July 2007

HEINZ LANDS IN THE SOUP OVER SEX CLAIMS

Mark Borkowski, a marketing expert, said companies could be naive in presenting research involving their products, and risked damaging their brands' reputation.

Lyndsay Moss - Health Correspondent - The Scotsman

It was a marketing man's dream: Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup was not only one of Britain's iconic food brands, it also improved men's fertility. Heinz yesterday trumpeted university research which showed that eating its soup could "give guys extra oomph".

http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1177742007

But the soup's rise from kitchen cupboard staple to must-buy superfood proved shortlived after The Scotsman contacted sceptical fertility experts and the company admitted it had overstated the research, which it had partly funded.

The case reveals the pressure food companies face to claim health benefits for their products as they try to cash in on the superfood phenomenon, and raises questions over use of research they commission.

Heinz's claims were based on a study involving six healthy male volunteers who were asked to consume a can of Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup every day for two weeks.

Carried out by the University of Portsmouth, the study found that a fortnight of soup-slurping had some effect on semen. Seminal levels of lycopene, the component of tomatoes which makes them red, increased by between seven and 12 per cent.

Lycopene has antioxidant properties which can help protect DNA, mopping up harmful chemicals in the body called free radicals which can play a part in infertility.

It is also known that infertile men have lower levels of lycopene in their sperm, leading to suspicions that dietary changes could help them become fathers.
The result, the company suggested, was the creation of "super sperm" with the potential to boost fertility.

Nigel Dickie, a spokesman for Heinz, said: "It's good to know that Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup could boost your mojo and give guys extra oomph. And for Heinz Ketchup lovers, the tomatoey goodness will put more ketchup in your bottle."

But in fact, the Portsmouth study found that while lycopene levels rose in semen after a period of soup consumption, there was "no measurable increase" in the sperm's ability to combat damaging free radicals.

The scientists said more research was needed to see if higher lycopene levels really would help boost fertility. Allan Pacey, secretary of the British Fertility Society, said although the study found higher lycopene levels in the sperm, it did not find any improvement in its quality to tackle infertility.

"I am convinced that diet does have an effect on fertility," he said. "Studies have shown that a healthy diet can help with conception. But I am not convinced that eating tomato soup every day for two weeks, on the basis of this data, is going to achieve that.

"I would much rather people ate fruit and vegetables and a sensible, healthy diet over the long-term."

Dr Pacey, a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield, said sperm was produced by the body over three months, so long-term changes to diet would be most effective at improving its quality, rather than a two-week alteration.

A University of Portsmouth spokesman said its scientists were "excited" by the results of the study, published in the British Journal of Urology. But he added: "While the study has demonstrated an increase in the levels of lycopene in sperm, that is only a pointer to bigger studies to find out what impact that might have on fertility. We are now in talks with Heinz to conduct a bigger study.

"But on the basis of this research alone, we cannot say that the lycopene levels in sperm boosted fertility." Later, a slightly more restrained Mr Dickie admitted: "There is more work to be done."

Mark Borkowski, a marketing expert, said companies could be naive in presenting research involving their products, and risked damaging their brands' reputation.

"Companies have to know the difference between PR and advertising," he said.

"Tomato soup is loved by people; they find it a comforting idea. You do not want to risk that kind of reputation by making statements which could turn out to be wrong."

PR STUNTS THAT I'VE LOVED

The insanity around the Prince free album debate is unbelievable. The Mail On Sunday giveaway yesterday of Prince’s Planet Earth caused uproar amongst the music retail stores who claimed it devalued music on every level. I myself think this is one of the two great publicity stunts so far this year. Prince’s album sales have gone up and down throughout his career. His last album to reach number one in the U.S. was 2131 last year, but this was his first U.S. number one for seventeen years.

Prince was paid by The Mail On Sunday an amount rumoured to be around half a million, and everyone who could get hold of a copy of the Mail on Sunday yesterday got to hear Prince’s album for free, which will without doubt, introduce a lot of new listeners to the artist. Those who couldn’t get a copy yesterday, will probably buy one when it comes on sale. The debate around whether he should have given it away free or not has created such a furore, that this has generated even more press for Prince and his album. It can only be thought of as a cunning PR stunt, along the lines of the second Stunt I want to mention which was The Simpson’s Springfield Competition.

