Watching brief - Amanda Platell denounces the new Becks hairstyle
Published 26 May 2003
Who are the models for journalists in the BBC's new political thriller? Not the Sun's Rebekah Wade or the Sunday Mirror's Tina Weaver: both are far too well-dressed
BBC1's new thriller State of Play has got me wondering: who done it? Not who killed the beautiful young mistress of the high-flying new Labour MP, happily married with two gorgeous kids, but who provided the background information about hacks to Paul Abbott, the writer? His journalist characters are so clumsily and curiously put together, they're more Frankenstein than Fleet Street.
The shambolic editor is tolerant but assertive (like they are), upmarket but not posh (that narrows it down a bit), smart but makes stupid jokes. I suppose the only ones we can rule out at the moment are the Sun's Rebekah Wade and the Sunday Mirror's Tina Weaver. They're both far too well-dressed. So who is the editor based on?
As for the edgy hack with a heart Cal McCaffrey, played by John Simm, my best bet is that he is a cross between the Guardian's Kevin Toolis and the Daily Mirror's Tony Parsons. And the lawyer was just a joke - sharp-suited, tough-talking, risk-taking. In all my years in journalism I have met but two in-house lawyers: they were anything but cowardly in the face of a difficult story but neither owned a decent suit. One assumes the newspaper's a broadsheet, what with cutting remarks such as "did the paper shrink while I was away?", a title like the Herald and the fact that the staff never discuss soccer in their editorial meetings.
The programme did achieve a first for me. At the end of the show, you could turn over to BBC4 to see part two, which I duly did for the first time.
The sisterhood came out in force at the weekend - in the right-wing press - to defend Clare Short. Suzanne Moore argued in the Mail on Sunday that, whatever her flaws, Short was still worth 12 Geoff Hoons. I'm not quite sure how much of a compliment that is. She concurred with Germaine Greer in the Sunday Telegraph, who also believes women are treated differently to men in politics, and that the bonkers label is saved and savoured especially for fallen women. "Success is less the result of hard work than low cunning," wrote Greer. Men, she continued, have mastered the art of not doing the work yet taking the credit for it. In my experience, she is absolutely right.
But I can forgive Short anything on reading in the Sunday Times Atticus column that she had not only doubled her overseas development budget, but increased her department's booze bill by 600 per cent, from £10,000 to £74,000.
David Beckham has a new hairstyle. Who cares, you cry? Well, it seems millions of people do, as more column inches were devoted to our soccer captain's recently acquired cornrows than to the suicide bombing of the Middle East road map. The broadsheets largely looked away, choosing to feature that other footballer with an equally silly hairstyle - but alas a permanent one - David Seaman. At least Seaman had done something, captaining a triumphant Arsenal in the Cup final.
Beckham had his braids installed as a mark of respect for his "lifelong hero Nelson Mandela" after wangling a photo op with him. This is the kind of grotesquely cynical tokenism we have come to expect from our politicians, Becks, not our sports stars.
Apparently he unveiled his Bo Derek look at the weekend in Nice so as not to upstage Mandela later in the week.
With the looks of Tarzan, the voice of Jane and the intellect of any one of the small apes that shared their jungle home, Beckham is the kind of soft lad who would think apartheid was an Armani diffusion label. Lifelong hero indeed.
The Mail on Sunday revealed that our brave Falklands veteran Prince Andrew was in Rabat on the night of the suicide bomb attacks in Casablanca. Demonstrating that indomitable British spirit, the "playboy prince" kept partying with his billionaire Arab friend. The Duke of York is not a playboy prince - he's just a play prince, the kind of royalty that deprives monarchists of a reason to believe.
I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! runner-up John Fashanu launched a vicious attack on the presenters Ant and Dec after the ITV show ended, claiming the "bastards revelled" in his agony. No, Fash, a nation revelled in your agony. And with such pearls of wisdom as "If you're a man drowning, save yourself first, because you can't save anyone else until you've done that", we are reminded why your discomfort gave us such pleasure.
Another G2 coup, getting Christine Hamilton to review Channel 4's Mary Archer: my life with Jeffrey. Christine wrote: "The main difference between [us] is that her husband has lied to, cheated and deceived her personally . . ." As opposed to embarrassing your friends, colleagues and the entire Tory party, Christine?
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