The earth won’t stop spinning every time you leave the room.

I’m an avid but passive TV trailer watcher. There’s a JAG trailer running at this time in which ’Mac’ tells ‘Harm’: “You know, Harm, every time you leave the room, the earth doesn’t stop spinning.” When I heard it, I thought to myself what a snide, nasty, bitchy thing to say. This morning, I read a report about Asha Bhosale’s rage at being denied the opportunity to sing ‘Mehabooba’ in the new Sholay and I said to myself the JAG snidey is the perfect retort to her Diva airs. Does she ‘own’ Mehabooba? Well, there’s a by-now-notorious precedent for that kind of high and mighty behaviour. The 1980s super model, Elle Macpherson, now a 42-year-old, 6-foot Aussie mother of two, claims she is the original ‘body’, so dubbed by the venerated Time Magazine. http://celebrities.netscape.com/story/2006/08/11/who-is-really-the-body/. She is outraged by the Victoria Secret’s The Body bra model Heidi Klum’s attempt to usurp her rightful throne. (Heidi Klum, by the way, is the 33-year-old, 5-foot-9 mother of two with one more coming soon.) Boys and girls, please note that Macpherson has her own skin-care cosmetic line called ‘Elle Macpherson The Body’, plus a lingerie brand and the fitness video (‘The Body Workout’. Klum, once called ‘The Body Two’ in deference to Elle surfaced in the US in the late 1990s. Both Klum and Macpherson regularly feature in the Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit issue, including the latest one. Now on whenever I get an advertising brief exhorting me to write ads so that “we can own so-and-so positioning”, I shall think of Asha, Elle and Heidi before I get down to the task.