Books

Poor old Dustin Diamond. His fellow Saved By The Bell alumni have all moved on - Elisabeth Berkley has her nudity and Mario Lopez has his gratuitous self-love, for example - but he hasn’t.

But don’t feel sorry for Dustin Diamond because he’s doomed to spend the rest of his life stereotyped into a perpetual inescapable vacuum where he’ll only be known as Screech from Saved By The Bell to everyone he ever meets all the time forever until he dies, because some good has come out of it.

Dustin Diamond, you see, has decided to use his notoriety to pen a no-holds-barred Saved By The Bell tell-all book that’ll chronicle the cast’s naughty shenanigans in a frank and shocking manner. Honestly? We’re underwhelmed. Now, if there was a Hangin’ With Mr Cooper tell-all book coming out…

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Hecklerspray only recently learned that Kerry Katona was actually born - we simply thought she'd congealed, popping up Master-And-Margarita style on the outskirts of some grim Northern town, swathed in chip fat and possessing the piercing dead eyes of a truly soulless abomination.

Nah. Turns out that she has a mum.

Warning: if you've just eaten, you may want to avoid reading this report for a short while. On the other hand, if you're bulimic - and need a horrific mental image to really spur on that gag reflex - please allow us to be of service. Ready? O-kay.

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Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, or Judy Garland as she’s also known, has been largely gone from the public eye for what we think must be centuries.

She’s been dead since 1969, but a new book on her is coming out anyway. It doesn’t seem to answer any of the questions you’d hope, like if a dwarf really does hang himself in the background in the orchard scene, or whether or not Pink Floyd synched there album to the Oz film with her blessing.

No, instead it throws up the horrible reality that was Garland’s post-Oz life. As the headline up there indicates - that life was filled with some very non-Dorothy-like things - imagine if the Wizard was really super horny and those monkeys were all drug pushers.

Now that’s more what her life was like.

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The problem with filming the devil’s movies is that if any of the scenes require the architecture of a church, the owners of said church, along with their serious-minded boards of directors, must pass off on it.

This is where Angels and Demons has recently run into trouble. There is a scene in the book where Tom Hanks & a hot German woman named Elsa (who’d only recently slept with his father) break through a church floor, follow some flowing gasoline through a gathered crowd of rats to an old dead knight with a clue on his shield.

Now they can’t film any of this on location - the Rome Diocese has banned it.

The location slack will reportedly be picked up by two Kingdom Halls and a Mormon stake center. This of course means not a single gargoyle will be shot on camera. It’s bad because they need a gargoyle that comes to life just in time to save Tom Hanks from the exploding jelly truck. It’s really a pinnacle scene.

Thanks a lot, Diocese.

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Marilyn Monroe was tricked into killing herself by Bobby Kennedy.

So says Dr Jack Hattem, who, backed up by secret FBI files, says the Hollywood bombshell was somehow fooled into believing she would be revived in time as part of a plot involving Senator Robert Kennedy, the brother of JFK, who was gunned down 40 years ago this week.

Instead, Monroe, who staged many fake suicide attempts throughout her life to gain sympathy, was left to die by staff and friends. It’s all in Hattem’s new book Marilyn Monroe: Murder By Consent.

Certainly, Marilyn Monroe may have been dead for 46 years, but that doesn’t mean that people have stopped speculating about the circumstances of her death. We spoke to Dr Hattem and listened to some of his more compelling claims, including where Kennedy was on the night of Marilyn Monroe’s death and why the recently unearthed Marilyn Monroe sex tape might not be the only one knocking about.

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It must have been such a relief for JK Rowling when she finished the last Harry Potter book, because it meant she could focus on what’s really important to her - which, it turns out, is Harry Potter.

Not content with the book of Harry Potter fairy tales she recently wrote, or the Harry Potter encyclopedia she’s working on now, JK Rowling has found the time to write a prequel to the Harry Potter books, set before Harry first went to Hogwarts.

However, there’s only one copy of this 800-word Harry Potter prequel and it’s going to be auctioned for charity, so hardly anyone will be able to read it. But the rest of you shouldn’t worry - give it a year and Warner Bros will have bought the rights and padded it out into a brand new nine-hour movie trilogy. In space.

