Pandora

BEWARE THE revenge of the Teletubbies this Christmas. A hospital in New York is warning that the Teletubbies have been indirectly responsible for toddlers being injured, and even killed, by their TV sets. Doctors at the Jacobi Medical Center warn that the British-made TV programme encourages kids to hug the TV. "Unfortunately, the children are toppling TVs down on themselves, causing head trauma and other crushing injuries," Dr Ellen Crain, director of emergency paediatric services, told the New York Post. There have been 73 cases of injury in the US, with two deaths in the Bronx area of New York alone. Ominously, on Christmas Day BBC2 will feature Big Hug: The Story of the Teletubbies.

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JOHN EDMONDS, leader of the GMB, one of Britain's biggest unions, and the man who famously denounced boardroom fat cats as "greedy bastards", is himself faced with a spot of industrial unrest. Staff in his press office are to hold a vote on strike action unless Mr Edmonds rescinds his decision to dismiss Tom Condon, the union's spin doctor. Condon has been accused of all manner of misdeeds, including leaking stories to the newspapers about the fact that the union has mislaid pounds 6m. A further irony is that Condon is the former industrial editor of The Sun, where he was the scourge of industrial militants.

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THE ENGLISH playwright David Hare has just been given permission - from the notoriously finicky US Actors Equity Association - to make his Broadway stage debut as an actor. He will star in Via Dolorosa, his personal memoir about Israel. The play recently made its London debut at the Royal Court, where Hare, who is married to the fashion designer Nicole Farhi, began his dramatic career in the literary department some 30 years ago. Meanwhile, Hare's play The Blue Room just opened on Broadway with a $4m advance sale - enough instantly to guarantee its status as a profitable hit; his play The Judas Kiss opened in New York last April and another, Amy's View, is scheduled to debut in the city next spring. Both The Blue Room and The Judas Kiss featured stage nudity, most notably Nicole Kidman's bare- bottomed romp in The Blue Room. Apparently there is no plan for Hare to disrobe during his dramatic account of The Holy Land.

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READERS WILL surely recall Pandora's earnest suggestion during the World Cup last June that the FA introduce a way to show how much injury time was left in a match. Despite the wide use of this system in Europe and elsewhere, our own Premier League told Pandora at the time that there was no popular support for the measure. However, the Football Supporters Association had different ideas and urged the Premier League to introduce injury time display boards. The boards are now a fixture at all Premier League matches and a League spokesman told Pandora: "The move came off the back of the World Cup." When pressed, he admitted that they were considered "successful". Of course, Pandora would be the last person to say, "I told you so".

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HELENA BONHAM-CARTER (pictured), the cinema's favourite English rose, appears as a dying woman in a wheelchair, without make-up or elaborate hair styling, in her next film, The Theory of Flight. "I relished the idea, actually," she told USA Today. "For one, I didn't have people primping me all the time. And the reality is that I've often been cast for what I look like, and it was a relief not to be cast for that." However, Pandora suspects that Kenneth Branagh, who plays the love interest in the film, was cast partially because he plays that role in real life, although Helena is keen to disparage such an idea. Helena's father was disabled by a serious stroke two decades ago and she used her experiences of life at home, as well as her dad's wheelchair, to prepare for a role that is said to be among her very finest work.

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PANDORA HEARS a (possibly apocryphal) tale of a car bumper sticker displayed on a vehicle, observed last week near the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall: "Only two bombing days left to Ramadan."