NEXT week's 41st Cork Film Festival looks like being a celebrity-free zone.
For a long time the organisers hoped they'd be able to snap up Michael Collins, with all the attendant razzmatazz that would involve, for its opening movie. Instead they've got Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and none of the stars who include Helena Bonham Carter and Richard E. Grant have (as yet) agreed to turn up, though apparently Mel Smith just might.
Comedian Sean Hughes was the big name in attendance at the very crowded Murphy's-fuelled festival launch on Wednesday he's in one of the festival's films, writer/director Trish McAdam's Snakes And Ladders which also stars Porn Boyd and the indecently talented Gina Moxley. He is leaving next week for his first tour of Australia, though how his particular brand of Irish humour will go down Down Under is anyone's guess, given this week's news that they've pulled Father Ted from the airwaves because the viewers just didn't get the joke.