If it's not on the frount cover of "Grazia" it hasn't really happned yet.

Celebrity news is a lot like fish; we want it fresh, we like it juicy and in Japan they eat them raw. The internet until recently, was the fishing trawler we sailed in, roughing the winds of rubbish websites and free porn to get you the stories about stars that you needed, stat. The early days of the internet were like the wild west of celebrity news, there were no rules, no legal teams, it didn’t even have to be true, who cared- yeehaa!

Today, however, if you were to hear, that say a certain pop star had not only broken up with her boyfriend but also flown a passenger plane into a landmark building in the process, when you googled it at work, searching desperately for an adrenaline shot of excitement in the flat lining monotony of your office day, when Mr. Google rooted around in his big bag of facts, that story wouldn’t necessarily be the first to pop up on his little page.

Killjoy celebrities now employ people specifically to sieve through search results ensuring that the more embarrassing stories are firmly locked in the dusty forgotten vaults of result page three. According to my recent spins the most popular searches about Tiger Woods have to do with something called the PGA (I’m assuming it’s some nineties girl band he’s impregnated) and the area of Kate Moss’s life people genuinely find the most interesting, according to her google reports is her chuffing Topshop knicker range. It’s airbrushing but for the entire internet, untaggging all the unwanted icky bits and deleting all the double chins. I’m sure when George Orwell, rasping over a typewriter predicted the fiendish big brother brilliance of fact eradication, he had no idea his TB riddled mind wasn’t actually forecasting Stalin’s Russian but the future of celebrity PR.

Catch of the day is Catherine Zeta Jones, returning to the stage after over twenty years to appear on Broadway. I feel sorry for CZJ, when she first winked and caught the world’s attention she was a fresh faced stunner in her late twenties, relishing her moment in the Hollywood sun. This was the dream that had kept her going all those damp years down the pit in Wales, tap-dancing through the strikes, pirouetting down those damn valleys. As she walked up her first red carpet she surely thought, damn you Maggie, this is one mine you won’t close down.

But I think she mixed up admiring the vintage years of the moving pictures and actually getting married to it. She probably meant to say to Michael Douglas “Hey, what was Charlie Chaplin really like?” but what came out was “Yes, of course I’ll marry you”. Poor Kecko, he looks like a sandcastle that one more wave is going to collapse. Catherine always dressed like a star, but unfortunately it was a star from the nineteen thirties who was still alive and trying desperately to prove she still had it, while actresses the same age as her skipped by in skinny jeans. And now tragically she is forty and at the age when she should be moving onto her tasteful Donna Karen phase , she’s looking like an Upper East side granny.

I’ve a horrible feeling that if her and Michael bit the dust she’ll pull a Mariah on us and dress for the next decade in dental floss.

Sometimes your only hope on the celebrity high seas is that a story isn’t true, that a line isn’t twitching, that it’s all a dream. Here goes-Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhall might be splitting up.

I know, let’s just change the subject for a little bit to allow our subconscious to process that information while our conscious mind retracts from the idea like an elastic band made out of molten lava and broken dreams. X Factor- Joe won! Didn’t Cheryl look nice; apparently her and Ashley want to have a baby. That’s about as likely as...

And we’re back. The couple who had been dating for two years have reluctantly decided to split. Friends say that Jake AKA the world’s perfect man, was looking for more commitment while Reese, still smarting from her divorce from Ryan Phillipe was reluctant to get remarry. This beggars the question how shitty must her marriage have been to turn down the chance to be Mrs. Gyllenhall?

To put it into context, had Joseph Fritzel’s daughter, pre counselling, her eyes still blinking in the fresh Austrian morning air, been showed a picture of him in his little check shirt and asked if she was up for it, she’d been picking out wedding dresses before you could say, feck it every family has their problems. It’s with news like this that I turn to the sacred showbiz columnist prayer “If it’s not on the front cover of Grazia it hasn’t really happened yet”. You scoff but I plan to use it to sit out the next general election.

