Up. Miley Cyrus
CW’s righteous sideline, Goddamn You, The Patriarchy, was alerted this week to
an incident in the Bahamas. Miley Cyrus, the 16-year-old multimillionaire
star of the global smash-hit Disney TV show Hannah Montana, was photographed
in her bikini.
As you can see, she is a cheering picture of smooth-limbed, healthy, wealthy
beauty.
However, on some internet forums, these pictures have been greeted with
deranged comments, such as “Miley is a blubber-butt” and “She is FAT!” Cyrus
immediately fired off a furious Twitter reposte, in which she laid faceless
internet bitching to waste, and ended it with the bracingly succinct: “Oh
and PS/ if your thighs don’t jiggle, go and see a doctor. Thanks.” It seems
that Cyrus is not as easily goaded into the life-crippling body dysmorphia
and anxiety-triggered bulimia as The Goddamn Patriarchy would like.
Down. Ian Hart
Three months ago, CW received an invitation to the forthcoming wedding of EastEnders
star Samantha Janus. It wasn’t addressed to CW, you understand — it was
addressed to the respected British actor Ian Hart. Hart lives on the same
street as CW, you see, and was, clearly, the victim of a gigantic postal
mishap.
Well, CW very much meant to tootle down the road and pop the invitation
through Hart’s door. It really did. But the subsequent months went a bit
fast-forward and blurry and, to cut a long story short, the invitation still
sits under a Sutton’s seed catalogue in CW’s kitchen, with a ferocious
turmeric stain on the top right-hand corner. That invitation to Janus’s
wedding, meant for Ian Hart plus one, has become, in many ways, part of CW’s
family.
Knowing all this then, imagine our horror on spotting the cover of this week’s OK!
magazine. “Samantha Janus: Star-Studded Wedding Exclusive!” it roared.
“Intimate interview and stunning pictures!” With increasing anxiety, CW
flicked through the 14 pages of coverage. Yes, there was Barbara Windsor
here and Natalie Appleton — without whom, it appears, no celebrity wedding
is complete — there. There was even mention of how David and Victoria
Beckham had coincidentally been in Claridge’s at the same time as the
wedding, which by OK!’s logic, meant that they were part of Janus’s
wedding simply from having used the same door.
But while CW flicked through, with increasing desperation, for any mention or
glimpse of Hart’s handsome, happy, really-enjoying-being-at-this-wedding
face, it finally had to come to the bleak realisation that Hart really was
not there. For some reason, he appeared not to have known that the
nuptials were occurring. “Has anyone not been able to make it that you wish
could have?” OK! asked the blushing bride. “Pretty much
everyone said yes,” Janus replied. “We’ve been lucky, because most
of our favourite people could come.”
Well, the inference is all too clear to CW: having broken Janus’s heart by not
even RSVPing to his invitation — the respected British actor Ian Hart is not
one of Janus’s “favourite people” any more. CW has torn a celebrity
friendship apart. It is very, very sorry.
Down. Jennifer Ellison
Jennifer Ellison — one of those blonde, model-y women whose exact route to
fame would be tedious and also oddly dispiriting to explain — has granted an
audience to OK! In the course of the desultory conversation about literally
nothing, the magazine — driven to extremes to wring anecdotes from Ellison’s
moribund career — asks: “You’ve had lots of brushes with Hollywood. When
were you last there?” That’s not making a film there, you understand, or
attending the Oscars: it’s just literally going to the place in America
called Hollywood.
“Brushes with” might just be CW’s new favourite euphemism. After all, this
week we “brushed with” royalty (drove round that roundabout outside
Buckingham Palace) and the Moon (looked at it through a telescope while
eating cheese).
Up. Victoria Beckham
This week’s big story was undoubtedly that Victoria Beckham’s handbag
collection is now worth £1.5 million. We know! We were shocked, too! Is that
all? Can Posh really be making do with just £1.5 million worth of
handbags? Well, of course she isn’t. The figure is merely the total of her
collection of Birkin handbags. She has hundreds of other expensive handbags
from Prada, Mulberry, Marc Jacobs, etc. However, the price of this further
collection has not, as yet, been released to the public — possibly because
the American Institute of Mathematics has not yet invented a number big
enough, having topped out at around “50 billion trillion willion gillion
fillion drzillion mwahbrillion”.
