Pandora

HUGH GRANT told Stephen Saban he's concerned he could be developing gynaecomastia, the gender-blur medical condition where men grow breasts. "I may be going through some change of life. Don't you think my breasts look rather droopy at the moment?" Grant asked Saban, the celebrity interviewer, in the new Detour. "The girls in my office today were talking about boob jobs and I quite wanted to jot down the telephone number of the guy doing them. What I need is a Wonderbra for men." Grant, 38, also says that "I can't live without alcohol." Although some scientists believe that gynaecomastia is caused by chemical effluent in the water supply, others believe it's exacerbated by liquor consumption.

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T-SHIRT PHILOSOPHY: "Rehab is for quitters."

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RUPERT MURDOCH has ordered his son Lachlan and head honcho Peter Chernin to implement an organisation-wide, across-the-board 3 per cent budget cut. Pandora's spy in the Wendy House wonders: is it just a coincidence that Peter Stothard, the editor of a newspaper called The Times, faces an expensive, high-profile libel action from Tory party treasurer Michael Ashcroft? Ashcroft is a billionaire. He's got deep pockets. Does Stothard have the bottle to face him down? This looks a zero-sum game, kiddo: two men enter the arena, but only one may leave...

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NELSON MANDELA will be relaxing in the Bahamas this week at Lyford Cay, the millionaires' playground.

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ANOTHER TRIUMPH for Pandora, Princess of All Media. Now that the sleepy Americans have picked up on our gag about Tina Brown's new vehicle (Talk is Cheap, Pandora 16 June 1999), Pandora raises the ante on the over-hyped American trash mag. Take Brown's curious decision to run Mohamed Al Fayed's deeply tragic conspiracy theories about events in Paris during August 1997. When these were first aired in The Mirror, they were rubbished as tabloid bile. So Brown's tired re-run validates Dodi's grieving father's peculiar ideas? Or is Tina hedging her future employment options for when the Talking stops? Either way, Talk's still cheap - but silence is golden.

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GROUCHO ST JUDES will be the name of the new club opening next week in Glasgow. It'll have a bar, a function room and a restaurant. The wildcard is that Groucho St Judes, unlike its London counterpart, will be open to the public.

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WAHEED ALI used the front page of The Sun the other day to fire Kelly Brook from The Big Breakfast. Neil Reading, Brook's agent, reportedly heard the news from Andy Coulson, number three on the Wapping comic, who called him at 9pm the night before and said: "Kelly's sacked, it's the splash, sorry mate." Twenty four hours later Reading and Coulson were spotted enjoying a cocktail moment in the Met Bar. Clients come and go but mateship, it seems, endures...

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LIGHTS, CAMERA... Action. That's the title of Fox's new sitcom. One who crashed a sneak (preview) described it as "Hollywood meets South Park, but with real people." Action's first episode is about a Hollywood hooker who befriends a mendacious, rotten studio suit; Keanu Reeves plays a cameo role in the Ted Demme vehicle, which also has shovel-loads of snarky, savage insider gags and lots of obscene language that's bleeped out. How bleeping bleep is that?

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OH, AND Hugh Grant (pictured here, looking fit) also said that he's thinking of quitting showbiz. "I do feel a bit jaded right now," Grant, who's promoting his new mob movie Mickey Blue Eyes, says. "And I've been promising myself for 14 years that I would give it up to do something more demanding. My fantasy is to do more writing."

In the interest of keeping our favourite film star in autosmile mode, Pandora suggests a job swap. "Hugh can do more writing with Pandora," she says, "If I can do more love scenes with Julia Roberts."

Contact Pandora by e-mail: pandora@ independent.co.uk