadian, comes from good Christian stock, and he's the first genuine YouTube sensation to cross over into mainstream pop stardom." When I had written it, someone said to me "but what about Susan Boyle?", and I realised not mentioning her would undermine the point, so I added the quickest line I could think of to clarify. I agree it makes the same point as you, but frankly there are only two really successful mainstream YouTube crossovers that I know of, and one of them is Justin Bieber and one is Susan Boyle (who as I say I'd forgotten about, but obviously isn't a popstar). I think the joke was really, really obvious, but coming under the headline "an old person's guide" that the editor chose for my piece, it creates an impression of ripping you off that is misleading. The point about Justin Bieber always trending on Twitter would be a luminously obvious one to make to anyone writing a piece about who he is - his name is up there twice among the trending topics every single time you visit the Twitter front page. Gazillions of people will have noticed this. The joke about half of Twitterers asking "who is Justin Bieber" came simply becausee very time I write about someone whom a certain section of Guardian readers would regard as culturally infra dig, there will be people who respond by posting "who is [whoever]?" beneath the column to make their sniffy point (and you are very welcome to trawl through my back catalogue to verify this). I knew they would do it more than ever on the Justin Bieber front, so I was looking for a way to head that off and came up with this. That was why I did the "your ignorance only makes him stronger" stuff. And the reason I thought of this was because in the Popeater piece I read, they quoted a Conan O'Brien tweet which said "I just learnt that retweets of my Bieber tweet mentioning Bieber actually help Bieber. Bieber, you're a worthy foe. Bieber." Finally, the point about being arrested for not tweeting. I hate to break it to you but you are WAY from the the first one to think of that. I remember reading about the mall incident in November, when it happened, in a variety of places. The Huffington Post's headline, among very many others, was Man Arrested For Not Tweeting. The point was made endlessly. I see you said it was a "scary new world" - the reason I said "this is Justin's world now" was a very lame (on my part) skew on the old "It's Frank's world - we're just living in it". I'm afraid I frequently rehash that old Sinatra line in copy. In the end, your post appeared before mine and in my view is much funnier than what I wrote. In fact, the bits I found far funnier were the many things I didn't think of, and were I in the business of nicking jokes I would have taken other ones entirely. So I can also see how you might think I had ripped you off, but I can honestly tell you I didn't, and I hope the above points have gone some way to convincing you of that. If they haven't, feel free to call me and I will gladly continue to try do so. I think it might have been reasonable to ask me to respond before you posted inviting me to fuck myself, but perhaps you might now consider appending my response to your original post?I look forward to hearing from you.Marina"CelebrityJustin BieberMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/mar/31/justin-bieber-rip-off-wars
Marina Hyde pieces together the totally heartwarming story behind Lindsay Lohan's Indian Journey, which airs tonight on BBC3Once more to a familiar furrow, stardust-seekers, as Lost in Showbiz asks the sub-rhetorical question: what do you reckon about "documentaries" like Peaches Geldof on Islam? "Finding a celebrity who genuinely cares about the issue really helps pull in a crowd that wouldn't otherwise switch on," is the view of BBC controller Danny Cohen. "But you have to be careful. If you get a rent-a-celeb, this audience can spot it a mile off."Mm. Spotted 50 miles off - lumbering knickerless over the horizon - comes Ms Lindsay Lohan, whom you might recall was BBC3's somewhat leftfield pick to explain the issue of child trafficking in India to its audience. Contemplating the hire, this column fell back on that old cliché about Lindsay not even being able to get arrested in Hollywood, which was technically wrong, as Lindsay has been arrested for a high-speed late night car chase and possession of class A drugs, among other CV highlights. Still, suffice to say her diary was sufficiently "freed up" for her to jump at the chance of caring about the trafficking issue and stuff, and the Beeb have been forced to defend her involvement ever since.Lindsay Lohan's Indian Journey - like BBC3 say, it's not about her, it's about the issue - finally airs tonight. But by way of a curtain raiser, and thanks to assistance from the likes of Unicef and a BBC source close to the production, Lost in Showbiz has been able to piece together the totally heartwarming story behind Lindsay's "journey".To India, then. As I say, the documentary is about the issue of child trafficking, and the production company's plan was for Lohan and the crew to be in situ for a planned raid by Indian authorities (with the aid of a charity), ensuring she was there for the rescue of a number of children who had been trafficked and placed into forced labour.After protracted negotiations, Lindsay agreed to do this, so first class flights were booked for her, her bodyguard, and her assistant. Meanwhile, the crew travelled to India and waited for Lohan to make her entrance. At this point, according to a BBC source, the hokey cokey one might have regarded as inevitable started, and Lindsay began backtracking on her commitment, causing flights to be repeatedly cancelled and rebooked as she kept producers in the dark as to her plans. Alas, despite myriad ignored messages, she failed to pitch up in India before the raid, which went ahead without her in a way that, say, a Roberto Cavalli fashion show would never dare to.It was at this point that Lindsay took to Twitter, in tweets later described by the BBC as "misinterpreted". "Over 40 children saved so far," read one of these communiqués. "Within one day's work ... this is what life is about ... Doing THIS is a life worth living! Oh, and I'm talking about being in India."Mm. Intriguingly, Lindsay was not even in India at the time these messages were tweeted - a fact on which BBC3 declined to comment, saying only that police raids are not scheduled. On the contrary, say local police and magistrates - the raids had been planned for two months and Lindsay's implication that she was there was somewhat resented. "We'll be complaining to the BBC and talking to our lawyers," a leading social activist and lawyer, who was organisationally involved with the raids, fumed to the Daily Telegraph. And for a bit it looked as if the Indian mission might be just another of Lindsay's nice ideas that she never quite got round to (see also a mooted trip to Iraq with Hillary Clinton, and some African mercy mission with the Red Cross).However, Lindsay finally agreed to travel to India, arriving the day after the raid. According to a BBC source, the cost for acquiring three last minute first class travel tickets was by now in excess of £30,000, though the BBC press office say this figure isn't correct and that anyway the film was delivered by the production company at a fixed cost. They do not dispute the fact that they knowingly allowed her to travel without a work visa, a decision which might now see Lohan blacklisted from travelling to India.Still, once in India, by all accounts Lindsay behaved obligingly, though whether you regard her spending no more than two and a half days in India justifies the title "Lindsay Lohan's Indian Journey" is a matter for you.Thereafter, though, things began to fall apart once more.Realising a serious treatment of the subject would require Lindsay engaging with a serious authority on child trafficking, the producers worked to set up a filmed interview between her and Unicef in New York. Despite some rumoured misgivings about the choice of celebrity advocate, Unicef agreed. Lindsay having also agreed, a camera crew was duly dispatched to New York ... and once again, the hokey cokey started. Indeed, despite repeated entreaties to Lindsay to reconfirm she would be honouring her obligations on this issue about which she professes such passion, Lindsay's studied vagueness continued right up to the minute of the meeting, whereupon Unicef confirm to me that madam stood the lot of them up.Why? Well, the magic of the internet allows us to establish that Lindsay was disporting herself at Milan fashion week at the time. Here she is with Roberto Cavalli. In the end, hasty arrangements were made for her to ask the questions of Save the Children in London, and in the documentary a partied-out looking Lindsay can be seen doing that before suggesting people should help via "Twitter? There's Twitter ... "As for the documentary, you must judge it for yourself, but having seen a preview DVD of it I second my colleague Amelia Gentleman's assessment that the most excruciating moment comes after a very young street beggar from Calcutta tells Lohan her story.Over to Amelia's account:The shaven-haired girl is explaining that her parents would beat her unless she went out every day to earn money, but it's hard to concentrate on what she's saying because what's happening behind her is so distracting. Lohan is rubbing her already-red eyes, spreading mascara around the place, twitching her eyebrows."Um. Um. Oh my God," the film star says, her lips wobbling uncontrollably. A disembodied hand pops into the screen to pass her a tissue. "Um. How did she feel? Um. How did they treat her?" she asks, beginning to sob.The small girl turns to look at her in bemusement. The translator gives an embarrassed laugh and says to the girl: "She's crying for you. Why don't you comfort her?" So we watch as the puzzled child dutifully strokes Lohan's long mane of golden hair."Oh my God! Oh my God!" Lohan says, with a husky gasp. "Sorry, I'm having a moment." Mercifully, the camera is then switched off.One could write thousands of words about the matter, but in that single vignette is distilled everything that is arse-about-tit about this level of celebrity-led documentary.So what have we learned from l'affaire Lohan? I guess the question is: does it really matter if, behind the scenes, the so-called talent behaves like a real piece of work, as so-called talent has been wont to do since time immemorial? I am afraid I would have to say it doesn't, within reason (and within reason I include a fair amount of financial wastage) - but if, and only if, what ends up on the screen justifies the means. For instance, I don't care what horrors Joan Crawford and Bette Davis were on the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane: it ends up being a cracking film. However, if what you're making isn't a high camp movie but a documentary about child trafficking, and your famous trainwreck star keeps genuine experts from fronting such films, and your end product features a scene in which a very young and serially abused child labourer is required to comfort a Hollywood starlet, then it would seem fair to cast the production as such an obvious moral failure that it's worth anatomising the wrongheaded decisions that led to such a flawed idea being aired - and wondering if they are not symptomatic of a wider cultural malaise.The puzzle is that all of this could have been avoided if BBC3 hadn't indulged in such ludicrous casting. After all, it's not as if Lindsay is merely rumoured to be a flake. Lindsay is known to be a cast-iron, copper-bottomed, A-list flake. Indeed, her utter flakery is so well documented that there exists on public record an extraordinary letter to Lindsay from the CEO of Morgan Creek, the studio that produced the last major film with which she was involved (it might become evident that the two are connected). "Dear Lindsay," begins this notorious blast from James G Robinson. Since the commencement of principal photography of Georgia Rule, you have frequently failed to arrive on time to the set. Today, you did not show for work (all day). I am now told you don't plan to work tomorrow because you are "not feeling well." You and your representatives have told us that your various late arrivals and absences from the set have been the result of illness; today we were told it was "heat exhaustion." We are well aware that your ongoing all night heavy partying is the real reason for your so called "exhaustion." We refuse to accept bogus excuses for your behavior.To date, your actions on Georgia Rule have been discourteous, irresponsible and unprofessional. You have acted like a spoiled child and in so doing have alienated many of your co-workers and endangered the quality of this picture. Moreover, your actions have resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. We will not tolerate these actions any further.If you do not honor your production commitments, including your scheduled call time for tomorrow, and any call times thereafter, we will hold you personally accountable. This means that in addition to pursuing full monetary damages, we will take such other action as we deem necessary to preserve the integrity of the Georgia Rule Production as well as Morgan Creek's financial interests. I urge you to take this letter seriously and conduct yourself professionally.That, my ducks, is how serious people treat talent that is taking the piss. That the rubes at BBC3 apparently felt unable to do so is a shame, but we can only hope they think twice before commissioning the next demographic-insulting "journey". At least let us get into 2011 before Kerry Katona's Darfur Odyssey hits the schedules.CelebrityLindsay LohanIndiaMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/apr/01/lindsay-lohan-child-trafficking
Yes, Tom has much to share with us about foreign conflicts. But Karl, aka 'Bush's brain', has some thoughts of his own . . .Lost in Showbiz knows you only come here for the glamour – but hopefully stay for the hugs – so today we have Tom Hanks, Karl Rove, and a somewhat dysfunctional analogy between the war on terror and the Pacific theatre of operations in the second world war. I do hope you wore heels.To summarise: this week, Tom Hanks mentioned the war, and Karl Rove – the Rod Hull to George Bush's Emu – didn't let him get away with it, and now they're having a media spat in which racism and Barbra Streisand are hot button issues.And so to the extended version. You might know that Hanks, along with Mister Spielberg, has produced a new 10-part HBO miniseries called The Pacific, which is set during the Marine Corp's battles with the Japanese in the second world war. What you might not know is that "over the past two decades, Hanks has become American history's highest-profile professor, bringing a nuanced view of the past into the homes and lives of countless millions". Not my words, but those of the current issue of Time magazine. "His view of American history is a mixture of idealism and realism," notes the interviewer, "both of which have characterised all the work he has produced; he's a Kennedy liberal with old-time values, the kind that embraces Main Street on the Fourth of July."Sure. As far as his movie star persona goes, Hanks is often regarded as the Jimmy Stewart de nos jours, which some think says something about nos jours. But he's a star who brings us a certain type of American story, from Saving Private Ryan to Apollo 13 to the searing Vietnam picture Forrest Gump (winner of six Academy Awards, kids. Still, unlike fellow sixfer The Hurt Locker, at least it didn't think it was too deep to bother with narrative).Unfortunately, though, Professor Hanks's promotional tour for The Pacific has provoked controversy. "Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as 'yellow, slant-eyed dogs' that believed in different gods," he informs Time. "They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what's going on today?"Well it does and it doesn't, Tom. But before anyone could call him on the finer details of the Plan Dog memo, our hero used another media appearance to expand upon the point. Shortly after ridiculing the idea of Karl Rove's new book, Tom told a TV host that his series represents "a war that was of racism and terror. And where it seemed as though the only way to complete one of these battles on one of these small specks of rock in the middle of nowhere was to – I'm sorry – kill them all. And, um, does that sound familiar to what we might be going through today?"Totally! Although didn't Johnny Japan want the oil in the Dutch East Indies, which would make him kind of America's Iraq analogue? It's so confusing, and I can't find my DVD of Michael bay's Pearl Harbor to make sense of it all. I guess the only shame is that Tom didn't float the old "Did Roosevelt know in advance?" conspiracy theory, thus drawing an implicit parallel between the Pearl Harbor truthers and their 9/11 descendants.Still, it was quite enough for Bill O'Reilly. You might get one free pass for being America's most sainted movie star, but the Fox News anchor isn't giving you two. "You've got to kill them!" Bill shrieked to his viewers of jihadists. "They won't negotiate and they won't stop. What is it about that simple thing that Tom Hanks doesn't understand?"Enter Karl Rove. The man famously described as "Bush's brain" – high praise indeed – was on O'Reilly's show promoting his new book Courage and Consequence. (Yes, that's genuinely the title. Just assume I Screwed The World was taken.) Joshingly dismissing Hanks as "the boy", Karl judged him "impervious to rational discussion", adding: "He receives his opinions in whatever they drink or smoke or eat out there in southern California in the acting community. He's stuck and I get that."Mm. As for his own book – described by Joe Klein as "a work of titanic pettiness", Karl declared "I didn't write this book with the expectation that it would be picked up by Hanks and Danny Glover and Sean Penn and Barbra Streisand as part of their book club."Wouldn't that be the most amazing book club? Alas, we must leave the spat there for now, but it's clearly a developing news event, and when I know more, so will you.[Although, as a footnote, I am intrigued by Rove's telling O'Reilly that in the miniseries of his book, he'd be played by Red Buttons. One of the notable things about that now-deceased actor and comedian is that he was due to open on Broadway in a naval farce set in – yes – Pearl Harbor, on the massively unfortunate date of 8 December 1941. I need hardly tell you the show did not go on. But was the Dark Lord Rove making some obscurely brilliant point mentioning him, or was it a mere coincidence? Lost in Showbiz long ago gave up trying to get inside the mind of Bush's brain, and leaves you to make the call.]Tom HanksCelebritySecond world warMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/mar/18/tom-hanks-karl-rove
