Last week Fiona Phillips, the anchor-presenter, resigned - immediately sparking a media freak-out over who will replace her. The PR machines of Kate Garraway, Kate Silverton and Ulrika Jonsson have all whirred into action, with a series of briefs (“Jonsson is in advanced talks!”) and counter-briefs (“Garraway will be passed over, and forced to resign! And she's fat!”), to the sorrow and disappointment of the outgoing Phillips.
“The press make out that all the women are at each other's throats - but they'd never say that about [male presenters],” Phillips commented, tuttingly - before sticking the boot into Kate Garraway (“I don't go to the opening of an envelope”).
CW takes into account Phillips's comments. It really does. But come on! It's a �1 million contract! Let's face it - Garraway, Silverton and Jonsson are going at each other like fighting cocks, pulling extensions, gouging eyes and repeatedly punching each other in the ovaries and screaming: “Do you want to hand over to the news in your area now? DO YOU? Because the news is YOU'RE OVAH!”
But is it worth it? Phillips resigned because, by all accounts, GMTV warped her into a pastel-jacketed Colonel Kurtz. I've been a madwoman - but it's just the tiredness,” Phillips has said. “It makes me see the dark side of everything.”
Given this information, the job does rather make a poisoned chalice look like a nice cup of tea. Garraway! Jonsson! Silverton! Hang in there for Countdown instead.
UP David Blaine
The American magician who has made a career out of performing undeniably amazing feats (entombment in ice, 40-day fasts) - albeit in an inexplicably annoying way - is to return. He is to undertake another fast - but this time he will be hung, upside down, “like a bat”, over Central Park. Perhaps DC Comics will be inspired by this event to create a new character: a maverick loner, with superhuman powers, who makes the world a better place by inverting himself, displaying quasi-anorexic behaviour and wearing eyeliner.
UP Billie Piper
The ever-razzy Piper returns this week, in ITV2's Secret Diary of a Call Girl. As before, she plays a well-dressed metropolitan woman who is into a) shoes, and b) being a prostitute. Alas, Piper's pregnancy made shooting the series problematic. “I just wanted to sit on my bum and stuff my face,” Piper revealed. Had she engaged in such activities the other way round, of course, it could have been a whole new episode.
DOWN Sienna Miller
Miller has had another bad week. Someone has written “SLUT” on her house - and in a bad way. Meanwhile, the woman who runs siennamilleronline has shut the site, saying: “Recent events ... have heightened my lack of interest.” Miller has let it be known to friends that, these days, “a private yacht” is the only place she feels safe. Sienna! Private yachts are stuffed with yet more celebrities and millionaires whom you might accidentally fall in love with! Get the bus!
DOWN Kate Middleton
“Wait-y Kate-y” is not the work-shy Sloane that the press have been painting her as. For the past six months, Hello! magazine has revealed, Middleton actually has been employed - working from home, for the company owned by her parents. CW doesn't mean to cast aspersions - it really doesn't - but “working from home” (dossing about, watching Under The Hammer), “for Mum and Dad” (being paid “super pocket money” simply for being alive) = three hours a week, tops.
DOWN Solange Knowles
Solange, sister of Beyoncé, is trying to make a name for herself a) in the world of pop, and b) out of a better rack of letters in Scrabble. As you can see, Solange has found herself a pair of shoes so extraordinary that they make a medieval court jester's footwear look like a smart pair of brown lace-ups. Thus far, the “fashion world” has not attempted to describe these items. This is because the most accurate summation of them is “a pair of luxuriant monkey bums”, and only CW has the courage to say it like it is.
UP Matthew McConaughey
In 1999, when the police busted Matthew McConaughey, they found him naked, stoned and playing the bongos. Amazingly, it turns out that Matthew's actually the dull, accountancy-material McConaughey. In her just-published autobiography, I Amaze Myself, the actor's mother reveals that McConaughey's father died while they were having sex and that, when the paramedics carried his corpse from the house, naked, the new widow was “proud” that all the neighbours saw “Jim McConaughey's big gift”. This woman has one hell of a “bright-side” facility.
UP Carla Bruni
The appearance of France's first lady on Later ... with Jools Holland has provoked the wrath of the NME. “It's disgusting,” it declared. “Rock'n'roll is supposed to be anti-authoritarian.” To recap: Bruni-Sarkozy's family moved to France from Italy after kidnap threats made by the Red Brigade. The teenage Bruni studied art and architecture, modelled nude and shagged Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger. Then she married the French President, and released an album in which she a) compared her husband's love to heroin, and b) admitted that she cannot be faithful - before giving all the royalties to humanitarian causes. CW suggests that this all puts the paradigm-busting activity of, say, the Pigeon Detectives into some perspective.
UP Selina Scott
Kicking patriarchy ass since 1984, Scott is engaged in suing Channel Five, on the ground of age discrimination. CW says: Go Selina! Kick the butt of The Man! This, however, isn't CW's main interest, vis-à-vis Scott. For the ensuing brouhaha has revealed that, for the past ten years, Scott has run a business selling socks made of goat mohair. That's mohair (spiky) made of goat (rancid). To sell - profitably - the hair of the goat for the foot of the man is an extraordinary feat. If we were Five, we would be terrified.
DOWN Pamela Anderson
Anderson has apparently asked Hugh Hefner: “If anything goes wrong, I can come and live [at the Playboy mansion], can't I?” CW doesn't know quite what level of “wrong” Anderson is contemplating. This is, after all, a single mother with hepatitis C who had her honeymoon sex video stolen, then flogged to the internet. But the idea of a woman spending her Golden Girls years in an LA mansion surrounded by naked, trampolining 17-year-olds while the Albert Steptoe of soft porn heavy-breathes into his dressing-gown, sounds a fairly maudlin fate to us, all told. Surely even presenting GMTV would be preferable?
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