Up. Celebrity MPs
David Cameron has said that he would welcome Joanna Lumley standing for
Parliament at the next election. Esther Rantzen has said that she will
stand at the next election. Terry Waite is considering his options. Clearly,
we stand on the threshold of the beginning of the celebrity MP era, or the
VIP MP. Or, at the very least, thousands of think-pieces on the subject.
Personally, CW is 1,000 per cent in favour. After all, while most reporters
couldn’t be bothered to investigate the shady practices of The Right
Honourable Member for Wolverhampton North, if that Honourable Member turned
out to be, say, Bill Oddie, the press would be all over him like ants. The
slightest hint of misdemeanour, sleaze, ill-attendance or corruption
and it would be on the front pages in type so large, The Sun would be
the size of the stone table that Aslan was killed on. At a single, A-list
stroke, the UK would have the most accountable, trustworthy Parliament in
the world — plus it would force Heat into, effectively,
becoming Hansard. And all because of celebrities. Is there nothing they
can’t do?
Carey, the American R&B diva famous for selling 200 million records and
asking for “puppies to hug” on her concert riders, has been photographed
attending the film festival at Cannes. The big story has been that she was
seen in seven outfits in 72 hours — three of which were worn between 2pm and
midnight on Saturday. CW can see that, on the one hand, constantly changing
your outfits might exude extreme aspirational wealth and glamour but, on the
other hand, the only person CW knew who changed their clothes that much was
just rather sweaty.
Down. OK! magazine
Since the death of Jade Goody, CW has kept an eye on OK! It’s kind of
like a publishing suicide-watch, really. CW doesn’t want to leave alone a
magazine in such palpable distress and with no real direction left.
By way of confirming all our darkest fears, this week OK! showed the
first signs that it might be losing its mind. OK! invites you to a shock
Corrie wedding!” a puff for next week’s exclusive runs. “But WHICH ONE of
our favourite stars has decided to tie the knot? Is it Kym Marsh? Tupele
Dorgu? Or Tina O’Brien? All will be revealed in next week’s special wedding
issue!” That’s right — OK! has just invented the
celebrity flashmob wedding. Holy moly.
Up. Michael Winner
Although there are not many entries for CW’s “celebrity who has had the most
Jewish experience in a supermarket” award, it surely does not diminish the
quality of this week’s winning entry, from the koala-faced restaurant critic
Michael Winner. In this week’s peevish restaurant review, Winner predictably
harps on for 600 words about how incredibly rich and tasteful he is — but
then suddenly mentions bumping into his three friends, Hymie Pockle, Moishe
Pippick and Abe Schwonz “in the washing powder area of Tesco”. That CW
should see anything better, and at its time of life.
Up. Jordan
Two weeks after breaking up with her husband Peter Andre, we can only wonder
what it is like to be Jordan — at the centre of an emotional cataclysm.
The heartbreak is deep. The healing could take years. Imagine CW’s relief,
then, when it thought — against all expectations — that it might be seeing
the first, tremulous “green shoots of recovery” in the ex-glamour model’s
mien. “I would like to state that I am still keeping a dignified silence,”
Jordan said, in this week’s OK! column. “I have lots to look
forward to . . . I have my first appearance on a catwalk at the Clothes Show
Live for my horse-riding range, KP Equestrian. I am also deciding how to
launch my novel Sapphire, which comes out in July.” Jordan’s message
here, clearly, is that we all may safely stand down our concern, and just
buy the frigging merchandise as usual.
Up. The lemur fossil
Last week’s big celebrity news story was the creation of an instant icon: the
Missing Link Lemur Fossil, the latest evolutionary jigsaw-piece between
monkey and Man. As an instant, priceless treasure of humanity, the fossil
was accorded the greatest accolade possible in modern culture: its picture
was that day’s Google homepage image.
However, Celebrity Watch has to admit that it was somewhat alarmed on first
hearing this news — mistakenly believing that scientists had discovered that
the missing link was the British R&B singer and Fame Academy graduate, Lemar.
The confusion lasted only ten minutes at the most, but it did suddenly make
sense of why — if he was encased in limestone for the past 47 million years
— Lemar’s last two albums just didn’t do that well.
