Fox (n): carnivore of genus vulpes; crafty person; scavenger; (vb) to confuse; -ed (adj): to be drunk.
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Monday 30 April 2012

Sleb speak.

CELEBRITIES don't speak the same way as the rest of us.

Firstly they live in a place where everyone loves them, and people are rarely mean. They are the prettiest person in the room, always sunny-natured, and they never get zits. Whenever I see someone famous directly quoted all I can hear in my head is "tra-la-la!", because that's pretty much what they usually mean.

If there's something unpleasant to be said, they don't speak at all. They publicly ignore it while getting their spokesman to talk about the unpleasant things to friendly journalists in return for getting their point across without things looking ugly.

There are plenty of genuine, nice and fairly normal people who happen to be famous - but I'd argue they're not 'celebrities'. They're actors or singers or whatever. 'Celebrities' are people who went on the telly and became famous overnight. They usually can't do anything useful at all, and in order to keep the pretence going they have to be flawless in every other respect.

It's this simple fact of high-profile life - and frankly if I was on the telly on Saturday nights I'd be careful what I said everywhere else too - which causes a lot of celebs problems. Sometimes their spokesman oversteps the mark, and sometimes they don't realise when they ought to shut up.

That's what led, I presume, to Simon Cowell giving hours of one-on-one interviews to someone writing an 'unauthorised' biography. This would be fine if Simon were a normal human being, but he's spent the past 30 years or so in the music industry surrounded by twonks trying to suck up to him and he sounds, in all honesty, like a bit of a mess.

Black toilet rolls aside, he has the same attitude towards sex, boobs and conquests as a 14-year-old boy, and slightly less charm. To sit down and reveal that unpleasantness to a journalist is very funny for us, but not a great move for him.

The same rule has applied to the former TV talent show contestant which is Cheryl Tweedy, a pretty girl who's not much of a singer and has managed to make everyone forget about how she's a tattooed thug who whacked a nice Nigerian lady in a nightclub toilet over a 10p lollipop.


Cheryl - because she can't be seen to do this herself - appears to have allowed a spokesman to say she was upset that Cowell's book said he wanted to sleep with her, accused her of playing up to him, and say that he felt "like a mouse being played with by a beautiful cat".

It has been reported "Cheryl thinks Simon is a creep and the last man on Earth she'd sleep with", and "Cheryl's camp are furious", presumably because saying it herself would make her look like she reads the papers, lives in the same world as the rest of us or cares, which of course would never do.

But she also illustrates the flaw in celeb-speak - which is that, when they do talk, they're not that bright.

So on the one hand we have 'Cheryl's camp' furious that she's being treated as a sex object, and on the other we have the great muse herself posing in a series of outfits that won't zip up talking about how much she likes sex, wants to sleep with Prince Harry, is only interested in having babies and is actually quite old-fashioned.


Yes, dear, you look and sound like 1984. Or is she trying to recreate the spy-in-a-bag look?

(It must be a coincidence that her new single is out soon and it's not getting much airtime on the radio).

She also says she's thinking about writing her autobiography - well, talking about stuff that makes her look good to someone else who will write it for her - because she wants to "say things from my point of view".

Is it going to be called "Tra La La?" Because it should be.

The only reason I'd be interested in Cheryl Tweedy's point of view is if she could explain how you can zip yourself in and then padlock the bag from outside.

But if she wants to carry on being flawless she really ought to put a sock in it.