Fox invited 32 Springfields in the U.S. to participate in a competition to host the Simpson Movie Premier and to ultimately be named as “Home of the Simpsons”. To enter the town had to submit a 3-5 minute video demonstrating enthusiasm for the Simpsons. The competition caused excitement around the world, not only the U.S. and gained global coverage. The winning town was Springfield Vermont who will host the premiere in their town’s movie theatre which holds only 300 people! It really warms my heart to see great publicity stunts like these.

FACEBOOK PHENOMENON

The last few days have seen the broad sheets chattering over the growth of Facebook and its ability to become one of the most astounding of the web 2 offerings. This development has been driven by an extremely clever and one can argue, compelling publicity stunt. All new web platforms face the problem of sustaining interest. At the moment there are hundreds of thousands of people of all ages placing their profiles on Facebook, but what’s popular today can soon become old news. The stunt is involving technical developers and inviting them to create applications that will work within Facebook, rather than Windows, the dominant operating system. Venture capitalists Bay Partners has launched a fund to invest in start ups building these applications. More than 16,000 applications have already been launched. The music sharing service, iLike, has been the most popular application already launched, adding about 1 million users each week since its launch in May. There’s a great PR spin on the brand, suggesting that Facebook has already turned down a take over bid of over 1 billion dollars and there are rumours that they are likely to go public. It’s a very clever PR Platform which emphasises the sophistication of the industry that has grown up with web 2.0

LIVE EARTH

Reading this morning’s papers, I couldn’t help but notice the lacklustre coverage for yesterday’s “Live Earth” event. It strikes me that perhaps we’ve all got big event fatigue. Two years ago I was asked to be on a panel organised by the media magazine PR Week, to judge the greatest publicity stunts of all time. Live Aid was one of them, an event which we all felt was a challenging, clever, awareness raising, life affirming, fresh and brilliant idea which generated instant fame, coverage and money. Above all; it really made a difference. Part of its success I think was that there was an overall central spokesperson, Bob Geldof, keeping it alive. Live Earth lacked this central focal point and I don’t think this helped. There is an increasing number of huge music events happening these days, and so it’s difficult to get any real impact from them. The complexities of global warming haven’t suddenly been understood and taken on board after Live Earth, and I wonder it’s actually had much effect at all or whether it was just preaching to the converted? I hope I am proved wrong.

70S POSTER ICON IS BACK, SO ANYONE FOR TENNIS GIRL?

Mark My Words
70s poster icon is back, so anyone for Tennis Girl?
July 06th, 2007 | Category: Mark My Words
From the Scotsman -

IT WAS the poster that adorned the walls of countless adolescents at the end of the 1970s and fuelled a million male fantasies. Caught in bright sunlight, a woman tennis player, lopes off court, rather indiscretely scratching a naked buttock.

Now Tennis Girl, taken by photographer Martin Elliott in 1976, is posed for a return match

The marketing expert Mark Borkowski cites Tennis Girl as “the first glossy popular pornographic shot”, adding: “It was fairly innocent - it was one of those student posters.”However, he believes its revival now is purely driven by nostalgia. “The need for those kind of bedroom images is now fulfilled by lads’ magazines. It’s playing on nostalgia, there will be more publicity than there will be sales.”

Borkowski insists Athena’s role in popular culture history was a commercial one. “They were the first to provide cheap posters you could adorn your horrible bedside wall with.”

http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=1052912007

70s poster icon is back, so anyone for Tennis Girl?
FERGUS SHEPPARD (fsheppard@scotsman.com)
IT WAS the poster that adorned the walls of countless adolescents at the end of the 1970s and fuelled a million male fantasies. Caught in bright sunlight, a woman tennis player, lopes off court, rather indiscretely scratching a naked buttock.

Now Tennis Girl, taken by photographer Martin Elliott in 1976, is posed for a return match. The £2 poster that helped to establish Athena as the pioneering high-street supplier of cheap art is being reissued, but at a price. For £300, middle-aged men who grow restless as they recall the svelte teenager of the original can have a limited-edition, canvas reprint of the shot for their walls. Until now, the only place to get hold of the poster has been on auction websites such as eBay, where copies of the original can appear for £300.

Elliott, now 60, says the picture was posed at a tennis court in Birmingham. Neither he nor the model - his then girlfriend, 18-year-old Fiona Butler - could actually play tennis and the equipment and whites were borrowed.

Taken as Britain came to the end of one of the hottest summers on record, it was issued as a poster by Athena in 1978 and sold about two million copies. It was a steady seller throughout the 1980s, and only went of circulation in 1994 when Athena's parent company put its troubled high street stores into receivership.

