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I found myself pondering the Jennifer Ellison brouhaha this morning as I waited for my Christmas haircut. She finds herself all in a tizzy over Maxim presenting pictures of her naked, allegedly. ‘It’s awful – they’re not my boobs,’ she says in the Mirror. ‘That’s not my belly button. I’ve got a sticky-out belly button and that’s a sticky-in belly button.’. But then ‘Maxim is a huge fan of Jennifer Ellison,’ explains a spokeswoman. Like one of those ‘number one fans’, presumably and not the type Jennifer would prefer. Handily the Mirror includes a genuine photo for comparison. But there’s no reason the readers should care, so long as the pictures do the job.
Magazines like Maxim and FHM, used to play a useful role to young female starlets. Right alongside pics of the man with larvae infested gums, an arm severed in a freak tug-of-war accident and a frost-bitten maggoty toe, people like Britney Spears and Cat Deeley would pose in their underwear (nipple free zone). It gave them an opportunity to shake off their otherwise safe and sexless images (didn’t always work). Now though, it’s all Page3 girls and Abi Titmuss. So Jennifer’s missed the boat. But even if she hadn’t she’s no real prospect of being treated as a ‘serious actor’. That’s all one way traffic; serious actors can play at modelling, but models can’t act. And she’s doubly cursed, because her famous acting role was in a now axed soap. As the Mirror points out, her subsequent career’s had her play a Barbie doll ‘who routinely poses in raunchy outfits that leave little to the imagination’. Perhaps she should be glad someone’s prepared to airbrush her bits and so give her career a touch more longevity. After all, most people with a sticky-out belly button would prefer a sticky-in.