The Prime of Miss Louis Walsh

In the most improbable car accident since Princess Diana, Tiger Woods, previously the most reliable star of the world’s most boring sport, smashed his slow moving car into a tree in his own driveway. It quickly emerged that rather than rushing to rescue him, it was his wife’s discovery of his pathological inability to keep his own clubs in his caddy that propelled her to attack his back windscreen with a ten iron. Since then a veritable tsunami of cocktail waitresses, porn stars and reality TV contestants have washed up on the tabloids front pages all claiming to have had private swings with the US Open champion. News stations in the US have even been forced to create phone lines at the end of reports for women who think might have slept with the golf sex machine. Blessed with a gorgeous wife and a beautiful family, people are stunned that he would risk everything for a few shots in the rough.

It was his all American image that attracted the lucrative sponsorship contracts and advertising deals that had him on course to becoming sports first billionaire. How on earth did a man trained obsessively at a competitive sport since childhood, drilled to be ambitious, selfish and single minded and assured that he was the greatest in the entire world, turn out to be a be so bad at personal relationships? His mother assured him that he was wonderful and his Dad declared that he would not only be the best golfer the world had ever seem but probably the best human being ever and yet he still turned out to have the morals of a bank overdraft fine? Incredible.

His poor social skills became stuff of golf legend, with tales of his bad language, abrasive behaviour and general rudeness became notorious. Still as he smiles at his loyal wife over breakfast as her morning croissant flakes over fresh new stories of his wandering irons, I bet Elen blocks out the rising screams in her heads by repeating “but he’s very good at hitting little balls into across big fields, he’s very good at hitting little balls across big fields”


Meanwhile enjoying some bittersweet schaden freud with a double shot of vodka is Jo Wood after reports that her ex Ronnie was arrested for beating up the teenage girlfriend Ekatrina Ivanovc that he left her for. Neighbours were woken by the couple’s screams before witnessing the Rolling Stone attempt to strangle the tiny blonde and part drag her down the street. Ekaterina is not pressing charges and although she has moved out of their mansion is reportedly desperate to win back the aging rocker.


Meanwhile Jo is happier than ever. After years of marriage her new single social life has doubled her friends and for the first time, she incredulously revealed in an interview the only person she has to worry about is herself.
Maybe Jo needs to sit down and have a quiet word with Amy Whinehouse. The newly revitalised singer, sporting a fantastic new pair of breasts seems to be using her new found confidence to win back her ex- husband Blake Fielder- Civil.

This is the same man who recently finished a spell for GBH and attempting to pervert the course of justice, a sentence he seasoned with a short stint in rehab for his heroin addiction, the drug he introduced to Whinehouse with such brilliant results, the same man that broke her heart so badly she penned her break through record, Back to Black and wrote some of the greatest descriptions of the unflinching exquisite agony of heartbreak. And yet and yet, call me a romantic but wouldn’t it be great if they could make it work? If their raggle taggle, can’t live without you, if I live with you we’ll probably overdose and die, rollercoaster settled down into boring old happiness. It’s that insane hope that created the great art that Amy’s adored for and probably of the misery that’s made her infamous too.

That’s why there a lot to be said for every woman having her special friend, you know, a confirmed bachelor, the sort of man you wouldn’t mind getting changed in front of. Every girl needs her own Louis Walsh. He is the unsung hero of the X Factor, the one that takes himself the least seriously, who doesn’t mind making an idiot of himself because he realises how ridiculous the show is and how lucky he is to be there. This is the same man that spent most of the eighties touring the midlands with Johnnie Logan, who could begrudge him a bit of glamour at this hour in his life? Louis seems to be looking much fresher lately with rumours of a few nips and tucks here and there.

I’m saluting this late spring for little Mr. Walsh, may his prime be long and happy. Maybe, he and Jo could get together and have a double wedding with Blake and Amy? As Tiger Woods have showed us; stranger things have happened...

