Hosted by the amiable Bert 'Moonface' Newton, the show that has a bunch of minor celebrities commenting on other celebrities, including this character who claims he is "king of the UK paparazzi', Darryn Lyons whose rainbow coloured hair still doesn't detract from his pudding shaped face.
Lyons made a gaffe to rival the dud TV show he fronted in Australia and his autobiography that was launched in a blaze of publicity and was soon forgotten.
Moonface Bert above pudding faced Darryn (right)
Guffawing that Bond girl Caroline Cossey was exposed as the "first sex change " to appear in a film (For Your Eyes Only) in 1981, Lyons ignores the fact that one of the most famous cases of gender reassignment surgery, April Ashley appeared in The Road to Hong Kong with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby 2 decades before.
The story appeared in Duncan Fallowell's 1982 biography of Ashley, April Ashley's Odyssey.
April's auto-biography The First Lady (published by the distinguished John Blake) had to be pulped when it was discovered to be a re-hash of Fallowell's book. Ashley had claimed affairs with Michael Hutchence, Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif amongst other notables although most denied it .
April should have taken Shelley Winter's advice to a gal pal who needed more lovers to spice up her book when Shelly advised.."if they're gay or dead just say they were lovers and they'll never deny it". At least she was right in Hutchence's case.
# Lyon's Big Picture agency and others like Splash could be badly affected by the new law signed in California today by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that will severely restrict the intrusive actions of the "stalkarazzi' as they are known. The law will put the onus on photographers agencies and publishers of material equally with large fines making them all liable to law suits from aggrieved celebs who claim their privacy has been breached. Which isn't often in Hollywood where the norm is to have your publicist phone ahead to alert the media when one is out on a private shopping excursion.But it does give stars even more control over their public image.
Most LA agencies only have themselves to blame. For the last 10 years they have been loading up unemployed immigrants with cameras, sending them out into the streets en masse to surround a star's house or car to cause havoc. Payment for any resultant photograph is filtered down to the increasingly desperate snappers. Something had to give.
