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I WAS supposed to take my daughter to the Wicked movie premiere the other week but alas events conspired against us.
Now, having seen pictures from the glitzy London bash, I think I dodged a bullet.
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For while my 11-year-old has always loved its main star, Ariana Grande, especially her ditzy character in Victorious, I’m not sure I want her idolising the singer/actress’s current look.
Ariana Petite is now so emaciated she appears less like the good sorcerer she’s supposed to play and more like a witch’s broomstick.
It was unnerving seeing her touring the world promoting the £100million blockbuster with her bones protruding in such an alarming fashion.
And before anyone accuses me of “body-shaming”, let me be perfectly clear: Yes, that is exactly what I am doing.
READ MORE FROM COLIN ROBERTSON
To a point.
Look, Ariana Grande can be as thin as she likes — her body, her life.
I have absolutely no idea if she has been hitting the Ozempic weight loss jabs, as many have remarked.
I also don’t know if she has an eating disorder or whether she is “deficient in nutrients due to her vegan diet”, as some doctors have suggested.
Maybe she is just naturally that thin.
She has claimed that her previously fuller frame (still tiny but at least one that appears to have had more flesh on it) was not making her happy.
She described that figure as “the unhealthiest version of my body”, adding: “I was on a lot of antidepressants, and drinking on them, and eating poorly, and at the lowest points of my life.”
OK, so she’s happier now?
Well, I hope so. And if she’s not, then I hope someone is looking out for the recently divorced singer.
Because it sure as hell doesn’t seem to be the Hollywood studio that is apparently OK with having a key character in one of its biggest productions looking like she’s malnourished.
If that happened in another industry, there would likely be an outcry.
The fashion business, to take one example, is forever coming in for a pasting when it uses stick-thin models.
And rightly so.
Dead-eyed girls, who could slip down a drain if they didn’t watch their step, were a concerning fixture of the fashion world in the early Nineties.
This so-called “heroin chic” look was widely condemned for glamourising drug use and generally suggesting that looking hungry and close to death was cool.
But while designers were relentlessly slammed for promoting this dangerous “ideal”, rarely does the film industry come in for any flak when it does something similarly irresponsible.
Why does Hollywood get a pass?
Wicked is a PG-rated film, designed to appeal to a mainly young female audience, much like the hit musical on which it is based.
Yet the only trigger warnings censors thought relevant were ludicrous disclaimers about “green skin discrimination” and “talking animal persecution”.
Jab themselves silly
So thousands — maybe millions, it’s made £129million so far — of impressionable young girls like my daughter will watch it and think this frankly unrecognisable version of Ariana looks perfect.
Why else would she be cast as the heroine of a major blockbuster? Will they then look at their own bodies and think that maybe they should be that thin too?
Kids — especially girls — are already under enough pressure to look a certain way thanks to endless social media reels, which are not filmed and edited by a cast of supposedly grown-up studio folk.
We parents are forever on our guard for harmful content that includes everything from how to trick people into thinking you’ve eaten more than you have, and — incredibly — how to become anorexic.
I predict Hollywood’s skeletal star count will only get worse as more and more actors who have no need to lose any weight jab themselves silly with Ozempic and waste away in front of our very eyes — in widescreen.
Only recently Christina Aguilera — like Ariana, a former child star and pop icon — turned up at an event looking a fraction of the woman she was.
Fans were aghast. And worried.
So who will be next?
And will Hollywood care?
Or do we have to wait until something terrible happens?
Because that truly would be wicked.
Odd ad might pull Jaguar out of last-chance saloon
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JUST two days to go now until Jaguar unveils its new car in Miami – and I can’t wait.
It’s been a long week watching everyone get their knickers in a twist over its rebrand.
“Morse would be wheel-spinning in his grave” harrumph appalled critics, furious that the firm behind a car I bet most of them have never owned has decided to, er, try to find some actual customers.
Because that’s the thing with Jaguar. It may be a classic British brand but people stopped buying them when other fancy-pants vehicles came along.
If you want to look rich and important now (and with a massive nob, natch) you buy a Range Rover, a Porsche Cayenne or some other SUV king-of-the-road monster.
A gleaming metallic saloon is all a bit . . . Alan Partridge.
Jag tried to get a piece of the SUV action – and I have enjoyed driving the smart F-Pace many times. But I didn’t buy one – and neither did many others.
Jaguar sold just 65,000 cars last year, which in terms of scale for a global car company is a bit like you claiming to be a retailer because you sold a few old shirts on Vinted.
So I don’t blame Jag for pulling a handbrake turn towards some-thing completely different.
Yes, the pretentious new advert is a head- scratcher but it has done what it set out to achieve – everyone is wondering what this new car they are unveiling on Monday will look like.
A great day for East 17
IT’S December tomorrow so we can all start cranking out the Christmas tunes without the bah humbug brigade bing us for going too early.
First out the block for me is always East 17’s Stay Another Day, a genuine Christmas cracker that gives me such a warm buzz I feel like singer Brian Harvey after he necked those 12 ecstasy tablets.
So I was delighted to hear the band’s songwriter, Tony Mortimer, is re-releasing it for its 30th anniversary – and on vinyl too.
With that and Band Aid now back in the charts, all I need now is Santa to bring me that Diamond Back BMX that was on my Eighties Christmas list but never made it down my chimney.
Still a hell of a line
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CRITICS of Band Aid have had a lively week pointing out how crap the lyrics of Do They Know It’s Christmas? are as a new 40th anniversary version is released.
Fair enough, it is a pretty ham-fisted attempt at evoking Africa’s plight.
But Michael Buerk’s “hell on Earth” line – uttered during his heartbreaking TV dispatch and repeated in the new video – was the real message.
His report’s images of a sea of skeletal human beings starving to death in a 40C dust bowl was one hell of a wake-up call.
Yet the idea that those scenes are out of step with a modern, forward-looking and “positive” Africa is sadly not true.
I lived in The Gambia for years and love Africa and its amazing people with all my heart.
But the devastating reality is huge parts of the continent remain a disaster zone – 35 wars are going on there right now, including in Ethiopia.
Around 163million Africans are facing hunger, according to the Africa Centre For Strategic Studies.
Just look at Sudan, where Band Aid money is currently going – 150,000 dead and 10million forced to flee their homes by a seemingly endless war.
In September the World Health Organisation said starvation in the East African nation was “almost everywhere”.
Many of the dead, as in Ethiopia four decades ago, are babies.
If that isn’t hell on Earth, I don’t know what is.
Church a risk, Boris
BORIS JOHNSON has been banging on about how Britain has too many “fatsos”.
Our cheese and wine-loving former PM is, of course, well qualified to talk about this.
His argument is that kids are becoming fatter because they spend too long inside staring at screens and being told the outside world is a no-go zone because it’s full of paedophiles.
He also blames the Church, which he says spends too much time droning on about slavery reparations and other woke claptrap instead of offering spiritual guidance to stop us from filling our faces.
He is definitely right on the first point.
Kids should absolutely put the Doritos down, get off Fortnite and run around in the great outdoors.
But if they want to avoid the paedos, they should probably give the Church a swerve.
CZECH billionaire Daniel Kretinsky is on the brink of buying the Royal Mail.
If he’s successful then the Czech really will be in the post.
lTHE rowdy fellow who Roy Keane offered to meet “in the car park” after the Ipswich vs Man United game last weekend was lucky.
If it had been Roy’s old United colleague, Eric “kung-fu” Cantona, he had mouthed off to, he would still be picking studs out of his face.
