Jennifer Aniston has bought the rights to Getting Rid of Matthew, a comic novel written by Ricky Gervais’s long-term girlfriend, Jane Fallon. The novel is all about how appalling men are, especially adulterous men. Her new production company, Echo, has also purchased The Divorce Party and The Goree Girls. The latter is about how cool women are without men. Got the message yet, Brad?

Will Smith, the world’s most dependable box-office draw, is setting up a private school in Los Angeles this summer. He says children should know Plato at six, as well as more “real world” skills. He has little patience with traditional teachers, boasting he could teach himself to fly a space shuttle “because someone has written a book about it, and I could read that”. His confidence is disarming, but if I spotted Smith climbing aboard a shuttle, armed only with Space Flight for Dummies, I’d jump clear.

Still on space travel, last week’s blast-off for the final series of Battlestar Galactica has prompted articles in magazines about its pseudo-obscenity, “frak” (as in “Frak you, frakboy”). The largely Canadian cast has no problem with fraking explosively, nor the British actors doing American accents. The pebble in the shoe, or plum in the mouth, is James Callis, aka the British-accented sniveller Gaius Baltar. He is, complain fans, just too Hugh Grant to frak convincingly. Unfair: do they not recall Grant in Four Weddings? It still gets fraking dubbed every time it’s shown on American television.

Dominic Kay Scott has won a court battle to wrest back control of his directorial debut, Saving Angelo, starring Kevin Bacon, so he can show it at summer festivals this year. When he will turn 12. Meanwhile, Anna-Sophie Dutoit has signed a deal to have Faded Memories, a drama about a teen who cannot stand to be touched, released in five LA cinemas. She is 17. Orson Welles was 25 when he was hailed as the “youthful genius” of Citizen Kane. What a slouch he has turned out to be.

Ziggy Marley has refused to allow his mother, Rita, to use his father Bob’s tunes for a film based on her autobiography, No Woman No Cry, in which she would be portrayed by Lauryn Hill. Why? It could be because he is working on a rival documentary with Martin Scorsese. Or that he recalls her forging her husband’s signature to seize the late musician’s estate, instead of splitting it with the kids – for which she later apologised. Or it could be, as Ziggy claims, that no actor is worthy of playing Bob on film. Didn’t Bob’s music teach generosity and forgiveness?

The New York Times has run an apology for misreporting Eddie Izzard’s “cake or death” stand-up routine. “He imagined what would have happened if the Church of England, rather than the Roman Catholic Church, had run the Inquisition – not if the Church of England rather than the Romans had tried to conquer the world.” Yep, that’s Eddie Izzard, sucked dry and reduced to dust.

And a last word on the Oscars, from nominee Tom Wilkinson, on meeting Julie Christie at the ceremony: “When I started out, I wanted to make movies, to make money and to have sex with Julie Christie. I wanted to tell her that, but I don’t think she’s the kind of woman who does humour.”

Richard Brooks is away

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