Here’s some intriguing intelligence from the London Evening Standard’s City Diarist.
The Channel 4 press office has just leaked to me details of the next Celebrity Come Dine With Me. I can’t wait.
You must know the programme. Four or five people who live in the same town take it in turns each night of the week to entertain the others to dinner.
They vote on each other’s performance and the winner walks away with £1000. The programme hangs on the skill of the voice over by Dave Lamb.
I expect him to excel himself with this celebrity line-up even if they have opted to take each other to their favourite restaurant rather than soil their hands cooking at home. The line up, I can reveal, is:
-Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, entertaining at The Connaught;
-Lord (Tim) Bell, still chairman of Chime Communications despite the fact he is trying to buy out a huge chunk of the business, entertaining at Hibiscus;
-Piers Pottinger, Bell’s partner in arms, hosting at the Boulestin (yes, I know it closed in 1994 but indulge me);
-Baron Chadlington (Peter Gummer as was), chief executive of Huntsworth, hosting (natch) at George.
Sorrell as the largest shareholder in Chime is deeply opposed to Bell and Pottinger’s plans to buy out their PR business. He has very strong views on the matter.
So do they. Chadlington, I understand, finds the whole thing very amusing. So will viewers… if it ever gets aired.
Can this be true?
Bell and Sorrell used to be pals of course; they worked together in the upper echelons of the brothers’ Saatchi & Saatchi and then Sorrell helped out when Bell’s Chime Communications overreached itself in the 1990s. Now they’re not so pally, as the story explains.
Mind you, by the time the publicity-conscious quartet have had dinner with each other every night for a week there’d probably be murder in the air anyway.
Poor old Piers seems to be the only one who isn’t a Peer.
I assume he’ll be serving.
More on “AdScam.”
Cheers/George