TV starlet ain't half hot mum

The Australian Defence Department is investigating allegations that television celebrity Tania Zaetta had sex with special forces soldiers during a recent tour of war-ravaged Afghanistan. The high-level document says that Zaetta had relations with troops at the Australian base in Tarin Kowt, the capital of Oruzgan province, last month. Pictures and a video were said to have been taken. It was revealed that the unsubstantiated claim was made by veteran rock singer Angry Anderson. Zaetta and Anderson were the two headline acts on a 17-day tour of the Middle East that staged concerts for Australian soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The department has been severely embarrassed after admitting it broke privacy rules by naming Zaetta - who has denied the allegation - in a briefing document to the Minister for Defence Joel Fitzgibbon. Australia’s military was in retreat last night, apologising to Zaetta for the leak, and ordering an immediate inquiry into how the document — officially referred to as a “hot issues brief” — became public. The federal Opposition demanded Mr Fitzgibbon apologise for the "gross" and "extraordinary" invasion of the TV star's privacy. Spokesman Nick Minchin, who travelled on a transport aircraft with Zaetta and Anderson during the tour, has demanded an explanation from Mr Fitzgibbon. "This is a gross invasion of her privacy," he said on Fairfax radio today. "It is very unfortunate and I think Mr Fitzgibbon, as the Defence Minister, should come out today and explain exactly how this has occurred. He should apologise publicly to her. This is an extraordinary invasion of her privacy. He has got some answers to provide."

Zaetta, who has appeared on Baywatch and Mission Implausible, a British pay-TV show, strenuously denied the allegations and said there had been little opportunity to be alone with any soldier, even if she had wanted to be. She described the claim as "hurtful". "That is the absolute first I've heard of it. That is the most ridiculous story I've ever heard about my life - and I've heard plenty over the years in this industry," she said. "It takes the cake. I've just done this most amazing life-changing experience, been to the most unbelievable places and for this to be said, it's very hurtful."

Zaetta was the co-host of 1990s television stunt show Who Dares Wins, which is also the motto of the Australian SAS. She is also a popular film actress in India; starring recently in Charlie’s Angels-style hit, Mr. Black, Mr. White. “How does a supposed document . . . that I don’t know about get leaked in the first place — that’s a little bit concerning about the security of the country,” she said. “It’s complete lies . . . apart from being hurtful, it’s damaging to a woman’s career, to her reputation.” The Government now faces a potential compensation payout after she sought legal advice over the claims.

Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister, reluctantly commented on the scandal, which drew criticism from the opposition conservative Liberal Party over invasion of privacy. “These matters are under investigation within the Defence Department and I will leave it for that investigation to reach its own conclusions,” Mr Rudd said.

Artists on the tour - dubbed "Tour de Force - Middle East 9" were warned they would breach Defence Force regulations if they fraternised with troops. Another performer confirmed the entertainers had been told that they would breach regulations if they consorted with the troops. “I have heard of quickies but I have never heard of anything that quick . . . a tour like that is hard work,” John Clinton, of the country rock band the Wolverines, said.

Anderson, lead singer of rock band Rose Tattoo, told The Daily Telegraph he had no knowledge of any complaint. But the document says the secretary of the Defence force's entertainment division "was informed yesterday by Mr Anderson that he had been told by SF special forces troops whilst at Tarin Kowt that Ms Zaetta had sex with them and they had the photos and video to prove it."

"The issue was not raised by Mr Anderson during the tour. The tour CO commanding officer was aware that Mr Anderson did not think highly of Ms Zaetta, often criticising her," the document says. A Department of Defence spokesman confirmed that an investigation into the allegations was underway and that statements would be taken from those who participated on the tour.

Anderson, who said he is a member of the Forces Advisory Committee on Entertainment, said he had not made a complaint about Zaetta. "I don't know where that came from. I don't get into personal or petty dislikes, particularly when it could hamper or have a detrimental effect on a tour," he said. "I don't know Tania very well. As far as I could tell she conducted herself in a very professional manner. It's two weeks away, it's pretty intense and I pretty much kept myself to myself." Anderson said he had formed a friendship with a male comedian during the tour. "I guess I could be accused of being homosexual. I was often seen in his company."