Elliott says he has received regular requests to reissue Tennis Girl over the years. The retro fad for the 1970s and 1980s has only underlined its place in the pantheon of post-modern kitsch. Jonathan Ross, Frank Skinner and Ricky Gervais are among those who confess to being fans of the shot, and Kylie Minogue referenced the famous bare-bottomed pose for a cover of the men's magazine GQ.

But did Elliott know he was creating a classic as the shutter clicked on that summer day in 1976? "Christ, no. My conversations with Athena revolved around what was it that was making every bloody person buy it. There was no formula. It is just one of those odd things that happens occasionally in every sphere of life; something inexplicably becomes famous."

Tennis Girl was only one of Athena's products that decorated a generation of bedsits and student halls of residence throughout the 1980s. Erotikiss, an airbrushed sapphic fantasy of two women kissing, became a trademark image, as did the likes of Long Distance Kiss by Syd Brak. A 1986 Athena poster called L'Enfant, right - more commonly known as Man and Baby - achieved iconic status and massive sales with its depiction of a bare-chested man holding a baby, its mixture of muscle and apparent new-man sensibility catching the female imagination.

However, Howard Sounes, author of Seventies: The Sights, Sounds and Ideas of a Brilliant Decade, has a rather more basic explanation for the success of Tennis Girl. "It's soft porn to put on a teenage boy's wall so he can gaze at a girl with no knickers. It's not art, it's just soft porn... it's not a particularly good picture."

Sounes also says the focus on kitsch icons such as Tennis Girl overlooks the true pop-art achievements of David Hockney, Gilbert and George and Andy Warhol in the same decade.

The marketing expert Mark Borkowski cites Tennis Girl as "the first glossy popular pornographic shot", adding: "It was fairly innocent - it was one of those student posters."

However, he believes its revival now is purely driven by nostalgia. "The need for those kind of bedroom images is now fulfilled by lads' magazines. It's playing on nostalgia, there will be more publicity than there will be sales."

Borkowski insists Athena's role in popular culture history was a commercial one. "They were the first to provide cheap posters you could adorn your horrible bedside wall with."

In addition to its airbrushed fantasies of enigmatic women with ruby lips and blue-lidded eyes - some sporting the Sony Walkman headsets just emerging in the era - Athena also did much to popularise classic black-and-white photography, typified by 1950's Kiss by the Hotel de Ville taken by Parisian photographer Robert Doisneau. Athena was not entirely preoccupied with the artistic qualities of monochrome, however - it also knew black-and-white pictures would go with pretty well any kind of wallpaper.

Athena's demise was a mixture of the artistic and the commercial: airbrush art had become rather passé by the 90s, and Athena stores found themselves often in shopping centres with high rent but little passing custom. Some stores, sold to independent buyers, still remain, but large chain stores such as IKEA have arguably filled the gap for new homeowners who need to put Dali reprints or 1920s shots of New York skyscraper workers on their sparse walls.

Elliott split up with his girlfriend in 1979, and, for her, Tennis Girl appears to have been a less than happy experience. "Fiona never really wanted to be associated with it. She got married to a very wealthy guy and I was perceived as the ex-boyfriend, which I was. She tried to dismiss the picture for his sake. There was a time when the tabloids tried to get hold of her [but] she never wanted to talk about it."

In a 2001 interview, Fiona, now a mother of three and married to a millionaire, said: "I'm not at all embarrassed about that photo."

She said she had not made a penny from the picture, but insisted: I don't want to be in the news again."

Elliott holds no cultural claims for Tennis Girl. "I see it as a photographic seaside postcard, I suppose. It was staged; neither of us played or had any interest in tennis whatsoever. It was just an idea we had."

Now living in retirement in Cornwall, he will only say the royalty cheques are "a nice little pension". He goes on: "People say, 'You must be a millionaire', but that is ridiculous. You do okay. It's a nice little earner, though I know that's an Arthur Daley phrase."

The photographer owns the copyright to the image and has not licensed it to any poster company since the demise of the Athena chain, occasionally selling rights to the image to newspapers and magazines.

But he has given the go-ahead to art company Pyramid Posters to produce 1,850 canvas reproductions, 23.6ins by 31.5ins, which it plans to sell online.

Ally Mayer, managing director of Pyramid Posters, said: "Tennis Girl is one of the most famous images of all time. It has a huge following, which has grown enormously since it came off the market 25 years ago.