Why the bugging affair should be the least of the FA's worries in the lead-up to the World CupBehind closed doors, you can't imagine. Behind closed doors, is where it happens. That's where the truth is. That's where the life is.Not my words, or indeed those of covertly bugged England general Fabio Capello, but the words of music's Peter Andre – a man who scarcely even regarded the conception of his children as a something on which it might be seemly to close the doors, preferring to invite TV cameras to document every minute of his tediously "insane" life.That Peter's adventures are marginally more predictable than a fake-tanned episode of Mr Benn doesn't matter to those who continue to watch in their droves. The desire to be let in on something – however illusory – is insatiable for some sections of the public, many of whom then cheerfully blamed the media for Peter's divorce in the same way as they will blame them for gossiping away the World Cup. Indeed, for some, this ovine voyeurism has become such a normal part of culture that it hardly seems odd that the England camp was apparently bugged by a "member of the public" – shall we call them a citizen journalist? – in the run-up to last week's Egypt game. Yes, I'm afraid the great "how to go out in the quarter-finals" battle plan may now be dangerously compromised, and Jerry's probably going to steal all our tactics. But try to keep calm and carry on.The last football spy drama I can recall was that tale three years ago about a Cessna making flights over Manchester United's Carrington training ground. "It remained unclear who authorised the filming," panted the Mirror back then, "and whether the material is destined for this country or abroad. The covert clips of players such as Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo working on tactics, formation, free-kicks and penalties during the astonishing spying mission could be invaluable to rival clubs." Could be. But almost certainly weren't.This time, the spy stuff is rather less lofty, with reports suggesting that though the six-hour recording may feature discussions about "World Cup tactics", it's more notable – and presumably more sellable – for chitchat about win bonuses and some joking about sex scandals. Inevitably, it has been speculatively talked up as "dynamite", but I bet it's dynamite only in the sense that anything a footballer or manager says is deemed explosively interesting, despite all evidence to the contrary (yet again we must draw a parallel with Peter Andre).Quite rightly, the FA's lawyers have pointed out that the recording constitutes a total breach of privacy, but in the internet age the fear will be that despite newspapers' refusal to publish, the transcript or portions of it will be posted online. There's a reasonable chance that within a fortnight we'll be faced with a John Terry-type situation, where feverish internet chatter effectively rendered the player'ssuper-injunction defunct even before it was lifted.Doubtless, then, the FA is already considering its media strategy if the tape's contents become public. Might I suggest an official line of "Get over it"?Unfortunately, because the FA is such a serially useless governing body, no one at the top has ever been in a strong enough position to affect an air of amused sang froid about these regular teacup storms. As long as it wasn't you in the schtuck, it probably felt rather a relief to "firefight" the latest rumours about Sven's love life instead of defending your staggeringly incompetent mismanagement of, say, the Wembley Stadium project.But sooner or later someone in public life is going to have to offer the "Get over it" response to an overexcited media and its consumers. The policy of attempting to appease people who wish only for heads to roll seems increasingly pointless.Frankly, if whatever is on the tape needs putting into perspective, people should recall the time the England set-up willingly invited a fly on to their wall. They should recall Graham Taylor, several fathoms out of his depth, turning to his nodding dog Phil Neal and hazarding: "We'll put Wrighty on, shall we?" Watching the pair gibberingly agree that it was "made for Wrighty", they should recall the horrifying realisation that Taylor had been several times less competent even than he had looked. Quite an achievement.That, my ducks, is a real exposé. Never mind what off-guard jokes were made at the England camp, and never mind even if the answer to the question "what's my motivation?" is "two million quid and half a point on the image rights". No matter what happened at Capello's headquarters last week, nothing, but nothing, could ever be as sensationally damning.EnglandFabio CapelloMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/mar/11/marina-hyde-football-england-bugging
Diva presenters, bad dance, graceless hosts. Marina Hyde looks back at a starry nightLadies, gentlemen, and non-members of the academy: welcome to G2's almost-live coverage of the heartbreakingly succinct Oscars telecast, which – despite the fact that no one would dream of doing anything as transgressive as swearing – is being brought to you with a 24-hour time delay.Right off the bat I want to join the salutes for The Hurt Locker – a movie just too damn important to bother with stuff like narrative, and which will one day be deemed just as hilariously underrated as American Beauty (which, you might dimly recall, won a mere five Oscars) and Dances With Wolves (a paltry haul of seven, including a best director statuette for Mister Kevin Costner). As for James Cameron's hopes for Avatar, his groundbreaking, record-breaking movie . . . well, they are with Eywa now.This was indeed a night that made history – David Letterman is now no longer the worst-ever Oscars host. Co-presenters Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin proved they couldn't hit a gag with a trunkload of IEDs, falling back three times on comedy misreadings of the autocue, to ever-diminishing returns. They weren't even phoning it; they were texting it in, deferring even the comedy opening number to Doogie Howser MD. As is too often the case with this marquee event, it was a night that lived down to expectations. The Oscars telecast is like one of those movies where you just know that at some point, someone is going to slide down the back of a door with their head in their hands. That someone will be you – but we'll come to the soi disant "Legion of Extraordinary Dancers" later. For now, it's time to sling out some more gongs.Best drinking game The one where you do a shot every time someone mentions Meryl (surname very much de trop, obviously). Ever since the heyday of the studio era, an adorably defensive Hollywood has wanted you to know that it doesn't just have sex symbols who can turn in a role. It has actors – men and women who deliver something so much more epic than mere performance. These days, the mantle once worn by the likes of Norma Shearer and Greer Garson is all Meryl's, and failure to either nominate her or mention her less than three times in any given Oscars ceremony would trigger an industry-wide existential crisis. This year's second-best drinking game? The one where you take a gulp every time a member of the motion-picture community salutes the troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. It really puts stuff into perspective.Most tediously predictable seating arrangementPlacing James Cameron directly behind Kathryn Bigelow. Hey, did you hear that those guys were married once? Even if you did, I'll bet you haven't listened to nearly enough yakking about the subject yet.Best acceptance speechThis year produced that rarest of occurences, both a best actor and a best actress whom you'd love to have a drink with. For all Jeff Bridges' immense charm though, Sandra takes the speech honours. Wherever you stand on America's Sorta Sweetheart, she played it just the way you should: surprised, sweet, sisterly, self-deprecating, and with the brief threat of tears, but not so you feared she'd be overwhelmed by them. A class act. Plus, she gets triple points for the joke about Meryl being "a great kisser".Best They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To moment Footage of Lauren Bacall accepting an honorary Oscar at a gala a few months ago. "A man at last," drawled Bacall of her statuette. "The thought that when I get home I'm going to have a two-legged man in my room is so exciting I can hardly stand it." At the Oscars, this was immediately followed by a cutaway to Cameron Diaz chewing gum. Truly, it was the stars that got small.Best diva momentBest director presenter Barbra Streisand walking almost to the front of the stage, then waiting imperiously for a lackey to rush out of the wings and help her down three steps to the microphone. Long may she fib about the farewell aspect of her tours.Worst cutaway A tough category, now that reaction shots appear to be subject to the most heavyhanded ethnic profiling. Ethan Coen was the night's go-to Jew, the guy they cut to right after Steve Martin made the joke about Inglourious Basterds star Christoph Waltz playing a Nazi "obsessed with finding Jews", and observed that the contents of the Kodak Theatre were pretty much "the motherlode". Don't worry, viewers – see, Ethan's laughing! The Jews totally get the joke! The sledgehammer cutaway was also deployed each time an African-American star was mentioned. The fact that you could practically hear a producer screaming, "Close-up on Morgan Freeman! Or one of the other four, goddammit!", really added to the sense of how far we have come.Most never-ending segmentIf you had spent the last few weeks wondering what the score from The Hurt Locker would look like interpreted via the medium of modern dance, this was the night for you. In what felt like a 47-minute medley, each and every nominee for best score was ... glossed, would you call it? . . . by a troupe called the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, who really know how to distil the tension of bomb disposal into a soft-shoe number. This year's ceremony was produced by one of the judges on So You Think You Can Dance, which goes some way toward explaining that excruciating segment, but nowhere near excusing it.Best reminder of what Hollywood dreams are made ofOprah Winfrey's tribute to Gabourey Sidibe. "She was a student trying to earn some money to go to college. On Monday she skipped school to audition for a movie called Precious. On Tuesday they called her back to meet the director ... On Wednesday, she got the part. And tonight, she is sitting at the Academy Awards in the same category as Meryl Streep." Ain't that the movies? Nicely done, Oprah.Best fauxhemianSean Penn. Even though Sean knows that real outsiders simply wouldn't show for the Oscars, he agreed to present best actress, and used the occasion of someone else's big moment to announce, "I never became an official member of the academy", before taking an incoherent swipe at them for failing to acknowledge his ex-wife. I know! You can almost smell him mocking the institution. Still, while Sean is only a country member of the academy, fans of Team America will recall that he is a leading light of FAG, the Film Actors' Guild – a powerful lobby coincidentally led by Oscars co-host Arec Bardwin.Most awkward stagingAs a tribute to the various 12-step programmes with which so many attendees are familiar, the best actor and best actress nominees are now bigged up in a segment that resembles an AA sponsors' meeting. Julianne Moore eulogised Colin Firth, making it clear they had "only worked together for three days", while Colin Farrell recommended Jeremy Renner with a reminiscence about "that trip to Mexico, which I wish I could remember more of", while saying "man" and "brother" a lot.Worst sound designThe Oscars ceremony. I fell asleep in that desperately called-for discourse on the difference between sound editing and sound mixing, so I might have missed the explanation as to why, in the year 2010, the Oscars telecast sounds as if it was engineered by a competition winner. Is it really beyond the wit of early 21st-century TV professionals to raise the level on the auditorium announcer's mic to "discernible"?Best lectureCourtesy of best supporting actress Mo'nique, who thanked her husband for advising her that "sometime you have to forego doing what's popular to do what's right". Blithely undermining her fellow nominees, the Precious star praised the academy for rewarding "the performance not the politics", apparently under the impression that Oprah's campaign juggernaut for the movie is about as far away from power-player politicking as you can get.Worst definition of horrorNo-time Academy Award-winners Taylor Lautner and Kristen Stewart introduced a tribute to the horror movie genre, which took some bizarre detours. Movies you never realised were horror flicks include Marathon Man, Edward Scissorhands, Little Shop of Horrors, Jaws, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Beetlejuice and, um, Twilight, which was really flattered by being interspliced with The Shining. Do adjust your records accordingly.Most self-regardingly graceless hostsThe academy, which banned The Hurt Locker's producer Nicolas Chartier for sending the most innocuous email to a circle of acquaintance, in which he asked them to vote for The Hurt Locker "and not a $500m film". This is apparently an "ethical lapse" in breach of the academy's negative-campaigning rule, so the man who financed and produced the movie wasn't there to see it have a night he could only have dreamed of. Yet Zac Efron is given pride of place up front near Meryl. Where's the justice?Worst fact-checkingDemi Moore introduced the "in memoriam" section to people we've lost, in a montage that failed to include her pre-2003 bodywork. Rather more glaring, however, was the omission of Farrah Fawcett, whose failure to make the cut an academy spokesman would have you believe was totally intentional. "Major fail" is Roger Ebert's view on the matter.Most arresting emergence from the Where Are They Now files . . . Is Judd Nelson – how to put this? – going through some stuff? The Internet Movie Database indicates the Breakfast Club star will feature in six TV movies or straight-to-DVD releases this year, but his appearance during the John Hughes tribute was certainly eye-catching, and all information as to where Bender's currently "at" would be gratefully received.Finally, best technical innovationSky +. Because of your vision, Sky +, and that of the trailblazing TiVo that went before you, I will never know what Sky pundits Ronni Ancona and Mark Dolan made of it all. I absolutely could not have done it without you.OscarsKathryn BigelowJeff BridgesJames CameronMeryl StreepSandra BullockCameron DiazMorgan FreemanOprah WinfreySean PennAlec BaldwinJulianne MooreColin FirthMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/mar/08/oscars-2010-highs-and-lows
