More bad news for the PM. In January, More 4 will be airing The Trial of Tony Blair, in which Robert Lindsay repeats his turn as the Labour leader. This time, Blair is put on trial for war crimes after he leaves power. To make matters worse, the channel has commissioned a clutch of newspaper cartoonists to mark the event. Steve Bell's contribution revisits the famous shot of Tone and Cherie grinning outside No 10 in 1997, mirrored by the same image outside Wormwood Scrubs. The effort by the Independent's David Brown is perhaps the cruellest. It shows Blair putting on his tie in the mirror but Saddam Hussein reflected back in an identical pose - with the tie replaced by a hangman's noose.
Watch out for two new reality-TV stars in the new year: the Chapman brothers (right) are keen to make their debut. "I phoned up and tried to get a place on Celebrity Shark Bait," Dinos Chapman tells me, "but they said I wasn't 'ITV enough' and gave it to Ruby Wax instead." TV bosses might be forgiven for exercising some caution: Dinos is keen to play "mind games" on other contestants, and talks fondly of his plans to smuggle "a large bucket of LSD" on to Celebrity Big Brother.
Undeterred by the disaster that was the big-screen version of Thunderbirds, the British film company Working Title is turning its attention to another kiddies' favourite: this time, adapting Roald Dahl's much-loved 1980 novel The Twits. Hamish McColl, co-writer of The Play What I Wrote, that smash West End homage to Morecambe and Wise, is already on board.
Organisers of the Beijing Olympics have been wooing the British screenwriter and director Anthony Minghella. They flew him out there a couple of weeks ago to discuss a possible "artistic contribution" to the event's opening ceremony. His brilliant production of Madame Butterfly is probably what impressed the Chinese. It can't have been his most recent flick, Breaking and Entering, which was dismissed by the critics as "diffuse" and "strangely out of touch".
There's a sequel in the pipeline for You're Fayed, Keith Allen's 2005 documentary about Mohamed Al Fayed. "Mo" has agreed to the project, apparently after giggling about it with his friend Jacques Chirac during a recent visit to Paris. Oh, the weird world of the rich, powerful and famous. What's more, I hear Al Fayed has letters from the Princess of the Wales that he may make public in the new film - and that they are "dynamite".
bendowell@ btinternet.com
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