The document says all personnel on the tour were briefed on Defence force policy on fraternising with troops 10 days before they flew to the Middle East. Under a heading "Talking Points" - briefing notes given to ministers as suggestions for handling controversial issues in public - the document suggests the minister say: "I'm aware of the allegation and understand that an investigation is currently being conducted.

In interviews given to publicise the tour, which was filmed by the ABC's Australian Story and aired over the past two weeks, Zaetta said: "I'm single and there has been a lot of teasing that I am going into a place where they haven't seen girls for a long time." Just before the tour left, she said about touring the Middle East: "If you can't get a date out of there then you've got no hope."

Commanding Officer of the tour Lieutenant Colonel Greg McCauley said he could not comment and referred inquiries to the Department of Defence's public affairs division. Sources on the tour said they had no knowledge of any Defence investigation and were surprised that an allegation had been made by Angry Anderson.

A civil union is no big deal

Tonight on Brothers & Sisters, ABC is featuring the quintessential May sweeps event, but with a critical twist, notes matthew Gilbert. It's a big fat wedding, which, along with burials and casting stunts, is how the networks inflate ratings during those months when ad rates are set. But the Brothers & Sisters marriage is a gay marriage - technically, a civil union, since the show's Walker clan is dysfunctional by way of LA and not Boston. And so some 11 million viewers will watch the joining of two men in what one character calls "holy man-trimony."

Stop the presses?

Actually, no. The wedding of Kevin and Scotty isn't a controversial network milestone, like those early gay and lesbian kisses on the likes of Dawson's Creek and Roseanne. Indeed, it's no big deal at all. ABC has deemed a gay commitment ceremony a sweeps event; no advertisers are pulling out and no hate campaigners are shooting arrows, according to ABC; and life goes on. Despite the decade's fraught politics about gay unions, the subject is not exactly making for incendiary TV in 2008. While gay marriage can still be a polarizing political issue, the realities of gay life - coming out, kissing, weddings - have become normalized in popular culture enough to pass by almost unnoticed on prime time.

Compare that to the noise that has accompanied so many early, pioneering network attempts to show gay people doing what straight people do, such as simply talking in bed, which triggered protest in 1989 over an episode of Thirtysomething. When Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet on Ellen in 1997, there was brouhaha and there were boycotts. Now, on the day of Kevin and Scotty's nuptials, which arrives after much on-screen making out by the couple, there seems to be only TiVo-setting and shoulder shrugging.

Even the writers of Brothers & Sisters don't bother charging tonight's wedding with conflict and controversy. Scotty's parents are certainly unhappy about the ceremony - his mother calls it a "contrived event" and a "pretend wedding" - but none of the conservative regular characters on the series blink twice. Indeed, Calista Flockhart's Kitty, a former right-wing TV pundit who has objected to gay marriage and who is now married to Rob Lowe's Republican senator, presides at the altar. "When we give up on what was," she says to all those assembled, "well that's when things we thought improbable or impossible, even, happen right before your eyes."

Kitty's reference to "what was" has a broad resonance on Brothers & Sisters. The Walkers' Uncle Saul, played by Ron Rifkin, is a gay man who has spent his life in the closet; he finally comes out to the entire family tonight. Now in his 60s, Saul is plagued with regret for having failed to live his life out loud, without the fulfilment that his nephew Kevin has found. During the ceremony, as Kevin (Matthew Rhys) and Scotty (Luke MacFarlane) exchange rings, the camera gives us a poignant shot of Saul. He is the product of a time when gays and lesbians were more apt to spend their lives trying to come out - or trying not to come out - instead of moving ahead to find love and commitment.

"What was" represents the thinking of earlier generations that were sceptical or condemning of enduring gay unions. Brothers & Sisters is both expressing compassion for and distancing itself from the kind of old-school thinking that doomed gays and lesbians to short-term relationships or loneliness.