The supermodel has been accused of hitting her staff – againTo New York, where I'm afraid Naomi Campbell has been accused of beating her staff again. It seems that she flew into a rage at her driver this Tuesday, slapping him until he was forced to pull over and call the police – though when they arrived, Naomi had bolted from the vehicle. The driver sustained bruising, but has since declined to press charges.Naturally, madam's people are said to be launching a PR offensive. Perhaps Sarah Brown – who recently told Harpers Bazaar that Naomi was her "21st-century heroine" – could re-use last week's bullying talking points, replacing the words "my husband" with "my dear friend"? "The Naomi Campbell I had heard about was beautiful, successful, always late, a bit frightening, even a bit out of control," Brown explained to Harpers. "[The] Naomi Campbell I met [was] certainly beautiful, but also sincere, direct and impatient in a good way."Alas, while even Naomi might stop shy of smacking the PM's wife, the Campbell her minions meet tends to be impatient in a bad way. But I'll concede she's "direct". She first pleaded guilty to assault of her personal assistant in 2000, the weapon in question having been a telephone. In 2003, a former assistant sued her for throwing a phone at her during "a tantrum". In 2004, her maid claimed to have been slapped around the face: Naomi countered that the maid had started the fight. In 2005, her personal assistant alleged Naomi had smacked her around the head with a BlackBerry, while another associate accused her of coming over "like Mike Tyson" after they wore the same dress to an event.In 2006, she was arrested on suspicion of assaulting her drugs counsellor, while a former housekeeper sought damages and claimed she was "a violent super-bigot". In 2007, she was sentenced to community service after assaulting her New York maid, who had required stitches after Naomi beat her around the head with a crystal-encrusted phone when she couldn't find a particular pair of jeans.Still, as Naomi's spokesman said this week: "There shouldn't be a rush to judgment." There has been the odd rehab stint to address this "illness", and the latest incident really serves to remind us that the life of a recovering servant-beater is a constant battle. Just because Naomi got to the end of one day able to look in her bathroom mirror and declare "I did not hit the help today", doesn't mean that the next day the struggle will not become impossible. She's always one weak moment away from letting the darkness close in, and staff members failing to live up to her high standards are no better than those enablers who say one drink can't hurt.CelebrityMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/mar/04/naomi-campbell-hitting-staff-again
Was Michael Jackson's son electroshocked by his cousin Jaafar? Or was it Jermajesty?Attention all units: we have a situation developing in Encino, Los Angeles. Suspect is an armed minor who may have threatened another minor with a stun-gun. Uh, potential victim responds to the name of Blanket . . .Readers, this week we have it all: 300,000-volt weaponry, bitter family factionalism and the quotidian threat of intra-grandchildren violence. The only possible location could be the Jackson family compound in suburban LA.By the Jackson compound, of course, I do not mean Neverland, Michael Jackson's sprawling Santa Barbara ranch. That property has long been asset-stripped of fairground rides, giraffes and the miniature railway that constituted its transport infrastructure, while its erstwhile squire looks down from the great wishing tree in the sky, the mantle of weirdo public statements about privacy and comportment now passed anticlimactically to Tiger Woods.No, we're talking about Hayvenhurst, the Jackson family HQ in Encino, which is occupied primarily by matriarch Katherine, along with various children, their spouses, ex-spouses, and a clutch of grandchildren including Prince Michael, Paris and little Blanket. It's your basic nuclear family (Chernobyl model).In fact, think of the Jackson compound as a west coast version of that Camelot on Cape Cod, the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. In the role of Joe Kennedy we have Joe Jackson, controversial paterfamilias whose ferocious ambition saw him thrust his significantly more appealing sons upon the world stage, while he controlled things behind the scenes. Katherine is Rose Kennedy, obviously, while Michael could only be JFK. We are one Jackie Bouvier short of a picnic, I grant you, though there will be some suggesting Debbie Rowe. Shame on them. This column is not in the business of comparing the legendarily fragrant former first lady with an ungroomed horse-nut whose signature style appears to be stonewashed denim. Put on a tailored shift and giant shades, Debbie, or accept that passing Greek shipping magnates are going to assume you're crew, not second-wife material.Anyhow. The week's news is that there is trouble in this earthly paradise. The LA County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) has launched an investigation, after one Jaafar Jackson, 13, ordered a stun-gun off the internet. Accounts as to what happened next vary, from the family's official version that "all of the kids are happy, healthy and wonderful", to various insider sources who claim that the family's security team "stopped Jermaine's kids from stunning Blanket".So who's Jaafar? Well, if you're having trouble keeping your Jackson progeny straight without flashcards, allow me to muddy things further. Jaafar's mother is Alejandra Jackson, who was originally in a relationship with Randy Jackson, with whom she had two children. However, her residence in the Jackson compound has been unbroken for 18 years, because she then went on to marry Randy's older brother Jermaine. With Jermaine she had two sons – Jaafar and Jermajesty.Jer analysis is correct: the latter is the most brilliant name in showbiz.Alejandra has since split from her second Jackson brother – Jermaine is now married to Halima Rashid – but she continues to live in the house as part of Jermaine's child support arrangements. However, in court documents filed last year, according to TMZ.com, Alejandra complained that most of the support money she received was from Katherine, often in the form of gift cards for Ralphs supermarket. Now sources are saying that Jaafar paid for the stun-gun online using Ralphs gift cards.(While you digest that little instance of synchronicity, I should say that despite initial reports, the weapon should be classified as a generic electroshock gun, as Taser have pointed out that it wasn't one of their guns. Remember: Tasers don't stun people, kids do.)At time of going to press, the LA social workers' investigation was still ongoing, so we can't be sure precisely how this little contretemps will shake down. Possibly unconnected is the suggestion that Michael's kids might cease being home-educated this year, and start attending a normal local school – which sounds as problematic an idea as releasing that SeaWorld orca with behavioural problems into the wild at this stage in its career. I can't help feeling Free Blanket would end on less of an "up" than Free Willy.Still, we must salute the Jackson family lawyer who, having spent ages insisting there was nothing to see here, rashly announced on Wednesday: "There is no second stun-gun." Aha! Finally the "second stun-gunman" theory makes its debut. Lost in Showbiz just knew Jermajesty's bedroom was this story's grassy knoll, and hereby refuses to accept all future findings of those Earl Warrens at the DCFS. Who Didn't Taser Blanket? is officially this year's conspiracy theory.CelebrityMichael JacksonMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/lostinshowbiz/2010/mar/04/jackson-blanket-jermaine-taser-jaafar
It is a blush-making compliment that this extraordinary film director chooses to make his home in LondonThe following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday 4 March 2010 The paean below to the US film director Tim Burton said: "How oddly fitting that this son of Burbank should live in the house owned by Alice's original illustrator, Arthur Rackham." Setting aside Lewis Carroll's own drawings on his manuscript, the illustrator we should have named for the published Alice in Wonderland was John Tenniel. Phil Collins, Jim Davidson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Paul Daniels. Names crying out for the prefix "Come my revolution", yes – but also the roster of entertainers who threatened to leave Britain should Labour win the 1997 election. Lloyd Webber now denies the ultimatum, as well he might with the BBC gifting him an annual 10-week advert for his musicals; but you will agree it takes a certain type to regard the withholding of their very presence from a sovereign state as some kind of vote-swinger. Britain: a place so hideous that even Jim Davidson doesn't want to live here.Faced with such privations, then, it can be easy to forget that extraordinary and marvellous outsiders do make the decision to settle on our shores. It's not a one-in-one-out policy, obviously, but as Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland premiered this week in London, the pain of Davidson's Dubai exile felt easier to bear. Can we officially count Tim Burton as one of ours now? It might be insanity, and would certainly appal this shy man whose beloved once described him as a "home for unfinished sentences", but I insist we take the director's making his home in London as the most blush-making compliment.Born in sunny Burbank, California, into a suburban existence which has the flavour of a punishment for sins committed in a former life, convention demands we style him as "the maverick filmmaker" – which if nothing else serves to justify the distaste for convention which runs through his work. He now lives in north London with the splendid Helena Bonham-Carter and their two children, in what has come to seem the absolutely inevitable union between Herbert Asquith's great granddaughter and the boy whose childhood inspired Edward Scissorhands. Or as Bonham-Carter once explained: "It's because we both don't like combs." The pair famously keep next-door homes with a connecting room, thus assuming the status of most sensibly housed lovebirds since Woody Allen and Mia Farrow before The Unpleasantness.Artist-wise, we Brits have struggled with American imports. There was the erstwhile Mrs Guy Ritchie, whose showy embrace of what she imagined to be our national pastimes – shooting and fishing – was excruciating in the extreme. Then there's Gwyneth Paltrow, who married Chris Martin, but whose legendary Oscar gushing and willingness to lecture on topics such as "friendship divorce" never made her an easy fit. Burton is different. Both he and Bonham-Carter give glorious form to the sort of eccentricity many wistfully believe was once a national peculiarity, but which is difficult to hold on to these days – what with our unambitiously rancid politicians and homogenising talent shows. They are anti-celebrities, really. "With the number of people I ignore," Bonham-Carter once observed, "I'm lucky I work at all in this town."A gothic original in a sea of identikit starlets, paparazzi pictures of Bonham-Carter are periodically the subject of Wildean tabloid headlines like "Helena BAGLADY-Carter", which only serve to paint the publications as the sort of pinch-lipped little curtain twitchers you'd cross continents to avoid knowing socially. In contrast, the Burton-Bonham-Carters' refusal – inability, even – to play the showbiz game makes them a hundred times more fascinating, and their cheery bohemianism is a powerful charm. Yet there's no luvvie schmaltz. Asked recently why he cast Helena as the Red Queen in Alice, Burton replied "Helena? I don't know … she's got a big head." Also, "she was available".She may often joke that she'll never work with her husband again, and she may have perfected a hilarious line in passing the pair off as a sort of undead Sybil and Basil Fawlty, but their collaborations have felt like a homecoming in themselves.It's notable that Burton's other enduring muse is the fervent Anglophiliac Johnny Depp, who was so grateful for the care his daughter received at Great Ormond Street that he visits the wards in his Jack Sparrow costume. Depp was there at the Alice premiere, along with Vivienne Westwood in a deconstructed tiara, Camilla Parker-Bowles in floor-length and tiara (non deconstructed variety), Barbara Windsor in a miniature silk top hat, and of course Bonham-Carter, resplendent in Westwood and assorted pearls and ribbons and lockets. To say there was an absence of Californian tan would be an understatement – the entire thing resembled a convention of Miss Havishams. In a good way.Burton can make people re-examine the world from an angle they never thought of before. So when he enthuses about London's history and museums and weather, he does so in a way which reminds us how nice it is to feel proud of such things, and how oddly fitting that this son of Burbank should live in the house owned by Alice's original illustrator, Arthur Rackham."I keep thinking that I'm going to miss Los Angeles," he said recently, "but that never seems to happen." Their loss. Looking at this week's photos of him smiling shyly among the swirl of Wonkas and corpse brides that are his people, one can only venture what a pleasure it is to have him here. In that quaint old British phrase, he adds to the gaiety of the nation.Tim BurtonHelena Bonham CarterMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/26/can-we-count-tim-burton-as-ours
Because there is simply no franchise out there that Hollywood is not currently rebooting or re-rebooting, it comes as little surprise that there's a new Muppet movie in the works.There is still lingering confusion over the title, which will in fact be The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made, and not - as some still insist - The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever Made. The latter would always have been a preposterous claim, as it could never possibly top the majestic The Muppet Christmas Carol, which is always the title to mention in retort to Michael Caine's biannual whinges about having been insufficiently garlanded as an actor during his career. (Yes, you can mention The Swarm, Jaws IV: The Revenge, or my beloved Seagal's On Deadly Ground – but The Muppet Christmas Carol is the clincher.)Anyway, it's always hard to know which bug-eyed and brightly-coloured sources to trust, but according to an insider talking to hollywoodlife.com, the new movie's plot will involve the Muppets having to round up celebrities for a telethon to save their old TV studios - meaning the potential for a galaxy of Caine-esque performances is ripe.Add to that the news that Kermit has become "destitute" – "the main characters find him living in squalor" – and I think you'll agree you have the potential for tears and social commentary amid the laughter. Perhaps most intriguing, though, is the fate of Miss Piggy, who these days is apparently "a Lady Gaga-esque character living in Europe." Whether Piggy will reprise Gaga's famous Kermit costume has yet to be revealed. The important thing is that Kermit-the-real-life-Muppet, as opposed to Kermit-the-character-in-the-Muppet-movies, was fine with that particular outfit choice by her Ladyship, and subsequently even escorted Gaga to an awards ceremony. Back then, People magazine asked him whether he wasn't "creeped out by a woman who'd just been photographed wearing a dress made out of, well, him (or close relatives)". Kermit's reply? "I was just happy it wasn't made out of anyone I recognised."Well quite - it all looked desperately unlike unofficial merchandise. Still, if our fun-fur vaudevillians are looking to get their own back, couldn't Miss Piggy enliven the movie by wearing a costume made out of hundreds of mini Gagas - or would that be a referential warp too far for the young audience to get their heads around?Marina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/mar/02/1
Let's face it: the world's greatest job doesn't come up for grabs every day . . .Crank up the Carl Orff soundtrack and say goodbye to the bliss of off-season: there's a spare chair going on The X Factor's judging panel.Technically, Simon Cowell's karaoke kraken should be dormant at this time of year, slumbering deeply somewhere beneath the Atlantic until August, even as winner Joe McElderry makes the transition from household name to special-interest pub quiz question.Yet Dannii Minogue's pregnancy changes all that. Dannii announced this week that she will be in Australia giving birth during the auditions, and will therefore be unable to journey from British city to British city in the cause of harvesting this great nation's misguided teens. All of which opens up the most enticing of vacancies. We'll be assessing the runners and riders in the weeks ahead; in the meantime, self-confident applicants should complete the following in 25 words or less. "I think I'd be perfect to join Louis on the B-team because . . ."CelebrityThe X FactorDannii MinogueMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/feb/25/dannii-minogue-x-factor
It's not showbiz, and it's probably deeply insensitive, but hell - you don't come here for the hugs. I merely wonder whether anyone else has been able to watch all the Brown bullying stuff play out without thinking of The Day Today's brilliant church bullying segment?You really can't marvel enough at a show so extraordinarily ahead of its time that it still feels fresh today, despite having been broadcast 16 years ago - an immense achievement, considering they were satirising the news. Or rather, as a friend observed to me this morning, they were satirising a kind of media that hadn't really been invented then, and to satirise the future is a very special sort of genius indeed.CelebrityGordon BrownMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/feb/23/brown-bullying-the-day-today
