Hello! Category
The world according Hello! magazine, starring Lord and Lady Chinless Wonder
Wayne Rooney In Hello!
SAYS Wayne Rooney in Hello! magazine on the matter of his summer wedding to Coleen McLoughlin: “I wouldn’t invite people for the sake of it.”
Although Hello! might well invite its readers on Wayne’s behalf…
Posted: 18th, December 2007 | In: Back pages, Hello! | Comment
Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Hello! Magazine
HELLO! magazine celebrates its 1,000 issue. “HAPPY 1,000,” it says to itself a little self-indulgently.
We can forgive the magazine slapping itself on the back. When you reach 1,000 you are liable to talk to yourself and repeat things you’ve said 1,000 times before.
Anorak has been reading Hello! since the first issue and today brings you Ten Things You Never Knew about the magazine:
10: The 1,000th issue promises a retrospective on “UNFORGETTABLE COVERS” but fails to include the picture of Liza Minnelli and David Gest’s wedding in 2002. Anorak recalls the happy couple stood alongside Elizabeth Taylor, and best man Michael Jackson. Hello! forgets. But we cannot
9. The wedding of Liza Minnelli and David Gest was held at Madame Tussaud’s, and, indeed, it was only when Jackson sneezed that guessed realised they had been showering the wax look-alikes with rice and confetti and not the real flesh and bone persons. Mr Jackson’s noses are believed to have become switched in the confusion.
8. The Minnelli-Gest coupling was not to last. It was Gest who told us his wife had beat him. “You see I had terrible concussion from when I was in England and Liza was drunk. I’d picked her up and lifted her over my head, and because she’s so violent when she’s drunk, she hit the back of my head, bang, bang, 20 times. I pulled her down and she hit me again 20 times. Then four weeks later in Hawaii, my head exploded.”
7. Gest later told us: “Did you know I’m kind of an unofficial mascot at Arsenal? I love hearing the fans screaming, ‘Gesty! Go, Gesty!”
6. Gest was appearing in the I’m A Celebrity jungle. Minnelli was heard to utter: “I hope David Gest gets “f*****d by a kangaroo and eaten by crocs.” Ant ‘n’ Dec said it was too late for any news games and thanked Minnelli for her input.
5. The Minnelli-Gest uncoupling was not an isolated incident but part of the greater Curse of Hello!. One example was provided by the model Helena Christensen who offered: “Michael [Hutchence] and I love each other and, although we both have to travel a lot, we have a very steady relationship . . .” The statement of love was punctuated by an official missive: “Michael Hutchence and Helena Christensen have announced today they . . . will be spending time apart.”
Chris Hutchins, the gossip writer for the now defunct Today newspaper, opined: “It looks as if famous people who are about to split up first call their press agents and say `fix us a spread in Hello!’. It’s uncanny.”
4. 1,715 of the individuals featured on the cover have suffered “verifiable misfortunes” after appearing in Hello!. Footballers have had the worst luck (78%), followed by soap actresses (64%), reality TV stars (51%), boyband singers (41%) and marine biologists (1%).
3. No celebrity has ever burped, farted, sworn, or looked anything less than “stunning”. “It’s unbelievable,” says one former Hello! contributor. “Once, a reference to ‘light perspiration’ on the brow of a celebrity interviewee was deleted from a story and the entire print run pulped.
2. Says an insider: “In my day, if we had gone off to a celebrity interview and come back without a news story, we’d have been killed.”
1. When Tom Cruise married Katie Holmes is was declared the “Wedding of the Century”. There have been seven such weddings, five “weddings of the decade” (including two on the one day) and 23 “weddings of the year”.
* Anorak is aware that Minnelli and Gest sold the exclusive rights to their wedding to OK! magazine, just as Catherine Zeta- Jones and Michael Douglas had done…
Posted: 12th, December 2007 | In: Celebrities, Hello! | Comments (4)
Hello!: Stars Reveal All And Brad Pitt Is Father From Normal
“SECRETS OF THE STARS REVEALED,” announces Hello!’s cover page.