In some ways, the show's stance toward Saul and his generation recalls how Barack Obama tried to describe his relationship to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in his March speech, before denouncing Wright entirely. Obama understood the roots of Wright's point of view, even while he rejected it: "For the men and women of Rev. Wright's generation," he said before once again chanting his mantra of change, "the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years."

Brothers & Sisters wants to focus on the change, as well. "It's amazing, what our children teach us," Sally Field's Nora says to Saul tonight after the ceremony. Brothers & Sisters is no stranger to self-congratulation; the series has always served its liberal point of view with a chaser of sanctimony. But it does consistently push forward, at no cost to its popularity. Surely it's no coincidence that two of the show's key producers, Greg Berlanti and Jon Robin Baitz, are openly gay.

The road leading up to this Brothers & Sisters non-moment has included countless TV breakthroughs, of course, most of which have garnered attention. On the networks, the pushing of the envelope has primarily been in the context of comedy, on sitcoms such as Will & Grace, Roseanne, and Friends, which gave us a commitment ceremony between Ross's ex-wife and her partner in 1996. And in the cable TV niches, writers have been delivering dramatically rich portrayals of gays and lesbians for years, on shows such as Six Feet Under and The L Word. And the fact that recently out-of-the-closet celebrities such as Neil Patrick Harris and T.R. Knight are successfully playing heterosexual men has added to the de-fusing of sexual orientation on series TV.

Brothers & Sisters is defining a new sense of calm about gay life in America, one that involves none of the gawking and squawking that have accompanied so many of the networks' earlier attempts to normalize homosexuality. I suspect that Brothers & Sisters will stimulate more public controversy over its incest-tinged plot line - a growing romance between Justin Walker and the woman he thought was his half-sister - than anything having to do with gay marriage. Sometimes, the phrase "so what" is the password to the future.

VH1's pale imitation of the Sexual Revolution

This is compelling television to be sure -- after all, we're talking about sex: hippies cavorting in the altogether. Women's libbers brandishing their bras. Playboy bunnies and Hugh Hefner. Helen Gurley Brown and Burt Reynolds's naked centrefold. Suburban swingers. Jaybird-naked couples shedding what remains of their inhibitions at the infamous Plato's Retreat. Drag queens and porn stars. But there's something missing from this made-in-America tableau: Almost every single one of the characters in the spotlight is white, notes Teresa Witz.

Such is the case with VH1's new, four-part documentary series: Sex: The Revolution, which starts tomorrow night. "Sex" presents a sweeping survey of the seismic changes in 20th-century American sexual mores, and the legal and cultural shifts that resulted from it. A large part of the problem is that it tries to do too much, tossing out historical highlights and lowlights at breathtaking speed. The talking heads who shape the discourse over four hours -- Erica Jong, Armistead Maupin, Hefner and Gloria Steinem -- tend to be the usual suspects, while black and brown folks get shoved to the background. They're the soundtrack through which white folks found sexual salvation. (Cue the Little Richard music. See the stoned sister falling out of her dress at Studio 54.)

"It's true," says Hart Perry, who directed the series along with Richard Lowe. "At one point, we were dealing with the cultural crossover between black and white . . . when we talk about rock-and-roll. I wanted to talk about Norman Mailer, the 'White Negro.' . . . [But] there was too much competition for stories. This is certainly not the definitive story on the sexual revolution."

It is a story of the sexual revolution, shown through "the artifacts of culture," news footage, films, music videos, photographs, with a chorus of white boomers commenting on the action, and reminiscing about times gone by. Melvin Van Peebles, black feminist Michele Wallace, Danny Glover and musician Nile Rodgers make brief appearances; no Latinos or Asians are interviewed. (Glover on San Francisco's "Summer of Love": "It was about taking mescaline and getting laid. Or smoking weed and getting laid.")

Question: How can you talk about the cultural icons of the sexual revolution and not discuss blaxploitation diva Pam Grier? Or extol the significance of a loincloth-clad Jo Raquel Tejada, a.k.a. Raquel Welch, in "One Million Years B.C."? Why is it that instead we are told that the poster girl for the female orgasm was Jane Fonda in "Barbarella"? Or Marilyn Chambers, the Ivory Snow soap model gone bad in "Behind the Green Door"?

