sunday times column week twelve

Gambling and Girls Gone Wild

This week I sat in on a conference call to find a location for some sketches we are hoping to shoot in Vegas. We were looking for a flash looking penthouse with a view overlooking the strip there.

Some of the options were the one used in the film Rainman which has a Jacuzzi with a commanding view of Vegas and is the size of Livingston.

Classier again is the Playboy casino which has a mammoth purple suite whose centerpiece is a tastefully lit stripper pole. Yeah, baby!

There is another which has been specially designed for high rolling players from the NBA, the National Basketball Association, it has an extra large, extra long bed, and that thing you always dreamed of having in your bedroom, a half size basketball court. If you can’t score here, you might as well hang up your giant Nikes.

Vegas is Babylon, a city of pure capitalism, a neon circus in the desert founded by Mafiosi as a haven for gamblers and built for money laundering. You land at the airport and there are slot machines in the arrivals lounge, for those who are in too much of a hurry to lose all their money to even wait until they get to the hotel.

It is so hot there that you can barely step into the street without your hair going on fire. There are no clocks, this is a place where they want you to lose all sense of time. I remember standing at the window of my room on the twentieth floor of my hotel looking down on people hanging out by the pool at five am.

Sin City is trying to re-brand itself as a family destination, like someone with b.o. trying to cover it up with cheap perfume. Their TV ad slogan is “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”

The truth is that what happens in Vegas, such as serious gambling debts or certain kinds of diseases, may well actually follow you home.

All this is a long way from the one arm bandits of Saltcoats of my youth or the greyhound track that used to run in Shawfield Stadium that my dad took me to. There were often rumours of races being fixed, dogs being given valium or a greasy meat pie before a race, it was sort of the Tour De France, for dogs, of its day.

As a topical comedy writer, human misery is my stock in trade and it’s been a pretty good week.

Lindsey Lohan has fallen off the wagon, chasing her assistant into Santa Monica police station, having left her sobriety monitoring device but not her cocaine, back in the bar.

When searched, she said ‘it’s not mine’ the defence which I used myself when I was first caught with cigarettes by my mum when I was fifteen, and about as effective as ‘the dog ate my homework’.

The three guys who were in the car with her claim they were so traumatized that they want damages. They say that when they got to the cop shop the quick thinking starlet pointed to one of her hapless passengers and told the cop “I wasn’t me driving, it was the black guy” When in doubt, blame the black guy.

The posh rehab in Malibu she went to is called “Promises”. They should perhaps consider changing its name to “Broken Promises” or “Promises, Promises”.

In the old days the studio would have covered all this up, there is a famous story about a junior executive in the nineteen fifties who actually went to jail for a couple of years to cover up for the real drunk driver who was a big movie star.

Meanwhile Nicole Richie who drove the wrong way on the freeway with a big bag of grass and enough Vicodin pain killers to knock out an elephant, was made an example of and given four days in the slammer.

Britney, another Promises graduate, is also in trouble as her marathon meltdown continues apace. A shrink told me the real reason she’d shaved her head was that she’d been warned that a hair sample can identify any narcotics taken in the last two years, so she did it to avoid a drug test, out of fear that K Fed would get the kids.

Seemingly the poor thing turned up at a magazine photoshoot and wiped greasy chicken wings on an expensive designer dress. Then after her tiny dog left a brown calling card she used another frock to mop that up. She was in such a distressed state that the photos and the interview had to be scrapped as being altogether unusable. Apparently she fretted continually about the ceiling being about to fall in on her. Unfortunately I think it already has.