Up. Susan Boyle
With regard to Susan Boyle - the 47-year-old, hotly tipped contestant on the
new series of Britain's Got Talent - CW admits that it got it all wrong.
Last week, when we posted her in the lower echelons of the chart, it was
predominantly to record the Daily Mail's exquisitely spiteful nickname, The
Hairy Angel. We thought there was little more to the whole Boyle-matter than
that.
With the advent of a new week, however, it is becoming increasingly obvious
that we underestimated her significance. We underestimated it by around
140,000,000,000 per cent. In the interim, it has become apparent that this
pleasant-voiced church worker from West Lothian with the flyaway hair is not
just a contestant on an ITV1 talent show - but a potent signifier of faith
and belief; of never judging a book by its cover; of it never being too late
to have your day in the sun; or, indeed, The Sun. As we speak, Susan Boyle
is being talked of as a cross between Cinderella, Princess Diana, Barack
Obama and, over at the Daily Mail, Chewbacca. She is The People's Singing
Hairy Angel of Hope.
The odd thing is, we're not even exaggerating. Her Britain's Got Talent
performance is being discussed across the world, after getting more than 100
million hits on YouTube - more, as it has become fashionable to say, than
Obama's inauguration.
Oprah Winfrey is desperate to interview her; Demi Moore tweets of how Boyle
makes her weep and eBay is selling Susan Boyle fridge magnets (£1.99),
mouse-mats (£4.99) and mugs (£2.99). Boyle is the fourth-most searched for
item on the New York Times website. She has even been given a J-Lo style
nickname, Su-Bo. We have reached “Boyling point”.
As a consequence of Boyle being marginally more famous than the Moon, simply
for singing one song, once, her life has taken on a vaguely surreal hue.
West Lothian council has had to replace Boyle's garden fence, as her “fans”
knocked down the original. On Monday, she was photographed wearing a new,
modish jacket from Primark. This event made headlines in every tabloid.
Perhaps most crucially of all, she has become a fresh stick of gum for all
the Glendas of Fleet Street to chew over, now Jade's dead, and the Julie
Myserson story has run out of legs. Has Boyle been kissed yet? Should she
have a makeover? Will she move to London? Will she inspire others to follow
in her wake?
They've given her loads of “meaning.” But if CW knows one thing, it is that
giving cultural meaning to someone is a disturbing and burdensome thing.
Even Madonna reels under the pressure - and that's after 25 years on the
job, and peroxide balls of steel.
I'm sure if we all sat down and thought about this for a moment, we'd agree that
a shy, church-working spinster should really have no meaning attached to her
at all. Why don't we let her just be a contestant on a talent show and
nothing more?
Down. Marco Pierre White
Amazing scenes on ITV1 reality show, Hell's Kitchen, where the shouty chef
Marco Pierre White “teaches” “celebrities” how to “cook”. On Tuesday night,
the husband-and-wife team of Anthea Turner and Grant Bovey were split up,
when Bovey was the first celebrity to be fired from the show. “Marco -
promise me one thing? That you'll take care of Anthea?” Bovey said,
desperately. “You have my word as a man, Grant,” White replied, clutching
his arm, eyes ripe with noble tears. Guys! Guys! It's a two-week reality TV
show, set in a jumped-up imaginary caff! Not the tragic TV movie Who Will
Love My Children?
Down. Mike Batt
How can one describe such a man as Mike Batt? “The man who wrote the Wombles
songs and Bright Eyes, the legendary theme to Watership Down”? This week, in
one of those pleasing event-collisions that make the time pass more
amusingly, Batt ordered the cull of some rabbits on his estate - causing
millions of people to sing mournfully “Bright eyes, how can you close and
fail?”and, possibly, miming Fiver and Captain Bigwig being blown away by a
12-bore shotgun. “It seems that dead rabbits are the story of my life,” Batt
said, philosophically; but also underestimating the proportion of his legend
that must similarly be apportioned to sundry “wombling free”.
Up. Jessica Biel
Good news for the actress Jessica Biel! She is shooting a movie called Powder
Blue, in which she plays an exotic dancer. Biel's exotic dance trainer, Cati
Jean, was “wowed” by her moves: “Jessica is so good and so focused. She
could be a professional if she wanted.”