The Jurassic theatrics of first-class MPs such as Sir Nick Winterton aren't the Tory leader's big worry. His furtive colleagues areLike the Dutch football team or the Mossad, you can never be sure which Tory party is going to turn up. You might get darts-loving hipster David Cameron, just as you might get an electrifying display against the World Cup-holders or a devastatingly efficient assassination using the target's own phone. Then again, you might get Sir Nicholas Winterton – just as you might get an absolute shocker against Russia, or those bungling secret agents who bumped off a Moroccan waiter walking with his pregnant wife in Lillehammer in the mistaken belief he was a leader of the Black September.This week, David Cameron was mostly being just like you, even though you'd never dream of drinking canned Guinness and think crawling to Murdoch by describing Sky+ as "one of the great inventions of our time" is desperately common. Indeed, there will be those among you who regard people who sit around drinking cans of beer in front of the darts and sponging off the state for their wisteria-trimming are everything that is broken about Britain. But you might just concede that Cameron has made progress in acting normal since that cringe-making Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West) selection on Desert Island Discs.It may therefore be regarded as unfortunate that Sir Nicholas should choose the very day of this charm offensive to deliver his lecture on the proles. The member for Macclesfield is "infuriated" that MPs might soon have to travel standard class on the rail network, where passengers are "a totally different type of people" and – almost unbearably – "we are supposed to stand when there are no seats". Isn't Sir Nick a card? It's not just his total failure to connect his own party's privatisation of the service with the iniquitous overcrowding that, as one commentator remarked this week, would never happen on the train from Delhi to Haridwar.No, the case of the Wintertons – for her ladyship is also an MP – is far more emblematic than that. I think quite seriously that the couple should be scientifically preserved in some way to remind people what it was like until, well, about eight months ago. A husband and wife team of such luminous repugnance, the most reasonable assumption is that the Wintertons were hatched in an al-Qaida-underwritten research facility, created with the sole aim of destroying all British trust in authority from within.There was the business of the mortgage-free home they transferred to a family trust, into which they paid £20,000 a year of taxpayers' money as rent. Then there was Nick's habit of slapping women MPs' arses. Then there was Ann's racist joke at a rugby club dinner in 2001, which she followed in 2004 with a gag about the dead Chinese cockle-pickers, made – with exquisite judgment – at a diplomatic dinner. Outside Westminster, the whole demeanour of the Wintertons might have been grounds for professional concern and possibly a visit from Her Majesty's Constabulary, but in 2002, Nicholas was rewarded with a knighthood for – and I can scarcely believe I'm typing this – services to parliament. To repeat, this happened in 2002 – post the dawn of the new millennium, post-9/11, post any number of things that should have made the likes of the Wintertons appear as the most mesmerisingly hideous anachronisms to anyone normal.Fast forward to this week's torpedoing of Operation Normal, and a Tory spokesman dismissed Sir Nick's views as not reflecting the Conservative party. Naturally, one hopes that's true. The next election will bring a partial clear-out of horrors in both major parties, and Cameron has certainly been more successful in conveying a modernised image than super-fly William Hague's back-to-front baseball cap.But playing on my mind is a vignette starring Liam Fox. We lay our scene at a party in the year 2000, where the former GP was holding forth to guests, including some journalists. "Have you heard my new joke?" he demanded delightedly of them. No one had had the pleasure. "What do you call three dogs and a blackbird?" he inquired. Go on, tell us. "The Spice Girls!" The embarrassed silence that greeted this punchline was mistaken by Dr Fox for slow-wittedness on his audience's part, so he told the joke again. When the story appeared in print, the then shadow health spokesman offered the classic non-apology apology, saying he was sorry "if anyone was offended". "One thing is for sure," countered a spokesperson for the Spice Girls, "no one has ever heard of Liam Fox so no one would bother making offensive jokes about him."Yet for all the period charm of this putdown, Scary and Sporty and Co have since faded away with their fortunes, while erstwhile nobody Liam Fox now seeks to assume the vaguely important role of secretary of state for defence in a Cameron government.While pantomime dinosaurs like the retiring Winterton are a useful lightning rod, then, it might be wise not to discount the possibility that there may be stealth dinosaurs still abroad, wearing open-necked shirts and tweeting about social policy. The mystery is not simply when exactly it was that young-ish, educated politicians with professional backgrounds had Damascene conversions to realising that racist jokes and distaste for the electorate and the like are bad, but whether they have all really had them. Which Tories are "normal", as the politicians would have it, and which ones are merely pretending?ConservativesDavid CameronLiam FoxMPs' expensesGeneral election 2010Marina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/19/conservatives-david-cameron-nicholas-winterton
The Tories hope to tap into Goldie Hawn's 'brain science' to safeguard the future of educationAt last, the Tories have managed to fit their education policy with a much-needed celebrity angle, allowing shadow education secretary Michael Gove to schedule bilateral talks with Goldie Hawn.By now you will have read that Goldie invented a trademarked technique called MindUP, which incorporates each lesson concept with the "brain science" associated with it, making children less aggressive. It's something to do with Buddhism and breathing, but I'm afraid it wasn't around during my formative years and every time I try to explain it I end up damaging school property or joyriding. Fortunately, there are some intriguing testimonials on Goldie's website."A kindergarten student who was being bullied in school was moved to another class," reads one. "Recently this student had contact with his previous class and classmates. Apparently he spent some time thinking about what had happened. While in the car, he told his mom he knew why the other boy bullied him . . . He said the boy did not use his pre-frontal cortex to make good decisions and he often acted that way because of his amygdala."Gove, I'm begging you: picture Ralph in The Simpsons saying that to Nelson. Extrapolate the consequences. And retire this idea before someone gets hurt.Education policyConservativesCelebrityMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/lostinshowbiz/2010/feb/18/goldie-hawn-tory-education-policy
Vancouver needs to stop being so touchy about criticism of the 2010 Games. Ridicule is all part of the Olympic ideal"Piss off Brits," concludes a furious email typical of the Guardian's Vancouver Olympics mailbag, "and stop producing so many ugly women.""I am deeply disappointed at the tone of this article," fumes a response to my colleague Martin Kelner's intentionally amusing article about the unintentionally amusing opening ceremony, "and the tone of many Brits or expat Brits enjoying the hospitality of our country." To which the only appropriate reply is: do lighten up, Canada! Sorry for coming over all capital letters about it, but Olympic hosts are SUPPOSED to be teased. You basically pay billions of dollars for the world to laugh at you. Deal with it.It's not like the merriment gets in the way of the sport. It's the après-sport, if you will – something that happens around the edges, but in its way as much a part of every Games fortnight as the competition itself. Treating anything reverently bar the sport is creepy. Even the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron de Coubertin, appeared to tacitly understand that the Games were war by other means, for all their facile message of world peace.This is why Australian comedians Roy and HG scored such a hit with their nightly TV show during the Sydney Games, and it is why Vancouver is made for the latest stunt from the brilliant Steven Colbert, whose gift for debunking sacred cultural events is becoming second to none.When a key US sponsor went bust the Colbert Report star got his viewers to raise $300,000 of donations to take their place, and it is in this guise as a faux right-wing talkshow host – who just happens to be funding the US speed skating team – that he arrived in Vancouver this week. The artist behind the iconic Obama poster has created an image of Colbert holding a torch astride a bald eagle, which fans are being encouraged to post "all over Vancouver"."Vancouver 2010," reads the slogan. "Defeat the world!"I suspect Canadians will get the joke, because they are by and large a nation of good sports – much better than the Americans, of course, but then who isn't? Apart from the Chinese and stuff.Which brings us to another of the most magical things about the Olympics. For 16 days every two years you get a free pass to joke about questions of national character without feeling like your least reconstructed relative. And so it is that when you hear that Switzerland haven't won gold in any Alpine event since Calgary – Calgary! 1988! – you are perfectly within your rights to shriek: "Jesus, Switzerland – buck up. Alpine events are what you DO. Hello? Are you failing to medal in cuckoo-clock competitions as well? Did you accidentally publish every murderous dictator's banking details online?"So it is, too, that news the Olympic flag would be borne into the stadium last Friday by eight famous Canadians was the cue for the rest of the world to chortle: "Wait, there are eight famous Canadians? Are they exhuming people?"The Brits are particularly entitled to laugh, because in two years the rest of the world will be laughing at us – and good on them. Please, did you see our eight‑minute spot in the Beijing closing ceremony? Find me any Brit who could contain their mirth at that and you will be holding a copy of the Daily Mail. It used the adjective "embarrassing". Even London's mayor was giggling. So let them lacerate us in 2012. We'll revel in the delicious shame.Delete as you find applicable, but the fact is we are too irreverent/self-loathing/crap at stuff/ to take ourselves seriously. And anyway, hosting the Olympics means you paid for this stuff. It's your party and you can ridicule it if you want to.Come 2012, London's bigwigs will be trying desperately to present a stage‑managed image of us to the world. Inevitably they will fail in various ways – mostly in a manner that will amuse us serfs – because hosting the Olympics is like going inside the Big Brother house. You might be able to put up a front for a day or two, but you can't hide your true nature for long. Blood will out.So any Canadians upset by people giggling at their malfunctioning ice penises or bad weather need simply wait for what is going around to come around. And make no mistake: no one will be cheerily undermining London 2012 more than the British themselves. It's what we do. To co-opt the most apposite cliché, were it an Olympic sport, we would win gold every time.Winter Olympics 2010Marina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2010/feb/18/vancouver-2010-winter-olympics
As public declarations go, it does not match Myleene Klass's sensationally self-effacing tribute to Alexander McQueen - "I've only just started out as a designer myself and the guy was a huge inspiration". (Reminder: Myleene "designs" babygros for Mothercare.)But I am indebted to a reader for alerting me to the following tweet from John Prescott, fresh from an encounter with one of early 21st century Earth's most empowering individuals. "Just met @therealgokwan," he observed yesterday afternoon. "I'm a big fan of his show. He does such a great job on helping women feel more confident with their body image."Thanking you, former deputy prime minister! Further examples of worlds colliding in this most seemly of ways are most welcome.John PrescottCelebrityMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/feb/16/1
Just what convinced Ms Styler to work with Britain's biggest supermarket?More cultural riches, now, as Lost in Showbiz salutes the first 2010 showing for one of our most beloved characters. She is, of course, Dame Trudie Styler – actor, film producer, environmentalist, and commander of a Swat entourage that can jet a hairdresser anywhere in the world before lesser humanoids have even finished screaming at their servants for the morning.Anyway, guess what? Trudie's only going to star opposite Charles Dance in a straight-to-DVD movie, based on a story by Jackie Collins, and produced by Tesco – Tesco! – for exclusive sale in their stores. It's like all my narcotised Christmases have come at once.Tesco is apparently aiming to bring out a slew of films based on works from "the world's most loved, bestselling authors", and this one's called Paris Connections. It's the story of a glamorous journalist who's called Madisan Castelli – of course she is – who becomes embroiled in an investigation into the murder of size-zero models in Paris. Some young unknown plays Madisan, while Charles Dance plays "Russian oligarch and haute couturier Alexsandr Borinski" – God I love Collins – and Trudie is his devoted assistant Olivia."How can Aleksandr protect his models against this homicidal maniac," inquires the press release, "and how will it affect the imminent launch of his new line designed by international TV superstar, Coco de Ville?"Well I for one simply can't wait to find out. "I'm delighted with this fantastic cast that will bring my characters to life," declares Jackie. "Charles Dance as my powerful Russian will bring such a strength to the role. A terrific actor with a great screen presence as is Trudie Styler, who has class, style and acting chops."As a movie producer herself, Trudie will be only too aware that one's projects should be backed by people of calibre, making Britain's biggest supermarket an inspired choice. Who knows whether it was the store's famed ethical credentials that enticed her, or the sweet way they handle critics of their operation in Thailand. But enticed she has been, and the campaign for Paris Connections to get an A-list premiere at one of their out-of-town superstores starts here. Every little helps, and all that.CelebrityTrudie StylerTescoFilm adaptationsMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/feb/12/trudie-styler-tesco
Some things are too important to leave to chance . . .If your specialist subject is Career Afterlives of Former Hollyoaks Players 2001-2006 – and I have to assume it is – you will have been bemused this week by a picture of Gemma Atkinson on her way to perform in Calendar Girls, the extraordinarily empowering play about not-quite-seeing Madge from Neighbours' tits. (There's a cream cake in front of them!)Hang on, you'll have thought as you ashed over the Daily Mail and wondered if 10am was too early for a Horlicks martini, what is the lady who brought such subtly shaded life to the character of Lisa Hunter, and then went out with Cristiano Ronaldo, and then went on I'm A Celeb, doing reprising her performance as improbable Women's Institute stripper Elaine? Have I fallen through some tear in the space-time continuum? Is it 2009 again?The answer is no. Gemma's stint in the show did end last year; but there's now a touring version of Calendar Girls, though someone else is playing improbable WI stripper Elaine. Gemma's doing improbable WI stripper Celia. When she's finished, Charlie Dimmock's going to take over as Celia. The redhead who used to be in Hollyoaks is going to be Elaine. Currently starring alongside Gemma are ex-EastEnder Letitia Dean, ex-Oxo Mum Lynda Bellingham, feminism's Hannah Waterman, and Howard's Way legend Jan Harvey. The redhead from Hollyoaks is the understudy.In recent weeks we've read lots about the encouraging state of British theatre, so I shan't bother seconding all that, but any lingering confusion about Gemma repeating on us in this way should be cleared up when you realise that Calendar Girls is what Lost in Showbiz likes to call a care-home show. It's an unofficial offshoot of the actors' benevolent fund. Calendar Girls exists purely as a safety net to catch a certain type of British performer who isn't at that precise moment ordained into the Loose Women priesthood, or engaged in skate-offs, dance-offs, cook-offs or witchety-offs with others of their ilk. See also Holby, Emmerdale, The Bill. West End-wise your other choice would be Chicago. Even Kelly Osbourne "wowed" in that.Why? Well, it is a matter of absolute national security that no more than a couple of hugely indifferent actors of this certain stratum can be out of work at any one time, and so it is that shows had to be created specifically to accommodate them. You know the type. As regular readers might recall, time was that everything screened in ITV's 8pm Sunday night slot had to either be a spinoff from Heartbeat, or have the word "heart" in the title. In the first category were Heartbeat and The Royal (daytime got The Royal Today); while the second comprised the likes of Wild at Heart and Where the Heart Is.You see, the classic category mistake is viewers assuming that what's on the box is designed with them in mind. It isn't. Television is mainly about finding a berth for this endlessly dispossessed repertory company. They've axed Ballykissangel and Monarch of the Glen? Don't get your hopes up, because they're just going to invent Wild at Heart to pick up the survivors. And the people in charge come back for each and every casualty, even though it's a suicide mission and their careers are probably already dead and other careers will be ended in the effort. Bar the Cowell stuff and Corrie, ITV is basically Saving Private Ryan in network form.As a case study, consider Patsy Kensit, who in 2004 was the subject of a mesmerically caring Mail headline. "FROM MAN EATER TO MATRON," it thundered. "No longer pursued by men, no more the toast of the town – even TV roles are drying up for Patsy, single mum and very much alone."That was the point at which someone in authority just said: enough. We're going in. Like Northern Rock, Kensit is simply too big to fail. If Kensit goes, then who next? Hobley? Holden? And so it was that Patsy was rehoused in Emmerdale. She even got to arrive in a helicopter.As for how and where these decisions are made, there is a central sorting system, which is run out of a Ken Adam-designed war bunker in Willesden Green. The entrance is disguised as a manhole cover. So if, for instance, Natalie Cassidy leaves or is axed from EastEnders, a red alert will be triggered. "We have a mediocre actor down! Repeat, we have a mediocre actor down!" The chiefs of staff will assemble and a green 3D map will rise up out of a central table, this piece of laser cartography detailing the main theatres. (That's theatre in the conflict sense, not the West End one. Although Calendar Girls is both.) Where will Cassidy be deployed? A flashing dot appears in BBC1's Wednesday night schedule. "Sir, we have an opening in Waterloo Road!" someone will note breathlessly. "She ships out at 8pm tonight!" Another disaster averted – and Britain will never know how close to meltdown it came.So . . . in answer to the question I know was plaguing you, that is why Gemma Atkinson was pictured on her way to Calendar Girls this week. I hope this clears things up.CelebrityMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/feb/12/calendar-girls-lost-in-showbiz
