Diary: Just the role for J-Lo?

Lopez has a handful of developing film projects to keep her occupied (AP)

Poor Jennifer Lopez just can't catch a break. First her new album Love? was postponed by her "parting of the ways" with record company Epic. (While performing the lead single, "Louboutins" at last year's American Music Awards, J-Lo lost her balance and fell over onstage. She was wearing Louboutins.) Then her big summer rom-com, The Back-Up Plan, got the critical cold shoulder. Now, it seems someone is trying to sabotage plans to install her as a permanent judge on American Idol. She was rumoured to be replacing Ellen DeGeneres, who recently quit the show. But, claimed People magazine's anonymous source, "her demands got out of hand... [producers] Fox had just had enough". Another insider, however, hotly denied the story, saying the reports were "wildly exaggerated". Whether or not she wins a judge's spot, Lopez at least has a handful of developing film projects to keep her occupied. Among them is a remake of Overboard, the 1987 rom-com starring Goldie Hawn as a spoilt, difficult billionaire socialite. Could be just the role for J-Lo.

* David Cameron was keen to describe his own travels in the British Isles in his speech on tourism yesterday. Among the PM's favourite holiday spots, he said, are "Snowdonia, south Devon and north Cornwall, the Lake District, Norfolk, the Inner Hebrides, the Highlands of Scotland [and] the canals of Staffordshire". His love of the Inner Hebrides, he didn't add, comes from time spent shooting stag at the 20,000-acre estate owned by his wife's stepfather, Viscount Astor, on Jura. As journalist and fellow crackshot Bruce Anderson said in 2007: "David has been stalking deer for 20 years or more. He is very good with a gun... He has the 'right-left' knack whereby you shoot two deer in one go before they run off. Only the best stalkers can do that." Sounds like a thoroughly middle-class pursuit.

* More4's drama-documentary about the Miliband brothers (to be broadcast on the eve of the Labour leadership election) will feature interviews with some of the boys' fellow pupils from "Labour's Eton", Haverstock School: not, sadly, Liverpool winger Joe Cole or hip-hop group N-Dubz, but novelist Zoe Heller and Labour mayoral candidate Oona King, 42. King, I'm told, doesn't recall much about the young Frasier, 45, and Niles, 40, being between the pair in age. But she does, she explains, have a lot to thank their father for. It was Ralph Miliband, the celebrated Marxist thinker, who gave Oona's mother, Hazel, her place at the London School of Economics, where she went on to meet Preston King, Oona's father.

* Tom Greeves, ConservativeHome blogger and erstwhile speech-writer for Boris Johnson, is also a struggling stand-up comedian. This week he grumbled on the website about the comedic dominance of the Left, which he blamed on BBC execs lazily letting panel-show guests mock the PM for being posh (see above). Plugging his Edinburgh Fringe show, Greeves also lobbied – somewhat ambitiously – for a booking on Have I Got News For You. His cause was taken up by Tory MP Douglas Carswell, who suggested on his own blog that scrapping the licence fee would encourage more right-wing comedy on to the airwaves. I fear Mr Carswell's logic is flawed.

* Should Greeves encounter any troublesome lefties, he could do worse than follow the example of comic Seymour Mace, whose Fringe show was disrupted by drunken hecklers this week. When they left noisily midway through his act, Mace pursued them from the venue, his raised voice drawing the attention of security staff. Mace's manager assures me that by the time he returned to finish the show, the comic was "completely calm". Had the hecklers been below drinking age, they might have recognised the 6ft 3ins Geordie's dulcet tones: Mace is also the voice of CITV.

* Jonathan Franzen is the first living author featured on the cover of Time magazine since Stephen King in 2000. I hope his new novel, Freedom, won't be overshadowed by the autumn's other surefire critical hit. I speak, of course, of Russell Brand's My Booky Wook 2.

highstreetken@independent.co.uk