Can you guess what the campest thing to happen this month was? No? Then pour yourself a meths daiquiri and let Lost in Showbiz tell you all about Sarah Harding's lookylikey No 1 fan.
We lay our scene in Brighton, England, where female pop sensations Girls Aloud gave a concert last Wednesday. "The girls had done a great performance," a crew member told reporters at the weekend, "and walked into their dressing room buzzing. But there was someone there waiting." Maurice Chevalier? Kim Jong-il? "A girl in her 20s who looked exactly like Sarah. She was carrying a book with lots of photographs of Sarah and started screaming: 'I love you! I'm your biggest fan!'"
Apparently, the faux Sarah was such a convincing double that she had fooled even the security guards. Kind of like that Dynasty plotline when the evil Krystle lookalike fooled everyone into thinking that she was Actual Krystle, when Actual Krystle was being held hostage by . . . well, by someone or other. Like Blake in the subsequent series, I seem to be suffering from stagy amnesia.
Anyway, Evil Sarah was removed by security, and Actual Sarah has now bought a burglar alarm and panic button.
Whatever. Lost in Showbiz hasn't enjoyed a celebrity stalking moment so much since Anna Kournikova's No 1 fan swam nude across a Miami bay to reach the tennis star's home, but washed up on the wrong pool deck, and was carted away shrieking, "Anna! Save me!" That said, I also quite liked Conan O'Brien's crazy Catholic priest. "I want a public confession before I even consider giving you absolution," his reverence wrote to the chatshow host, "or a spot on your couch."
And I adored Dessarae Bradford, author of two memoirs of time she did not actually spend with their eponymous stars - Colin Farrell: A Dark Twisted Puppy, and the wonderfully elegiac I Fucked Alec Baldwin in His Ass. Look out for them on Richard and Judy's summer reads.
Back to Sarah Harding, though, and it's clear that the drama must be used as creative inspiration. After all, Girls Aloud have yet to give us their Spiceworld. That 1997 movie caper was perfect fin de siecle fare, but as we move into uncertain times - the global economic slowdown, the increased threat of terrorism - it is clear that Girls Aloud's celluloid offering must be altogether darker.
How about this for a plot? As the Girls are returning from laying down their new album, their tour bus crashes in a heavy blizzard. When they groggily come to, the band find themselves in a remote log cabin, all in one bed, wearing matching ankle splints - with five No 1 Fans trying to feed them soup and gushing about how crazy they are about Tangled Up. (With today's advances in CGI, Kathy Bates could play all of the fans, in varying wigs. Can you even imagine how awesomely she'd inhabit the role of the death-staring Nicola Roberts-a-like?) Anyway, at first, the girls accept that the phone lines are down and are grateful to their nice lady nurses - but then the No 1 Fans make a discovery. They listen to the copy of the band's just-recorded album - and it turns out Girls Aloud have a shocking new musical direction. They've gone emo.
"Oh you dirty birdies!" hiss the syringe-wielding No 1 fans, who do something with a sledgehammer that's probably going to rule out the Love Machine dance at any future concerts. And then - well, I don't want to spoil the ending. Suffice to say, the hard-to-kill looky-likeys do not go down without a fight. But ultimately, no one comes back from having a four-track embedded in their skull.
Studios: I expect this to be optioned within a matter of days, so please only make offers we can both be proud of.