"We are anticipating a huge demand, from both Tennis Girl fans, old and new, and art collectors keen to make an investment."

Elliott says he has only agreed to this reissue because it will be produced on canvas.

He says he will sign the limited editions, but may have no need to display one in his own home. "I have one poster of Tennis Girl on my wall," he admits

This article: http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=1052912007

GEORGE MELLY

It’s a sad day today as George Melly is dead. He was one of the true entertainers and raconteurs. I met him when I was working as a fledgling publicist at the Wyvern Theatre in Swindon where George would entertain the citizens of Swindon with his peculiar stage performances. One of his greatest fans was my mother who really thought her son had made it when I introduced her to him backstage. Years later, I reconnected with him in the Assembly Room members bar at Edinburgh where he regaled me with stories, many too rude to put on the blog. His funniest involved a housemaster masturbating into a saucer, then pretending to be a cat and licking it up. The surrounding detail to the tale is equally exotic and it’s a very sad day when such a colourful character has departed this life.

PROUD SPONSORS OF THE GENOCIDE OLYMPICS

This arrived in my inbox this morning read the full article in Business Week. The practicalities of the commercial world.

Proud Sponsors of the Genocide Olympics
Business Week, June 21, 2007

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jun2007/gb20070621_511854.htm

Among the nightmares that might plague a marketing executive, bankrolling an event that some call the Genocide Olympics could well be one of the worst. But that’s just what the likes of Adidas, Coca-Cola (KO), General Electric (GE), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Kodak, McDonald’s (MCD), Samsung, Visa, and others are facing. As Beijing prepares for the Summer Games in August, 2008, activists around the world are planning to take China to task over issues ranging from the Dalai Lama to Darfur. And the multinationals that have coughed up tens of millions of dollars to sponsor the Olympics are caught in a public-relations bind.

BAD GIRL ARMY

She's the biggest thing to come out of Britain since The Spice Girls. But will the wine, the man and the attitude be enough for Amy Winehouse?

There is nothing conventional about Amy Winehouse. She seems to have sprung fully formed from a subterranean music dungeon – a creature of extravagant plumage, big hair, black mascara trowelled on, red lips like slices of juicy plums. She is a kind of cross between a member of The Ronettes and a Goth Dusty Springfield.

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,21996773-5005368,00.html

Scantily dressed to kill, tattooed to the max and with more attitude than a street-walking cheetah, Winehouse, 23, is an archetype and might have tilted into the caricature of a bad-girl rock-chick were it not for her music.

She is not just a bad girl bellowing male-oriented rock songs or playing the riot-girl game. She is a strange, elliptical, jazz balladeer, composing complex confessional songs that expose the underbelly of her addictions, her lovers, her personality.

Onstage she is barely coherent, slugging back glassfuls of wine or some form of alcohol to keep her machinery oiled. She is part panto bad sister, part street-smart guttersnipe. She is the diabolical Ms Hyde to the wimpish Jekylls represented by Joss Stone, Dido and Norah Jones.
The weirdest thing is that Winehouse looks and, to a certain extent, sounds like Tennessee trailer trash. She is the kind of woman you’d expect to meet slinging hash in a hick-town diner who’s just got out of jail for taking an axe to her boyfriend’s mistress.

She’s got danger written all over her almost literally in the fact that her tattoos depict pneumatic women with impressive figures. She has the cartoon character Betty Boop tattooed on her back. She has the name of her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, etched on her left breast plus a horseshoe, a lightning bolt and an anchor on her midriff emblazoned with the words “Hello Sailor”. She got her first tattoo at “about 15” and now has around a dozen.

Talking of her parents’ reaction to her first “ink”, she says: “My parents pretty much realised I would do whatever I wanted and that was it, really.”

Unlike Pete Doherty, whose disgraces just make him seem pathetic, Winehouse is relentlessly endearing. This in spite of any number of bad habits.

She drinks too much, swears too much, mutilates herself, suffers from anorexia and bulimia, smokes cannabis, beats up her boyfriends and misbehaves in an epic manner. Not so much a role model for the nation’s young women, more a distillation of all the evils with which they are often associated. And yet she is adored.

Of all the Winehouse gossip keeping the tabloids busy, the most constant staple has been her on-off affair with the man who has now become her husband. But, aside from his association with Winehouse, little is known about Fielder-Civil, 25, except that next month he will appear in court on a grievous bodily harm charge after a landlord was injured in a pub brawl in London’s East End.
Has music’s bad girl wed a bad boy?

