Le Grand Hotel, Paris

Time for some serious product placement: Le Grand Hotel, Paris. Go and stay there. I spent a few nights with the Artist there recently and it was, well, magnifique. I needed to be there, as opposed to any other hotel, to do some top-up research for a book I am currently re-igniting. Certain key scenes happened there in 1914. Oh, the wilful intrigue of my vagueness.

Le Grand is a big hotel and part of the Intercontinental Hotels Group. It might not be everyone's idea of a romantic Parisian bolthole. There are plenty of bijoux hotels in the 6th, but I always feel a bit uncomfortable in places of limited staffing - you know, when the same face pops up in different areas of the hotel, or the worn out Monsieur on the front desk knows too much about your movements. I need the freedom of anonymity you get in a big hotel to help me switch off.

If you are looking for immaculate, yet understated five star service that is devoid of stuffiness, then you will struggle to do better than Le Grand. The IHG group are currently on a mission to offer a more chilled out first class service across all their hotels. It works here already. The hotel, which is one of the oldest large hotels in Paris, had a major re-fit in 2002, so it is finely spruced throughout. Our room was luxurious and overlooked the Opera House. Recent modern additions to the hotel include a small, but perfectly adequate spa. Despite the lush re-furb, the cosmetic traditions of the hotel's more famous older parts have been preserved. There's the relaxing Winter Garden central atrium, the exquisite Cafe de la Paix with its ornate splendour (what a place for breakfast) and then there is the devine, gilt-mirrored oval ballroom called the Salon Opera. Take your girl for a private waltz here beneath the giant crystal chandelier. This is where Daniel Craig hosted the post-premiere party for James Bond's Casino Royale in November, so if you've got two left feet she can at least close her eyes and think of him.

So, if you are considering a break in Paris, think of Le Grand. If not to stay, then maybe for a meal, or afteroon tea, or a flute of champagne. Or, indeed, a dance. Feel free to mention my name.

Sound Sensors - ******* Censor This!

I cursed out loud when I heard about plans to bring in sound sensitive sensors close circuit surveillance cameras. Give us all effing strength, I thought. I am a big hater of the proliferation of cameras. It is nothing short of insidious and reflects the utter disdain with which the dark powers of our country view us all and our civil liberties. If I wanted to be watched everywhere I went, then I'd sign up for a reality show. I have a deep fear as to where it is all going, or, indeed, has already gone. What are we leaving our children? And don't give me that rubbish defence that cameras stop crime. Were the Ipswich girls protected by being watched by some copper in a watchtower 20 miles away twiddling his joy stick? Or was PC Sharon Beshenivsky, or John Monkton and countless others?

My London borough - Kensington & Chelsea - is currently being legally vandalised with the erection of cameras for the CON-gestion Charge extension which begins in February. Pretty, old, quaint streets are being blighted by these black poles with their sinister little cylindrical eyes. You never ever witness them going up though. I reckon all the work is done over-night, in secret shame.

I will save my full rant about the State sponsored insanity that is this Extension for another time, but for now, I say bring on the Sound Sensor censors. I often walk past a speed camera, or high altitude CCTV lense, or even a bus lane camera, and stick two fingers up to the sky like a demented village idiot. At least the new cameras will get the full value of my venom with the audio because I frequently accompany my pointless salute with the words: "FUCK OFFFFFF!"

Walk The Blog

A wise internet expert lawyer friend called Mark Lloyd told me ages ago that having a blog was like owning a dog. You have to walk it otherwise it looks miserable and unwell. What can I say, I’ve been busy getting on with life on my island, hence the lack of blogging exercise. Not that I haven’t been thinking about it. In fact, there’s too much to write about and I could happily tap away every day, but there’s only so much writing self-indulgence one should consume. However, here’s a potted round up of vignettes, or soggy, one-bite blog canapes I've ben chewing during the past week or so. Think of this as me putting the unfit blog on a lunge and making it sprint a few laps around the office.

THE RAT TRAP: In need of creative solace for various writing ventures that are still in long-term incubation, I headed alone to the Finborough Theatre in Chelsea to witness some actors putting themselves through the mill at the outer limits of the creative world.

Fringe theatre is a sobering leveller for anyone wanting to create something. This is the reality, the kind of place where stuff really begins, once it has exited the painful solitary place of one's head. The Finborough is a small room above a pub with the audience so close they can feel your breath and see the quiver of your veins. Actors are peeled back to the bone in such places and you cannot fail to admire the hideous, personal excavation work they do when you see them up close at a mini crucible like the Finborough. I can almost forgive some of those mad-as-hatters actors I have interviewed over the years for their vainglorious verbiage when I see what they go through. Almost.

