Jordan must have thought she’d be a shoe-in for Eurovision. She was so confident she said she’d leave the country if she lost. The bookies were so confident they had her as hot favorite. The News of the World was so confident it printed a story saying she’d won.

Like greedy children stuffing themselves sick with party bag chocolate, the Academy award nominees and their accountants are set to discover that nothing in this life comes for free

Pepsi’s latest ad has roused the ire of an animal rights group because it features a chimpanzee, but both sides stand to gain from the resulting publicity Pepsi cannot have failed to second guess the reaction in the wake of the banned Puma ad

‘Doing a Sharon Stone’ is not necessarily the best way to revive a flagging career, If the star of your celebrity has faded to a crepuscular glow, your best option is to do something that will make the public see you in a completely new light. This is the advice that two Hollywood agents have recently given their clients, though the reinvention has taken dramatically different guises. http://media.guardian.co.uk/columnists/story/0,7550,1401137,00.html

Prince Harry’s unfortunate choice of fancy dress demonstrates a lack of knowledge and perspective. Something should be done to awaken in the prince and his contemporaries a solidarity with earlier generations. I have a friend in New York City employed as a senior picture editor by one of the major photographic agencies. Although he is nearly 70 years old, he has kept his job way past his retirement date, despite company policy to the contrary, because he’s the only person in the building who knows Who’s Who in all the old pictures from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. To his…

Germaine Greer did more than most contestants to expose the dark underbelly of the reality TV format. It seems only yesterday I was writing about Janet Street-Porter’s decision to head off into the jungle of reality TV and put her intellect on display in the Australian bush among all those loathsome creepy-crawlies.

Theatre needs the oxygen of publicity to remind us that it matters, says Mark Borkowski Thursday December 23, 2004 Roald Dahl’s children’s book The Witches was dramatised by David Wood several years ago, and in its professional productions, especially at Christmas, attracts its fair share of objections as a suitable treat for young theatregoers. The letters arrive, not by the sackload, but enough: witches = black arts = paganism = the antichrist… that kind of thing. And how Dahl, who believed passionately in spreading secular sedition, would have enjoyed it.

The note of triumphalism over David Blunkett’s resignation sounded by the Fortier-Quinn camp really tells us quite enough about them. Were not a Sword of Damocles hanging over their future in terms of the ex-Home Secretary’s action to secure access to his son, I’ve a feeling the press would be dealing with them in a considerably more creative manner than seems to have been the case this morning. The story will wait and it’s a dish best served cold. The mystery is really how the third most powerful man in the Government could have wound up in this situation. Where…

Roald’s Dahl’s children’s book “The Witches” was dramatised by David Wood several years ago and in its professional productions, especially at Christmas, attracts its fair share of objections as a suitable treat for 7 – 12-year-old theatregoers. The letters arrive, not by the sackload, but enough: Witches = Black Arts = Paganism = The Antichrist…that kind of thing. And how Dahl, who believed passionately in spreading secular sedition, would have enjoyed it. Being polite, theatre managements always acknowledge such concerns, but up goes the curtain anyway. It’s just the way we do things in our enlightened, inclusive British society.

They’ve already crowned themselves king and queen of our out-of-control celebrity culture, but now Posh and Becks are to be deified – it’s official. Well not quite, but our favourite couple might have thought twice before presenting themselves to the public as the mother and father of baby Jesus. No such qualms for Madame Tussaud’s who have dusted down the Beckhams’ waxworks, dressed them up in ‘ancient robes’ and installed the couple as Joseph and Mary in their nativity scene.

Whether it’s football or politics, it usually makes sense to stick with what you know and where you belong, writes Mark Borkowski Speculation that David Beckham plans to embark on a megabucks movie career when the time comes to hang up his golden boots was fuelled recently by the appearance of Tom Cruise at his side to watch Real Madrid beat Getafe 2-0.