“I used to go out clubbing with Blake,” says a friend, who did not wish to be named.
“He’s kind of a charming bad boy. He’s the sort of bloke who’s got all the chat – who’s got a little twinkle in his eye. He’ll go out and misbehave and do who knows what, but he’d never let a woman go through a door second.

“He’s always called a music video assistant, or a gopher.”
To all observers of the pair, commitment seemed the last thing on their mind when they suddenly wed. They had only recently been reunited after a short split. So it was out of the blue when Fielder-Civil, after an inevitable night on the tiles in May, asked Winehouse to marry him. A day later, Winehouse said yes. Cue another celebration. The event was that rarest of things in the celebrity universe – spontaneous. There was no publicity campaign, no deal with Hello! magazine. Just a $140 ceremony and a 48-hour hotel room lock-in.

The ceremony itself was pure rock ’n’ roll. Winehouse arrived at the marriage bureau in Florida clad in a short halter-neck floral-print dress. Fielder-Civil was sporting a ’50s-style grey suit and trilby. There were no guests and the couple moved on to the Big Pink Diner in Miami where they toasted their union with a breakfast of burgers and fries.

Winehouse’s mother, Janis, was distraught at being left out. So Winehouse has agreed to hold “a large family bash” in London, to appease her mother, although she says her taxi driver father, Mitchell, is “going to kick my head in – he’s still got to pay for the proper wedding”.
The wedded couple appear to be as happy as puppies. At a recent gig she spent most of the evening mouthing “I love you” at her husband (who, for good measure, has a new tattoo reading “AMY” behind his ear).

She told the crowd: “I don’t know if you heard, but I just got married to the best man in the world.”
If it had been Britney, or Paris or Lindsay, we would all be asking for the sick-bag. But there is something deliciously unpremeditated about the continuing saga that is Amy Winehouse. Elton John says he worships at her feet. Lily Allen wishes she were more like her. Even Jo Brand is a self-confessed fan.

The famous fans, the musical accolades and tabloid escapades are all a far cry from Winehouse’s middle-class, Jewish background in Southgate, North London. Amy Jade Winehouse was born on September 14, 1983, four years after brother Alex, to Mitchell, a taxi driver, and Janice, now a pharmacist. Music runs in her family.

Her mother and father brought her up on a diet of Sinatra, Dinah Washington and Ella Fitzgerald, setting the tone for her future career. Her uncles are also professional jazz musicians and her grandmother once went out with Ronnie Scott.

“With my schoolfriends I listened to hip-hop and Missy Elliott, “ she reveals. “But jazz was my private thing. From the age of 11 I was listening to Ella. I loved her.” \

At 10, Winehouse and best friend Juliette Ashby formed a rap duo called Sweet-N-Sour, modelled on the duo Salt-N-Pepa. At 12, she won a scholarship to the Sylvia Young Theatre School but was expelled for “not applying herself” and for piercing her nose.

Her parents had separated when Amy was nine and, while they remain a close family, it is possible the split marked the beginning of her self-destructive streak.

“My childhood was really good,” she says. “We lived in a semi-detached house down the road from my gran. My dad left when I was nine. They sat us down and said ‘We’re separating’. It was all very open. I think it hit my brother worse.

“All I knew was that it meant I could wear make-up, short skirts and swear at my mum. I didn’t mind Dad going because I thought it would be fun and I knew he wouldn’t disappear, he’d always be there.”

Success beckoned after she joined the National Youth Jazz Orchestra. After her then boyfriend passed her demo to a record-company man, she signed to Island and a management contract with 19, the company founded by Simon Fuller, the man behind the Spice Girls.

Her debut album Frank went platinum and Winehouse won an Ivor Novello award aged just 21. Frank Jones, who helped co-write songs on the album, said she was “unlike anything that had ever come through my radar” and her two albums have received the kind of critical acclaim artists twice her age would die for.

In common with many catapulted into the limelight at an early age, Winehouse embraced the excesses of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle with a recklessness bordering on the suicidal. Although her father claims she is not an alcoholic because she does not drink every day, one feels he is being overprotective or plain disingenuous.

Many of her appearances on stage or on television have been marred by her inability to perform properly due to her drunkenness. An attempt to duet with Charlotte Church on the latter’s chat show was toe-curlingly embarrassing. She smashed her foot into a glass table and slurred her way through Michael Jackson’s Beat It. The worst scenes were edited out but Winehouse defended herself by saying: “I was drunk. Charlotte invited me on the show so she must know I’m a bit of a liability.”