The change strip for the World Cup was unveiled this week by Kasabian, to a crescendo of boos while onstage in ParisAs the World Cup approaches, it gets harder and harder to resist the notion that Umbro is not so much the England kit supplier as a wicked parodist working not simply to ridicule the national side from within, but to reflect back at the nation what it sees as its most self-regarding delusions.Back in March, you may recall, the sportswear firm unveiled the new England strip with what this column judged the type of fanfare normally reserved for the development of a cancer vaccine. When the big debut happened, it was basically revealed to be a polo shirt. Or was it? "The detail is in the minutiae," mused Umbro's chief designer, "even down to the spacing on the ventilation holes. The configuration of the holes is actually taken from the position of some of the roses on the three lions crest. It's a bit of a Da Vinci Code, a "rose code" if you like."The shirt will ultimately become a major motion picture, but until then the challenge for Umbro has been to find a way to top that last iconic event. On Monday, the company managed it. England's away strip was unveiled in Paris. By Kasabian.In case you imagined this to be a particularly distorted Chinese whisper, I shall set out the facts as we know them. After much consideration, Umbro decided that the cleverest – dare I say the coolest – way to reveal the new England away kit would be to unveil it in front of lots of French people who had paid to see a Kasabian concert. To this end, the band's lead singer Tom Meighan returned to the stage for the encore wearing the shirt – a move which said to the presumably bemused French fans "look upon our away strip, and despair". Or, "we are a nation of vainglorious pricks, even compared to you lot, which is saying something". Quelle finale.I need hardly tell you that the shirt is the polyester equivalent of droning on about 1966, being fashioned to recall those iconic shirts in modern technology. Or as Umbro's pretentious screeds about the concept it capitalises as "England Away" have it, "the sleeves require an articulation concept in order to work with the body".But you may be still be wondering: why Kasabian? "[Umbro] said they wanted to take it away from the footballers for once and do something up to date," the Republic of Ireland-supporting Meighan said. "They wanted to combine with rock'n'roll."For those who assume that it's more that Umbro didn't want to combine with anyone who might be on the front of the News of the World come Sunday, your cynicism staggers me. This isn't just a shirt. You see, this is an attempt to singlehandedly overhaul the image of the British tourist via the medium of sportswear.Alas, the fabled Englishman abroad has for some time now ceased to be epitomised by that debonair charmer David Niven. For many of those nations lucky to have hosted him (and indeed her), the Englishman abroad is that creature whose epithets are public urinator, thrower of cafeteria furniture, wearer of Sun-branded plastic Tommy helmets. No longer. "For the new England away shirt," explains Umbro, "we wanted to look at re-imagining the concept of the Englishman abroad." Good luck with that, but go on. "We wanted to shine a light on modern Englishness and its cultural impact across the globe. And we did it with the greatest cultural export from these isles – music.""And so, on a wintry February night, Kasabian walk out to commence their encore," pants Umbro. "The first bars of Fire ring out and the hall erupts – singer Tom stands proud in the shirt and a few thousand Frenchmen jammed into the beautiful Paris Olympia, hot and screaming for more, see England Away. The chorus comes around, the masses rise from the floor and in broken English the words ring out across the crowd, 'I'm on Fire … !'"According to less parti pris reports, and indeed the official video clip of the moment posted on Umbro's own site, the unveiling was greeted with loud boos, which is rather more understandable. Were you to attend a concert by Air at Brixton Academy, only to discover that their finale was to unveil France's new away strip, you might question why they were acting like such plonkers (even Johnny Hallyday couldn't pull that move off).All of which suggests that the launch of England Away is just another poignantly overblown way of sticking two fingers up at foreign inferiors, only to backfire as Englishmen slink home from abroad accused of overweening pride. We must congratulate Umbro on another wily satire.EnglandMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/feb/11/england-football-away-kit-umbro
Marina Hyde dons her rubber gloves and sifts through the comments on the Daily Mail websiteYou can never speak too soon, but Lost in Showbiz's search for the Most Priceless Daily Mail Comment may well be over."No amount of rebranding will ever make this couple acceptable," writes Anna from Maidenhead on an article on the paper's website at 11:07 today.As for the couple to whom Anna refers, is it Katie Price and Alex Reid? Is it Charles and Camilla?No, my ducks. It is Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, about whose relationship a new book has been written, in which we apparently learn that the Fuhrer's other half was "no dumb blonde".So … hats off to Anna on that observation - we must indeed hold fast to the idea that these people might in some way be allowed to rehabilitate themselves with the aid of the right publicist, perhaps paving their way for an appearance on one of the second-tier reality shows, or introducing the competitions on This Morning.And yet, I have to tell you that Anna's observation isn't the half of it. There is something grimly, hilariously revealing about applying the mindset of the Mail's commenting hordes to this most extreme example of what you might refer to as "couples who have been in the public eye". So let us don rubber gloves and sift through some of the rest of the comments, marvelling all the while how some preoccupations hold fast even in the face of what you might imagine to be a fairly distracting picture of unimaginable evil."Where would we be without all of these hyperintelligent women?" asks Brenda Blessed from Pymouth. "Somewhere nearer sanity I would say."Amazing! "Why didn't he marry her?" a reader from Essex inquires. "What was in it for her?"Sir Biggles from New York begins by quoting a line from the article. 'Only my Shepherd dog and Ms. Braun are faithful to me and belong to me,' complained Hitler at the end of the war. "I doubt very much Adolf would have used the term Ms," fumes Sir Biggles. "He would have used Miss."It is left to Justin from Swadlincote to provide the more nuanced take, cautioning against the prevalent view of Hilter as having been a bit of an imbecile. "Historians would want us to believe she was 'dim' and an 'airhead' but I am sure this author is much closer to the mark," he muses. "The same goes for Hitler, who must of [sic] been a very clever man to have achieved what he did. However, there is no doubting this intelligence was channeled [sic] incorrectly. I wonder if his mum / school teachers ever told him that."Thanking you, Mail readers! For some time, Lost in Showbiz has been thinking of leading a field trip to the Mail's commenting boards, where we all mingle amongst the regulars. In light of this enticing display, I shall begin soliciting letters of permission from your parents or guardians at once.CelebrityAdolf HitlerDaily MailMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/feb/10/most-priceless-daily-mail-comment
Marina Hyde on another selfless celebrity humanitarian missionOur Quote of the Day comes from Jennifer Aniston, who is currently sojourning in a $9,000-a-night villa in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Jennifer is on holiday with close friends, close Friends, and "close friends" - including Sheryl Crow, Courteney Cox and Gerard Butler. Actually, I say holiday, but it would help if you saw it as more of a humanitarian mission.As Jennifer tells Access Hollywood: "[Gerard Butler] said to me, 'You come to Mexico all the time and Mexico is really hurting right now because of the swine flu and the drug trafficking and all of this sort of stuff but it's not all of Mexico. These people survive on us coming down and spending money and coming here to these beautiful places. It sort of made sense to sort of say 'Hey, let's help out Mexico.'"Like Jennifer says, it sort of makes sense to sort of say that. But only sort of.CelebrityMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/feb/09/jennifer-aniston-saving-world
It's tempting to think of perverse celebrity blogger Perez Hilton as a man for whom the net was made. Yet he's gone mainstreamCongratulations to gossip blogger Perez Hilton, whom Forbes has named as the biggest star on the web for the third year running. Were I to honour Perez in the style he has made his own, I would probably use Microsoft Paint to scrawl "no one cares fat whore" across a photo acquired by sticking a periscope up his trousers, but unfortunately we have yet to introduce that kind of functionality to the Guardian Comment pages. Still, give it time.Perez, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, beat luminaries such as the Twitter founders, causing some unfamiliar with his work to query whether he deserves the top spot. Agonisingly, I suspect he does. Just as there are wannabe wags – not wannabe Wags, the difference is crucial – currently joking that, as an aggressive, foul-mouthed cheat, John Terry is the perfect embodiment of English values, so it is tempting to think of Perez as the man for whom the internet was made.Oh, I know they originally conceived the thing as a military tool or whatever, but that was merely a failure of imagination. The web has come into its own as a means of gambling, disseminating porn, and seeing whether Paris Hilton was wearing knickers last night; and though its founding fathers couldn't have predicted their baby would turn out like this, it's amazing how even an unpromising child can blossom. Britney Spears was the most searched name on the internet for the fourth year running in 2009, and if you like your upskirt shots of her augmented with the words "unfit mother", Perez was the place to go.For those unfamiliar with his shtick, that's about the size of it, and in its early years I suppose this would have been characterised as its charm. Even Britney used to wear T-shirts advertising the site. It had the flavour of a cheeky outsider pressing his nose against the window of a Hollywood party that was taking itself rather too seriously, panting a while, then writing rude words in the condensation its breath left behind.It's difficult to pinpoint the exact point at which Perez passed through that window, but passed through it he most certainly has. He appears in music videos and on celebrity reality shows. He co-hosted the MTV Europe music awards, and has been touting himself as a candidate to fill Simon Cowell's soon-to-be vacated chair on American Idol.In joining the throng of those he mocks, Perez Hilton has completed the transformation from blogger to satirical character – a sort of demented cross between Charles Pooter and Kenneth Widmerpool. That he presents TV gigs in the manner of someone who has just won a competition to do so must be part of his appeal. The internet's biggest star is a man who would trample over his grandmother to get inside the tent he was pissing into minutes before.Least easy to swallow is his perverse morality, which manifests itself in his notorious policy of outing supposedly closeted celebrities (Hilton is gay himself), apparently to make the world a better place – as though interspersing such public service with upskirt pictures were in some way empowering to the gay community.The absurdity of his position was crystallised when he picked a fight with Will.i.am, calling the Black Eyed Peas star what the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation subsequently asked the media to refer to as the F-word. A smack from the band's manager was allegedly forthcoming; Perez later admitted that he had considered using the N-word. His reaction to his public rebuke was to post comically self-regarding screeds, characterised by statements such as "I am saddened Glaad chose to victimise me further by criticising me".Even for someone who clearly couldn't give a toss whether something is true or not, some of his big calls have been unfortunate. Fidel Castro still lives, and in retrospect, reacting to breaking news that Michael Jackson had suffered a heart attack by dismissing it as a publicity stunt was probably the wrong way to go. "Either he's lying or making himself sick … We're dubious!!""We", however, sail on regardless, only accruing more visitors and watching as what used to be called the mainstream media waddle dutifully behind (I'm still spellbound that last year the Daily Telegraph ran his story that Michelle Obama was pregnant). Yet increasingly, that old mainstream media/blogger distinction seems outmoded. It's surely time to bury the lie that super-bloggers such as Perez are in some way outsiders. He may care to style himself as a renegade – the John Rambo of gossip – but the fact is, Perez is now as insider as they come. All pseudo-dissidents go establishment in the end. Once-idealistic rock stars buy country piles and whinge about paying tax, the likes of Perez start taking the freebies and decline to call Paris Hilton out for homophobic remarks because she buys him off with access.Anointed by Forbes, cravenly courted, endlessly imitated – we must face the fact that Perez is more mainstream than the floundering mainstream media. Drawing sperm dots dripping out of the corner of Jennifer Aniston's mouth is now the norm; everything else is beginning to look kinda fringe.CelebrityBloggingUnited StatesMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/05/perez-hilton-celebrity-media-blog
Time now to revisit Awkward Angels, our occasional series on celebrity charity products that somehow don't quite hit the right note. "To help raise funds for the victims of the Haiti earthquake," begins a press release, "international actress and face of Mango, Scarlett Johansson has designed an exclusive handbag." Ah."The print on the handbag represents the ancient cartography [sic] of Haiti," it continues, "and contains the message 'Supporting the people of Haiti' written and signed by the actress."Thanking you, Scarlett and Mango, for the opportunity to purchase this exclusive product. It's all in the very best of causes, of course – as indeed is Lindsay Lohan's plea to customers of her clothing line to "please help us do our part for the children of Haiti by purchasing this legging … the fame legging." (Incidentally, don't be alarmed by that "our" – Lindsay refers to herself in the third person all over the line's website. "We've been followed and fawned over," she declares, "pursued and praised, hounded and heralded... just like our muse, Marilyn Monroe.")But whether these ideas quite come off is another matter, and you must feel free to nominate your own Awkward Angels as and when they're struck by inspiration.Marina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/feb/03/1