In days gone by -- many days gone by -- we as a nation were a buttoned-up lot, having sex but never copping to it, repressed and reactionary. Good girls didn't do it, not unless they'd signed on the dotted line, crossing the great divide between Mrs. and Miss. Good boys never did it with other boys. The bad boys who did were thrown in jail, diagnosed as sick and probed with electrodes in an effort to "cure" them. Throughout much of the country, interracial marriage was illegal, as was birth control -- even for married couples in Connecticut. Fear ruled. You fornicated at your peril. But after Alfred Kinsey, the '60s, the Pill, Stonewall and Roe v. Wade, something changed: Now people were doing it and talking about it.

So where's the full conversation in "Sex: The Revolution"? Perry says he wanted to explore the legacy of lynching victim Emmett Till and the lethal fear of black male sexuality. But largely missing also is the inclusion of African Americans, Latinos, Asians, etc., as participants in the process. Watching the first segment, we see sex anthropologist Kinsey in the late 1940s and early '50s loosening up America with his books, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" and "Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female," and we see black-and-white films featuring terrified white kids scared to even kiss. Then the footage cuts to Little Richard jamming with his guitar, and suddenly the (white) kids are rocking and rolling and going nuts. The message: Black sexuality is alien and different from "mainstream" society, contagious and powerful enough to make everyone else abandon all constraints.

When white feminists are talking about being pushed to the sidelines of the antiwar movement by macho males, the segment cries out for a little perspective. Like hearing how Black Power pioneers Kathleen Cleaver and Elaine Brown felt when Stokely Carmichael declared that the only position for a woman in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was "prone."

It's cool that the filmmakers explore the beginnings of the gay and lesbian pride movement, and how the Stonewall uprising of '69 was the watershed moment in the movement. But it would've been nice if the directors had acknowledged that it was black and Puerto Rican drag queens such as the late Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who got things started back when the cops showed up at the Stonewall Inn.

Sex: The Revolution airs on VH1 at 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Uncensored encore showings will be on the Sundance Channel on May 19 and 20 at 12 a.m.

Venus de Miley

When Annie Leibovitz's picture of child star Miley Cyrus appeared in Vanity Fair her tween fans - and their parents - went ballistic. The naked back, the satin sheet, the damp hair ... how dare the innocent heroine of the hit series Hannah Montana look so provocative? Germaine Greer dissects the image itself, and then we look at the people behind it: the photographer, Annie Leibovitz, and Disney, which markets the billion-dollar actor...

When Miley Cyrus was asked about the picture of herself clutching a satin sheet to her chest that Annie Leibovitz has taken for the current issue of Vanity Fair, she said it looked "pretty and natural" and that she thought it was "really artsy". If by this she meant artistic, rather than artsy-fartsy, she was right on the money. In western art most of the women portrayed semi-clad or totally nude are children. Their nipples are pallid and undeveloped, their breasts hard and veinless, their pubes unfurred. When Lucian Freud paints girl children, nobody cares; when Leibovitz photographs them, everyone goes ballistic. When Botticelli paints the yet-to-be-enjoyed goddess of love emerging from the sea, people come from all over the world to gape at her. The Greeks and Romans liked their goddesses meaty; our preferred Venuses are children. Hardy perennials such as Diane de Poitiers held their sway as long as they did because their bodies never matured.

Kate Moss has been able to earn millions only as long as she could continue to project the body image of a 13-year-old. The appeal of her nude portraits derives from the heart-breaking curve of her narrow hip-line and the tautness of her barely perceptible cleavage, not to mention the sulky innocence of her unfocused gaze. The icon of the 34-year-old mother qua 13-year-old virgin is even more disturbing than the sexy image of the 15-year-old Cyrus, because it is so much rarer and weirder. Sexually knowing 15-year-olds are normal. No matter how much energy Disney - which makes the TV show Hannah Montana, in which Cyrus stars - might put into denying the obvious, 15-year-olds are sexually aware. Any schoolteacher coping with a heaving mass of 15-year-old women knows that whatever their tribal culture or their religious affiliation, they are fascinated by sex. Girls' magazines pay lip service to health and friendship issues: their real subject is boys.