She also famously turned up at a recent awards ceremony several hours late.

Reports suggest her new husband is unable to control his wife’s drunken rages and has been beaten up by her.

“I’m either a really good drunk or I’m an out-and-out s***, horrible, violent, abusive, emotional drunk,” she admits.

Her capacity for self-harm seems to be growing exponentially with self-inflicted cuts on her left forearm. Then there’s her strange behaviour while briefly split from Fielder-Civil to date musician and chef Alex Claire.

On one occasion in Camden’s Dublin Castle, the disgruntled chef says he was with Winehouse when she started selling kisses to punters for shots of tequila.

Claire, who sold his story to News of the World under the headline “Bondage Crazed Amy Just Can’t Beehive in Bed”, claimed she would be seen out with him one night and with Fielder-Civil the next. And despite her promises to Claire, Winehouse could not bring herself to remove the tattoo above her left breast that reads “Blake’s pocket”.

Her ex-suitor concludes Winehouse has “cut out my heart, bit a chunk out of it, threw it on the floor and stomped all over it”.

“She’s scared to be happy. I hope she finds happiness one day,” he says.
But happiness is not a cut-and-dried term when applied to the Winehouse and Fielder-Civil union.
“There’s always been a kind of Fatal Attraction element to their relationship – it’s like they can’t live without each other,” one friend says.

Says another: “We hoped the pair would calm down now they’re married, but the problems are as bad as ever for both of them. It’s incredibly worrying.”

So what’s next for Winehouse and her husband, whom she calls Baby.
“There is a definite trajectory to these things,” says PR consultant Mark Borkowski, “where someone like Amy Winehouse enjoys a honeymoon period. That’s happening now.

“Festivals are about to start, she’s just got married. The question is, how long can it go on?”
But Winehouse is not somebody who exists purely as a celebrity. She made her name because of her extraordinary voice and, to a certain extent, her extraordinary style. So she does not need the publicity in the same way that someone like Paris Hilton does. But there will come a time, says Borkowski, when her liberal attitude to the media comes back to bite her.

“Like many people of her generation, she’s very comfortable with all the attention,” he says. “There’s a sense in which that whole circle – Pete Doherty, Kate Moss et al – are anaesthetised to it. But there is a value to keeping yourself out of the press. Because at some point, you may wish it to stop.

“That’s going to be difficult for Amy Winehouse. She and her husband have sent out signals that they don’t want to be left alone, and further down the line, I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw her hand in the lens of some paparazzo.”

But while indulgent Brits and Aussies are prepared to shrug off this kind of behaviour, the Americans might not be so generous. US audiences who have been won over by her musical talent have been shocked to discover that a singer they assumed was a fortysomething American black woman is a 23-year-old white Jewish Londoner.

In the case of excessive bad behaviour, Americans like their stars to be penitent in public. But Winehouse, whose most famous single Rehab tells of how she refused to go into a care unit, is unlikely to start wearing sackcloth and ashes any time soon.

Her route from being a nice, plump, shy, anxious, middle-class Jewish kid to an extreme panto bad girl of skinnily cartoonish proportions leads to the obvious conclusion that her demons are not being exorcised through her music. No amount of confessional songs and brilliant performances will substitute for the time in rehab she so evidently needs.

Her end goal skips that step. She says what she really wants to do in 10 years’ time is to settle down and be a good Jewish mum.

“I love parties and rock ’n’ roll,” she confesses, “but secretly I’m never happier than when I’m cleaning. In 10 years’ time I’m gonna be looking after my husband and our seven kids. I’d really like to get everyone in one place and sit down and eat a meal together.

“I would like to uphold certain things, but not the religious side of things, just the nice family things to do. At the end of the day, I’m a Jewish girl.”

ROYALS TO THE LIONS

Peter McKay in today’s Daily Mail suggests that Princes Harry and William are being advised by their media minders to go for the easy option when being interviewed. McKay thinks the Princes should not seek to control their questions and should perhaps face Jeremy Paxman or John Humphrys. In my opinion, the Royal Family get enough of a battering from the media, so if the Princes choose to media manage, then good on them. The punters don’t distinguish between an OK interview or a Paxman interview. We’re in the age of Heat and Closer Magazines, why should the Princes chose to face the lions if they don’t have to?