Jolie and Pitt take on aid

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (that bloke who follows her carrying the kids) are to produce a big-budget series about the lives of aid workers.

Jolie’s passion for international developmentish things is well established. She is forever arriving in impoverished regions, not always to pick up children, and has carved out a reputation as a slightly more fragrant Bob Geldof. In 2003 she starred in Beyond Borders, a worthy aid-worker drama.

The couple have worked together before, most recently on A Mighty Heart, produced by Pitt and based on the life of Daniel Pearl, the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter (also worthy). When they met, they were co-starring in the hitman romantic comedy Mr & Mrs Smith (less worthy).

Alas! Pertinent as it may seem, the Department of Health will not tell us the body mass index of Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary.

“We can’t give out health information about a secretary of state,” says a spokesman, sounding shocked. Maybe we’ll call again tomorrow and ask to speak to his teacher.

“I was on a plane to South Africa last week,” a sad sounding Alastair Campbell tells ArabianBusiness. com, “and there was a form to fill in that had the category ‘occupation’, and I didn’t really know what to put.”

According to his offical biography, Chris Huhne (the Liberal Democrat leadership candidate who looks like he has just trodden something into your carpet) was “educated at Westminster School, the Université de Paris-Sorbonne and Magdalen College, Oxford University”.

The middle one has been bothering us. Does a gap-year language course really belong on a CV three and a half decades later?

“It was just a stint,” admits a Huhne flunkey. “But it wasn’t a gap year. He left school in spring 1971 and started Oxford in autumn 1972.”

Sounds like a gap year to us. Potential additions to Huhne’s revised CV: Wearing clothes made of hemp and Not washing my hair for so long it started washing itself.

The regrettable business of defeat does not appear to have dampened spirits for the English rugby team’s trip home. Their British Airways flight took off with 76 extra bottles of champagne and an increase of 60 per cent in the usual beer allocation. The airline also added an extra 96 bottles of water. No word on what quantity remained when the flight landed.

Madonna’s wedding tiara failed to find a buyer at a charity auction in Seattle. The headpiece, which she wore at her marriage to Guy Ritchie in 2000, was being sold in aid of the Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Centre. But, at $350,000 (£170,000), buyers may have found it too expensive. Or just minging.

A Spitting Image puppet of Diana, Princess of Wales, is to be auctioned. “Somebody has always got to find whatever you do as offensive,” sighs Richard Westwood-Brookes, the auctioneer

A YouTube link of James Blunt singing You’re Beautiful on Sesame Street, with the lyrics changed, educationally, to “a triangle . . . ” has, it seems, reached the inbox of almost everybody with an e-mail account.

To our great dismay, a spokeswoman for the singer tells us that the new lyrics were written by the show, not Blunt. “It is a great honour to be asked to perform on Sesame Street,” she adds, not, apparently, joking.

Postscript

Tom Cruise hopes to cheer up David Beckham, whose US season came to an abrupt halt at the weekend when his LA Galaxy team failed to make the play-offs. The actor and his wife, Katie Holmes, have befriended the England midfielder and his wife, Victoria, and Cruise told BBC Radio 5 Live that he has the perfect pick-me-up. “We will go out and fly some airplanes or race some cars or something like that,” said Cruise, speaking at the premiere of his film Lions for Lambs, in London last night. “I’ll talk to Victoria and see if she’s all right with that. But we’ll have some fun.”

— Laurence Olivier’s costume from Richard III has been discovered by a new film memorabilia website, AsWornIn.com. This will be of particular interest to John Lydon, who says that Olivier’s performance as Richard in the 1955 film largely inspired his Johnny Rotten stage persona. In anticipation of the Sex Pistols’ 30th anniversary gigs in London, Lydon has even asked to try on the outfits. Rumour has it that a recitation at the Globe may follow.

— Pity Julianne Moore, christened Freckleface Strawberry (not unfairly) by childhood peers. “I hated it,” she tells People magazine. “But they were just calling it like they saw it, even when they said things like, ‘You look dirty,’ and ‘Can I smell them?’ ” Still, she seems to have recovered enough to write a children’s book called, of all things, Frecklefaced Strawberry. Its moral, she says, is that people should embrace how they look.

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