Kelly Brook bows out (just lean forward a little more)
Miss December: Petra Nemcova
Traffic lights
But why is it that when the lights change the cars at the front of the queue take so long to respond? They don't seem to realise that for cars ten places back the speed at which they get away can make the difference between getting through the lights or not and losing a couple of minites as a result. Not very much in itself but when driving through Surrey when you have a set every 400 yards or so it all adds up and makes journeys far longer than they need to be.
Needless to say it is usually women who are so slow off the lights.
Agent DVD returns
Agent Triple P has been to Vietnam twice and enjoyed the company of J a local girl from a very well connected family. Like all Vietnamese girls she was slender to the point that you were scared you might crush her: easily solved by putting her on top, of course. Agent DVD may be in a dilemma here because whilst they are very lovely they may just be too skinny for him!
Alesha: still jiggling
Herbert W Spencer
By the mid-seventies, orchestral scores for Hollywood films had virtually disappeared; even the makers of the James Bond films had dispensed with John Barry in favour of a "more up to date" sound from Broadway composer Marvin Hamlisch. But then in 1977 George Lucas commissioned John Williams to write a fully orchestrated, old-style Hollywood Score for Star Wars and, as usual in the film industry, everyone else copied every element they could in an attempt to have such a success. Overnight orchestral scores reappeared in the movies.
John Williams called on a Hollywood veteran to Orchestrate Star Wars; someone he had worked with before on The Towering Inferno (1974).
Herbert Winfield Spencer was born in 1905 in Chile but moved to California and by 1933 had orchestrated his first film. He started a long working realtionship with Alfred Newman, one of the heirs of the Korngold style and together Newman and Spencer worked on The Black Swan (1942). This film was Twentieth Century Fox's attempt to emulate the success of the Errol Flynn Warner Brothers swashbucklers for which Korngold had provided the scores. The Black Swan was nominated for the Oscar for best soundtrack (won by another Korngold influenced composer, Max Steiner, for Now, Voyager (1942)) and Spencer and Newman went on to score 24 films together.
Spencer orchestrated most of John Williams great scores: the original three Star Wars films, the three Indiana Jones films, Superman (1978), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and ET: the Extra Terrestrial (1982). Spencer worked on many other films after Star Wars and his orchestration of Williams underrated score for Spielbergs epic failure 1941 (1979) is particularly effective. Spencer went back to his Hollywood beginnings and orchestrated the extracts from the classic scores of Korngold used in the spoof swashbuckler Zorro: the Gay Blade (1981).
Other composers copied the Williams style for fantasy films and Spencer orchestrated one of these, Laurence Rosenthal's Clash of the Titans (1981).
Spencer's last seven films were all with John Williams and he died in 1992 aged 87. Listening to Williams scores since then there is no doubt that there is something missing compared with the Spencer orchestrated scores. At their best (Superman, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), ET) Spencer's orchestrations brought a depth and subtlety not heard in any other film scores before or since.
Latin Babes 2: Penelope Cruz
This is our favourite: nice apple!
We have always liked Penelope Cruz since we saw her in Jamón, jamón (actually this entry would have gone better with the Tapas bar one!) and Belle Epoque. There were pictures of her and her sister, Mónica, everywhere in Hollywood when we went there last month, advertising some new clothing line.
However we think she is clothed about right here. Triple P likes a girl who is dressed (however scantily) on top but undressed below. We think Agent DVD might have an opposite view!
Latin Babes 1: Salma Hayek
On Monday I went there with another colleague, who hasn't been there before, and two very curvy Russian Girls sat next to us and were being flirty so we had to buy them some wine. Shame we had a meeting at 2.30. Looks like Agent DVD picked the wrong week to go mountain biking in Cambodia!
Sophie Anderton: going down
Whilst Anderton has a good set of cheekbones and long legs what does she think she is worth? Agent Triple P can't believe that any woman is worth £10,000 for a bonk. It's Chateau Lafite syndrome: a £5,000 bottle is not really worth a 1000 times the cost of a bottle of Wolf Blass in Tesco but people will pay for the exclusivity.
Poor Sophie doesn't realise that by charging that sort of money she is torpedoeing any exclusivity she might have had.
Anyway, today she has lost a £100,000 modelling contract for a fake tan you've never heard of. It makes us very suspicious that the whole thing has been engineered so this firm can get some publicity. Or are we just being a great big cynical old Hector?
Hmm, £500 maybe. And half that in the Baltics, including a better bust. Or so we are told.
Kate Garraway: out at last
Carmen Kass
5'10" Carmen was the face of the Christian Dior perfume, j'adore and is just the sort of skinny type that the likes of Calvin Klein, Chanel, Donna Karan, Givenchy, Fendi, and Versace were bound to sign up too.
Although she scrubs up nicely she is very much a runway model and is really too skinny for Triple P.
Cantus In Memory of Benjamin Britten
Perhaps it is because we find it reminiscent of the opening of Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony but taking seven minutes to do what Strauss does in half a minute.