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Since that Austrian house of horrors incest sex dungeon was found, people everywhere have questioned their own parenting standards.

Which is a shame for Geri Halliwell, because her new children’s book is being released today, and reading a Geri Halliwell book to a child is only a couple of notches down from locking them in a cellar for 24 years and getting them pregnant against their will.

We’re joking, of course - Geri Halliwell’s book is just a bit of harmless fun. It doesn’t compare at all. But Geri Halliwell promoting the book by banging on and on and on and on about herself forever? We don’t know about you, but actually that does feel like being raped by your father in an incest dungeon in Austria.

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Miley Cyrus has conquered every medium she’s tried; TV, film, music, reputation-sullying internet underwear photos - she’s queen of them all.

But what about the world of autobiographies? Why, no. Of course not. Miley Cyrus is only 15 years old. For Miley Cyrus to write an autobiography at such a young age would be to insult the intelligence of her fans in just about the most unforgivable way possible. That’s something we can all agree on.

Well, all of us except Miley Cyrus and the Disney Book Group, because it’s been announced that the Miley Cyrus memoirs are coming out soon. We’re especially looking forward to the chapter about how, by the age of 12, Miley Cyrus had more money than all of us would ever earn from a lifetime of backbreaking physical labour combined. Fun!

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The copyright lawsuit between JK Rowling and The Harry Potter Lexicon finished yesterday, but don’t think you can go back to not giving a stuff about it again.

As you remember, JK Rowling claims that The Harry Potter Lexicon unfairly and illegally plagiarises the Harry Potter novels, while the makers of The Harry Potter Lexicon just claim that it’s nothing more than a reference book. And now the case has concluded.

However, we won’t know if JK Rowling or The Harry Potter Lexicon author Steven Vander Ark will win yet, because the judge needs to go away and think about it. And he won’t do that until both JK Rowling and Steven Vander Ark have submitted written summations of their arguments to him. We’re just guessing here, but we’d assume that Vander Ark’s summation is going to be identical to Rowling’s, but with a couple of words changed and cheaper-looking artwork.

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As if yesterday’s thrilling installment of That Court Case Where JK Rowling Gets Upset Because Someone Else Wrote A Harry Potter Book wasn’t enthralling enough, there’s more.

That’s because yesterday JK Rowling made it into court to speak about her outrage that a third-party Harry Potter reference book, The Lexicon Of Harry Potter, was being published without her say-so. “We all know I’ve made enough money.

hat’s absolutely not why I’m here,” JK Rowling told the courtroom. And that sounds fair - quite often the mega-wealthy lose the thrill of making money and replace it with a new interest.

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JK Rowling knows everything there is to know about Harry Potter - her brain is literally a soggy, pulsating Harry Potter encyclopedia.

And JK Rowling wants to pass on her unbeatable knowledge of Harry Potter to the fans by cutting the top of her skull off, smooshing her brain into a billion tiny globs and selling them on to Harry Potter fans for a million pounds each. Or she wants to write a Harry Potter encyclopedia and sell that instead. We forget which.

Anyway, a new third party Harry Potter encyclopedia that’s coming out soon has got JK Rowling worried - not only will it scupper sales of the official JK Rowling-written encyclopedia, but it’ll also be an inferior product. Anyway, JK Rowling’s great big lawsuit has begun. And it’s either really exciting or quite dull. We forget which.

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Of all celebrity feuds, none have been odder than the one between Kathleen Turner and Nicholas Cage about whether or not he stole someone's chihuahua once.

It was a serious feud, too - after Kathleen Turner accused Nicolas Cage of stealing chihuahuas and drunk driving in her autobiography, Cage took her to the High Court for it.

But now it's all come juddering to an end, with Kathleen Turner making a public apology for the claims. Thanks heavens - now we can all stop thinking of Nicolas Cage as the man who stole a chihuahua and go back to thinking of him as the man who runs up hills dressed as a bear and punches girls square in the face. It's his comfort zone, if you will.

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