Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends are fleeing at an amazing rate – it’s almost as if withered octogenarians aren’t sexy any more, isn’t it.

First Hugh Hefner’s heart was broken by the loss of his number one girlfriend Holly Madison, who made the somewhat perplexing decision to run off with a rubbish emo magician. And now one of his other girlfriends – the equally generic titty model Kendra Wilkinson – has decided to leave Hugh Hefner and get engaged to an American football player as well.

Although Hugh Hefner seems to remain on good terms with Kendra Wilkinson, this news must have nevertheless bruised him quite badly. After all, it’s hardly as if Hugh Hefner lives in a great big house stuffed full of identical booby halfwits all willing to have gruesome, underwhelming sex with a frail 82-year-man just because they’ll probably get a minor role on a crappy reality TV show out of it, is it? Oh.

Hugh Hefner has never wanted for female company. He’s dedicated his entire life to living out a sexually progressive agenda that’s allowed him to have instant quibble-free sex on demand with any number of women who all look so freakishly similar that there’s a strong chance they’ve all been glooped out of a pulsating Alien-style egg tube.

But lately it looks as though the only female company that Hugh Hefner gets is from the women who occasionally visit to wipe his bottom or make sure that he hasn’t been lying at the foot of his stairs meekly calling for help for more than a couple of weeks at a time.

It was only a few weeks ago that Hugh Hefner’s number one girlfriend Holly Madison dumped him, started hanging around with the world’s most easily-ridiculed magician and took to bleating on about how high maintenance Hugh was. And now Hugh Hefner has been dealt another cruel hand.

It turns out that Hugh Hefner’s number three girlfriend, Kendra Wilkinson, has left him too. According to reports, Kendra Wilkinson has decided that, rather than stick around to act out each and every sexual whim of a sleazy old man, she’s going to get married to Philadelphia Eagles receiver Hank Baskett. People reports:

“[She] has met someone who she would like to spend the rest of her life with,” Hefner said in a statement on Thursday. The Playboy mogul says Baskett proposed to Wilkinson on Saturday. I have given her my blessing and will be giving her away at a very special wedding ceremony at the Playboy Mansion this coming June,” the statement adds.

Oh good. At least Hugh Hefner is going to be giving Kendra Wilkinson away. There’s definitely nothing creepy about that.

However, just because he’s lost Holly Madison and Kendra Wilkinson in short succession, it’s not all bad news. After all, he may have bid farewell to his number one girlfriend and his number three girlfriend, but that still leaves Hugh Hefner with his number two girlfriend Bridget Marquardt, who’s presumably called his number two girlfriend because she lets him stick it up her pooper.

And besides, rumour has it that Hugh Hefner has replaced Holly Madison and Kendra Wilkinson with 19-year-old twins named Karissa and Kristina Shannon. You see? Hugh Hefner will never be lonely. Thank God for opportunistic moral-free fame-hungry tit models who couldn’t give off more of a gold-digger vibe if they chopped one of their own legs off.

When you look as much of a slow-thinking himbo as Brad Pitt, it's much harder to convince people to let you star in intelligent, thought-provoking, Oscar-winning dramas, because people always see you as the pretty boy from Meet Joe Black.

So when Brad Pitt announced that he was going to star in a movie adaptation of State Of Play, the blisteringly well-received BBC thriller that made a star out of Bill Nighy and won a slate of awards, it looked like Brad Pitt had finally got it right – he was making a film that was serious enough for him not to be taken merely as eye candy but not so serious that its constant sermonising turned audiences away. Not that it matters now because Brad Pitt has walked away from State Of Play right before filming was supposed to start and the studio wants to sue him. But Brad Pitt will get the last laugh because he'll still get to show off his acting chops in the movie he's making instead – Mr Pretty's World Of Doe-Eyed Gazing.

Brad Pitt has often said he's envious of Leonardo DiCaprio's career, since DiCaprio ditched his teen heart-throb image and now makes serious-minded popular movies like The Departed and Blood Diamond while Brad Pitt is content to gurn through smug nonsense like Ocean's Thirteen while occasionally making serious-minded Oscar-bait movies like Babel and The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford – movies that hardly anyone wanted to see.

But that seems to be changing a little – recently Brad Pitt has been putting his name to everything from Coen Brothers movies to F. Scott Fitzgerald adaptations to films about Richard Nixon. Whether or not anyone will go and see these films is another matter, but at least we know that nobody is going to see Brad Pitt in the Hollywood remake of State Of Play – because Brad Pitt isn't going to be in State Of Play any more.

Based on the BBC miniseries about journalists investigating a crooked politician – that won three Baftas, a Royal Television Society award, a Banff television festival award, a Broadcasting Press Guild award, a Cologne Conference award, a Directors Guild of Great Britain award, an Edgar Award and a Monte Carlo TV Festival award – the Hollywood remake of State Of Play is to star Edward Norton and Helen Mirren. But not Brad Pitt any more, because he's decided at the last minute that he didn't like the script. State Of Play's studio Universal has put out the following statement:

"Brad Pitt has left the Universal Pictures production of 'State of Play.' We remain committed to this project and to the filmmakers, cast members, crew and others who are also involved in making the movie. We reserve all rights in this matter."

Brad Pitt's walk-out follows a couple of weeks of meetings with director Kevin McDonald over the quality of the script. And since the writers' strike forbids making any last-minute script-changes – like adding more scenes where Brad Pitt showers or rescues puppies from burning trees while everyone watching weeps with undying gratitude – Brad Pitt has left.

So while Universal toys with the idea of suing Brad Pitt for backing out of State Of Play, it's also on the fast-track to look for a replacement. Johnny Depp's name has been mentioned, as has Russell Crowe's, and yet John Simm – the actor who made Brad Pitt's role his own in the original miniseries – scandalously doesn't seem to have been given a second thought.

But perhaps we're being too harsh. Brad Pitt has been around for long enough to know what's good and what's bad, and maybe the script for State Of Play really was beyond repair. After all, you don't get to make flicks like Troy without learning a thing or two about quality, do you?