Pandora

STANLEY KUBRICK'S death robbed cinema of one its great eccentrics, but Marlon Brando (pictured) still punches his considerable weight. A baffled Charlie Sheen watched as the Master of the Mumble, while filming Free Money, dashed into a bathroom where he inexplicably stuck his head into the lavatory bowl. Brando also repeatedly hammered female lead Mira Sorvino about the noggin with one of her high heels during shooting. But Brando's methodology seems contagious on set: "Mira really got into it," according to director Yves Simoneau. "She was asking him for more."

ALLEGED ARTIST Martin Creed, a friend of Damien Hirst, has got up the noses of the good citizens of London's Clapton. The conceptual Creed plans to tart up a Grade II listed building with a neon sign proclaiming "Everything is going to be alright". Oh no it's not, say residents of Linscott Road, home of the Portico, the 18th-century house in the eye of this particular cyclone. Apparently the local worthies feel Creed's project's disrespectful. One suggested nobbling the illumination, so it reads "eVERY THINg is gOiNg to be AlRighT".

FOLLOWING PANDORA'S revelations about Gordon Ramsay's unhygienic kitchen practices, it seems Kensington & Chelsea environmental health officers have become interested in the Truffle Thief's den. "We will be visiting the restaurant by the end of this week," one confirmed

LAST WORD on St Paddy's Day shenanigans: when the Irish opened their new Beijing embassy on their national day a couple of years ago, an aide placed some shamrocks in a cut-glass bowl of Waterford Crystal in the new embassy lobby. The ambassador was peeved to subsequently see the shamrocks had vanished. Then he noticed his Chinese guests picking green detritus from their teeth...

IT'S TAKEN them 20 years but Starsky & Hutch trio David Soul, Paul Michael Glaser and Antonio "Huggy Bear" Fargas will finally sit down in the same room together - in London's Brixton next week. Glaser, who's carved out a successful career as a TV director in LA, is waving the flag to support his sometime co-stars' show Alive in the Fridge, a theatre-music type event, playing sporadically at (surprise!) The Fridge from 24 March until 8 April. This reunion may be bilious Seventies nostalgia - but at least it's pukka bilious Seventies nostalgia.

WHICH IS more than can be said for ITV's hideously lame pseudo-Seventies sitcom Days Like These. If its cretinous creators thought that anyone during the Seventies used phrases like "sorted" and "I'm there for you" they not only weren't there themselves, they're not all here either.

SOMEONE WHO'S not just here and there but everywhere is Robin Cook. If it isn't one thing (private life, smear campaigns) it's another - like this. A broadcast hack calling the Cookie Monster this week for a comment was told, "No, you can't speak to him, he's too busy running the country." Which country would that be then? Kosovo? Sierra Leone? Or is there something our Number One Guy isn't telling us?

WINNER OF Pandora's saucer of milk this week is the feline e-zine Chic Happens. It assigned a reporter to cover Miuccia Prada's Miu Miu show in Milan. The run-of-show notes consisted, in their entirety, of a four- line poem by quondam Hollywood movie director Tim Burton:

Stick Boy liked Match Girl,

He liked her a lot,

He liked her cute figure,

He thought she was hot.

CH's scribe responded:

I tried on the outfit

It burst at the seams

Thanks anyway Miu Miu

I'll stick to my jeans. Miaow!

Contact Pandora by e-mail: pandora@ independent.co.uk