Growing old gracefully has found its champion

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They are the King’s New Clothes of our time: celebrities who go under the cosmetic knife.

Oh, that the process did for their eyesight what it promises to do for the rest of their face. But no; they and their sycophantic showbiz chums see rejuvenation, while the rest of us see a very modern spin on the phrase ‘money for old rope’.

Is it only their audience who read that line in Desiderata – “gracefully surrendering the things of youth” – or does anyone in the entertainment industry also get it? Someone who realises that a face looked after by natural means – exercise, sleep and diet – can retain an elegance that renders the trappings of age irrelevant, while a face that wrestles with Nature instead often looks more ghoulish than grand?

Well glory be, I think that someone may exist. Reference in a magazine article to the film Love Story last weekend, got me wondering, whatever happened to Ali MacGraw?

Turns out it may be more a case of what hasn’t happened to her. I could be wrong but judging from her photograph at the link below, Ms MacGraw hasn’t had ‘anything done’; hasn’t boarded that futile bandwagon to the operating theatre; hasn’t elected to go 12 rounds with Father Time and ended up looking like it.

Without at all forcing the point in the interests of chivalry, I am amazed to conclude that Ali MacGraw remains eminently capable of turning heads.

And she will be 80 next year.

Good on you, girl.

Whom did Live Aid aid, exactly? Beware the pontificating celebrity

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Maybe you fell for it.

You were denounced as “racist” by Emma Thompson, or harangued by Benedict Cumberbatch and you walked straight into the trap. You assumed that people who breathe such life into scripts written by others are just as authentic when speaking for themselves.

Or you’ve never watched Steve Coogan on Question Time, so still cling to the notion that entertainers make natural social commentators.

If so, you need to read this chilling account of where the money raised from Live Aid may have ended up. For those of you born after the most famous fundraiser of all time, the whole event was driven substantially by the passion and resolve of Boomtown Rats bandleader Bob Geldof, who relentlessly badgered all and sundry, great and small, to get their hands into their pockets.

His efforts made him far more famous than his music would have done and there is no suggestion that his intentions regarding the Ethiopian famine that prompted Live Aid were anything other than admirable. If Spin‘s reporting is accurate, however, he may have been monumentally misguided. Something at least to bear in mind next time Hollywood grandees are damning your reservations over mass migration, particularly from Islamic nations.

Just because they can wipe the floor with us when it comes to acting, it doesn’t follow that their grasp of what’s what in this complex world is any firmer than our own.

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Live Aid: Bob Geldof’s Original Response to SPIN’s 1986 Exposé 

Geldof, Guccione square off over money

Karma – Barton team selection leaves BBC looking biggest fool of all

Joey Barton (Photo: michael.kjaer)

Twenty years ago, a Joey Barton equivalent would have got as close to Question Time as I will to sainthood.

Nowadays, sadly, different standards pertain. ‘Is he up to the job?’ comes well below ‘Is he edgy?’ and ‘Will ratings soar?’ on a list of the questions asked of themselves by the rather shallow people who appear to run television.

So populism prevails over qualifications and Barton is in, only – I’m told – to be so woeful he made Steve Coogan look good.

Reviews, of course, centred solely on one segment of his contribution:

“The footballer-cum-self-styled-philosopher was rabbiting away about the future prospects for Ukip, when he said: “So if I am somewhere and there were four really ugly girls, I’m thinking, ‘Well, she’s not the worst’, because that is all [UKIP] are, that is all you are to [the electorate].” – The Independent

Sure enough, this was seized upon by every available horseperson of the Outrage Apocalypse. Without thought, without analysis. Because nowadays, only labels matter.

And leading the way, wouldn’t you know, was the BBC, bravely endeavouring to mask its iPlayer ratings glee the following morning by reporting how their erstwhile ‘project’ had uttered ‘sexist’ comments on Question Time.

I would suggest the joke’s on them and many others among their media chums, however, because I’m not sure the comments are sexist at all.

Prejudice or discrimination based on a person’s sex or gender? Barton simply uttered the truism that heterosexual males grade women on their looks. Of course we do: we pursue those we find pretty and stay ‘just good friends’ with those we don’t.

What’s more – and this may shock you, liberal media – women grade men in exactly the same way. Just listen in on any hen party once the Tequilas begin to bite and tell me I’m wrong. This is how heterosexuality functions and it cuts both ways, unlike genuine sexism, which declares – overtly or implicitly – that one gender is inferior to the other.

Barton’s comments were inelegant and didn’t befit the occasion – well blow me down –  but the clumsy, knee-jerk response of the BBC in reporting them makes the Corporation look even more pathetic.

You’re more of a charlie than a Joey, Mr Barton, but for feasting so spectacularly on the hand that fed you, I have to say, God bless you.