We train female children to be manipulative and to exploit their sex. From the time she is tiny, a girl in our society is taught to flirt. She is usually dressed like a mini-whore in pink and tinsel, short skirt, matching knickers, baby-doll pyjamas, long hair falling over her face. She learns to court attention and, when successful, to hide her face. If she's lucky enough to get to be a big sister she might get over this sleazy conditioning, but very few daughters these days get to grow out of being "daddy's girl". When the time comes she is likely to reject approaching womanhood, desperate to keep her thighs skinny, and nearly as desperate to acquire hard, high breasts. The idea of growing into her own body is charmless, frightening. One thing we know about the Leibovitz photograph is that Cyrus saw nothing amiss in clutching a satin sheet to her apparently naked bosom, and looking at the camera over her shoulder. Girls are taught to look at the world in that sidelong fashion from the time they come to consciousness.

For her photograph of the teenage celebrity, Leibovitz chose a palette strongly redolent of the dirty postcards of yesteryear, sepia embittered with black, a suggestion of eye-blue and lip-red, as if retouched by hand, with never - thank our stars - a hint of pink. The light is centred on the child's sallow, unformed cheek. Her eyes are shadowed and puffy, her lips slightly set, as if she is waiting out the slow shutter-click of an obsolete camera. Nobody has run a comb through her disordered mass of dark hair, which seems greasy and damp, as if with sweat. As one of her now ex-fans shrieked in his blog, "She looked like she is freshly fucked in these photos!" The subject of Leibovitz's photo could be a child prostitute from Casablanca, vintage 1900, the camera in the hands of a sex tourist who is about to toss a few coins to the doorkeeper. It is Disney, after all, that is merchandising this child, and the suggestion of pimping will cling to it. Leibovitz may be cynical, is obviously cynical. She is also, as usual, justified.

Now Disney accuses Vanity Fair of drumming up controversy and deliberately manipulating a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines, as if its own motives were not identical. The photo shoot for Vanity Fair was probably carried out weeks ago but the brouhaha has been timed for the very day the magazine appeared on the newsstands. Disney could have refused to make its star available for a shoot with Vanity Fair, or, if what it wanted was to protect its brand image, it could have demanded the right to vet the pictures. Cyrus was not undefended in the clutches of Leibovitz; her parents and minders were present and apparently saw nothing amiss in the offending photograph, which, in its original state, probably looked less like a dirty postcard than it does on the pages of Vanity Fair.

Before Leibovitz, Cyrus was regularly photographed on red carpets dressed as a 35-year-old in sequins and chiffon with heavy makeup, hair extensions, fuck-me shoes, and occasionally a segment of baby breast escaping at an ill-cut armhole. Otherwise she dresses as a schoolgirl in long socks, very short skirts and the same hanks of rather gluey-looking hair. These publicity shots are far cheaper and far nastier in implication than the Leibovitz image, which has class. Meanwhile, in a series of candid snapshots apparently of Cyrus that have found their way on to the internet, Cyrus the professional virgin is apparently happy to show herself nipples akimbo in jersey underwear, pulling down a vest to display a green bra, and disporting a bare belly on a bed with a boyfriend. All tacky, all in circulation, and all displaying the usual knowingness.

Cyrus said that Leibovitz didn't photograph her "in a skanky way". That she can be relied on to do for herself. Prostitution is the paradigm of service industry. It is the tragedy of Cyrus's life that she has nothing to sell but herself and she is fast approaching her sell-by date. From this time forward.

Branded for life: How the tweens became an advertiser's dream

With their unbeatable combination of "pester power" and burgeoning brand awareness, tweens are the advertiser's dream. Aged between six and 12, American tweens spend $51bn of their own pocket money annually - mainly on never-ending TV spin-off products, collectables, so-called multi-platform opportunities (video games, live shows, downloads, clothing). And, as if that wasn't enough tacky plastic stuff, an additional $170bn is spent on them by friends and family. It is thanks to these tween spenders that Miley Cyrus, star of Hannah Montana - up there with High School Musical as one of Disney's biggest money-spinners - is set to be worth $1bn by the time she's 18.

