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sexta-feira, 23 de julho de 2010

This week: Conrad Black, Nick Griffin and Keith Chegwin

Lucy Mangan on the people in the media limelight over the past seven days

The tale continues

Conrad Black

"Barbara drew her manticore fleece closely round her shoulders and threw another bundle of twenties on to the fire. How cold the Palm Beach mansion sometimes got these days! Perhaps she shouldn't have replaced the doors with phoenix feather panels. But no matter. For soon, soon her husband would be home!

"The newspaper tycoon had served nearly half of his prison sentence for fraud and obstruction of justice. Now he had been released on a $2m bond – she had almost had to sell her collection of Pegasus-foal-lined handbags to raise it – while the US courts decided whether to overturn his convictions on the grounds that the original judge really hadn't realised how very rich he was at the time.

"Now, a bright future beckoned. Yes, he still owed millions in unpaid taxes and faced an array of civil actions from creditors and investors, but Barbara was a woman of unyielding faith. She knew that somehow – somehow! – the Blacks would rise again."

Party political outcast

Nick Griffin

You'd think so proud a patriot as Griffin would know that it is simply not done to wave your invitation to a Buck House do under everyone's noses and promise to "bring a million nationalists to the party".

But he did and the Palace withdrew the invitation two hours before the shindig. I like to imagine it as a scene from Lethal Weapon 2 with the Queen in the Danny Glover role, pointing a pearl-handled letter opener at the fat Griffin head and announcing: "It's just been revoked". They said it was because he'd used the invitation for political purposes and not at all because they'd made a frightful bish by inviting a racist pig in the first place.

While obviously one is sorry for Prince Philip, who was probably looking forward to having the first good laugh with a guest since the Mitfords, the sight of Griffin (pictured) stuffed into morning dress and futilely attempting to gain entry did, nevertheless, lift the spirits considerably.

Cheggers plays innocent

Keith Chegwin

If you're one of his 36,000 followers, you already know that he posts jokes on Twitter. Now other comics have complained that they are not all necessarily his own, hand-tooled products and that by posting them he is breaking that unwritten agreement not to plagiarise working comics' material.

Cheggers – slightly disingenuously, given that while utterly delightful in his own way he hasn't been funny in any of his 53 years – claims he wrote all the jokes themselves. Maybe he means "wrote" as in "typed".

But either way, the complaints must end. Let Cheggers write/type what he wants. For when he is bored, we know what happens. The Naked Jungle happens. So tweet on freely, old chap – for the love of God, tweet on.

What they said

"'Refudiate, misunderestimate, wee-wee'd up. English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!" Sarah Palin. Lowering our IQ one tweet at a time.

"It had a very sweet taste, you could taste oak and it had a strong tobacco smell. And there were very small bubbles."

Diver Christian Ekström, who tasted one of the oldest bottles of champagne ever found, from a 1780s Baltic shipwreck

"Sweat. Sigh. Shower. Sing. Towel. Talcum. A grapefruity Eau de Cologne with vague mahogany basenotes. Emerge. Sweat." Martin Amis tweets. And how.

What we've learned

• New parents miss six months' worth of sleep by the time their child is two

• The South Bank Show is to be resurrected on the Sky Arts channel

• Selfridges is launching its Christmas season next Sunday

• The Coronation Street cat's ashes have fetched £844 at auction

… and what we haven't

• Who bought them. And why



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