It is a classic example of a piece that tests volume control on a hifi, however, with the string orchestra starting pianississimo and ending fortississimo.
Bidet as it may..
Ankara Way
We were not at all sure that we would meet up at all and, indeed, we only had confirmation when B telephoned from the airport at 7.30pm on Wednesday to say she had just arrived in Ankara from Istanbul. Agent Triple P bailed out of our dreary reception early so that we would be back in the Sheraton to meet her but the local traffic conspired against us and she got to the hotel first. She said that she was starving as she hadn't eaten since a rather meagre breakfast on her flight from Frankfurt to Istanbul that morning. She was dressed in her little black cocktail dress, which she had changed into in the ladies, she said. She also mentioned, rather distractingly, that she wasn't wearing any underwear. Agent Triple P is growing ever fond of B as all her appetites are at a similar level to his.
The restaurant was an all white, rather over-lit for Triple P's taste, establishment but the menu was reasonable and the wine list was not bad either. They sat down in a cozy corner (top right in the above picture). B decided they needed a starter, an intermediate course and a main course, which Triple P thought eminently sensible.
"Girls who don't eat are no good in bed!" as his old Sicilian colleague Barone A, used to say.
Given he had had an affair with this well known fifties Italian actress (confirmed by several sources) she must have been a good eater indeed.
Triple P ordered a Trittico salad of tomatoes, mozarella and avocado. B ordered Insalata Di Polpo with artichoke and olive, mushroom, caper and spicy lemon dressing.
Wine was very expensive and B berated him for not ordering something local as he usually did. However, he thought a restaurant that charged £110 for Gavi di Gavi was trying it on and the Turkish wines were unknown quantities and no cheaper that the Torres Gran Vina Sol he eventually selected.
She reminded him that he had promised her caviar at some point.
For the next course, Triple P had penne with wild mushroom and red pepper sauce. B had a seafood risotto.
She had had a bad day, having to catch the 7.25am flight from Frankfurt to Istanbul, then having an endless meeting and no lunch (Germans hate to miss lunch) and then catching the 18.30 flight to Ankara. She had had to get up at 4.50am. Triple P pointed out that he had been up at 6.30am which was really 4.30am UK time. She was not impressed and decided her day had been far more stressful than his, which no doubt explained the fast evaporating Torres and the necessity of ordering another bottle.
In order to elicit some sympathy he described the drunken girl who had molested him on the plane on the way over the previous night. She had really been quite drunk and having poked him in the shoulder from the row behind to find out the time she came forward and sat down next to him for the rest of the rather empty flight. She was flying on to Damascus and tried to persude Triple P to continue on to Syria with her. His explanation that the Syrian authorities would not look too kindly at someone turning up without a visa did not go down well and he was glad to escape the pretty, but seriously flaky, girl at Ankara's splendid new airport.
Their main courses arrived. Triple P controversially went for veal and B had the Petto di Pollo which arrived beautifully presented with fresh vegetables and saffron mash.
She pointed out that she had never seen him order veal before whereas it was one of her favourites. Triple P had always maintained that only Germanic people (and in this category he included the Milanese) could enjoy something as anodyne as veal. B liked the fact that all the blood was drained out of it. She is a dreadfully bloodthirsty girl who enjoys horrible Hollywood splatter films and becomes sexually aroused watching live bullfighting, as he had discovered on a trip to Madrid with her. He soon realised that there was no need to pay for the dodgy tv channel when you could get bullfighting for free.
In order to have something to finish the wine off with they ordered a cheese plate to share, which was just as well as it was enormous, Triple P had no idea if it was local or not but it was all very good. He was surprised that B did not order a dessert but perhaps even she had limits and she had eaten a lot of bread.
They identified only one real problem with the restaurant, as they had even turned the lights down, and that was the warbling cd of 1960's Italian pop songs which was now on its third play.
They left the restaurant and B retrieved her bag from the bell desk. B said that she had not booked a room and hoped that she was not assuming too much. Agent Triple P assured her that he could fit her in whereupon she replied that, surely, that was her line. Perilously close to a joke, from a German. As they got into the lift she did take the opportunity to remind him about the promised caviar again and he said she was easily bought. She replied that she knew that and she was a complete slut, distractingly hiking up her already short hemline enough to show that, indeed, she was not wearing any knickers. Triple P replied that of course that was the only reason he liked her, whilst hurriedly checking to make sure there were no cameras in the lift.
As they walked from the lift lobby to his room, nine doors down, B walked in front of him pulling her dress up again until it was up to her waist, revealing her pert behind. Triple P new the hotel was completely full and had a panic attack at the prospect of someone coming out of an intervening room and him being arrested for bringing a woman of ill repute into the hotel, which he was suddenly sure would be worth at least ten years in a Turkish prison. Triple P usually had trouble with hotel keycards but in that particular instant he got the card out of his wallet and into the door in nine tenths of a second, which was just as well as by the time B was half way through the doorway she had already pulled her dress completely over her head..