The Gossip

Irvine Welsh

Every fortnight Ben Dowell gives you exclusive back stage whispers and chit chat.

Playwright David Hare is a happy soul – he has just overseen the filming of his 2000 Royal Court play My Zinc Bed for HBO, the US cable TV giants who are recreating a play for today slot on the network.
He is now putting a score to it all (composed by Brit Simon Boswell) and saw it for the first time last week at a Soho screening room.
 I’m told he described Uma Thurman’s performance as the wife of the wealthy boss (Jonathan Pryce) who has an affair with an idealistic alcoholoic (Paddy Considine) whom her husband brings into their fold as…… “spellbinding”.


Thomas Schutte’s colourful perspex sculpture Hotel for the Birds was due to replace Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth in April then in May…and we have still not seen hide nor hair of it. 
I have asked the GLA four times and they still haven’t come back to me.
Surely Ken isn’t worried about the sculpture because some people are murmuring that it’s a piss take of his decision to eradicate the pigeons from the Square?


Ruffled feathers among the elite of Brit Art. 
I hear that Tracey Emin (briefly) fell out with her art dealer mentor Jay Jopling because he distracted attention from the highlight of her career representing  Britain at the recent 'art olympics' the Venice Biennale….by launching Damien Hirst's  £50m skull the previous week.
She wouldn't speak to Jopling for two days and was also miffed because Sam Taylor Wood was representing Ukraine (though why she did that is anybody’s guess).
Miss Taylor Wood is of course also Mrs Jopling …so he probably didn’t have much choice about that one…
 
 
We’ve already had Kenneth Williams, Fanny Craddock and Robert Maxwell. Now I can reveal that the BBC4 is sizing up biopics of Noel Coward, Marvin Gaye, Jeremy Thorpe and….. Steptoe and Son actors Harry H. Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell of all people.


Financial Times journalist Gautam Malkani tells me he’s busy writing the film script for Londonstani, his punchy and well-received first novel about Asian youths in Hounslow.
Every major independent film and television company in town has made an offer to buy the rights, but the author held firm and went for DNA Films because, he tells me, they have the best track record on getting the right music, which as he says, is the most important things about the adaptation.

 
Irvine Welsh can probably forget about being on fellow scribe Helen Fielding’s Christmas Card list this year.
“All that Bridget Jones s***e weight loss putting on an extra pound, we wanted to get away from all that c**p,” he told me recently.
We wanted to show what life is like for young women not the way they are depicted on television or films. This is social realism in the way Bridget Jones is not, that whole f***g sterile and boring s***e.” Still, he modestly adds that his new film stands comparison with “anything I have done before and indeed any other stuff around.”
So that’s alright then.

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