sunday times column week ten

Potter Versus Posh

This week Harry Potter and David Beckham both hit Los Angeles. They could hardly be more different, one is a squeaky voiced over-hyped kid with a massive PR machine behind him, the other is Harry Potter.

This week Harry, Ron and Hermione got their stars on the Hollywood walk of fame, hands and feet in the wet cement. We had Ron on the show, a shy, weirdly normal kid, who said that he’d just bought himself an ice cream van, just for the hell of it.

They were photographed on Hollywood Boulevard outside Mann’s Chinese Theater. It’s a famous tourist trap where on a weekend up to a hundred street performers , look-alikes and superheroes, work the strip for the tourists who want to get their pictures taken with Chewbacca, Spiderman, Marilyn Monroe.



Seemingly one of the problems is that some of the less scrupulous street performers will just leap in to the shot and then demand money from the tourist. At least once a month the cops are called in to restore order among the movie icons, imperial stormtroopers, and befuddled tourists.

There is something oddly pleasing about the TV footage of an angry six foot five dude in a Chewbacca outfit, minus the headpiece, being huckled away by the LAPD for nutting a tourguide. “Look at me, ma, I’m on national TV!”

Another time Batman and Spidey got into a stand off with some striking construction workers who didn’t want them to use their portaloo and before you could say Holy Shit the black and whites were on their way again.

The latest fracas involved a Chewie making a lewd and libidinous gesture towards a Marilyn Monroe while she was being photographed then running off before the cops could find him. Only here on the walk of fame could a six foot five alien dive into a crowd and disappear.

All this is a long way from the Posh and Becks machine, but it seems to me that it’s not a foregone conclusion that they will crack America and earn the money their publicists claim .

For a start if there is one thing that we are not short of here in Los Angeles, it’s malnourished women with implants who have an inflated sense of their own importance. Posh’s reality show ‘Coming to America’ has gone from a six part series on the struggling network NBC to a one off special, forty minutes of her house hunting, fretting over her driver’s license photos and showing off her cupboards and her much touted dry sense of humour.

I read on a British tabloid website that Rebecca Loos is trying to take credit for strengthening their marriage by having affair with him, which is a bit like Hitler taking credit for the founding of the state of Israel.

Soccer as they call it is big here like La Crosse is big in Europe. It is popular with Latinos but beyond the age of twelve kids play baseball, basketball or American football. A live sporting event with plenty of ad breaks for TV, t-shirts fired into the crowd with a canon, celebrities on giant jumbotron screens, cheerleaders and instant replays. It is a sport branded so aggressively it would make Posh and Becks blush at the modesty of their ambitions.

Beckham is now at an age when footballers used to start looking around for a good pub to invest in and he joins a team who are underperforming in a league that looks to me like an above average pub team, the mismatch has the feel of a movie.

Beckham’s gig here is clearly a sideshow to the main event which is the attempt to launch the Beckham Brand here in America. Seemingly they are massive in Japan where people love the fact that they are both so clean looking, like a Barbie couple. My guess is he’ll be seeing a vocal coach to deepen his voice so that he can start acting.

Meanwhile I have been doing my own modest bit for the Ford Motor Brand doing more sketches to plug their new SUV on the show. Yesterday we did two sketches on the coast in Malibu, one involving rock climbing and the other surfing. Even though most of the hard stuff was done by body doubles, the few hours of rock climbing, sucking in my gut on the beach and being hit in the nuts repeatedly by my own surfboard have left me feeling like I have played ninety minutes against Vinny Jones.

Watching Joe the professional climber stick on a ginger wig and a kilt, climb a sheer cliff face like he was a monkey, fall two stories onto a crash pad then leap up and do it all again was a laugh.

The real highlight of the day for me came after I staggered out of the water having failed to even get up on the surfboard in the rough seas to watch my pro surfer double as he weaved and bobbed casually through the waves in a kilt.

There was something about that image of a guy skimming those waves in a soaking wet kilt, Braveheart meets the Beachboys, that made me smile at the wonder and the silliness of it all.