Mad Tv Characters

One of the characters most revealed in Piers Morgan's new book, The Insider, serialised in the Daily Mail, is Cherie Blair. The most telling moment comes soon after her husband becomes Prime Minister in 1997, when she pleads with the then editor of the Daily Mirror not to give her "the Diana treatment".

Against all expectations, including mine, Morgan's diaries are riveting. They reveal Cherie as a woman racked with insecurity, yet pumped up by a vanity strange and unexpected in one to whom nature has not been generous.

Why on earth would anyone want to give Cherie "the Diana treatment"? The princess was then a spectacularly beautiful and stylish woman, an icon for a generation, loved by the people and tireless in her charity work. Cherie was a dumpy mum-of-three, distinguished only by her ruthless ambition, and who, when it came to fashion and style, put the "neigh" into clothes horse.

For her most recent charity work, a tour of Australia to aid children with cancer, Cherie personally pocketed more money than went to the sick kids. Diana indeed!

As for her pleading with Morgan not to publish the infamous pictures of her sunbathing topless, no editor could have survived the loss in sales.

Monday morning, Woman's Hour, and a steely Jenni Murray interrogating Tony Blair about why women don't believe him any more--it doesn't get much better than that. As I left the flat for the Royal Free Hospital, the PM was claiming great improvements from the extra billions he had poured into the National Health Service, especially in the treatment of breast cancer.

Credit where it is due: it is excellent that now women need wait only two weeks to see a specialist and have a diagnosis on discovering a lump.

Alas, I had already waited seventeen and a half weeks just for an appointment for a biopsy, which is not even the beginning of "treatment" in the new Labour scheme of things. But it serves me and many like me right for having such an unfashionable condition. There is no political priority on skin cancer.

Until we who use the NHS regularly can see it improving for the many illnesses, and not just the few headline-grabbing ones, we will go on distrusting Blair and his wasted billions.

The Woman's Hour interviews with the three leaders have been absolutely first rate, particularly the one with Blair. BBC TV has few enough top-rate female political interviewers. Give Jenni a show.

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Despite her mad Marxist tendencies, I've always been a great admirer of Vanessa Redgrave's work as an actress. Yet she didn't look her best on her newspaper review on Breakfast With Frost. I hope we can just put it down to the rigours of her rehearsals for the RSC production of Euripides's Hecuba in April.

Prince Charles lamented to Gavin Hewitt, as recounted in Hewitt's gripping new book, A Soul on Ice: a life in news, that the great unwashed had tortured him over his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles--she that other great unwashed, according even to her friends. "I thought the British public were supposed to be compassionate," he moaned. "I don't see it." As usual, Charles missed the point entirely. We feel compassion for those who are suffering, not the insufferable.

And while we're on the subject of men behaving badly: what kind of person sits on the GMTV sofa for 12 years being unpleasant to every woman who has the misfortune to be his co-presenter; rakes in nearly half a million pounds a year for two and a half hours' work, three times a week; gets sacked (sorry, decides to leave); then turns upon the programme that made him a household name-before he's even left? Enter Eamonn Holmes, the only man in TV worth his weight in gold. This week, he incautiously threw it around in the Daily Mirror, in a parting shot at the show that made him a star.

The Pavarotti of popular TV would have been wise to make sure he had another job before he started dumping on the one he's just left. Loyalty still counts for something in this business.

Brian MacArthur's launch for his book Surviving the Sword, at the Imperial War Museum London, was a tribute to one of the finest and nicest men in this business.

I first met Brian when he was launch editor of the Today newspaper. It was doomed, but we didn't know that then. Fresh off the boat, I saw nothing suspicious in my being the only features sub employed for a seven-day operation. They were exciting times; Today was the first colour paper in Britain and the first "new-tech" one, too.

There was also the newspaper's founder, Eddy Shah, who said of MacArthur: "I have only ever dealt with one journalist I felt I truly trusted." You are not alone, Eddy.

COPYRIGHT 2005 New Statesman, Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group

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