Biel is the former star of American TV's longest-running family drama, 7th
Heaven, an award-winning movie actress and the long-term girlfriend of
Justin Timberlake, regularly voted one of the sexiest men in the world. So
it must be gladdening to know that, if she made a bit more effort, she could
be stripping down to a pair of polyester Anne Summers knickers in a pub in
Leytonstone and passing around a pint-glass for tips.
Up. Lady Gaga
CW has its first official celebrity obsession of 2009. Lady Gaga, an American
pop star with two No1 singles (Just Dance and Pokerface) under her belt and
a predilection for appearing in public wearing little more than a gigantic
hat and a Dolly Mixture glued to her lulu, is perhaps what we might
technically refer to as “the razziest woman on the planet right now”.
Last week, she made what CW considers to be a seminal appearance on Friday
Night With Jonathan Ross. She was explaining how she had requested dry ice
on her forthcoming tour - only to be told that there wasn't enough room on
the stage for a dry ice machine. “Then I remembered,” she said in her
teeny-tiny voice, taking a polite sip of tea from a china cup, “how, in my
stripping days, I used to carry a portable dry ice machine in my purse, and
would...fog myself.” Finally. The advent of the self-fogging diva. CW has
waited long for this moment.
Down. Ivana Trump
Curious thought-processes have been noticed in Ivana Trump, the former wife of
the multimillionaire Donald. This week, she spoke of her love for her
daughter: “We are like sisters.” Although essentially a heart-warming
declaration of love, the specific choice of words is confusing. A mother
carries a child for nine months in her womb, labours to bring it into the
world and then selflessly devotes herself to the child, in what is
universally recognised as the paradigm of human love.
A sister, on the other hand, just sweats all over the armpit-holes of that
dress she “borrowed”, then resentfully slams a book token down on the table
at Christmas. For a mother to love her child “like a sister” is, surely,
and, God bless them, a bit of a downgrade.
But then, if you'd given your daughter the endlessly troublesome name of
Ivanka Trump, perhaps you, too, would pretend to be her sister, instead.
Down. Jack Tweed
CW can't help but register a little alarm on learning of the latest movements
of Jack Tweed, Jade Goody's widower.
Jack has been sentenced to 12 weeks' imprisonment but Goody's children have
been told that he's “gone to Madagascar, to look after animals”. During
Tweed's previous jail-term in the summer of 2008, the two boys were told
that he was “living with Tarzan in the jungle”.
Is it Tweed's plan to call on the plot of a Disney/Pixar movie every time he
serves time in the Big House? Let's hope he keeps out of trouble, lest the
day comes when he has to say that he's off to search for the only girl in
the kingdom whom this glass slipper will fit.
Down. Hugh Hefner
Hefner - the intriguing 83-year-old sexual “iconoclast” in a dressing-gown -
has been explaining the story behind his previous relationship, with the
topless model Holly Madison, above right. “She was with me [in Hefner's herd
of tame Playgirls at the Playboy Mansion] for eight years, when I had seven
girlfriends and she was at the bottom of the ladder, and was obviously very
patient. It was only really in the past two or three years that it became a
one-on-one kind of relationship.” Gosh, Hefner has an exciting way of
finding a new partner!
It sounds like the Setanta Shield for blondes with big tits. Or a putative
“sex act” round of The X Factor.
Up. Julia McKenzie
What would a week be without one of CW's now almost obligatory pictures of
Animals That Look Like Celebrities? This is particularly pertinent when one
bears in mind that, thus far, CW has left untouched the possibility of
finding animal pictures that appear to depict much-loved character actresses
from the sitcoms of the late Eighties? Well, the week starts here, kids: for
feast your eyes upon a Polish Frizzle chick that, undeniably, brings to mind
the identical visage of the star of Fresh Fields and its Continent-based
sequel French Fields, Julia McKenzie!
Down. Katie Price
Price, presumably wearying of her high-profile media ubiquity - whatever
contrary signals might be sent out by her third reality TV series, weekly
column in OK! and 56 merchandising lines - has an important issue to clear
up. “Paris Hilton and I texted each other last night. I've been to her house
and she's a friend -
but I'm not talking about her,” she told OK!. Celebrity Watch has used its
special Celebrity Watch binoculars on this statement, and can see no
contradictions, glaring failures of logic or bright aurora borealis of
self-defeating, auto-name-dropping thickness within it whatsoever.
