Was this a little white lie, Liam?
RELLE MacPherson’s elaborate bedtime regime guarantees her seven dreamless hours, she says. Mind you, her ritual includes an infrared sauna (what’s an infrared sauna?) pillow spritzes and special tea. Most of us have humbler routines. My beforelights-out regime includes obsessively checking my ancient bedside torch, so I don’t wake my wife when I get up for my 3am pee; setting not one but three alarms if I have to be up early for breakfast TV (I’m sitting in for Piers Morgan again next week); and most importantly of all, writing a list of everything I must do next day. Skip any of these and sleep’s a stranger. But I’ll never look like Elle.
RAS UNFORCED own-goals go, Liam Neeson’s jawdropping, career-terminating confession was right up there with the most blatant back-heelers into the net. One wonders what he thought as he strolled away from an interview where he’d just ignited a pyre under his own feet.
“That went well”? Or: “Hmm... perhaps I should have been franker.”
Opinion is sharply divided over Neeson’s decision to open up about “my week as a racist vigilante”. I hosted a three-hour live debate show on TalkRADIO the day the actor hit the headlines and it was pretty much all my listeners wanted to talk about.
The row focused on two areas: why he’d said it in the first place, and what his mea culpa revealed about him.
It’s difficult to know what was going on in Neeson’s mind but these big-star Hollywood publicity interviews are about as far from real-life conversations as it’s possible to get.
My wife and I have conducted countless such exchanges for our TV shows and they’re very strange affairs.
Usually the celebrity doesn’t really want to be there in the first place and most of them would rather you pulled their teeth out without anaesthetic than ask them personal questions.
Sometimes your encounter with the star is just one in a long, continuous line of interviews.
The process of repeating the same answers over and over again drives them slightly mad. Remember Robert Redford in The Candidate?
His would-be president simply
JNOTHING wrong with online teasing of Meghan Markle for writing well-meaning but kookie messages on bananas for Bristol sex workers – “you are loved” “you are strong”, “you are brave”. You can take the girl out of La-La Land but you can’t... etc.
However, the bullying of Meghan, right, on social media for publicly cradling her “bump” (she’s expecting her first baby soon) accusing her of attentionseeking, is disgusting. Almost all pregnant women instinctively place a protective hand over their bellies. I did. And most of the trolls are women. They should be ashamed.
JTHE DERANGED FACE OF TRUMP’S HAIR-BRAINED SCHEME
THANKS to Donald Trump, I’ve got to get a new passport. The freezing of the US federal payroll in his battle to build his wretched wall with Mexico meant much official paperwork ground to a halt, and my passport seems to have vanished into the depths of the American civil service.
I had to send it to them for a routine identification query. It’s still missing in their system.
As we have to go to France soon runs out of words at the end of an exhausting day’s campaign trail encounters with the media. He ends up slumped behind a microphone, flicking his lips with his fingers and saying: “Blah-blah-blah-blah” before being hurried away by concerned aides.
I wonder if Neeson had a “minder” with him this week when he gave that interview to The Independent.
I doubt he did. Their scandal-sensitive ears would have pricked up at the ominous words: “This is a true story,” and as it became clear the actor was going seriously off-piste, they would have smoothly intervened. “Mr Neeson needs a little break. Can we stop recording? Thank you.” It happens all the time, believe me.
Here’s my theory, for what it’s worth.
I think Neeson was bored rigid talking about his latest film, a pretty simple-minded revenge fantasy. I think he was desperate for some interesting conversation, even if he had to provide most of it.
So off he went on his little racist reminiscence, thinking that if he qualified it enough with lots of subsequent regrets and self-flagellation, it would be OK. I even
RAT ROUGHLY five-to-eight tomorrow night, my wife and I will withdraw into a retreat worthy of a monk’s cell. Phones will be switched off. Blinds will be drawn. I will disconnect the doorbell. Endeavour is back.
Although Shaun Evans’s young Sgt Morse is a joy, it’s Roger Allam’s trilby-wearing DCI Fred Thursday, right, who steals the show. He gets the best lines, too. “Look after your shoes, and they’ll look after you,” he tells Morse, looking sadly at the latter’s scuffed brogues.
Threatened by a cocky thug, he says simply: “Oh dear. I’ll have to take my hat off,” before dispatching him.
Lovely stuff. I started to panic and decided to get a replacement, rushing to get the photos at the same shop George Michael once crashed his car into when he was a bit out of it. Afterwards some wit scrawled “WHAM” on the wall, sadly now erased.
I examined my new photos with mounting despair. I’d had to scrape my fringe back because no hair is allowed to obscure the face in passport pictures, and neither is a smile. I resemble a deranged wonder if it even IS a true story. It sounds wildly improbable. Friend tells him she has been raped by a stranger. Neeson asks her what colour her attacker was. (Uh? That’s a pretty weird question in itself, don’t you think?) When she tells him the man was black, Neeson arms himself with a cosh and patrols the streets hoping a “black ******* ” will accost him so he can kill him.
It’s one of the oddest so-called “true” stories I’ve heard in a long time and, like many, I can’t help suspecting Neeson invented it on the spot. Otherwise why not tell it to everyone else who interviewed him about the film?
But I could be wrong: it could be the longburied, literal truth. In which case Neeson certainly was once a racist – and a homicidally dangerous one at that.
If he wanted to purge his soul 40 years on, a Hollywood “junket” (slang for these bean-feast press days) was hardly the time or place.
He should have started with a priest.
Then maybe a counsellor. Then maybe a considered article or interview. But not during a plug for his new movie.
Thursday’s perfect Sunday
centenarian who has been let out from the old folks’ home while under supervision. Which is really annoying, because I rather liked my old passport snap – I thought I looked happy and wise.
Still, I’m stuck with it, and every time I have to produce it, I will curse Donald Trump.
My only comfort is that Trump’s passport photo is bound to be even worse.
I wonder what they made him do with his hair.