By Jan Moir
|
12
View
comments
Denial: Amy Childs insists she and ex-cricketer Darren Gough are nothing more than friends
Retired, married cricketer wants to bowl maidens over, no strings attached.
Master baker and mixer with wife attachment is tired of making dough and longs for fresh crumpet with no commitments. Apply box number 666. All genuine offers considered.
In the olden days, elderly gentleman in the final flush of life — or celebrity! — seeking last-chance romance would plight their troth in lonely hearts columns or perhaps at afternoon tea dances.
Or maybe they would just badger BBC secretaries until they gave in and married the brutes.
Today, they just sign up for reality television shows, the tackier the better. For no matter how washed up you are, no matter how depleted your skills set and your fan base might have become, there is always some thrusting starlet on the cast list who is even more desperate than you. And under these murky circumstances, love blooms like knotweed.
Hapless Darren Gough is the latest middle-aged celebrity to leave his wife after coming into contact with an ambitious glamazon half his age on a television reality show.
After forming a close relationship with TOWIE's Amy Childs on C4's The Jump earlier this year — a series in which the contestants had to master a compendium of winter sports — the former England cricketer has been forced to deny rumours of a romance with gorgeous, pouting Amy.
Is anyone well jell? Thought not.
Childs, who is 20 years younger than 43-year-old Gough, denied an alleged affair, insisting the pair became 'good friends' on the show and nothing more.
Still, amid reports of on-set canoodling in the snowy Alpine location, one can't help but feel Amy and Darren m isunderstood what taking part in The Jump actually meant.
Sadly, it now seems that Gough is just another tragic, celebrity man-child; someone who marries and has kids, who establishes and works for a happy family life — only to throw it all away the first time a young woman bats her sooty eyelashes in his direction, a looker who pays him a bit of attention and who does not say at the end of their first conversation; 'Excuse me, sir. Do you want fries with that?'
More from Jan Moir...
In this, Gough is not alone. Indeed, he is far from alone. In the glamorous bubble of reality television, men like him are picked off like prized gobblers in a turkey shoot.
Paul Hollywood, John Torode and a number of Strictly contestants whose marriages have crumbled when the opportunity of placing crabbed old hands on luscious young flesh proves too much to resist.
They just cannot turn away from the allure of a pretty face and carefree ways. How can a wife who has to stay at home, cook dinner for the kids, organise the lunch boxes, the PE kit and the family rota ever compete with that?
Last year, Great British Bake Off star Paul Hollywood left his wife of 15 years, after having an affair with Marcella Valladolid, his co-star on an American cooking show.
Now back with his wife, he described the episode as 'the greatest mistake o f my life'. She has given him a second chance — but not everyone is as lucky as him.
Men like Darren — this is not the first time he has left his wife — cannot seem to understand that having a family is a commitment you can't just shrug off like a winter jacket or a dose of the blues.
And of course the great irony is that these blokes are no golden adonises. They are men in the grip of their fading libidos and their glorious egos.
Who knows what happened on the ski slopes. What we want to know is: back in Essex, when faced with the prospect of being labelled a marriage wrecker and being stuck with potato head Darren, did our Amy come to her senses at last? Shut up.
Seeing men having manicures and pedicures in nail salons is no big deal.
However, now that the monsters are moving into our threading and waxing salons, should we be worried?
I don't want to explain the intricacies of the Desperate Dan, the Brazilian, the Happy Trail, the Full Hitler, the G-String, the Landing Lights and the Pits Stop to any man any time soon.
Diversity and equality can only go so far, and no further.
Keira Knightley was born to wear Chanel. Coco's original designs worshipped slim, elegant, beautiful bodies like hers.
Lagerfeld has carried on the tradition. This week, I loved Keira's wasp-waist creation — but surely any woman can be a similar shape by wearing something boxy on top and below.
And by that, I mean the boxy your new fridge came in on the top and the boxy your telly came in on the bottom.
Voila! Instant tiny waist.
Poor Malala Yousafzai. She is the brave 16-year-old shot by the Taliban in 2012 for her outspoken views on women's rights and education in Pakistan.
After recovering in a British hospital, it has been her unlucky fate to be patronised by Western talk-show hosts who cry and say that they want to adopt her when she appears on their shows.
At the Emirates Festival of Literature this week, she revealed that Bono — he had to appear somewhere in this narrative — once gave her a gift. An iPod.
How lovely! Except that it was loaded only with tracks by U2.
Hasn't the poor girl suffered enough?
Pass the morning sickness bag. It has been 23 long, long years since Demi Moore posed nude, pregnant and proud on the cover of Vanity Fair.