The Rat Trap was written by Noel Coward when he was 18 - yes, 18 - in 1918 but was only put on for 12 performances in 1926. It has been revived by director Tim Luscombe. It is a moving and powerful play which follows the turbulent marriage of two writers, their love shredded by imbalanced success.

Whether this play could carry itself on a bigger stage, I do not know, but I was riveted by this production and the performances across the cast. Most notably, the leads by Catherine Hamilton as thwarted novelist Sheila and Gregory Finnegan as the feted playwright Keld. They were superb. There were just 21 of us in the audience and such was the intensity of one of their argument scenes I felt physically uncomfortable, to the point where I felt a sudden auto-defence release of adrenalin, as if protecting myself from their venom.

So, if you are ever in need of an ice cold sluice of creative water, go along to your local fringe. Watch the actors unravel, marvel at their dedication. It is wonderful, almost inspiring. And it is not very often you smell freshly toasted tea cakes props from the stage, or see the steam from tea, or have the lead actress look you square in the eye and smile as you enthusiastically applaud.


TV ROUND UP. THE X-FACTOR: As expected, the winner was Simon Cowell. To slag off the X-Factor is pretty pointless. It would be like standing up in assembly at an infant school this week and lecturing against the commercialisation of Christmas. I have watched only a few episodes of this series – maybe five or six. If you have known Louis Walsh like I have and could control him with a remote control, you too would hit the Off button. I’ve known Cowell a bit, too, and he's great, priceless, so I persevere intermittently just to see him.

The discovery of Leona Lewis is quite something and I think Cowell cannot believe his luck. But, as they say, be careful what you wish for. Now we have a brilliant spin-off reality show: PRODUCER X-FACTOR. Has Cowell really got the talent to make Leona a star?

No excuses now. Even Gary Barlow warned him, so he must be in trouble. Everyone acknowledges that this girl is a supreme singer, but what will Cowell do with her? He has some tough decisions ahead - like what cover versions to give her. Judging by the “original” debut single handed to Leona from the show, I fear the worst. Within one listening I was humming my own chorus:

“Some people watched this show for a lifetime,
For a crap song like this…”


EXTINCT: I felt a shudder of disgust when I saw this show unfold after the X-Factor, not least to discover that Zoe Ball’s TV career was not actually extinct. This was a bad start. Flippancy aside, I felt utter revulsion at the prospect of people voting to keep animals alive. I didn’t get past the first ten minutes - I had endangered species to eat at my local illegal steakhouse – so I am sure it had some worthy intentions. But I can’t help worrying about the message this phone and text voting culture sends out to children. OK, it’s fine for the talent contests, but with wildlife? Surely there is something morally wrong here. I can imagine a scene in 50 years time when the last polar bear is found floating face down in an arctic lagoon as warm as the Caribbean and little Leona from Essex – named after the legendary diva - says: “Well, it ain’t my fault they all died. I voted for them in 2006.”

Over a rare silver back gorilla fillet later that night, I went into a state of reality TV excitement. I suddenly imagined a hybrid show of X-Factor and Extinct. It would be called X-STINKS and you could vote for certain living creatures to be extinct. I'm not a reality show voter by nature but I immediately started multi-texting the word LOUIS.


THE SUFFOLK MURDERS: And I thought the Prime Suspect series had ended recently. I admit, at times, I felt quite ashamed at my acute addiction to News 24 and Sky during the past week. However ghoulish, let’s be honest, it was all so appallingly riveting. Sadly, right now, I don’t have the time to examine the macabre reasoning for that in detail, or indeed all the fascinating aspects of the media coverage that this case has thrown up, especially in light of Tom Stephens' arrest.

However, I must offer up congratulations to the Sunday Mirror and its editor Tina Weaver for their scoop interview with Stephens. It presents a mouth-watering prospect: Tina going round to Andy Coulson’s office at the News of the World to collect his £250,000 reward.

