Ever-changing (white) face of the Doctor

Congratulations to Matt Smith, our new Doctor Who. But what hopes for the first black Time Lord? Colin Salmon, Paterson Joseph and Chiwetel Ejiofor had been linked to the plum role. Perhaps Adrian Lester, the first black actor to play Henry V at the National Theatre, can shed some light on the matter?

“If you don’t get called for an audition, or if you do and don’t get the job, you never know the real reason,” the Hustle star tells Radio Times. “If there’s racism, I’m out of the room when it’s discussed, so can only guess at it. But you realise something is not right when you look at the evidence – how many black actors in Britain are given opportunities? There’s an imbalance.” “We saw a dozen or so people, some of them black,” says Piers Wenger, the executive producer of Doctor Who. “There was never any resistance to the idea of a black Doctor,” he says, but the best actor “irrespective of ethnicity or age” was young Mr Smith. The good news for Lester is that offers to play a US president are now flooding in.

Any slacking on the new year’s diet and the rebooted Mr Motivator will come round and demand you “get off yo fat ass”. The former Derrick Evans, 56, has returned to GMTV, the scene of his triumphs in the early Nineties, to lick Britain into shape. Is there still a reserve slot on Celebrity Big Brother?

Keira Knightley is fast becoming Hollywood’s favourite muse. The actress is to play Zelda Sayre, the schizophrenic love and later wife of alcoholic writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the biopic The Beautiful and the Damned. Last year she played Vera Phillips, the childhood sweetheart of the similarly booze-addled Dylan Thomas, in The Edge of Love.

How to get rid of guests who overstay their welcome, the Tony Blair way. “Do you want to come round and not have an argument about development?” he asked Bono one lonely night while still at No 10. The U2 singer was over in a shot. “We were just sitting there, talking about everything. And, of course, I’m drinking,” Bono told the latest issue of Q . “After a few hours he’s like, ‘Um . . . ah . . . OK, it’s midnight, I’ve got to make a phone call, would you let yourself out?’.” A well-lubricated Bono slipped out, without disturbing the neighbours we trust.

“I can’t stand reality television. It takes work away from actors,” Tina Malone, the battleaxe in the Channel 4 series Shameless, complained recently. “The prime-time schedules are packed with cheap, supposed celebrity shows and less and less drama is being made.” So where better for Malone to fight the system than inside the Celebrity Big Brother house? For those not keeping up, Terry Christian has put Ulrika Jonsson up for the public vote – because, he says, she has an ego. Just three weeks to go.

Darts is truly the sport of kings. Or minor royals anyway. Trying to maintain his dignity in an Elvis wig at the Lakeside BDO World Championships was, we are assured, Peter Phillips, the Queen’s eldest grandson. He was in the audience enjoying a rugby boys’ night out with Mike Tindall, his sister Zara’s boyfriend.

The Face: Lady GaGa

Ready for a cyber-disco bad girl to sweep X Factor mediocrity from the charts? Lady GaGa has arrived and her instructional single, Just Dance, is battling for next week’s top spot. Born Joanne Stefani Germanotta, the New York pop prodigy began singing Cyndi Lauper and Madonna hits into a toy tape recorder, aged 4. As an outsider at the exclusive Manhattan school attended by Paris Hilton, Joanne gravitated to NY’s druggy bohemian crowd, and became a “go-go dancing performance artist”.

Taking her stage name from Queen’s Radio Ga Ga, the Lady, 22, was spotted by talent scouts and penned hits with R&B star Akon while perfecting her electro-burlesque stage show. On every tip list for 2009, the million-selling Grammy nominee will tour Britain alongside the Pussycat Dolls.

Postscript

The rehabilitated Mickey Rourke knows his limits. The Wrestler star told GQ: “Actors should shut up about politics, because they tend to be ill-informed finger-pointers who just cosy up to some flavour-of–the-month liberal, you know?” Surely not a dig at his potential Oscar rival, Sean Penn?

Courtney Love is atoning for her wild-girl past. “On Sofia Coppola’s 16th birthday I stole a lip gloss from her Sistine Chapel of a bedroom,” she confessed to Elle. “Years later, I left a Chanel lip gloss in the reception of the Mercer hotel for her. You know why? I believe that you’ve got to fix your karma.” All’s well that ends well.

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