sunday times column week sixteen

Soaps, Blond Justice, and Farewell.

Yesterday we shot the last of our sketches for Ford. In the finale Craig pulls up in a sports car with the registration number Ferg # 1, I chase him, bursting into set of The Bold and The Beautiful, a cheesey day time soap on CBS populated by these freakishly attractive day time actors.

Ashley, the lead in the show tells me that she has been doing the gig for twenty straight years and her character has been married a grand total of twelve times, twice to the same guy and once to his father.

At the end of the bit, Craig tazers me, and I’m bundled into the car. The last shot is of me in the back of the Ford Escape with stamps and a sticker saying ‘Return to Scotland’. You can see the sketches on www.cbs/late late show.com

We booked a family holiday in Cancun in Mexico, a four hour flight from LA, the big spring break destination for American college students, only to find that it was directly in the path of Hurricane Dean, as it approached I tried to take out extra insurance but apparently they don’t let you do that. In the end the resort was unscathed.

In an attempt to show that the days of celebrities like OJ and Michael Jackson getting away with breaking the law are long gone here in California ; Lindsay Lohan has been sentenced for possession of coke and two incidents of drunk driving. She was given four days in jail.

Nicole Richie’s sentence for reversing on the freeway out of her head on drugs was a measly ninety hours. She was sent home after an hour and a quarter. One newspaper describes this as ‘Blond Justice’.

One explanation is that LA county’s prisons are so overcrowded that anyone given a sentence of thirty days or less is processed in twelve hours and sent home to do their time, so it seems to me that they are certainly not overcrowded with celebrities.

I imagine that bewigged record producer Phil Spector who is on trial for a murder he actually confessed to, must be rubbing his blood stained hands in glee, thinking it is only a matter of time before he’s out and up to his old tricks.

There are rumours that Britney Spears is planning to move to London to get away from her troubles. Under California law, if you take a kid out of the state without the express permission of the other parent, you can be arrested for child abduction, and besides she’ll never master the parallel parking that London demands.

The rumours of a looming writers’ strike continue to build here with the current writer producer agreement due to run out in a couple of months. The studios boast to Wall St that their record profits will continue, and tell the writers guild that they can’t give them a better deal.

Back in 1988, there was a strike which lasted five months and gave a huge boost to the reality TV sector which has grown so much since then.

Given the huge publicity machine that the producers have access to it is hard for the writers to get their case across, especially since most people think that actors make up their own lines and that all Hollywood writers sit by their pools being fed seedless grapes by their semi naked assistants pausing now and then to jot down a few thoughts on their solid gold typewriters.

The truth of the matter is that only one in every six writers is actually making a living from writing, so that when it comes to a vote, there will probably a lot of guys who are now cutting hair or teaching kindergarten who would rather be telling people that they are a writer on strike than admit that the last thing they wrote was an episode of Flash Gordon.

Another scenario is that we will go on strike along with the Screen Actors Guild a little later. Since this is my last column I thought I’d finish it with an actor joke I just heard.

An actor finishes work earlier than expected, lets himself in the house and goes upstairs to his bedroom to catch a glimpse of a guy’s ass leaping out of the window. His wife is on the bed looking very sheepish.

“What the hell is going on ?” he demands.

“Look, I’m not going to lie to you. I’m sick of your selfishness and the fact that all you care about is your career. I’m having an affair” she hisses, “with your agent !”

The actor thinks about this for a second, catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror and says, excited, “My agent came to my house !”