ANN MARIE HOURIHANEreviews the week in celebrityville
AH, SOPHIE DAHL. That's what we're meant to say as we snuggle down to watch The Delicious Miss Dahlon Tuesday nights. They're selling her like she's a flake or something.
Dahl, who is beautiful and quite thin – although she was once brave enough to be a size 14 – is the latest posh English girl to provide us with gastroporn. That is, she’s a sigher, a giggler, a finger-licker, an oh-dear-I-really-shouldn’t type of girl, just like her culinary big sister, Nigella Lawson. Rachel, you have nothing to worry about. In Britain, gastroporn is the posh English girl’s equivalent of the lovely-girl-in-a-bikini-photo-op (more below) – only the possibility of gastroporn leading to bigger things seems to be slightly greater.
Perhaps Dahl, too, wants her own collection of kitchen utensils and a huge publishing deal – the whole nine yards of being an example to us all and living as a domestic goddess. She does look remarkably unhurried as she stands around her kitchen in a series of interesting prints, shaving fennel onto sourdough and talking about salads being fragrant.
All this domestic design detail is central to gastroporn, which thrives on the fantasy that we, the gastronomic jury, are allowed into posh English people’s homes, just as if we were their friends. Remember when Nigella allowed us to see her in her dressing gown, raiding the fridge with her hair in curlers? That’s the money shot in gastro-porn, which revolves around a girl tough enough to be a stranger to shame and socially superior to privacy.
Or maybe not. News has leaked out that the kitchen used in The Delicious Miss Dahlis not actually hers at all! This happened with Nigella as well, when it emerged that the kitchen used in her last cookery series had been purpose-built on an industrial estate. Now it seems that Sophie's kitchen is situated in a photographer's house in north London, and the house is on the market. So the smart guy is getting the rental fee and free advertising, and we have to pretend to be surprised.
Insiders are also worried that Sophie might be cleaving a little too closely to her role model. After all, Nigella was the first television cook to talk about the joys of cooking only for yourself.
Sophie’s first programme, “Selfish”, which went out on Tuesday, was about the solitary pleasure of cooking only for yourself. Hardly sounds decent, does it? Yep, that’s the general idea. In the gastroporn world the only sin is being found out. Remember Nigellagate, when it was discovered that Nigella used assistants to work on her recipes? What a shocker that was.
In fact, remarkably for such a beautiful woman, Nigella is better on the page than on telly. Her first book, How to Eat, is very well written and sincere. That was before she hit the merchandising road, married a Saatchi and went global, all while reviving the cashmere sweater. That was in the days when she had to let camera crews into her real kitchen, and film her dinner parties afterwards. It's lifestyle, you know, on this side of the Atlantic. It is unclear whether Martha Stewart gives dinner parties.
And things are not great in other parts of the television cookery world, either. There’s Jamie Oliver in tears over in the US because, amazingly, some people in Louisiana didn’t like him coming over and telling them that pizza is fattening. Jamie comforts himself with the thought that those pesky Louisiana people just don’t know what a lovely guy he is, or how much he cares about them. He just doesn’t understand that Nigella and now Sophie appeal because they make food naughty, whilst Jamie gets all puritanical and has started attacking chocolate milk.
And now Delia is off to do ads for Waitrose in order to prop up Norwich City FC following its relegation last year to League One (that’s the Third Division in old money). Norwich City is really Delia’s weakness – she can’t let it go, and has poured millions of pounds into it – that’s a lot of mascarpone.
But bless her, Delia does not sit among enviable roses reading poetry, as Miss Dahl seems wont to do. If Delia has a glint in her eye that’ll be the onions. Her charms are brisk. She is 100 per cent reliable. She has always been the Mills Boon of gastroporn, and that is why we are loving her long time.
Very odd couples in lovely lady land
SOME OF our female celebrities have started keeping their clothes on. There is a strict pecking order in female celebrity – and if there isn’t then there should be – by which beautiful young females mysteriously go up a level, or hit 30, or become famous for something other than their bikini-wearing abilities – and suddenly have the option of keeping their clothes on in front of photographers.
This is most noticeable when the female celebrity concerned is on duty at one of those lovely-girl publicity photo ops, frequently with scantily clad young women. The strange thing is that one half of this public relations equation always ends up looking as if she is in drag.
There was Glenda Gilson in cocktail wear, with a bathing-suited beauty on each tanned arm. Models Stephanie Barry and Aisling Cronin were in blue striped bathing suits, and Glenda was covered up in a sequinned dress, in order to announce Tia Maria’s sponsorship of Xposé Live in Cork in May. As you do. This startling image, in which Stephanie and Aisling’s comparative nakedness made Glenda looked like she was wearing a burqua, clearly demonstrated the seismic change Glenda has undergone in celebrity land.
A model of a very different kind – star jockey Katie Walsh – was also allowed to keep her clothes on. Just back from a double victory at Cheltenham, Katie was photographed in her work kit beside model Pippa O’Connor, who was wearing a cocktail dress, fascinator and heels in broad daylight on Henry Street. This looked quite peculiar.
Katie and Pippa were posing to publicise the news that Arnotts will be backing the Best Dressed Lady at Punchestown Racing Festival form April 20th to 24th. What are the best-dressed ladies going to be wearing – not practical and beautiful jockey silks, surely? AMH
When is it okay to stop being skinny?
WE ARE resigned to the fact that, for celebrities, dieting is a competitive sport, and one that they will always win – what else do they have to do, after all? We are also resigned to the fact that their extraordinarily successful diets are news.
Young Kelly Osbourne lost three stone participating in the US programme Dancing with the Stars – a regime that is unfortunately not available to most of us.
The lovely Charlotte Church has lost two stone, after giving birth to her second child. Let’s see: young woman in her 20s, lost two stone . . . Charlotte’s not back on the fags, is she?
And, having split up with her second husband, Mark Croft – she is getting the tattoo of his name removed from her back – Kerry Katona is showing off her new slim figure.
On the other hand, in a controversy that has gone on for longer than anyone would have thought possible, Nadine Coyle from Girls Aloud thinks her own legs are far too skinny and told OK!that looking at them makes her want to be sick.
Young women are notoriously obsessed with their weight. But it’s the sight of senior celebrities working to stay bone thin that is relatively new. Kristin Scott Thomas, Liz Hurley and Sharon Stone, that means you (we are leaving out the Desperate Housewives because their case is so extreme.) It is tough to have to be bikini-beautiful in your 40s, but Liz even has her own line in swimwear.
It makes you wonder if the modern female celebrity will ever be allowed to age. In the 1960s and 1970s screen goddesses such as Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly let their waistbands stretch a little, bought a couple of kaftans and kept going with the eyeliner. Bless them, they just wore bigger jewellery. AMH
