Peter Andre in a blackface row? He has to pay the rent somehow

• Eamonn Holmes: ‘I’ve had a hellish ten months — I’ve been in chronic pain’

This week, however, came a twist in the tale: despite them dating for a year, Eamonn Holmes’s new partner has refused to move in with him. “Eamonn ‘lonely’ as new girlfriend tells him: I won’t move in with you,” the MailOnline headline explained. Reading on, we learnt that Katie Alexander, 43, has decided to remain in Yorkshire, where she co-parents two teenage children with her ex-husband. “It’s not exactly ideal for Eamonn,” said “a friend”.

Of course, these things are always difficult, and one’s heart goes out to everyone involved in the never-simple process of ending old loves, beginning new loves and reordering so many interwoven lives into a new, and functional, system. However, be that as it may: why was the headline not “Eamonn: Holmes alone?” We only get one chance at these things, guys. Try harder.

James Bond

It seems that nary a week goes by without Celebrity Watch having some kind of James Bond newsflash — despite the fact the last film was released in 2021, we do not know who the next Bond will be, and the whole franchise has now been bought by Amazon. So presumably the next movie will be called James Bond: Prime, with a plot revolving around Bond trying to deliver a very important parcel of documents to a sexy double agent in Morocco, before shrugging and leaving it by some bins.

This week’s twist has been, I have to say, unexpected, with the entrance of Donald Trump into the fray. Last month the president announced that he would be imposing a 100 per cent tariff on all films made outside the US. “We want movies made in America again!” he declared, to the horror of pretty much everyone in the movie industry — shooting there is far more expensive than in many countries, including the UK, which offers delicious tax breaks and better catering. Bond films have, famously, been shot mostly at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, which houses the custom-built 007 Stage. For Bond to leave Pinewood would be like the ravens leaving the Tower — while, obviously, driving a car that can turn into a submarine.

It seems that the president has some sense of this — albeit in the most random and confusing way possible. “James Bond has nothing to worry about, that I can tell you!” Trump unexpectedly told The Timesat a press conference. “And, you know, Sean Connery was a friend of mine. Sean Connery was responsible for my getting zoning in Aberdeen. He said, ‘Let the bloody bloke build his golf course.’ I was like four years into the process, and it was impossible in Aberdeen. He was a great guy, Sean Connery.”

As with so many of Trump’s pronouncements, this announcement/golf-based rambling posed more questions than it answered. First — is there going to be an actual US regulation on tariffs in which lawyers will repeatedly write the sentence, “All foreign-shot movies to have a 100 per cent tariff imposed except ones with James Bond in”? Because, if there is, we can expect every film subsequently made to feature a small, cameo appearance by a character called “James Bond”, with tariff-specialist lawyers strenuously arguing that this technically makes it “A James Bond Movie”.

And, second, does Trump know that Connery isn’t James Bond any more? And hasn’t been since 1983’s Never Say Never Again? And, also, is dead?

Donald Trump

While we’re on Trump, brief mention must be made of Trump’s latest, late-night social media pronouncement — this time on the Boss of rock’n’roll himself, Bruce Springsteen.

Trump — notorious for being obsessed with celebrities in a way that just seems weird for a white-haired, 78-year-old man with 11 grandchildren — seems to be mortally wounded by any A-lister who doesn’t like him. Following Springsteen’s recent anti-Trump comments, the president took time out from being the leader of the free world to bitch at the Boss on social media. “He’s not a talented guy,” Trump typed, furiously. “Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK. A dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) who ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT.”

It seems extraordinarily risky for a man with skin like a tangerine, and eyelids like a gecko, to start throwing fruit-based skin-tone insults at another man. Where does the bitchery end?

Sarah Ferguson

To the Duchess of York, née “Fergie”, whose life has included being the royal family’s “fun” princess in the Eighties by pretending to poke people up the bum with an umbrella when at Ascot; writing a children’s book about a talking helicopter; and still being friends with Prince Andrew, the world’s least popular man — even though she has divorced him.

Adding to this varied existential CV, the duchess recently spoke about her pets: the corgis Muick and Spark, which she inherited from Queen Elizabeth after her death. “I have her corgis so every morning they come in and go ‘woof woof’, and I’m sure it’s her talking to me,” she said while speaking at the Creative Women Platform Forum.

• Sarah Ferguson says Queen Elizabeth speaks to her via her corgis

I’m sure she meant this to be a warm, fond little anecdote. A touching piece of dog-owner whimsy, honouring our late monarch. But, regardless of either your beliefs of an afterlife or the sanctity of the monarchy, it’s an undeniably unique mind that believes Elizabeth’s immortal soul is now split between two corgis, and that the message she brings from the misty eternal is, simply, “woof woof”.

The British

As anyone of any political persuasion will agree — although for very different reasons — it’s hard to feel proud to be British these days. The left feel shame over colonialism, the closing of our libraries and our increased xenophobia. The right are furious that the National Trust has given into snowflakes and is serving “woke” vegan scones. We’re all a bit glum. What aspects of our national character can we delight in? What does make us swell with self-respect?

Well, this week, the answer came from somewhere unexpected: sunny Tenerife. As part of a worldwide anti-tourism movement, the people of the Canary Islands have become increasingly vocal about the impact of holidaymakers on their country. “F*** Airbnb” graffiti is now rampant across the islands and beaches have been barricaded against nonresidents. Recently 130,000 protesters — from a population of just 2.2 million — chanted, “My misery is your paradise,” which feels like a future, very promising Lana Del Rey lyric.