The Prime Minister seems to have been relying too much on the telephone over the past few months, and not enough on professionals who can look him in the face and tell him what he should do. It’s all got quite embarrassing, and never more so than in the last 10 days, when we’ve seen Tony score a hat-trick against himself every bit as spectacular as Wayne Rooney’s. In reverse order, no competent publicist (sorry, ‘spokesman’) would have left a convalescent Prime Minister alone in a room with a phone. Give a former ‘rising-star’ the chance to dust off his…

When you’re out to win a piece of PR business you start with a credentials pitch. Here you lay out your wares in the most enticing way possible, dangling your USP hypnotically in front of the prospective client so that, with any luck, all resistance becomes futile. Yesterday New Labour Inc. came a-looking for our custom but didn’t risk putting any faith in something as vague as ‘luck’. Crammed with photo opportunities portraying Tony, Cherie and their cabinet ministers as one big, joyous family, not a trick was missed. Tony showed determination from the very start, picking off and disposing…

The eerie, blurred video images of the hostage Kenneth Bigley, pleading for his life with the odds so stacked against him, are working hard demoralising us in every living room in the land. The poor man may well suspect that he’s an unwitting pawn in someone else’s publicity stunt, but he probably won’t see the irony that these black arts of press manipulation originated in the USA. Forget bombs and missiles and warplanes; think communications. The biggest noise coming from Iraq is in the world’s press, on satellite TV and on the internet, where the war is going extremely badly…

Royal StuntWatch: How do you get serious national coverage for your chosen cause? Dress up as a comic book character Love them or loathe them, there’s no denying that members of campaign group Fathers 4 Justice have done an award-winning job in hijacking the nation’s, if not the world’s, attention. As a public relations coup, it ranks as one of the most successful in recent times: an audacious yet unfeasibly simply plan, quickly executed with a touch of humour and a serious message with a knock-on effect for the not entirely inconsequential matter of national security.

So then, after our completely predictable exit from Euro 2004 during the summer, England’s footballers are now trying to qualify for the World Cup in 2006, and what hard work they’re making of it. They didn’t play too badly against Poland and won the match 2 – 1, but then decided, in an act of childish petulance, that they weren’t going to talk to the spiky media because someone had written some shittythings about them since their epic draw last week against the steely might and legendary footballing skills of…Austria.

I feel a touch of tabloid fatigue coming on. The symptoms include sighing deeply and muttering ‘Oh come ON!’ repeatedly. It’s a familiar end-of-silly-season complaint and generally only lasts a morning or two. The Daily Mirror is responsible for my current attack. This paper has a reputation for NOT exactly being a founder-member of the Anthea Turner Fan Club, so the way they spun the not-terribly-interesting story of a peeved charity looking for another patron to help them raise funds (‘DUMPED’) was hardly a surprise. Apparently Mrs Grant Bovey agreed, under who-knows-what subtle emotional pressure, to help a hospice in…

So this is it. FIVE. My NASA moment. FOUR. Countdown to Tuesday, August 10th, THREE. 11.45am, the Wildman Room at the Assembly Rooms. TWO. I am shaking and sweating and starting to gain a glimmer of a tiny, petrified notion of what… ONE OH MY GOD WHAT AM I DOING? Will my tales of ancient publicists strike any sort of chord on the Edinburgh fringe? Is this bungee jump into the critic’s lap what I ought to be perfecting? Does this glorious Barnum-meets-Branson sort of publicity stunt still go on? Still attract an audience? Pass me The Sun, would you?…

Whatever bonkability has kept Sven-Goran Eriksson in the headlines during the only part of the year we should all be trying to forget the beautiful game, the Football Association have had the true dreariness of their crusty old clod-hopping male chauvinism revealed to the world. As if harking back to the mood of some secret, shady backroom deal from the 1960s, possibly with the Kray Brothers in attendance, the transcript of Colin Gibson’s ‘subtle’ approach to deal-making was printed in full in The News of the World yesterday. And sensational it was too, especially from a man paid £150,000 a…

The US election campaign PR drive is moving into the next phase. Never mind what’s coming out of the mouths: from now on it’s about posing and preening. Gone from centre-stage are the policy issues, gone the personality-based in-fighting about running mates and left of this party, right of that. Now we’re into full-blown Stature Proving, sprinkled with a light dusting of celebrity super-confidence. You see it less in the incumbent than in the challengers, but it’s there all right. When Kerry tagged his introduction of John Edwards, (previously a sworn rival, remember) with the memorable comment about ‘We’ve got…