When England's captain resigns we should recognise the pointless role for what it really isIsolating the single most witless comment on the John Terry saga thus far is a near-impossible task, but you have to think that Janet Street-Porter, 63, would be in with a shout. "Sick joke," began her Daily Mail column on the subject. "John Terry was chosen as 'Dad of the Year' by Daddies Sauce. That's a product I won't be buying any more."In any sane universe, the correct response for anyone over the age of six would be to throw one's head back and cackle: "Oh do grow up, Janet!" Instead, alas, the fashion of the times suggests we should react by saying that it is obviously a massive disappointment that the Street-Porter condiment cupboard will now be deprived of the brown sauce which was once such an integral player among its lesser sundry ketchups, but that nothing is more important than the harmony of that cupboard being maintained, so it is commendable – if inevitable – that Janet has taken such a tough moral stand and shown what she's about as a larder manager.And so to the travails of England's Captain Trashtastic, a cringeworthy bros-before-hos tale rapidly developing into the most precariously poised national crisis since Suez. On Sunday, various Manchester City players raised their shirts to display vests in club colours bearing the slogan "Team Bridge". Do you realise what that means? In the 24 hours leading up to the game against Portsmouth, some players actually approached someone in the Man City kit room, who actually agreed to rush out the sort of Team Whoever T-shirt last favoured by hipster ironists during the mid‑mesozoic period of Brad Pitt's ditching of Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie. A chain of events so utterly ludicrous that I can only assume it was a staged plotline for the forthcoming, Endemol-produced documentary to be set at Eastlands.Meanwhile, the sports minister, Gerry Sutcliffe, was limbering up for another of his vital interventions, explaining to England supporters left rudderless by the shock of it all that "to be the captain of England you have to have wider responsibilities for the country". "Clearly if these allegations are proven," he babbled on, "then it does call into question his role as England captain."Not sure what Gerry is suggesting with that "proven" – perhaps he imagines Vanessa Perroncel might have kept a stained dress in the manner of Monica Lewinsky. But if he thinks it's the business of government to be making utterances on such things, then he's even more lightweight a bandwagon-jumper than previously suspected.As Pat Nevin said in Newsnight's round-table discussion of the matter – Newsnight, if you please! – international football is different from club football, and in the former there should be plenty of leaders on the field. "We've got this extreme thing about the captaincy," he observed. "In actual fact it's not as important as people are suggesting." Well quite. Otherwise we wouldn't have given it to David Beckham, whose Agincourt moment was rallying his England team‑mates not to speak to the media in the wake of beating Poland in 2004, thus depriving the world of the "lads did really well" platitudes which are the armband‑holder's stock-in-trade. (Forget his "heroism" in the fabled Greece qualifier: as Nevin stressed, you don't need an armband to lead by example on the pitch.)A friend is fond of likening the responsibilities of England football captain to those of a regimental goat, and even if you believe that unfair to regimental goats, the contrast with the vitally important issue of who captains an England cricket side could not be greater.To an Italian like Fabio Capello, much of our obsession with the role will be complete anathema. Fortunately, the FA have given him carte blanche to deal with the Terry situation, and if he is brave, he'll follow up either the reluctant-but-inevitable dismissal of Terry, or the latter's resignation, by announcing that he has decided the captain will simply be the eldest player in the starting line-up – or the one with the most caps, it doesn't especially matter.When that tenure ends, the FA should enshrine the tradition in perpetuity. It is the sort of eminently simple and sensible innovation that the Soho Square brains trust is far too craven and hidebound to institute themselves, but which would save more hundreds of future man hours of hassle, and offer more of a genuine legacy, than 10 of their botched or quarter‑arsed initiatives.John TerryEnglandMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/feb/04/john-terry-england-captaincy-marina-hyde
Luckily, Perez Hilton and Martha Stewart have offered their servicesThe minute his US version of The X Factor was greenlit, Cowell announced his departure from judging duties on American Idol with a concern for his successor best summarised as après moi le déluge. For many, though, the chance to insult awkward teens from low-income families is viewed as the opportunity of a lifetime, and some of the early 21st century's most beguiling personalities are beginning to toss in their hats.This week drew two high-profile submissions, the first from napkin-folding pedagogue Martha Stewart, who explains: "I'd be the best American Idol judge because I'm fair." Next up was endlessly emetic gossip blogger Perez Hilton, whose rise to kingmaker-class really crystallises everything that's right about the world. "I'd be a great judge," he honked. "But I'd also happily be a judge along with Simon Cowell on his US version of The X Factor."His flexibility becomes him. Indeed, it would take a pretty special candidate to eclipse Perez, whose ability to crayon "whore" over photos of female stars who have displeased him surely marks him out as ideally suited to enter the karaokeosseum and do battle with the unarmed singers therein.Your move, Martha.American IdolCelebritySimon CowellTelevision industryThe X FactorReality TVMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/jan/29/simon-cowell-american-idol
The musical star may have called SuBo a 'virus', but she didn't mean it in a bad wayProper showbusiness this week, as we turn our thoughts to the fragile egosystem of musical theatre. A world of song, yes – but also a world of pain. A world of divas explaining to interviewers that their success has been earned by "a lot of hard work, a lot of toil . . . a lot of sacrifices", before giving a brittle, high laugh and turning toward the window to hide the tears sparkling in their eyes. The eyes that a famous Phantom once told them were their most beautiful feature, before he went off with that little tramp. But no, they can smile at the old days – they were beautiful then. They remember the time they knew what happiness was. Let the mem-ryyy . . . live again.Forgive me. Where were we?Ah yes. Stardom. This time last year, a certain Susan Boyle was just another one of those wonderful people out there in the dark, and now . . . well, what would you call the Britain's Got Talent runner-up? A star? No, not a star in the classical sense, but a phenomenon – an entertainer for our times, whose disproportionate hold on the public imagination underscores just how emotionally troubled those times really are.Were you Elaine Paige, however – Susan's much-vaunted idol – you might accidentally compare SuBo to "a virus", which would probably make what you were trying to say come across all wrong. In a way.But we're getting ahead of ourselves. To this week's last ever South Bank Show awards, then, which appeared to be making some sort of satirical point about the programme's own demise by inviting red-carpet guests such as S Club 7 alumnus Rachel Stevens and Peaches Geldof. The realisation that Peaches will now never get her own special was widely held to be the most poignant moment of the night.Also in attendance was Elaine Paige, who had her own special in 1996, but whose appearance these days is more likely to prompt vulgarian hacks to ask her some SuBo-related question. Elaine's been doing awfully well holding it in, if you ask Lost in Showbiz, but Monday night seems to have felt like the right moment to expand on her previous digs at talent shows. Glossing Susan Boyle's rise for reporters, she explained: "She was like a virus that spread across the world in a nanosecond."Alas, Elaine didn't reveal what type of virus Susan most closely imitated, so we don't know whether it's something manageable, like oral herpes, or one of the big hitters, such as Spanish Flu.But she did go on to remind people that: "It's all about turning someone into an immediate celebrity at the expense of longevity and working hard and experience. Susan Boyle is doing terribly well considering she literally came to the attention of the world overnight . . . She is a girl with no experience of anything to do with theatrics, the music business, or art in any way."All right, all right. Remember, although the euphemism "strong-willed" was not strictly invented for Elaine, critics are expected to retire the shirt when she takes her final curtain call.Of course, she and SuBo are acquainted, having first met last summer in some mesmerically patronising segment of America's Got Talent, when Elaine came out from behind a door to surprise Susan, speaking to her most famous fan with the kind of slow, rictus-assisted enunciation that just says "I know you have learning difficulties but I am above all c-a-r-i-n-g . . .""Hello Susan," she began. "It's Elaine Paige. I've come to see you . . . Are you having a good time?" "I'm enjoying every minute, every second," blurted out Susan."Good for you," purred Elaine with the smile Lost in Showbiz imagined she wheeled out when Lloyd Webber told her she wasn't going to Broadway with Cats. "That's what we want to hear . . . I didn't know what this was all about," she continued to Susan, "so I went on to the YouTube." Adore that "the YouTube" styling. Quite right, love, it's a fad – don't you dare give it the satisfaction of getting its name right. "And there you were."There indeed. Since then, Susan has had her own ITV special, in which Elaine was granted the great honour of being allowed to duet with her on I Know Him So Well. (What do you mean "whatever happened to Barbara Dickson"? It doesn't matter now we've got SuBo.) Meanwhile, there was Andrew Lloyd Webber referring to How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? winner Connie Fisher as "my new Elaine Paige", which must have produced conflicting emotions in a star who has often voiced her bewilderment at the snobbery in Britain."My audience find it too hard to absorb change," she once explained graciously of the failure of an album in which she tried a new musical direction. "It was clearly too much for them."How open SuBo's fans will be to any future tack-changes by their new idol we can only guess. But in the name of sanity, when they consider the pressure-cooker of the red carpet, let's hope they forgive Elaine this one misplaced, ebola-conjuring moment.Susan BoyleMusicalsCelebrityMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/jan/29/showbiz-elaine-paige-susan-boyle
A new website guarantees no sportsman need ever question the worth of the unexamined life againPestilence, war, famine, death, TMZsports.com. Staking its claim as this month's fifth horseman comes the recently announced venture by the man behind TMZ, the celebrity news website that takes videorazzi footage, cameraphone snaps, leaked medical records and the like, and somehow sublimates them into a whole more icky than the sum of its parts. Naturally, it is adored by millions and has been valued at $100m.Until now, TMZ has run the odd sports-star-behaving-badly item, but its runaway lead on the Tiger Woods saga seems to have inspired managing editor Harvey Levin to make the leap and launch a dedicated sports site. The voguish "game changer" label is being bandied about. Clearly, Levin believes sports scandal is – forgive the pun — the tiger economy of gossip, which means that those who complain that sport is already reported like a soap opera should prepare for further disappointment."We're not going to do a scandal sports website," claims Levin wholly unconvincingly, "but we can provide more authentic representations of celebrities. We're just looking to do authentic portrayals." Authentic is effectively the byword for the stuff stars don't want you to see, and as the Woods case shows there is no shortage of people willing to disguise basic prurience as a sense of betrayal. Yes, actual adults who can drive and vote and everything really do claim to feel "let down" by the disparity between a star's public image and their private life.That the site will limit itself to "authenticating" US stars is a comfort of sorts. But its advent nonetheless feels a little era-ending. After all, if anything were strong enough to survive the early 21st century drive toward blanket celebrification, you'd think it would be sport, the ultimate meritocracy. And yet, and yet … if TMZ can create a star out of the Octomom, then the fact someone's only a minor athlete letting their hair down on the last night of a tour isn't going to be a bar to their being pursued as a bete noire.Reacting to the TMZsports announcement, one NBA player rather naively said that he wasn't concerned about it because he doesn't really do anything newsworthy. Few do, on the strictest definition of newsworthy. For those unfamiliar with TMZ's modus operandi, obnoxious cameramen target celebrities going about their days, making such innocent inquiries as "hey – did you see your sister's sex tape yet?", then posting footage of whatever reaction they provoke.By way of an illustration of the degree to which the site will stretch the definition of "celebrity", you should know that a couple of years ago, one of their hidden camera operatives recorded footage of Fawn Hall serving at the counter in the bookshop for which she now works. For all those stardust junkies just slavering to know what the what the stars of Iran Contra did next, the big news was that Oliver North's shredder-happy PA is now in publishing retail.Without wishing to let daylight in on magic, it is a callow soul indeed who believes it will be even approaching difficult to catch athletes appearing to be drunk in bars, or smiling at people other than their spouses – and that there will not be an enormous appetite for such material. Already Deadspin, the sports blog in Nick Denton's empire, is considering how to combat its new competitor. First up: paying for more material. Or as the site's editor puts it: "If I have to start being more aggressive about using this burlap sack of scuzz money I have sitting on my desk, then so be it."Though the esteemed former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw recalls the febrile coverage of Joe DiMaggio's marriage to Marilyn Monroe and claims "there's always been an appetite for that kind of thing," it's abundantly clear that reporters tended to look the other way once the match report was filed. These days, the lines are far more blurred, and though it's tempting to think of TMZ Sports as sport for people who don't actually like sport, the crossover between gossip-junkies and fans is larger than many would care to admit.As with all such enterprises, the fact that you personally couldn't be less interested doesn't mean gazillions of others aren't. How debilitatingly besieged athletes will feel by leaky paramedics and bouncers and cameraphone-wielding citizens on the promise of a tip fee, only time will show, but the accelerating frenzy should mark the final schism with a time in which sports stars enjoyed what we might call a charmed life.Tiger WoodsMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2010/jan/28/tmz-sport-smut-marina-hyde
Marina Hyde is cheered by Sting's welcome return to cover status - on the front of Costco's magazineI am wildly indebted to a Worcestershire-based Lost in Showbiz reader, who has been good enough to send me the current edition of The Costco Connection. The Costco Connection is the mag produced by the wholesale warehouse chain - or as the publication itself has it, "a lifestyle magazine for Costco members". This issue's cover star? Sting.In the course of an exclusive interview, The Costco Connection enables Trudie's other half to promote his album of winter songs via provocative questions such as "tell me about the process of recording this album". But is the more nuanced inquiries that give us the real glimpses into the life of an early 21st century Sting. "How much time do you devote to fitness?" asks The Connection."I was an athlete when I was younger," replies Sting. (Was he? He tantalisingly declines to reveal his event or discipline.) "I've basically kept up my training ... I practice my instrument every day. I work out every day. I think. I write."Amazing. As for what he is currently reading: "I'm reading a book by Howard Bloom, called The Genius of the Beast. It's in favour of capitalism, which is interesting. I'm not sure I agree with it entirely" - you do, FYI - "but it's certainly interesting. I'm reading a story about D-Day. I'm reading a book titled The Mordecai Trilogy and a book about John Donne ... I like to read four or five books at the same time."Well of course you do. Whatever one's views about people who read five books at once, the chat marks a welcome return to cover status for our beloved hero, and we look forward to his next discount retail-based outing.CelebrityStingMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/jan/26/sting-marina-hyde
