Morning:
8°c
I stand four-square behind Dita Von Teese. That's a sentence I've always wanted to be able to write. But I'm not being creepy - or, at least, not just being creepy.
What I mean is that I applaud her stand against London's diresome Fun Police, who have decided old-style striptease is a threat to the moral health of the capital. Come off it!
Burlesque is almost the exact opposite of the witless and dispiriting gyrations of a Stringfellows or a Spearmint Rhino. That's all about the reveal. Burlesque is all about the conceal.
Stripping is all about bodies. Striptease is as much about clothes: feather boas, velvet corsets and sparkly panties. It makes most sense to see burlesque performers as female drag artists - and burlesque does have a very strong gay and lesbian following.
Of course, they're taking their kit off - in a sort of sexual pantomime - but you'll see more nipples on a catwalk than the stage of a burlesque show. And you're more likely to laugh and wolf-whistle at a performance than fumble sweatily for a cushion.
A few years ago I met Dixie Evans - known in her Fifties heyday as "the Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque" - at the middle-of-nowhere ranch house in California around whose dilapidated pool she curated the annual burlesque championship Miss Exotic World.
There was a strict no-swearing rule, and the small but devoted audience knew to expect a day of family fun.
"Last year," Dixie told me, "we had a couple of showgirls up from Vegas. And they took EVERYTHING OFF!" A year later, she was still mortified.
• Wine may help drinkers outlive teetotallers, a headline this morning tells us in a report of new research from Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Nice to think it were true.
As usual in these stories, though, the small print confirms that the wine-drinking they're talking about is "less than half a glass" a day: a quantity drunk by no one in the real world.
Nobody drinking it as wine rather than medicine, that is. Far from being cheering, this is the ultimate glass-half-empty story.
• Bit of an embarrassment for former rock 'n' roll animal Iggy Pop isn't it? From Stooge to stooge; from being busted by the cops to being censured by the Advertising Standards Authority.
"I got it Swiftcovered," yelped Iggy in the ad for Swiftcover car insurance. "I got insurance on my insurance!"
The ASA, however, pointed out that he can't be Swiftcovered, because their policy terms exclude people in the entertainment industry.
They didn't even find it necessary to specify "drug-raddled, self-harming sexagenarian lunatics in the entertainment industry".
Which, on the whole, demonstrates exactly the opposite point to the one the insurance company was hoping to make.