Camera Diaz

I've just flipped through the multi-scented January edition of GQ and alighted on the Cameron Diaz beach photo shoot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. Styled and dyed within an inch of her recogniseable, natural self, she cuts quite a figure in the sand and surf. I only write because I am perplexed by the shot on Page 179 with her in a see-through shirt, the sunlight casting a Ready Brek glow around her right breast. Is it an unwanted truth-telling trick of the light, or a printing error, or is she proudly showing off her boob job scar. Maybe she is very open about all this, I don't know. Or maybe they simply ran out of puff for the airbrush.

Bond. Plugger Bond.

I finally caught up with Casino Royale yesterday. I had some dead time, needed to veg’, and wanted to see it for myself. Call me a victim of hype. Quite what keeps me going back to James Bond all these years on, I don’t know. As with most blokes of my era, my childhood threaded through the Connery/Moore transition. Quite a golden thread to have in your life. But I’m not a Bond-buff with box sets and vintage posters, although I do still have the signed picture from Roger after I visited The Spy Who Loved Me set at Pinewood in, I think, 1976. I saw the submarines, the car, some filming, the lot. And then big Rog, in a black polo neck jumper, smoking a long cigar, came over for a chat. It was quite a day, which easily secured another 20 years of Bond interest.

I thought I was finally over it all after those awful, bouffant Pierce Brosnan vanity walks, but I still went back to see Daniel Craig. Keeping tabs on Bond is a bit like keeping in touch with an old friend, no matter how far the friendship has drifted. Things are nowhere near the same, but it’s good to see how he’s getting on.

And, clearly, Bond is getting on well. It seems churlish to criticise it. I've always liked Craig. A fine actor, marvellous in Layer Cake, and yes, he delivers on all the fronts required in Bond – no mean feat, bravo – but doesn’t he pout a lot and sounds so dry-mouthed you want to give him some water. And does anyone else think he over-did the weights and protein? And wasn't that switch from Venice to the interior set tragically, unbelievably obvious. Who did the lighting there, eh? And, didn't that card scene go on beyond all belief - what were they playing, group patience? And... oh shut up, it's a Bond film, it doesn't matter, it was fine. Thanks to Craig, the “franchise” (highly irritating word) is in good shape and is better stripped back from all the gimmicks. But blimey didn’t it go on? With the amount of blokes piling into the loo afterwards, I thought I was in for a tear up like the scene when Bond-baby gets his double “O” just so I could have a double “P”.

The trouble with Bond is that it has to be everywhere to succeed. Bill-boards, bus shelters, mag covers, newspaper giveaways, TV trailers, making-of documentaries. I’d seen the best bits and was sick of it before I sat in the darkness. Bond marketing is so highly pumped it is as if you are beaten into submission - rather like in a protracted Bond fight scene - until you go. I went to Paris for a weekend with the Artist the other week and Bond had even taken over our hotel – The Grand – for the post-premiere party. It is impossible to get away from it. Craig walked by me, pouting, in a grey suit, and thought, I’d ‘ave him, no bother. I'd have glassed him with my craftily acquired flute of Bolly, then clubbed mercilessly with my steel NHS crtuch.

If there is one thing I have learnt from Bond, it is to be utterly shameless in the pursuit of off-setting costs by blatant product-placement. Hotels, airlines, cars, watches, lap-tops, mobile phones, clothes, they all get blatant banner positioning in the Casino Royale banker. Hence, from now on, I’m going full out for brand connection in my life, so don’t be surprised when you next hear from me that I am sipping a glass of Krug while posting from my 118 Wally powerboat.

If it’s good enough for Bond, it’s good enough for me.

Press Gazette Lives!

Last Friday: The mobile goes while I’m on the M4 without a hands free set (please don’t tell). It’s Press Gazette. I nearly drive across three lanes to the Next Life exit. “But you died,” I say. “I wrote a sad farewell with TS Eliot and everything. I saw the hearse. A voice from beyond the grave, this can’t be so?”

But it was. Tony Loynes and the publishing company called Wilmington started banging on the coffin lid as PG was lowered into the ground and out it lurched. (Best I put us all out of the misery of this death analogy). OK. This company has bought the magazine and plan to publish this week. It is wonderful news, but talk about drama and leaving it all a bit late. I don’t understand. The editor and all the staff have collected their P45s and many of the key contributors have been, well, hacked off, but let’s not go over old ground. It is almost as if Mr Loynes and his team are having to re-launch the magazine from a standing start. Such a scenario seems crazy and unnecessarily difficult.

