Damien Hirst's attempts to ingratiate himself with his neighbours in the Cotswold village of Chalford, near Stroud, may have backfired. I hear he has generously offered the locals a brand-new sculpture to display alfresco. But sadly for the homme terrible (no one's an enfant at 41), the good burghers have turned him down - for "aesthetic" reasons, I gather. I suppose rural folk associate dead cows and pickled sheep more with everyday life than with six-figure sums. Still, I'm sure he meant well.
More controversially, perhaps, a leading light in the anti-Britart Stuckist movement, Michael Dickinson, is languishing in jail in Turkey. His crime: exhibiting a collage in Istanbul that represented the Turkish PM, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as a dog. So far Tony Blair has ignored pleas to intervene. But then Blair is backing Turkey's bid to enter the EU, which he is "proud to champion" despite the country's human-rights record. Mmmm . . .
Glad to see Cracker coming back to the small screen after eight years away, Robbie Coltrane (above right) acting his socks off in his impressive return as the whisky-guzzling, chain-smoking forensic psychologist. Word at the launch was how expensive the old fella is to insure because of his, erm, "unhealthy lifestyle".
Equity's 35,000 or so members have been sent a postcard urging them to persuade their MP to lobby Gordon Brown to give more money to the arts. It dropped out of the union's rather lame in-house magazine this past week and hasn't found favour with some actors I know. One famous member wailed: "This is embarrassing . . . Do they still think it's the 1970s? At least then we had some high-profile leadership with the likes of Laurence Olivier. Now no one has heard of anyone at the top." What, President Harry Landis? Or council member Roy Marsden of Adam Dalgliesh fame? Maybe he does have a point.
Actress Tamzin Outhwaite (pictured below left) is - with refreshing honesty, one has to say - feeling embarrassed at being hailed in the tabloids as the star of Woody Allen's latest film (set in London and starring Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell). "I am basically the girlfriend of someone and you barely see me," she says. "It's in and out. Blink and you'll miss it. It's nothing."
I hear the next big project for Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood mogul, will be The True Story of Alexander Graham Bell. He has given oodles of development money to a project that turns the life of the great Scottish inventor into a love story (naturally). No word as yet on casting, but the film will show Bell making his discovery by experimenting with vibrations in an effort to help, and also woo, Mabel Hubbard, the deaf mute who became his wife.
Meanwhile, over at the London Film Festival, BFI bigwig Amanda Nevill has been boasting about the four world premières among the 181 features and 131 short films showing in the season, which starts 18 October. You'd expect a slightly better show in what is, after all, the LFF's 50th anniversary.
bendowell@btinternet.com