For our good friends from the church of L Ron, it's not so much a tragedy as an opportunityPsychopath, conman, liar, fantasist, fraudster, bully, tax evader, megalomaniac – it's fair to say L Ron Hubbard's death was a blow to global humanitarianism. Happily, there is a silver lining to the cloud that has hung over Earth since the founder of Scientology shed his corporeal form in 1986. That silver- lining is the high profile, expansionist figures who represent his organisation today – and the good news is that they're turning their thoughts to Haiti.Were an idiot like you to itemise the myriad things that this most wretched of disaster zones currently lacked, chances are you'd omit "militant Scientologists who claim post-traumatic stress is a conspiracy created by the evil psychiatric profession, and who believe the correct response to extreme shock is to touch sufferers with one finger, before attempting to convert them to the ways of Hubbard".All I can say is, thank God for John Travolta. The Wild Hogs legend has unveiled his response to the unfolding crisis, announcing: "I have arranged for a plane to take down some Volunteer Ministers and some supplies and some medics." For the medics and supplies John must obviously be thanked, but for the Volunteer Ministers – arriving in Haiti via Air Travolta along with scores from other Scientology churches – the same cannot be said.According to an official press release, the corps will be on hand to dispense "spiritual first aid" to Haitians. Because really, nothing should feel more appropriate right now than gadding about Port-au-Prince offering survivors the chance to be hooked up to an e-meter. Hopefully if they find any gay people, they can begin curing them.For the Volunteer Ministers, you see, a tragedy is not so much a tragedy as a tragitunity.But please, don't take Lost in Showbiz's word for it – take that of L Ron himself, who personally decreed the strategy he called "Casualty Contact", in which he advised Scientologists to scan newspapers for reports of accidents or bereavements, searching for "people who have been victimised one way or another by life".Stipulating that one way to do this was to trawl hospitals, Hubbard declared of the ambulance-chasing Scientologist that, "He should represent himself . . . as a minister whose compassion was compelled by the newspaper story concerning the person [. . .] However, in handling the press he should simply say that it is a mission of the church to assist those who are in need of assistance. He should avoid any lengthy discussions of Scientology and should talk about the work of ministers and how all too few ministers these days get around to places where they are needed. It's straight recruiting!"Casualty Contact has since modulated into the Volunteer Ministers programme, whose yellow tents are increasingly visible at high-profile disaster sites, and often enlivened by special appearances by their celebrity adherents. Within these tents Scientologists administer the aforementioned Touch Assists, whose purpose is to "speed the Thetan's ability to heal or repair a condition with his body".After 9/11, aid agencies at Ground Zero voiced concern that the Volunteer Ministers had displayed their leaflets around the disaster site and operated in the restricted area without authorisation until this was pointed out to the police, who then denied them access. Two days after the tragedy, and presenting themselves as an organisation called National Mental Health Assistance, representatives of the Church of Scientology duped Fox News into running the church's freephone number for five hours on the bottom of the screen, apparently in the belief that it was the official outreach hotline. Fox News removed it after an irate intervention from the real National Mental Health Association."The public needs to understand that the Scientologists are using this tragedy to recruit new members," the president of the NMHA stated. "They are not providing mental health assistance."Au contraire, say the Scientologists, who claim they provide a unique brand of "meaningful help" during catastrophes. They were there after the tsunami, after Katrina – with added Travolta – and in Beslan, before being asked to leave after the local Russian health ministry judged their techniques unhelpful to already severely traumatised children.And of course they were there after the 7 July attacks, when an undercover BBC investigation taped the leader of the London branch of the Church's anti-psychiatry movement laughing that their role in the immediate aftermath of the bombings was "fighting the psychiatrists; keeping the psychs away [from survivors]". One survivor who happened to have mental health training voiced his shock that Scientologists had attempted to recruit him and others.What sort of numbers they'll do in Haiti remains to be seen, but hats off to Travolta and the church leaders for deploying in this way. As for Scientology's most famous face, do recall "the Mr Cruise response to 9/11" – setting up the First New York Hubbard Detox project where firemen who had breathed in the World Trade Centre dust were encouraged to submit to the "Purification Rundown", discarding their medication and taking endless saunas along with high doses of niacin, much to the despair of their doctors. Whether even Tom's nuclear self-confidence extends to mooting the First Port-au-Prince Hubbard Detox Project, only time will tell.CelebrityHaitiScientologyJohn TravoltaMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/jan/22/john-travolta-scientologists-haiti
Can Hustler's blockbuster parody take James Cameron's vision to the next level?Even as the Academy froths itself into the frenzy necessary to spray James Cameron with eleventy Oscars for Avatar, it's heartwarming to hear how smaller studios have been inspired by the director's fabled game changer. To wit, Hustler has announced it is to make a porn parody of the movie.Alas, the title – This Ain't Avatar XXX – feels a little uninspired, like no one at Hustler could really get past the tameness of Blue Movie to nail the Pandora's Box riff waiting to get out. On the plus side, though, the work will provide a much-needed boost to America's struggling blue bodypaint industry, as well as taking Cameron's creation to some places the director always seemed aching to go. "Right from the beginning," he told Playboy of his female lead's design, "I said 'she's got to have tits', even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na'vi, aren't placental mammals. A Neytiri Playboy centrefold would have been a good idea."That This Ain't Avatar XXX will change the game of its own genre seems most unlikely, but here's hoping it provides some sexual closure for Cameron, whose appreciation for his hot Na'vi clearly tended toward the frustrating. "We had a shot in which Neytiri falls into a specific position," he explained ruefully, "and because she is lit by orange firelight, it lights up the nipples. That was good, except we're going for a PG-13 rating, so we wound up having to fix it . . . "James, Lost in Showbiz is right with you on the heartbreaking limitations of providing family content, having just realised the perfect way to end this would be with some sort of blue balls joke. But we must all work within constraints, and you should thank Hustler for coming to your aid.CelebrityJames CameronPornographyMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/jan/22/avatar-hustler-x-rated-pornography
Marina Hyde is left with many unanswered questions after learning of the Dancing on Ice cakeForgive me, as it's a little late in the day and my mechanism might have gone, but is there something faintly leftfield about a TV show allegedly aimed at grown-ups producing support merchandise in the form of a cake? I am moved to ask on receipt of a press release entitled "The Official Dancing On Ice Cake - perfect for staying in on Sunday night!""Get your skates on," it begins with gossamer-touched charm, "and get down to Tesco to buy the new Dancing on Ice Staying in on Sunday Night Cake! A totally new celebration cake concept, this scrummy chocolate triple toe loop treat is the official party cake for fans and followers of the 2010 series of ITV1's hit show … While the contestants are slicing the ice on screen, slice and serve the cake at home and if there's any left, have some more during the commercial break too!"Great to have permission. And yet, so many questions. What is a "celebration cake concept"? If you buy this product, shouldn't you automatically forfeit your right to vote? And if this is the official party cake for Dancing on Ice, is there an unauthorised version? There may well be - were I forced to watch Dancing on Ice, I would go with the no-bake recipe that begins "take a bottle of vodka" … but no, I can't continue treating this as anything other than an alien plot to test the bovine stupidity of early 21st century earthlings. Some sort of idiocy rubicon has been crossed, and I can only wish you luck as the endtimes approach.CelebrityMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/jan/18/dancing-on-ice
What have things come to when a top entertainer can't defend herself with a kitchen knife?Time now for Lost in Showbiz to train its tractor beam on Myleene Klass, the gimlet-eyed girl next door who must surely be acknowledged as one of the hardest-working operations in showbiz.I say operations, of course, because behind every third-tier presenter is a team of agents and publicists working tirelessly to ensure their client is in the right kind of headlines – and you have to say that this week, Myleene's operation has been a tour de force. There might conceivably be the odd member of a remote Amazon tribe who is still unaware that Myleene saw two teenagers acting suspiciously in the garden of her Hertfordshire home last Thursday night, but such benighted individuals are very much a minority of Earth's population, and the tale is expected to have full spectrum dominance by noon today.But what makes this story so leggy, my darlinks, is that – according to her account and that of her agent, Jonathan Shalit – Myleene brandished a knife at the trespassers from behind her french windows, and when the police arrived on the scene they admonished her for this action, explaining "you are not allowed to protect yourself" and that "the law did not allow her to defend herself in her own home".Immediately, shadow home secretary Chris Grayling decided to make a comment about what the incident "showed", and it was when David Cameron joined in by calling the situation "ridiculous" that Hertfordshire police seem to have felt moved to make a statement in which they denied issuing a warning about the knife. "The story, based on quotes from Ms Klass's publicist and interpreted by some national newspapers, does not reflect the events of that night in an accurate way," they said. "Ms Klass was treated with respect and sympathy by the police officers who came to her home." The force has since pointed out that no reference was made in the incident report to use of a weapon, countered that the law allows householders the proportionate use of defence to protect themselves and their property, and added that "words of advice were given in relation to ensuring suspicious behaviour is reported immediately".Why was advice on prompt reporting given? Having bothered to establish the chain of events, Lost in Showbiz discovers that the initial call to police was not placed by Myleene but by a man believed to be her agent or publicist, to whom she was naturally on the phone at the time. Truly, the fourth emergency service. It was one or other of these men who called the Met in London, who then passed the matter on to the Hertfordshire force who attended Myleene's address in the small hours of Friday, by which time she had also been in touch with police. As for the story's appearance in the Sun the very next day, Hertfordshire police state: "We believe the media found out about the incident following a phone call from Ms Klass's publicist to Emma Cox from the Sun."Alas, despite having given copious quotes and assistance on the story all week, both publicist and agent declined to discuss this yesterday, so we shall simply marvel at the manner in which Myleene comes to embody any number of hot-button issues.There's an unsatisfactory NHS, which she tackled in a 2008 interview – the Sun again – used to promote her new show and range of baby clothing. "I am very, very fortunate, but I just wanted to be treated like everybody else," Myleene explained of the birth of her daughter, before claiming, "I used a false name, Angela Quinn, when I gave birth." Must have been an awkward charade, what with the medical records. Anyway, all this happened in the private wing of St Mary's in Paddington – the hospital tells me no one could possibly ever keep their real name off their patient notes – but back in the NHS system after the birth, Myleene claimed to have been unable to get a midwife to make a home visit until she used her real name. At which point "I had two midwives on my doorstep immediately. But what about all the other Angela Quinns out there?"Mm. Then, of course, Myleene was "targeted by the Taliban", as the Sun had it, during a visit to Kabul in 2006. At the time, this column questioned that "targeted", wondering whether a crack team of insurgents really had lain in wait in the inhospitable desert climes for weeks, allowing hundreds of military aircraft to pass unhindered above them, before finally getting a positive ID on the craft whose precious cargo was Myleene Klass and putting their fiendish assault into action. Still, the RAF scrambled a fighter jet to escort her plane, according to Myleene's obligingly full quotes on the matter.Finally, I'm reminded by a Guardian commenter of the story the illusionist Derren Brown tells of bumping into the charlatan Derek Acorah, whom he naturally holds in righteous disdain, but found himself unwilling to harangue in person. As Derren puts it, "my own apparently strong feelings gave way to the simple social code of being nice." And yet, according to a report that subsequently appeared in the Sun, "The pair started rowing but Myleene Klass, Derek's co-host for the new series of Ghost Stories, stepped in. The insider said: "Myleene told Derren to leave Derek alone. She said, 'You're obviously threatened by him.'"What a heroine she is – and with such frequency. Whether Myleene is being styled as a new generation celebrity Conservative remains unclear, but we shall continue to watch her fastidiously charted progress with interest.CelebrityLawCrimeMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/jan/15/myleene-klass-marina-hyde
Can the X Factor frontman hack it as a politics presenter?Dabbers at the ready, ye players of apocalypse bingo. Dermot O'Leary is in talks to present a political show, which means we're all one number closer to a full house.The programme would be for the BBC, the X Factor presenter tells the Radio Times, reminding the magazine that he has never considered himself "a classic, mainstream shiny-floor presenter. I always try to bring a little bit of edge to what I'm doing."According to Dermot, the show wouldn't be "particularly serious" – which won't put John Humphrys's mind at ease for a second – though as far as longer term plans go, Dermot addresses rumours that X Factor overlord Simon Cowell might be planning to launch him in America. "I'll be honest with you, I'm doing well and I don't want it to end," he says, somewhat poignantly. "I want to put my mark more squarely on The X Factor and I'd like to work in the States, eventually, as well. I'll work hard and I'll push for it, but I have to be philosophical . . . "Ah, the possibilty of a US transfer – the gnawing insecurity that secretly afflicts every one of Simon Cowell's repertory company of judgebots and presenterbots, whose unifying characteristic is simply that they could never, ever be bigger than the show. Will they be one of the units Simon deems worth inflicting upon America, or will they be kept back – still working for the UK's highest-rating formats, certainly, but always aware that Daddy loved some of the other ones slightly more than them?Only time will show what the Karaoke Sauron has in store for Dermot. But until he reveals his dark designs, at least we've the politics show to invent drinking games for – buoyed up by its potential to make Nicky Campbell's brief presenting stint on Newsnight look like Ed Murrow's See It NowThe X FactorCelebrityPolitics TVMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/jan/15/dermot-oleary-marina-hyde
'Why are we talking about this?' asks the gossip-averse actorPraise be. Mel Gibson has broken his silence on Tiger Woods – and it might not be the most enormous surprise to you that the actor and noted semitic war historian finds any focus on sinful celebrities misplaced. "I feel sorry for Tiger Woods," he tells an interviewer. "Why are we talking about this when we're sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan?"Wait – I think I know this one . . . They're behind it again, aren't they? "You've got this history-changing event going on," Mel continues, "and we're talking about Tiger's private life . . . It just drives me crazy."Please, don't make him crazy! It was only a few months ago that Mel lost his rag before the congregation of the $42m private church compound he owns in Malibu, after some of its 70 members apparently saw a discrepancy between whichever arcane version of the Bible they recognise and the fact Mel had got divorced and knocked up a trophy opera singer. On that occasion he threatened to shut the church down if they carried on gossiping about him, so who knows how terrible his vengeance will be if the Tiger-tattlers continue to defy his will?CelebrityMel GibsonTiger WoodsCultural OlympiadNewspapers & magazinesMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/jan/15/mel-gibson-tiger-woods