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Some things, Vanessa Feltz, you don’t declare at airports

And to think they once clamoured for Sarah Kennedy’s head over foot-in-mouth disease…

Check out this classic of celebrity narcissism from Kennedy’s Radio 2 replacement; confessed from Vanessa Feltz‘ own lips on yesterday’s early morning show.

Now I’ve always cut Ms Feltz some slack over her supposed ‘meltdown’ in Celebrity Big Brother. It’s standard TV hyperbole to label as ‘meltdown’ what you and I would call ‘letting off steam’. Is the woman mad? Absolutely not.

But now I’m wavering: tune in at the 1:11:50 mark, when one listener confides that she wished she could take a tablet that would stop her daughter going to China for 10 months.

Turns out Ms Feltz has been in the same situation, when her own daughter went to work on ambulances in the Middle East (wonder which side of the Green Line that was?)…

“Saying goodbye wasn’t enough,” Feltz recalls. “I suddenly screamed ‘Saskia, I love you more than any other mother in this airport loves her child…'”

Her daughter apparently gave her a withering look, which was probably mild compared to what any parent within earshot would have liked to have given her at that moment.

I’m still not buying ‘mad’ but it would seem I must now grant you ‘delusional’.

How soon before X Factor just shoots the losers?

Image via Wikipedia

I know the tension must be ratcheted up each new season but there are ways and ways of doing it. And last night, The X Factor chose its nastiest way yet.

As if the producers felt that the humiliation of a deluded woman who clearly needed saving from herself wasn’t enough, last night saw the encore: drag 180 audition survivors from all over Britain to the ludicrously-named ‘Boot Camp’ in London and then immediately send a number of them back home before they even get to sing another note in the competition.

Turns out that the four judges were reviewing audition tapes even while the Boot Campers were unpacking their suitcases, to weed out those who “were never going to make it”. The fact that these were the same four talent-spotting geniuses who okayed these latest rejects in the first place was a detail sadly overlooked in presenter Dermot O’Leary‘s commentary.

It was a mean, spiteful stunt that didn’t care whose hopes it crushed or time it wasted in a bid to feed the hype machine.

And, assuming that it wasn’t his idea, Gary Barlow was the one member of the judging panel with sufficient clout to tell the production team that either they come up with a new ratings ruse or they find a new judge.

Only he didn’t. Barlow, whose tilt at being the new Simon Cowell is rather like watching Aled Jones try to play The Godfather, just looked sternly on and muttered inanities about it being a tough business.

I do like a man who never forgets where he came from.

Rooney outburst shows sky not the limit where close-ups concerned

Image via Wikipedia

By now, everyone’s had his sixpenn’orth where Wayne Rooney’s outburst at West Ham is concerned.

We’ve heard about the increasing charmlessness of a man whom it would seem not even the great Sir Alex can tame (whoever it was labelled Rooney ‘the assassin-faced baby’ deserves some sort of award). We’re told how this was the hair-trigger anger of a troubled nation in microcosm, not to mention the national game gone rotten, Vol. LVI, Episode XXX. All of it done to death in the last few days.

So I offer only this. Were Sky Sports not so keen to have cameras up the nostril, anus and navel of everyone remotely connected with Premier League football, there would not have been an incident in the first place.

Just as bigger isn’t always better, neither is closer.

There’s a reason why few magicians would ever entertain the idea of being filmed at a range of two feet and from every conceivable angle, either on-stage or in their rehearsal room. There’s a risk of the illusion we all know exists being shattered, to no-one’s benefit but the carpers and smart alecks.

Football, too, I believe, could use a similar stand-off. While not all professional footballers are graceless oiks, there is ample evidence that a significant proportion of their number most definitely are. The beautiful game is practised by some ugly personalities and when you probe cameras into every nook and cranny of their working environment, far from gaining an improved appreciation of their world, you’re too often left wrinkling your nose at a tarnished spectacle.

Touchline cameras are not ‘progress’ and dressing-room cameras will eventually do their own bit to chip away the game’s veneer, as uneducated people high on adrenaline eventually resolve post-game differences of opinion as they have done for a century, only this time in the full gaze of a national audience.

And many in that audience, I suspect, will wonder if they need it. We’re well aware that professional sport has its dark side and we get our quota of ugliness from Monday to Friday; on the news and on our streets. When we turn to games for  light relief at weekends, many of us would gladly settle for the same suspension of belief we implement with David Blaine & Co. Spare us the reality; we’re happy with the illusion.

I have no idea what Wayne Rooney’s best side is where cameras are concerned but for the second time in a year we have proof that it’s best viewed at a minimum range of 25 yards.

You want to be truly innovative and ground-breaking, Sky? Here’s an idea.

Back off.

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