Back then, the startling image sent out a message that pregnancy was no longer something to be hidden under the voluminous folds of a sprigged cotton smock. The Expectant were out and proud, never to be hidden away again.
It was indeed glorious — but who could have imagined that Demi would start a celebrity trend? Sometimes I feel as if I have seen more naked pregnant women's bodies than a retired midwife — because so many celebrities continue to copy her.
Yes, the changes to the female body that motherhood brings about should be celebrated — but surely in the privacy of your own home?
The latest to flaunt the bump is Tamara Ecclestone — her topless preggie pix in Hello! this we ek are truly embarrassing.
Call me old-fashioned, but the only people who should see her exposed like this is her husband and her gynaecologist. Spare the rest of us! However, I suppose we must take comfort in the fact that if an Ecclestone is doing it, the trend is over.
PS: In other baby news, Hilaria Baldwin — wife of Alec — has just had their daughter Carmen's ears pierced. The poor tot is only six months old! 'She cried for a few seconds,' says Hilaria, 'but I cried way more.'
Why do it? So barbaric — and not a good baby look.
Well done Suzanne Shaw, right, from the pop band Hear'Say.
Yes, she was a bit of a silly girl who blew £1 million in 18 months when she was catapulted to stardom — via a reality show, of course.
Suzanne ended up £200,000 in debt but refused to be made bankrupt — now she is back on track. Good for her.
She sets an example to those who blithely go bankrupt when they get into trouble — thereby avoiding paying back their creditors.
It also makes me wonder.
All these pop kids and stars who have managers and accountants and advisers but still get into trouble — why do so many seem to get such lousy advice?
Day Four of the Oscar Pistorius trial and already it has become a circus.
There has been testimony about blood-curdling screams, witnesses in tears and Pistorius leafing studiously through court documents, clamping his hands over his ears and weeping in the dock.
South African media outlets have already been censured for breaking the reporting restrictions, and here in the UK, television presenters report the trial as if they were commenting on the latest juicy episode of a popular soap opera.
All this begs the question: Should trials ever be televised? South Africa is keen to show the world that its (non-jury) legal system is fair and open.
Yet in a trivialised world where scripted reality television shows further blur the line between what is real and what is not, where public appetite for thrills now spills into all areas that were hitherto sa crosanct and where even the lowliest witness — never mind the accused — is all-knowing in the ways of the media and the power of the camera, can justice be served in the spotlight?
We are all agreed that open justice is the right kind of justice. No dark corner of the system should be off-limits. There is certainly an argument for televising war crimes.
Yet this is the murder of a young woman. It should not be served up as entertainment fodder.
Trauma at Jonathan Ross Towers. Huffy Wossy (right) has pulled out of presenting a sci-fi awards ceremony this summer after sensitive types complained.
Apparently, this is because Ross is fatist, sizeist, sexist and sleazeist. Tell us something we don't know.
The row got personal when Tweeters targeted his wife Jane Goldman and his daughter Honey Kinney, 17.
Goldman was particularly incensed, leaving Twitter after accusing critics of bullying and 'spouting ill-considered poison'.
If only she had been quite so outraged and righteous when her husband and Russell Brand were abusing Andrew Sachs about his granddaughter Georgia over the telephone. Hypocrites.
Good lawyers cost a lot of money. And during the times in my life when I have needed lawyers, I have just gritted my teeth and paid their eye-watering bills, always grateful for their specialised expertise.
Yes, even when I took a lawyer who was working for me to see a play she could not get tickets for and then treated her to dinner at a top London restaurant she could never get a table at — and then she billed me for her time.
Suck it up, suckers!
However, answer me this. Why is this country giving legal aid to an Olympics ticket fraudster who lives in a £3 million home in London and must be extremely wealthy?
Ticket fraud mastermind Terence Shepherd was jailed for eight years for selling tickets to the 2008 Olympics that never existed.
Rebecca Adlington's parents lost £1,000 and were amon g those conned by this creep. He was ordered to pay back £1.25 million but has refused. Now he is getting legal aid to appeal against having his sentence extended.
The concept of legal aid is a noble one — one this country can be proud of. But like many things we do for the greater good, it has been misappropriated by conniving people.
It is supposed to help those who cannot afford proper legal representation in court — not rich shysters like him.
No doubt about it, Lupita Nyong'o was the darling of the Oscars. Her dresses were impeachable, her grooming impeccable, her speech terrific.
Now she is partying with Rihanna (uh oh!) and she was in the selfie that broke Twitter. The lipgloss she wore has globally sold out while designers are queuing up to fling free dresses at her.
In 2014, this is how a star is born — and she h asn't even had to go through the 'designing' a 'handbag' stage. That's class, Lupita. But please — stay away from the bad girls.
0 comments:
Post a Comment