Pandora: Don't shoot the pianist

(© Tim Sanders)

Readers passing St Mary's Church by London Euston tomorrow may wish to glimpse the Elton John and Kiki Dee de nos jours. Jon Snow will return to his becassocked roots as a Winchester Cathedral chorister and sing for the congregation. He has prepared two numbers: "The Hippopotamus" ("mud, mud, glorious mud") by Flanders and Swann, and a second, mystery turn.

Accompanying Snow will be the pianist and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger. Pandora suspects that ivory-tinkling Alan, who owns a £30,000 joanna and holidays at "piano camp", does not rehearse in the nude – at least not since colleagues circulated that rumour. All the same, best turn up the church heating. Tickets cost £5; proceeds to the New Horizon youth centre, which Snow chairs.

Woodward offers leg-up to Miss Great Britain

Is Shaun Woodward about to perform more of his memorable political gymnastics? I ask because the multimillionaire Northern Ireland Secretary, who defected from the Conservatives in 1999, has been cavorting with the enemy.

Last week, Woodward dined in London's The Ivy, the West End hang-out renowned for feeding the capital's arts and media crowds. He chin-wagged with the bearer of the Miss Great Britain crown, Gemma Garrett.

As revealed here, the shapely Garrett is standing in this week's Crewe and Nantwich by-election on the "Beauties for Britain" ticket. Labour's Tamsin Dunwoody defends her late mother's 7,078 majority. A few hundred votes could tip the seat to the Tories.

"Gemma was there in The Ivy with the chairman of Miss Great Britain, and Shaun was having dinner with Cilla Black, and they just got chatting," explains an aide to Garrett.

"He was extremely nice and told her if she needed any help up there, or if anyone was giving her any problems, she should call him. She hasn't rung yet, but she kept his number."

Woodward's assistant calls to explain: really, Garrett is such a keen political animal that, as she scanned the restaurant's celebrity clientele, she recognised Woodward and insisted on meeting him: "Shaun was having dinner with a friend at a separate table. Being a good Belfast girl, she recognised Shaun and a friend introduced them. They had a chat and that's all. Given her talents I'm not sure she needs advice from Shaun."

Jean-Claude returns kicking and screaming

JCVD – not a nasty bedroom ailment, but Jean-Claude Van Damme's comeback film. The Belgian fly-kicking trouper and self-styled "Fred Astaire of karate", 47, will next month bound back on to big screens – in France and Brazil, anyway – starring as himself in an engaging-sounding action-parody.

Van Damme has been hawking his wares around the Cannes Festival, left. Pleasingly, his "Franglais" performance will be adapted for the English ear; I hear that Revolver Entertainment has bought the UK rights and that the British release will be "later this year". There is no word on whether or not Van Damme's famed walnut-crushing buttocks will appear.

In one scene in JCVD, the ailing Muscles from Brussels walks into a bank robbery and must play his macho persona. Hopefully Van Damme's hips – and audiences' attention spans – can take the strain of his return to acting.

Alastair's losing cause

Reassuring to see that Alastair Campbell has recovered, following his urinals altercation with Pandora at the Arts Club in Mayfair two months ago. (Blair's spin doctor threw a wobbly, demanding to know "Did you follow me in here?")

Campbell turned out yesterday for a celebrity football team at Chelsea's Stamford Bridge ground, playing a ramshackle side of MPs to raise funds for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust.

Despite the cameo efforts of the Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, the parliamentarians were woeful, losing 7-1 to an onslaught led by the hat-trick-scoring 5 Live DJ Spoony. The retired sprinter Darren Campbell was booed off by his team-mates for missing multiple "sitters". Campbell did not score but played creatively. "We expected him to get much more of a kicking," says an organiser.

Life on Marje

Dear Marje, Is it true that the BBC is developing your biopic? A series about the famed Fleet Street agony aunt Marje Proops – who when she died in 1996, aged 85, was a national institution (as opposed to the rest of us, who just get institutionalised) – is in development, expected for BBC4.

The project is apparently based on Angela Patmore's authorised biography, published three years before Marje's death, in which the columnist disclosed that she and her husband "Proopsie" had had almost no sex, and she had conducted a long, torrid affair with the Mirror lawyer Philip Levy.

The search is on for a gap-toothed actress capable of wearing the Eric Morecambe glasses with the appropriate feisty ebullience.

The tragedy is that Marje did not live to advise Cherie.