New role for Berlusconi

Silvio Berlusconi is writing a screenplay. The former Italian Prime Minister let it be known at the weekend that he has begun writing a film that will hit Italian cinemas next year. A spokesman for his Forza Italia party later confirmed that he really meant it, and wasn’t making one of his famous “jokes”.

Many will recall other hilarious Berlusconi jokes, such as when he called a German MEP a “concentration camp guard” in 2003, or his 2005 gag that companies should invest in Italy to snare “the most beautiful secretaries in the world”. Sadly, and a little surprisingly, there is no suggestion that his cinema debut will be a comedy.

Berlusconi has previously been credited as a producer and owns majority shares in Medusa, the distributor, and Mediaset, the broadcaster. So, funny or not, chances are it will get made. We can’t wait.

— True, Salman Rushdie has caused an international furore, once again, by accepting a knighthood. True, there have been effigies burnt of the Queen and renewed death threats issued from excitable Iranians. On the plus side, 19 years after publication, The Satanic Verses is sitting at a very respectable eleventh place in the Amazon sales rankings. For every cloud, a silver lining.

— A racing kart belonging to Lewis Hamilton has sold on eBay for £42,100. Hamilton, 22, will donate the money to Tommy’s, the baby charity.

“It is pretty fast, just how I like it,” the Formula One ace wrote on the site, adding that he was selling because Vodafone McLaren Mercedes had “given me a much faster vehicle”.

Hamilton has promised the new owner some driving tips.

— Half of a telephone conversation overheard outside the launch of Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles at Serpentine Gallery: “Ja, ja. It is like ze 1980s in there. Mein Gott. Never so many of these people all together since that time. To one man I said, ‘I am a correspondent for Der Spiegel’. ‘Ha ha!’ he said. ‘Everybody in here is somebody except for you’.”

This is exactly how it was.

— Making a presentation from the stage at the Mojo Awards, Harry Enfield was keen to big-up his rock star connections. “I used to take Lily Allen to school,” he said quite impressively, reminding his audience that he used to live with the singer’s mother. And then, altogether less impressively: “In an Austin Montego.”

Isn’t he supposed to have had loadsamoney?

— Apologies for our mistake yesterday, in which we stupidly confused the Arts Council (funded by Tessa Jowell) with the British Council (funded by the Foreign Office). This made the latter call, not to deny that it had lied to us about Jowell and Tracey Emin having a fight at the Venice Biennale (they did) but to deny that it had a sensible reason for doing so. Go figure.

— Jack Straw, Leader of the House, briefed MPs yesterday on Commons modernisation. It had become easier to work with whips, he noted, because Jacqui Smith (the Chief Whip) was “a member of the human race”. One bright spark asked him to prove it. Straw just blushed and spoke in Latin. What alien race is he?

Postscript

A new image for Billie Piper, who has begun filming her new series Belle de Jour, based on the cult internet diaries supposedly written by a top-end London prostitute. Rather different, this, from her more familiar role as Rose Tyler in Doctor Who. Although phone boxes, in a sense, presumably remain key.

— “When I write something, half the time I don’t have a specific idea of what it’s about,” Sir Paul McCartney tells The Word magazine, elaborating testily: “I’ve always had that wave of people who interpret things and say, ‘Oooh . . . he’s talking about Yoko.’ And I’m thinking, ‘What? I’m bloody not. I’m talking about a car’.” Yoko, Volvo, easy mistake.

— John Travolta is confident that his presence in the remake of Hairspray will ensure box-office success. “You have to trust that people want to see me be this big fat woman who can sing and dance,” he tells W Magazine. A mistake made by Eddie Murphy too often.

— Billboards advertising a radio station and featuring a bald Britney Spears above the slogans “Total Nut Jobs” and “Certifiable” have been removed in Tampa, Florida. The singer’s lawyers felt that they amounted to “offensive, unauthorised, commercial exploitation”. Considering Britney’s career hitherto, the real objection is probably the “unauthorised” bit.

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