AM I expecting too much when I assume a celebrity urging me to buy a product must think it's pretty good themselves?

Martina Hingis, the world's top-ranked woman tennis player, is suing her former Italian sportswear sponsors for £28m, claiming tennis shoes she endorsed injured her feet.

Although she promoted the shoes from 1996 to 1999 in a £5.6m deal, she now reveals she had to pull out of tournaments in 1998 because of her "chronically" injured feet, which a doctor blamed on the tennis shoes.

Good luck to her, I hope she wins her £28m. Because Hingis is going to need it when all those members of the public come forward to sue her for encouraging them to part with their hard-earned cash to buy shoes which she believes could damage feet.

AMERICAN Richard Boeken, who smoked 40 cigarettes a day since he was 13, has been awarded £4.3bn after suing tobacco company Philip Morris for failing to warn him of the health risks. So if he genuinely didn't know that smoking kills, what planet has he been living on all these years?

MARKS & Spencer is sticking up for "normal" women again. Its latest swimwear model is a 36-year-old mother of three. She says: "I'm doing this for all the mothers with three kids to look after and no time for the gym. Getting to the supermarket is more important to me than getting to the gym and when cooking for the kids it's hard to come up with low-calorie dishes for yourself. My motto is 'A glass of red wine a day keeps the doctor away'." Hmmmm. How normal. How ordinary. How representative of your average British woman. Except that this is supermodel Yasmin Le Bon. She stands 5ft 9in tall, with ridiculously long legs, and weighs just nine stone. Marks & Spencer's last advertising campaign, featuring an "average woman" complete with huge bottom and cellulite, may have been uninspiring and a little depressing, but this is even worse. Does Marks really think a stunning model gloating that she manages to eat like a pig and do no exercise, yet still look gorgeous, will really make us average woman feel better about ourselves?

THOSE famous people featured in the Sunday Times magazine's A Life In The Day article always claim to get up at some ridiculously early time and start work on their latest novel/screenplay/painting by around 6am. (Is this the secret of success?) But this week, country singer Dolly Parton made them all look like lazy lumps when she revealed she's up by 3am. How long before someone claims to get up half an hour before they've gone to bed?

ACTRESS Sarah Lancashire has been gushing about her new love, TV executive Peter Salmon. Of her ten-year marriage, she said she only wed because she was pregnant and that leaving her husband was "lovely". Inevitably, her ex has hit back, branding the former Coronation Street star cold-hearted and manipulative. This may all be very entertaining for everyone else, but has either of them considered the impact on their young sons Matthew and Thomas? In this bitter war of words, they are caught in the crossfire.

THE biggest names in British pop in the 1980s are going back on the road again. Stars like Paul Young, Glenn Gregory of Heaven 17 and Richard Drummie of Go West got together this week to promote their tour. Immediately, it looked like a big mistake. This collection of mainly middle-aged, overweight and balding men, consigned to the musical wilderness for the last ten years, are hardly inspirational. Those of us who did used to go to their concerts and dance to their music don't want to be reminded of just how much we've all aged over the last 20 years. I'm not ready for all this nostalgia yet - can't it wait another decade or two?

Published: 15/06/2001