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Earlier this week, Lost in Showbiz was roused from its nightly stupor by the sound of the clock radio. But as it blearily prepared its hearty, locally sourced breakfast – its palsied hand fumbling for the Rothmans and struggling to get the cap off the sherry – it was stopped dead in its tracks. The reason? A voice emanating from the speaker. It spoke with great courage and dignity, of selflessness and sacrifice in the name of free speech. It spoke of preparing to face imprisonment for the simple act of publishing a book. “I thought I’d get my voice out there first,” it said. “And then go to jail.”
Readers, there is nothing guaranteed to win Lost in Showbiz’s respect like the writer prepared to surrender their freedom rather than be silenced. We all know the roll-call of literary heroes: from Voltaire to Solzhenitsyn, Václav Havel to Breyten Breytenbach, Shahrnush Parsipur to Lui Xiaobo. And now, it seems, another name may be added to this proud list of men and women: the name belonging to the voice Lost in Showbiz heard, defiantly refusing to blink as it stared down those who would repress it. The name of Kelly Brook.
Yes, that Kelly Brook: model, star of Piranha 3D and Keith Lemon: The Film, designer of affordable knickers for New Look and now, it seems, freedom fighter, risking incarceration so that the British public may know the truth. Of course, she didn’t ask for that last title to be appended to her name: the courageous agents of dissent seldom do. But cometh the hour, cometh the mammiferous lad’s mag lovely: the mantle has been thrust upon her by the forthcoming publication of her “tell-all” autobiography Close Up. Lost in Showbiz has read merely a precis of some extracts – smuggled out in samizdat form by underground magazine Heat – and it doesn’t mind telling you: this could be one of the most important memoirs of our times, right up there with R Kelly’s Soulacoaster, the book in which the R&B superstar revealed that he wasn’t present at the birth of his children because God told him to go to McDonald’s instead (“the Lord and I have agreed that I’m supposed to head to the hospital … after everyone’s all cleaned up”).
Brook’s revelations come thick and fast and the glittering, decadent celebrity world is revealed. It’s a world so rarefied and outlandish, so far removed from the ordinary person’s ken, that it feels like some bizarre, glamorous fantasy dreamed up by a screenwriter, set in exotic locales, its plot a dizzy whirlwind of hedonism and high-stakes gambling: “After drinking gin with a pal, Kelly lost £20 on the slot machines at Leigh Delamere service station and was sick out of the car window.”
But Lost in Showbiz, you cry: yes, that sounds remarkable, and clearly the image of Brook vomiting outside a Moto off the M4 – after a crazed night dallying with Lady Luck in the Full Hou$e amusement arcade – will live with me until I breathe my last. But illegal? Surely not: you can’t go to prison just for detailing a reckless jet-set life lived purely for kicks. Of course not: Miss Brooks’ legal issues apparently stem from the book’s portrayal of her love-rat ex-paramour, rugby union star Danny Cipriani. This is indeed one of the more striking depictions of infidelity that Lost in Showbiz has come across, hinging as it does on one, telling detail. Not only does Brook claim that the rugby union star is a serial cheat and “man-child” determined to accumulate as many female conquests as possible, but that his obsession with philandering so consumed him that he became incapable of operating a lavatory correctly, or, as she puts it, he was so busy chasing women he couldn’t “flush [his] own turd down the loo”. “Danny Cipriani is blowing up my phone saying: ‘I’m going to sue you’,” she said, shortly before announcing her willingness to go to prison over the issue.
Lost in Showbiz can only reiterate its admiration. Here is a woman of resolution and poise, a fearless woman, willing to face life behind bars so that the world may know the truth about Cipriani and his noisome stools. It casts aside the suggestion that jail isn’t really an option given that any action Cipriani brings would be a civil case, crying: for God’s sake, it’s the principle of the thing that matters. And yet, its admiration is tinged with disappointment: where are Brook’s high-profile supporters as she takes her dauntless stand for free speech? As yet, not a word from them. Where is Keith Lemon, the so-called Lenny Bruce of our age? What price his supposedly coruscating social critiques, his satire that spares no one – no matter how rich or influential – in its bold determination to speak truth to power, if he remains silent while Brook faces jail?
Lost in Showbiz has a message for Brook: take heart, you are not alone. This is a newspaper well used to legal threats from those who would rather the public were kept in the dark over matters of vital importance. This is the newspaper of Wikileaks, of Trafigura, of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations, and now it is proud to be the newspaper of Kelly Brook and her intrepid struggle to face down the legal machine and tell the world about her faithless ex-boyfriend’s unwillingness to flush the toilet. Unlike a certain rugby player’s bowels, we shall not be moved.
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