Adele Silva is happy “being single”. Adele “SAVOURS HER NEW FREEDOM”.
That should quiet the rumour mongers. We can now dismiss the gossip about the actress attempting to place her head in the oven in unseen footage of Hell’s Kitchen. Adele is happy.
And she doesn’t care who knows it.
The revelations so not stop there.
Charlotte Church and a radiant Gavin Henson are in deep “JOY” with their new baby. She’s called Ruby. And she’s a diamond.
Charlotte gave birth in a birthing pool. It was to have been a bed but what with global warming and all…
Geri Halliwell IS on a sunshine holiday with her daughter Bluebell. No, make that Geri Halliwell is on a SUNSHINE holiday WITH her daughter Bluebell. There is revealing and there is knowing how to reveal.
And there’s Brad Pitt telling Hello! that “HE’S JUST A NORMAL DAD”. Brad wears a clean blue T-shirt and tells us: “Fatherhood is not an overnight thing at all – more like a gradual learning process of what it means, defining for yourself what kind of father you want to be, how to fell worthy of carrying the name of ‘father’.”
Lines not plucked from Pitt’s role in Troy but from his own mouth, unscripted and off the cuff.
Words that any normal father hears and nods along to…
They are a revelation…
Posted: 3rd, October 2007 | In: Celebrities, Hello! | Comments (4)
Hell’s Kitchen: Barry McGuigan’s Compulsion Of Potato
BARRY McGuigan would like to thank Mr Eastwood of Eastwood’s Kebab Korner for all his help and care in making him Hell’s Kitchen champion.
No lightweight in the celebrity kitchen, McGuigan’s used every ounce of his stamina to pound potatoes into a frothy mash.
“I went into hell’s Kitchen to win, and I don’t do anything by halves,” says Barry, although children’s portions are available if there’s no rush on.
“Yes, I wanted my family to be proud of me, but above all I wanted to do it for my own sense of achievement,” says Barry. “If I compete I have to win, otherwise I feel I have failed. It’s a compulsion.”
Or what Marco Pierre White would all a “mousseline”.
And Barry won, of course, seeing off Paul Young and his 1980s white soul and Adele Silva’s vegetables.
Says Barry: “Adele was better then me at more things, but in area of service – and mashing potatoes and piping them – I had the upper hand.”
And duly delivered the knock-out blow…
Hello! Des O’Connor Takes His Pick
WE rejoin the action after the break, and TV stalwart Des O’Connor (what is age but a number?) is all set to marry Jodie Brooke, 38.
The singer-songwriter descends the oak staircase at Highclere Castle. Hello! hears her draw “gasps of admiration from the guests”, some as old as Des, some older and well used to gasping.
Jodie is wearing a dress by South African dressmaker Gert van de Merwe, an empire-line creation in French lace and dupion silk, hand-beaded in the ubiquitous Swarovski crystals.
And here comes the couple’s son Adam, carrying his parents’ wedding rings on a satin cushion. Adam is three. Gasps a plenty. Possibly a nurse and an inhaler, too.
And the moment is nigh. “I vow to love and comfort you; share laughter and tears with you…and make you feel special each day of our life together,” says Jodie.
True to her word Jodie cries. Leaving guests gasping more, and Hello!’s readers wonder what part of the vows it sketched over.
“You’re my husband,” says Jodie as the registrar pronounces them man and wife. Des, ever the professional, recognises the moment and holds his brief close.
The crowd goes wild. Bradley Walsh, Melanie Sykes and DIY SOS presenter Nick Knowles gasp. Cilla Black, “Des’s old friend”, tells us: “I have been to many weddings in my time but I said to John on our way here: ‘Something tells me I may need the tissues today.”
And Des begins to sing…