Mr Loynes wants me to continue the “Press Conference” interviews and we are going to talk again. Who knows how it can pan out for Press Gazette. A ruthless reduction in staffing and costs will help the accounts in the short term, but it will need decent news and features if it is to grow and continue to appeal to the most discerning readership you can imagine. However, it is the very nature of this readership that, in my brilliant opinion, is PG’s greatest asset and hope.

I only managed to blag all those big names to talk to PG because I believed in the unique demographic of the readership. I billed it in various mutations of breathless hyperbole along the lines of “the most powerful magazine readership in the whole world”. Seriously. A stream of PRs, managers and agents, from Tom Cruise's people down, got the hairdryer treatment from me as to why their client MUST appear in one of the smallest circulation magazines on Earth. I have to laugh when I think of some of the people I tried to get to. The Dalai Lama anyone?! But you can sell something if you genuinely believe in it. And a similar belief is what the new owners need to have.

Press Gazette has something special in its readership, but that readership is disappearing. So, there is a tough task ahead. Now that Wilmington has bought the magazine, they need to SELL it to the media world, so that in turn it will be bought. Only then can it have a healthy and prosperous new life. Welcome back.

Duran Durankle

I feel obliged to reveal the answer to a minor mystery laid down in the archive of this blog with more cunning suspense than anything Dan Brown could conjure up: the subject(s) of the interview that took me on a Jalfreizi jet to New York and, ultimately, to casualty and a month on crutches. Please carefully put down all fragile objects, the Phew! moment is here. It was Duran Duran.

The interview will run this weekend in the “Live” (as in LIVE each day, not perform LIVE!) magazine supplement of the Mail On Sunday. It was a decent interview - or “talk” as they/we say in the trade, with a good “line (angle) – which is them talking about the sudden departure of guitarist Andy Taylor.

They're a pretty good bunch to meet. Very normal, gracious, grounded, a laugh. They’ve been there and done it all and got out alive. By “it” I mean everything – the girls, the drugs, the booze, the fame. They are all in their mid-forties now, but they are still doing it - although without the substance support. Good on them. Their energy and indestructible desire for it all is quite remarkable and, no matter your musical taste, their back catalogue is impressive.

I had a drink and a chat with Simon Le Bon at Carina Round’s gig later that day. I reminded him that we had met years earlier - 1992/3’ish, I think. (“Hey, Rob, it's you! Have you done any good comebacks since then?" Numerous). Naturally, he didn’t remember and I wouldn’t have bothered if we hadn’t met at a slightly memorable event, rather than, say, a quick Hi at a party. No, I met Simon on one of my all-time favourite fantasy writing jobs that turned to mush in the face of cold-stone reality. And I've had a few.

Hello! and Autocar magazines asked me if I wanted to cover the inaugral London to Venice race of luxury super cars against the Orient Express. What a gig, yes of course. Imagine it - me, in a Ferrari or an Aston, hurtling across Europe, a babe taking notes for me in the passenger seat. Champagne and a masked Venetian ball on arrival, followed by a chilled out return trip on the Orient Express to rock my hangover away. I’ll murder to do this job.

I turned up at Victoria Station for the gala send off. The train was there in all its romantic Pullman splendour and the cars looked, well, amazing, and I’m not even a petrol head. Consider, if you will, my surprise when the race began and I was still on the platform with my photographer. When the fumes eventually dispersed, we were led to a silver Renault Espace, our home for the next 20-odd hours with other hangers on. Surely some mistake? No. Our vehicle was driven by a chain-smoking lunatic who was having a great time being “involved” in such a glamorous event. I'm not involved in anything, I thought, I'm in a van with you, you nutcase. I'm involved in misery. He insisted on playing Salt ‘n’ Pepper’s ‘Let’s Talk About Sex’ at full blast every time the party mood slackened. I had bus fever before we got past Maidstone.

Anyway, Venice in October was deserted, freezing and wonderful. We made it in time – only bloody JUST! - to attend the big party at the Cipriani. My solo glide across the lagoon on the hotel’s wooden Riva* was worth every fist-clenching, tooth-grinding hour on the road. Well, just about. I remember chatting with Simon that night. He had won the race in a red Diablo and was very happy. He smooched the party away with Yasmin before slipping back to their suite to rest his aching ankles from all that pedal pumping. The Diablo is a tiring drive. Me, on the other hand, had a sleepless night in a twin room in what amounted to a hostel for the homeless with the photographer snoring like a sick pig. Then it was back into the no-Effingspace. Now that's what I call rock 'n' roll.



*Le Bon told me he owns a Riva.