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Your support makes all the difference.A very special album hit the stores last week. On it, London- born composer Donald Fraser conducts the Hollywood Chamber Orchestra in a recording of American TV theme-songs - not, on the face of it, that unusual. What makes this disc worthy of note is that the songs are performed in the style of famous composers. Kitsch lovers can thrill to a baroque "I Love Lucy", a la Henry Purcell; a medley of the themes from The Brady Bunch and Hill Street Blues disguised as a Mozart concerto; or the Friends song drenched in Vivaldian strings. It's a shame that such inspired lunacy should labour under a title as uninspired as Mozart TV - especially since Fraser's last album, a reworking of Disney tunes, was called Bibbidi-Bobbidi Bach.
No one can have been unaware of last week's black-tie gala celebration for Elizabeth Taylor's 65th birthday (yes, the one to which Elizabeth Hurley wore that outfit). Along with La Hurley's black-lace atrocity (which in the words of one distressed gossip columnist "made jaws drop - in horror"), every nuance of the event has been widely reported, from the parade of fawning celebrities spouting rubbish like "'Elizabeth Taylor is what God would look like if she wore Valentino", to Hugh Grant's "comedy" routines, and Michael Jackson's musical number (minus a sorely missed Jarvis Cocker). Less thoroughly covered (and no, I'm not still talking about the dress) was Hurley's speech as designated Brit ambassador. Announcing that she was bearing a message from Taylor's "native people", she made crushingly unfunny references to tea and chocolate digestives, before delivering the promised message-from-a-nation, reproduced here in its stupefying entirety: "Jolly well done!" And you still think the Spice Girls are Britain's most embarrassing export?
You may remember a report last week about the UK publicists of The Proprietor turning to novelists for quotes to stick on their posters. US film people never have to resort to that, since movie blurbs here don't have to make sense. Proof? Posters for David Lynch's bleak, dark masterpiece, Lost Highway, carrying the words: "Cinematic nitrous oxide!"
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