Sunday, 17th November 2002

Richard’s REGiment Greeting

Courtesy of JR (Joan)

Jadie’s new face of Argos

A five-year-old stage sensation – who wants to be the next Britney Spears – is to become the new face of Argos this Christmas.

Little Jadie Hobson is to hit television screens in the run-up to the festive season as Richard E Grant’s daughter in the adverts.

Mum Lesley Hobson said: “We are extremely proud of Jadie and she’s so excited about seeing herself on TV. She’s got her hopes up high – she wants to be a famous singer and dancer and says she will be the second Britney.”

Jadie, a pupil at Our Lady of Ransom RC Primary School in Rayleigh, goes to the Tiffany Stage Academy, in London Road, Leigh.

SueW. also spotted this snippet on the Offshore Radio website:

“Since leaving Classic Gold during the summer of 2002, Paul Burnett has been involved in a major movie project, Making Waves. Based loosely on his time with Radio 270, the film stars Richard E. Grant, Michael Gambon, Johnny Vegas and Angus Deayton. It is currently in the early stages of production.”

To read more just go here.

I’ve finally been able to track down the “Two W’s”. Yup, the trailers for “Withnail And I” and “Warlock” are up on the site. Yay for me! :-)

BP Portrait Award Book, 2002

Foreward

By Richard E. Grant

Biography, film and photography record both the famous and the infamous for posterity. But actor Richard E. Grant believes that it is the painted portrait that has the power to endure.

A film director advised a friend of the artist David Hockney to keep going to the museum: ‘The pictures don’t talk, they don’t move, but they last longer.’

On my first trip to Hollywood, I expected to find numerous statues and sculptures commemorating and celebrating the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, James Dean, Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. Yet when I asked where I might find them, there was a genuine dumbstruck pause, advising that ‘the Hollywood waxwork museum is about your best bet.’

‘But wax melts,’ I countered, ‘surely there must be some permanent monument to these famous faces somewhere?’

‘Uh uh.’

Perhaps the most prolific portraitist, of the famous and the infamous, was Andy Warhol. Warhol made silk screens of photographic images, homogenizing them in his unique style, rendering a photo into a ‘painted portrait’. His multiple portrait of Monroe is probably as familiar as any of her films, if not more so. Despite making his own films at the Factory, it is his portraits that have endured and continue to arrest our attention. Working from the theory that it takes nine months to form a human, and nine months for the human body to decompose, the painted portrait similarly arrests your attention longer than a photograph, which takes a millisecond to snap. From which I assume it is the element of time that’s involved. You can shoot holes through this theory instantly, but the distillation of time inherent in a painting seems to hold our gaze longer.

When asked to write this introduction, I immediately grabbed a dictionary – ‘portrait: life-like description, likeness, image, representation, interpretation’. All the things that artists have done and will continue to do, despite the meteoric explosion of photographic, digital and computerized technology, and what’s yet to come.

Having been a regular visitor to the National Portrait Gallery in London, I have never tired of seeing the same faces looking back at me. Perhaps because they defy time, like Dorian Gray, by never ageing, even though the period in which they were painted is always obvious. The fascination of seeing a 400-year-old face is at once hypnotic, mysterious and reassuring, making you feel an intimacy with the past that no other medium quite fulfills in the same way. Here is the dress worn by Elizabeth I, mounted in a glass case, lit and labeled. Yet it is powerless to conjure a presence in the way that her portraits manage to do.Despite the current vogue for art installation and creature ‘pickling’, the need to represent, interpret and describe each other’s faces is indestructible.

Richard E. Grant gives his support to AYME.

AYME (pronounced “aim”) is a UK-based independent registered charity dedicated to giving help, friendship, support and vital contact to children and young people with Myalgic Encephalopathy (M.E.)

Back in March 2002 AYME wrote to over 110 celebrities asking them all to send signed photographs and messages of support to sufferers for ME Awareness Week. The organization had a fantastic response and as a result they managed to secure some cool celebrity interviews – Including one with our very own REG which you can read here.

Stephen Fry has begun filming his directorial debut “Bright Young Things” which features REG in a cameo role. The film is an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies and tells the story of a group of wild young London party people in the late 1920s. The main stars include Emily Mortimer, Stockard Channing, Hugh Laurie, Imelda Staunton and Harriet Walter, with cameo appearences by Dan Aykroyd, Jim Broadbent, Simon Callow, Sir John Mills and Peter O’Toole.

The trailers for A Case Of Evil, Strictly Sinatra and The Serpent’s Kiss have just been added to the Filmography section of the website. Check ’em out!

And a brand new REGimental chat room is in the works. All it needs is some “signage” and a new lick of paint. Stay tuned.

And finally it appears that the News section is once again on track after some niggles with the software. Apologies for any inconveniences.