Photograph: Dan Steinberg/AP.
God, like contestants on BBC1's Dance X talent bonanza, moves in mysterious ways. As previously reported by Lost in showbiz, Robbie Williams, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton have all lately found religion. Jesus's array of sunbeams is truly blinding.
While there are manifold benefits to being a sheep (insert your own "woolly thinking" joke here), being a shepherd has its own, arguably finer-than-merino, rewards - not least dominion over the sheep who can be persuaded into almost anything by judicious use of commandments and carefully chosen passages from the Bible. (I refer you to President Bartlet's exquisite demolition of Dr Jenna Jacobs in The West Wing).
Presumably, such thinking was behind Tori Spelling's decision to be ordained. (She did it, natch, online but received a certificate through the post.)
Her first act as the Rev, she reveals, was to "unite Tony and Dex as life partners in love". After their self-penned vows, the couple dined on veggie lasagne and drank martinis named after their favourite Broadway musicals. (It was, lest you hadn't guessed, a groom-and-groom pairing.) And they say romance is dead.
Anyhoo, the Rev Spelling continues: "True love is the ultimate, and pure love know [sic] no age, gender or race. I've found it, Tony and Dex have found it, and I wish love to all that seek it. Don't let anyone tell you who to love."
Not since reading Thora Hird's Book of Bygones and her reminiscences of Miss Hindle, her Sunday school teacher, have I been so inspired. (Coming from a Lancashire mill town, Miss Hindle didn't speak the local Morecambe dialect, and so would say: "Them there shepherds saw yon angel ..." which somehow seemed more exciting to the six-year-old Thora.)
Spelling, meanwhile, revels in her role as the Rev - which is just as well as, with her dear dad dead, it's probably the last role she'll get. Still, in a suitably Christian manner, let us be charitable and ignore the niggling thought that the devil not only has the best tunes, but the better actors too. If God has a plan, I suspect He is reading it upside down.