Healthy Living with Katherine Moss

I don’t know about you but when I’m looking for some healthy eating tips I always think, damn I wish I had the telephone number of a woman made famous for being abnormally bony, I bet she’d have some sensible dietary advice. I rang up Kerry Katona the other week when I was going through man problems and Madonna was such a help when I freaked out about getting obsessive and distractingly puffy faced as I get older, now here I am, feeling bad about having that donut, if only there was someone who I could turn to.


Kate Moss has got herself into some hot water (ugh just think of the calories) after flippantly remarking in an interview that nothing tastes as good as being skinny feels. Little mini Moss probably doesn’t follow the traditional food pyramid instead swearing by the lesser known cigarette-shaped Marlboro lights model .She is after all a supermodel; the average catwalker thinks that a sign you’re putting on too much weight is when you get your periods again so she’ll hardly be bleating about the benefits of your five a day. Also, it’s a bit hypocritical of glossy magazines to condemn her when her skinniness was the very thing that put her on their front covers in the first place. It would be like Hugh Hefner disowning Pamela Anderson for suggesting she was only popular for her breasts.

As for being a poor role model to young women, well knock me down with a lettuce leaf, Kate Moss is slightly irresponsible shock horror, next you’ll be saying I shouldn’t have asked Ronnie Wood to lead that marriage counselling weekend? If we can’t rely on celebrities to tell us what to do on who can we rely on? Experts! Pah, if they were any good they’d be on the front cover of “Heat” and until that day, I’ll rely on Amanda Holden thanks.


Celebrity is fickle, one minute you’re the bee’s knee next you’re the wasp’s sting. Poor Suri Cruise could do no sartorial wrong until recently then all of fashion world were lining up to take the four year old down just for wearing high heel shoes. Think of the damage it’s doing to her feet, they shrieked, imagine the irredeemable change to her posture, they warned. Considering her mother is slowly becoming invisible and her Dad thinks he’s the king of the aliens, Suri’s probably leafing through the glossies, fag in mouth, strong martini in hand, thinking, honey, that’s the least of my problems.


You see, it’s hard to recover from being famous at a young age, a bittersweet problem faced by X Factor judge Dannii Minouge.Despite starting out in showbiz first, she always seemed a slightly rubbish version of her older sister. Kylie was the blonde bombshell in sunny Neighbours, while Dannii was the surly goth in disaster stricken Home and Away. Kylie partied with Michael Hutchinson, while Dannii got hitched to the guy form Nip/ Tuck (actually at think that last one was a draw) Kylie span around while all Dannii wanted to do was have one blooming hit song.

After being bullied by Sharon Osbourne and completely overshadowed in last year’s show by the shiny new Cheryl, this year, at last, Dannii seems to be finally having her moment in the spotlight. Maybe the public are beginning to tire of Cheryl, especially after appearing in an ad for volumising shampoo despite the fact half of her hair began life on someone else’s head. Dannii is winning the battle of the outfits, each week striding on stage, like an eighties power dressing Nelson to Cheryl’s, big hair little dress again, Napoleon, every Saturday her Waterloo, her newly mobile face, released from its botoxed prison relishing the victory.


Still reeling from the loss of Jedward, then the world of music received a second blow this week, when it emerged that The Pussycat Dolls, the band that did for feminism what BSE did for the British Beef industry may have swung their final greased poll and sadly hung up their stripper heels for the last time. Reports suggest that the other dolls, Raggy, Blow Up and New York, grew fed up with Nicole, the lead singer’s constant spotlight stealing and showboating. Nicole has the highest profile in the group thanks to a relationship with Formula one driver Lewis Hamilton and solo collaborations with the likes of P Diddy. They also grew offended when the last two singles were described as featuring Nicole rather than just from the entire group.

I think they should bin the show- off and get a new lead singer, come on Dannii, this could finally be your moment! Unless Kylies free of course, or Cheryl’s interested or Louis has nothing on then you definitely have the gig. Maybe.