Stop whingeing, it’s the best job in the world

“Who is the worst celebrity you’ve ever met?” sounds like a fun parlour game. Especially when it is played by Simon Cowell and guests at his Barbados retreat.

Questioned by Piers Morgan, who has taken part in the beachside game – perhaps to avoid appearing in it – Cowell set out his criteria for entry when the pair were special guests at the Norwood children’s charity dinner at the Grosvenor House hotel in London: “Any celebs who take themselves too seriously or who whinge about lack of privacy,” said Cowell. “This is the best job in the world and we get paid for having fun. Too many celebs are up themselves.”

Morgan, soon to take over from Parky as ITV’s chat-show inquisitor, pressed Cowell to play the name game. “Annie Lennox, Hugh Grant . . . is he an awful little man?” TV’s Mr Nasty declined to play. Then offered one morsel. “Mick Hucknall doesn’t realise the reason he gets chicks. It’s because he is a pop star. He isn’t the most attractive man on the planet.” Well, that’s the Simply Red X Factor Christmas special off then.

Life carries on in the jungle even though ITV has replaced I’m a Celebrity. . . with England’s second string playing Germany in a footie friendly tonight. Here’s what you would have seen . . . the merging of the “home” and “away” camps due to severe Aussie floods, lots of bitching about Robert Kilroy-Silk and the imminent arrival of two new campers – one almost certainly a faded pop star.

They didn’t even get a lump of coal for Christmas in the Clegg household. Asked about his worst-ever Christmas present, the Lib Dem leader told Total Politics magazine: “My younger brother once gave me an empty bottle and told me I could fill it with gravel and make it into a lamp, which I thought was completely rubbish. He must have spent all of four seconds thinking about that.” Mr Clegg also reveals the culinary secrets behind the famous ham and cheese croquetas, for which his Spanish wife, Miriam, is famed: “She has a machine.”

We receive a leak from The Travellers Club. A note in the Pall Mall gentlemen’s club gents’ apologises: “These small urinals are a temporary solution until the specially ordered urinals arrive from Ireland.” The “O’rinals”, however, will not arrive for up to ten weeks, so the downsized solution is “an endeavour to minimise the inconvenience to members”. The urinals must be “reinstalled rather than the trough to avoid the continual leakage into the basement”. Using the ladies’ is not an option.

From the ultimate peacenik Gandhi to “the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon”, according to Churchill, Sir Ben Kingsley is to play Admiral John Jellicoe in Jutland 1916, the story of the epic, yet indecisive, First World War naval battle. Historians still debate the tactics of the British Grand Fleet commander. Sir Ben is so keen to hit the high seas that he is raising funds to produce the film himself. Then he is off to play Shakespeare. “I am stretching myself until I snap,” he cautions.

Postscript

Filming during a tense courtroom scene for the NBC drama series Medium, starring Patricia Arquette, was repeatedly disrupted by a fool in the jury box. Security threw the gatecrasher out, unaware it was Sacha Baron Cohen, secretly filming a prank for his new spoof movie as the camp Austrian fashion reporter Bruno.

Living in the 15th-century Kent manor house where Noël Coward wrote Blithe Spirit is fun, says Julian Clary. “Paintings drop off the wall randomly in the middle of the night,” he says at the Caitlins Kickstart charity event. “I imagine it happens if they are not to Noël’s taste.”

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