The former Liverpool executive's earthy catchphrase could open up several new careers for himIs there a more covetable free agent than Tom Hicks Jr, Liverpool's smutty Marie Antoinette, whose "let them eat cock" email surely marks him out as this transfer window's breakout star? Strictly speaking, of course, Tom Jr was not placing himself in the shop window when he penned his Algonquin-inspired rejoinder to the Liverpool supporter, but now that he has experienced a sudden freeing up of time, there must be a rush to secure his services.There may be those among you scratching your head at this juncture, wondering what sort of work Tom is possibly equipped for, bar moonlighting as an Austin Reed mannequin (it's something about the hair, the way he drapes the scarf, and his easy way with outerwear). That dismissive attitude is a failure of imagination on your part.Within the world of leveraged buyouts Tom's daddy has made his speciality, a key text is the business manual Who Moved My Cheese? For the uninitiated, Who Moved My Cheese? is essentially a parable of how to cope with a major change in your work life – ie getting sacked – and in corporate America it is often distributed thoughtfully to employees during periods of structural reorganisation – ie minutes before they are informed their desk is in the lift. In accordance with its teachings, Tom Jr should not see his downsizing as a setback. Rather, he should judge it an opportunity to adapt his … talents, I suppose you'd call them, to any number of current openings for which his vogueish "blow me, fuck face" catchphrase would equip him.American Idol will soon be in need of a new judge, certainly, while it has been far too long since anyone left the sort of obscene message on Andrew Sachs's answerphone that could galvanise Britain to shake off snow-paralysis and get back to doing what it does best: calling complaints hotlines. Failing that, it was only last week that we were examining plans to increase police powers for the London Olympics, and there seems no reason that Tom Jr should not serve as the prototype for a new, futuristic robot force to police the games. In a simplification of Robocop's four directives, the Hicks-inspired 2012 justice units would simply dispense a mechanical BMFF before dispatching non-cheerleaders.For all the obvious benefits to humanity of the above, though, it would be the most shameful waste were any new employment direction to lead Tom Jr away from the arena he knows best: football. The good news is that the Premier League appears to seek a diplomat with special responsibility for Africa. With so many unofficial authorities on the continent emerging in the wake of the attack on the Togo team in Angola – couldn't Phil Brown have gone the whole hog and deployed the styling "the dark continent"? – the search is on for someone who could distil the nuanced judgment of the Hull manager and others into a foreign policy position that will see the league not simply through the rest of the Cup of Nations, but the World Cup too. Justifying any comment by an unapologetically protectionist consortium of commercial interests about "naive" security arrangements – or, come to that, about "naive defending" – is this not a job for Hicks and the trusty BMFF?Failing that, Old Trafford seeks a lightning rod. Recent revelations from Manchester United may well have left the piggy-bank-raiding Glazer progeny looking for something to throw them into sympathetic relief, and who better than the scion of another football-crazy American family? At present, Tom Jr would simply be charged with responding to the Glazers' postbag, though if the feared sale of the Carrington training complex to a holding company went through, allowing it to be leased back to the club, he would already be in place to respond to any complaints United's chief executive, David Gill, might have about rental costs with an even better-honed BMFF.Then again, the post of Fratton Park cashier might tempt. Having failed three times this season to meet deadlines to pay their players, most recently last week, Portsmouth executives must be tiring of having to placate concerned employees, a burden that could be eliminated by simply installing Tom Jr in the club's accounts office behind a sign reading "You don't have to BMFF to work here – but it helps!"If none of those grabs, you can be sure that other opportunities will present themselves to our alluring free agent. Tom Jr's is the skillset most suited to these uncertain times in football and elsewhere, and by now you should realise that your failure to accept that will only earn you that least enticing of invitations.Premier LeagueLiverpoolMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/jan/14/tom-hicks-junior-liverpool
Pay attention, concerned citizens of the world: there is thrilling news about the BBC3 documentary in which Lindsay Lohan investigates child trafficking in India. Last month, you might recall, Lost in Showbiz heralded this important forthcoming public service broadcasting project, after Lindsay had spent a couple of days tweeting live from the subcontinent."Over 40 children saved so far, within one day's work," read one dispatch from what we could only describe as a sort of lobotomised captain's log. "this is what life is about . . . Doing THIS is a life worth living!!! Oh, and I'm talking about being in India.""Traffiking [sic] is a big issue here," ran another missive from the starlet and self-tan entrepreneur to her public. "I'm [doing] what I can." Not the most edifying of engagements with the subject matter, all told, and Lost in Showbiz ended the piece with a philosophical question for the BBC3 press office, who hadn't been arsed returning calls: "which do you think is more offensive – Lindsay Lohan being used as a plot device via which BBC3 can examine human trafficking, or human trafficking being used as a plot device via which BBC3 can examine the continuing Lindsay Lohan story?"Alas, the entire item prompted an amusingly sensitive communique from Danny Cohen, in which the BBC3 controller accused me, among other things, of being cynical. High praise indeed from someone whose contempt for his viewers would appear to be such that he imagines they won't understand or care about an issue unless it is bowdlerised for them by someone they are more used to seeing making knickerless nightclub exits. Danny also fell back on that old chestnut about not commenting on anything till one has seen it, forcing me to point out that one needn't always wait to see how something plays out before judging it a bad idea in principle. For instance, I thought the invasion of Iraq was a bit of a duff plan before it happened, and thought it reasonable to say so before seeing the whole concept in action. Ditto Peaches Geldof on Islam, and Lohan on human trafficking.Still, it's all bodycounts under the bridge now, and it is to the spiritual and creative death toll of Lindsay's Indian mission that we now turn, as someone has been good enough to place a teaser clip for the programme on YouTube.Saying "I told you so" is too obvious to bother with, so I'll merely direct you to the trailer, in which, according to the voiceover, "Lindsay questions if there's any solution to this abominable trade". "The whole situation is heartbreaking," Lindsay informs viewers who might presumably otherwise judge it to be basically cheery. "The parents aren't necessarily in the wrong, the children are obviously not in the wrong ... um … the traffickers are the ones in the wrong."Thanks for that, Linds.Anyway, the programme will be apparently be aired at the end of the month. What can you say? Other than, if this is the material designed to promote the show, one can only guess at the delights contained in the full version thereof.CelebrityMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/jan/12/lindsay-lohan-tweeting-child-trafficking-india
Marina Hyde ponders how best to rid the world of the latest ad starring the RedknappsNow, just a quick word before we adjourn for the weekend. The Jamie and Louise Redknapp Thomas Cook ad has been in existence for almost a fortnight – though it obviously feels like it has been playing on the inside of your eyelids since 1986 - and now that the initial feelings of hopelessness and despair it engendered have given way to Category 5 rage, thoughts inevitably turn to how to destroy it.Is there not something that can be done along the lines of Twiggy's censured Olay effort - for instance, if Jamie and Louise were found not to be enjoying an actual Thomas Cook holiday?At Thomas Cook HQ, Lost in Showbiz meets with a certain vagueness. I'm looking at the website now, I tell one of the publicists. Which Thomas Cook holiday are Jamie and Louise on? "It's just a usual Thomas Cook holiday," comes the reply. Is it? "Yes, just … a generic Thomas Cook holiday". Mm. Those who have sampled a Thomas Cook holiday in their time might dispute the "generic" – unless of course you have various genres like romance and horror (I think I sampled the horror in Greece in 1994).Still, if anyone has experienced a Thomas Cook holiday remotely similar to the experience Jamie and Louise seem to be having, from the moment they writhe luxuriantly in their economy class seats, would they care to get in touch to forestall Monday morning's tearful call to the ASA?CelebrityMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/jan/08/redknapps-thomas-cook-holiday-advert
California's dog refuges have been filling up as wannabe Paris Hiltons ditch their not-so-pampered poochesFrom humanoid diplomacy to a canine refugee crisis, now, with news that chihuahuas are replacing pit bulls as the breed most often left at Californian shelters. Animal welfare workers are calling it "the Paris Hilton syndrome", after the celebutante whose obsessive acquisition of handbag-portable dogs has inexplicably encouraged their popularity among people who don't actually house the mutts in chandelier-hung scale models of their Beverly Hills mansions.On the basis that celebrity animals are far more important than civilian ones, this column has been wont to focus on the Hilton menagerie, seeing it as a looming Malthusian catastrophe, whose chihuahua population would eventually increase too quickly for its resources, leaving weaker, less well-represented species – such as Paris's ferrets, monkeys and goats – at risk of poverty and starvation.Yet it seems the non-famous canines are really doing the numbers too, with one San Francisco shelter telling the LA Times that, at current growth, its population will be 50% chihuahua within months.By now, you will be desperate for good news. So take heart, because it turns out that Knocked Up star Katherine Heigl has a foundation that runs a programme called Heigl's Hounds of Hope – honestly – and that she recently arranged for nearly 70 chihuahuas to be fitted with miniature coats and airlifted to New Hampshire on a pets-only airline – honestly – where they will live free or die. Metaphorically, of course. Thanks to other donors, Colorado and New York will soon take their first shipments of California's displaced chihuahuas, and animal welfare professionals confirm they are now actively seeking assistance from the entertainment industry that did so much to precipitate the problem.As for the Hilton menagerie, its dog population alone stands at 17, and a heavily bowlderised version of An Essay on the Principles of Population is urgently sought.PetsCelebrityMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/jan/08/abandoned-chihuahuas-paris-hilton
Why we should all join the Anyone But Vinnie campThe briefest of mentions of Celebrity Big Brother to wind up, as we turn our thoughts to ludicrously miscast "national treasure" Vinnie Jones (above). Any engagement with the show essentially requires a drastic commuting of expectations, so Lost in Showbiz will merely plant itself in the Anyone But Vinnie camp, and express two desperately forlorn hopes.1. That when Dane Bowers asked Vinnie if he'd heard of the (unheard-of) movie The Condemned, and Vinnie replied "I was in it, you nutter", Dane was making an elegant satirical point.2. That at some point in the coming days, some other Bungalow of the Damned resident counters Vinnie's oft-repeated (and exaggerated) boast about having "been in more than 50 movies" by pointing out that appearing briefly in six straight-to-DVD shockers every year isn't actually as good as getting top billing in one you wouldn't rather staple your eyelids to the floor than watch.As I say, probably best to avoid betting the farm on either.CelebrityBig BrotherMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2010/jan/08/vinnie-jones-celebrity-big-brother
Tory plans to involve the public in policy making confirm that the illusion of deferral to the crowd is the mania of the age'The collective wisdom of the British people is much greater than that of a bunch of politicians or so-called experts." Yes, but is it, shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt? If only 2010 might be the year that The Wisdom of Crowds is superseded as the blue-sky thinkers' set text by Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, the 19th century history of popular folly upon which its name was a play.In the meantime, the Tories have solved the problem of their lack of policies: they are going to wait for the internet to tell them what to do. "Hi there," begins an edifying press release from Jeremy Hunt, in which he announces the launch of a competition to "develop an online platform that enables us to tap into the wisdom of crowds to resolve difficult policy challenges". Prize: a £1m record deal. Hang on, forgive me, it's just the £1m. But you might be on the point of discerning a certain influence, for all the pseudo Silicon Valleyishness of it all.Indeed, Jeremy is good enough to append a briefing note on the idea, which just begs for us all to bring out our Thatcherite blue pens and write a withering "NO" in the margin. Ten problems that could be solved by crowdsourcing, according to the shadow minister, include "identifying and rooting out wasteful government spending" – I volunteer the £9,500 claimed by Jeremy Hunt MP for a constituency home in which his agent lived rent-free – and "picking the England squad for the 2010 World Cup". (Good to see the wannabe secretary of state for culture, media and sport has that absolute prerequisite for the job: zero understanding of sport.)As for the prize, Jeremy explains: "We think a million [from the Cabinet Office budget] is about the right amount if we're going to get some serious IT development done." To which the only reasonable reply is: are you Dr Evil in disguise? It is Mike Myers's Austin Powers villain, of course, who has been cryogenically frozen for so long that he hijacks some nuclear weapons and attempts to hold the world's leaders to ransom for "one meeellion dollars", only to see them dissolve into laughter – a reaction one would imagine would be replicated by the world's greatest technological innovators were David Cameron to turn up and offer them £1m to design and develop a tool to change the face of democracy itself. A meeellion quid, love? I think they can do you a mouse mat for that.Amusingly, the Tories' crowdsourcing wheeze would appear to be a digital version of the Big Conversation, the attempt to harness the collective mind of the British public which ranks at number seven in the list of Imbecilic New Labour Ideas That Didn't Actually Kill Anyone. Crossing over to the list of Imbecilic New Labour Ideas That Killed Thousands, you might recall the Iraq war was opposed by a very large crowd – an analogue crowd, but a million-strong in London alone – who turned out to be very wise. David Cameron and his party ignored them utterly.An encouraging precedent for those who don't want talk radio callers to be the self-selecting lot defining sentencing policy, or indeed my mother to have a hand in picking the 2010 squad – though of course it's a lie that they ever would. For all its tomorrowville ideals, my bet is the Tories' crowdsourcing plan will end up a fairly standard "consultation" website, a suggestions bank from which bureaucrats will retroactively pull out someone who suggested what the government wanted to do anyway.Not that such a stooge will be without their uses. In fact, I suspect we are seeing the first instance of Cameron's excruciatingly wrongheaded plan to plunder the oeuvre of Simon Cowell. First TV, now politics – the illusion of deferral to the crowd is the mania of the age, and not just because it's cheap. Once, there were big ideas in television programming and in government, and either stars or cock-ups were made. These days, such risks have been jettisoned in favour of allowing the public to think they are writing the script. You can see why. It is far easier to act as if you are merely implementing people's decisions than it is to present them your decisions and say "love me".Is there not something deeply Cowellian about the idea that sitting somewhere in obscurity is someone brilliant, excluded by – and yet also unspoilt by – conventional politics? Flash forward to Cameron's first conference speech as PM, and you can just see him saying: "But you know what … I shouldn't be telling you about this schools policy, because I didn't come up with it. John Smith did. You won't know John Smith, because he isn't a ghastly old politician like me [pause for laughter at his self-deprecation]. He isn't some polished Westminster consultant. He's from Hull. He teaches Year 9 maths. He taught me where we were going wrong … And he's going to join me on stage now!" Enter an adorably unmanscaped Real Person – Cameron's very own hairy angel. It would bring the house down.Indeed, were I one of the bright sparks of the Tory communications department, I might judge this single moment in a conference speech to be worth way more than £1m from the marketing budget. But if I could get the Cabinet Office to pay for it, then so much the better.General electionDavid CameronJeremy HuntMPs' expensesSimon CowellMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/01/cameron-cowell-crowd-modern-mania
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