“We know when we’re not wanted: Brits start to turn their backs on Tenerife amid huge anti-tourist protests,” the MailOnlineheadline roared accordingly. But, reading further, we learnt that the amount of “backs” being “turned” was very small: just an 8 per cent “slump”, year-on-year.

Yes — despite being explicitly told to bugger off and stay at home, 92 per cent of the Brits who fancied a week on the Playa de las Americas, drinking 11am piña coladas in their bikinis while fostering baby melanomas, still packed their suitcases and went for it.

So 92 per cent of Brits knew — deep down in their noble, John Bull bones — that it is the right of the proud Anglo-Saxon to Ryanair to wherever they chose and absorb another nation’s UVA. Graffiti? Protests on the streets? Wear big enough sunglasses and you just can’t see it. Besides, most British cities also have anti-immigration protests and graffiti in them, so we’re kind of used to it. Young foreign men coming here from other countries, taking up our housing, hanging around the streets all day getting drunk and making people feel threatened? Or our young men going over there, taking up their housing, hanging around their streets all day, getting drunk and making people feel threatened — it happens everywhere! That’s globalisation! Water off a duck’s back! Both Y Viva España and Land of Hope and Glory! It makes you proud to be British.

Peter Andre

Well, I don’t know who, in life’s mad lucky dip of cultural events, had 2025 pinned as the year that Peter Mysterious Girl Andre made his big-screen lead debut in what is proving to be the most controversial movie of the year — stirring up accusations of cultural appropriation, racism and blackface — but, if it was you, congratulations. Your pinpoint psychic abilities make Nostradamus look like the rambling blagger he was.

For those not yet abreast of the project igniting a combination of fury and bogglement, allow me a quick précis. Peter Andre is a former one-hit wonder (1995’s abstastic Mysterious Girl)who has subsequently had what we might term “an ITV2 Career”: bit of reality TV here, albums of cover versions there. Panto. Five fragrances. A failed coffee shop. A column in Now! magazine called “Planet Pete”, in which he primarily talked about how he hoped his coffee shop wouldn’t fail; and then how sad he was that it did. And, of course, an eight-year marriage to, followed by a tumultuous divorce from, Katie Price.

Now happily remarried, Andre is currently gunning to relaunch himself as an actor. Last year he made his movie debut, in the low-budget flick Members Club. The elevator pitch for this was undeniably eye-catching: “Members Club centres on a group of middle-aged male strippers, working under the name ‘Wet Dream’, who find themselves entangled in a dark plot to resurrect a 16th-century witch.” There can’t be a screenwriter alive who isn’t kicking themselves they didn’t come up with this work of true inspiration. It’s … Black Magic Mike.

• Peter Andre: ‘I’ve not been invited back to Buckingham Palace’

But for Andre’s second movie — in which he plays the lead — he’s snagged a project that makes the concept of Members Club look like a safe, staid, sane snooze-fest: Jafaican. As the movie bible IMDb puts it: “Small-time crook Gazza Buckles (Andre) seeks £35,000 for his gran’s care-home fees. He overhears a tip, devising a scheme. In 21 days he must master Jamaican culture to execute a fraud in Jamaica.”

Or, to translate this into controversy, “White Australian-Cypriot Peter Andre pretends to be a black Jamaican Rastafarian, donning deep tan and dreads wig, and shouting ‘Bumbaclart!’ a lot, while committing crimes.”

As you might imagine, there’s been outrage. Ahead of Jafaican’spremiere at the Gold Coast Film Festival in Australia, one UK-based Caribbean film-maker wrote an open letter, calling the movie “an appalling act of modern blackface, and a shameful display of cultural mockery. It is a modern-day minstrel show, a deeply xenophobic mockery of Caribbean identity. The displaying of Rasta identity, complete with dreadlocks, is profoundly disrespectful. Reducing these to a comedic prop is an act of cultural violence.”

Having watched the official trailer for Jafaican, I have to say, on first viewing, it seems less an act of cultural violence and more an act of … comedic exhaustion? The biggest “joke” — saved to the end — is that Andre has gone to a beach in Jamaica … wearing an anorak. He’ll be too hot! It’s not the right coat for a beach!

However, defending your controversial movie on the basis of “comparatively inoffensive comic lassitude” is never legally advised; and, besides, the organisers of the Gold Coast Film Festival had already come up with a different, and incomparably worse, justification for Andre playing a fake Rasta: pointing out that his song Mysterious Girl “had strong reggae influences”.

For context: this is kind of like if Les Dawson had claimed he was Britain’s leading feminist because of those sketches where he dragged up, hitched his fake bosoms with his forearm, and mouthed, “She’s got problems … down below.”

Things were made even worse when Jafaican’swriter/director, Fredi Nwaka — a respected British film-maker and rapper of Nigerian descent — claimed his take on Jamaican culture was allowed because “my son is half-Jamaican” and that he “often visits Jamaica”. Again, for context: not dissimilar to claiming to be Irish because you like Guinness and Taytos.

But … as a dyed-in-the-wool Centrist Mum, always willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt — at least until we’ve seen every nuanced, splendid, reggae-influenced minute of Jafaican, anyway — I would point out that it is not beyond the realms of possibility that Jafaican might well be a dazzling satire on the long-observed phenomenon of young white men thinking it’s cool to talk in Jamaican patois and grow dreads. And that, additionally, there is every chance that a Jamaican-shot movie with a Jamaican crew and co-starring the Jamaican comedian Oliver Samuels and the Jamaican singer Sizzla could be less culturally problematic than has initially been judged.

Either way, none of it is Andre’s fault. He didn’t write it. He just turned up and put his wig on. Because, when your coffee shop fails, and panto season doesn’t start until November, you’ve got to pay the rent somehow.