Part of the phenomenon is so-called "age compression" - kids getting older younger - and rejecting traditional toys as unsophisticated. The falling birth rate is significant, too, along with the rise in parental working hours: a lot of the tween market is guilt money.

The company that appears to have the best understanding of the tween market is Disney. In 2006, High School Musical, the soundtrack to the Disney Channel film of the same name, became the biggest-selling album of the year in the US, with 3.7m copies sold. High School Musical has since become one of the biggest brands in Disney's history. In 2007, the sequel became the most watched cable broadcast ever, with 179m global viewers. High School Musical 3 is out this October.

Hannah Montana first aired on the Disney Channel in March 2006 and it, too, has grown into a massive brand. It starts its third season in the US later this year. It has made Miley Cyrus, who plays Hannah, a schoolgirl who leads a "secret life" as a pop star by night, into the US's highest-paid teen entertainer. Cyrus's concert movie took $65m at the US box office, and she is paid in $1m a week on tour, with millions more coming from her TV show, CDs and endorsements. Disney has just signed up her autobiography for an undisclosed billion-dollar figure.

The Hannah Montana merchandise is extraordinary: pink frilly T-shirts emblazoned with Hannah's face, Capri pants, camouflage mini-skirts, sparkly handbags, skin-on nail sets, necklaces, earrings, Nintendo games, plus a range of novels and collectable dolls. Arguably, it's oversexualised, but it's also a boring feminine stereotyping: the message is that sparkly makeup, manicures and "killer" mini-skirts are what it means to be a girl. This is bling and glam for the under-10s. And little girls lap it up.

"Tweens heavily influence buying way out of proportion to their numbers," says Ken Hertz, an entertainment lawyer and branding expert whose firm represents Will Smith, Beyoncé Knowles and Gwen Stefani. "By the time someone has reached their late teens, they're much more difficult to influence." Tween consumers can get happily sucked in for life. "If you can get a fan at tween age, you have a good chance of keeping them for a long time. It's not a new thing. That is what allowed the Spice Girls to sell out Madison Square Gardens in 10 seconds. And that is why New Kids on the Block have a reunion coming up."

Not surprising, then, that big players in the music industry - Sony, Warner, EMI - are now homing in on this lucrative market. The tween client base is seen as crucial in a climate where sales to teenagers and adults have dropped by 21.2% annually since 1999.

British children are less consumerist than American kids, says Louise Barfield, London-based branding specialist and mother of a nine-year-old daughter, but the pressure is on. "I don't allow my daughter to watch commercial TV," she says. "It's useless products that are not going to enhance her life - clothing, tattoos, cosmetics." Sleepovers are a big thing with girls from the age of six and seven, she says, where girls may want to swap makeup and clothes. "The way they communicate via brands, products and characters can be worrying: it's the sharing of it all they are fascinated with. You want them to enjoy themselves, but you have to ask: is this what I want my little girl to be focused on?"

Caught up in the moment: Why stars love to pose for Annie Leibovitz

Five hours before John Lennon was shot dead in 1980, Annie Leibovitz photographed him naked. His arms and legs were wrapped lovingly, needily, around the fully clothed body of his wife Yoko Ono. His lips pressed to her cheek, his eyes shut in bliss. But that wasn't Leibovitz's original idea for the Rolling Stone cover. She had wanted him on his own, but Lennon insisted that his wife appear too. So Leibovitz suggested that the two pose together nude. Lennon obligingly began to strip, but Ono refused to take off her trousers. Without thinking about it much, Leibovitz recalled, she told Ono to keep all her clothes on.

"Then he curled up next to her and it was very, very strong. We took one Polaroid," said Leibovitz, "and the three of us knew it was profound right away." Lennon reportedly told her: "You've captured our relationship exactly. Promise me it'll be on the cover." It was, but not as planned: it appeared on the memorial issue for the murdered Beatle. But what had Leibovitz captured? "You couldn't help but feel that she was cold and he looked like he was clinging on to her." Which seems unfair: I can see Lennon's clinginess, but not Ono's chilliness.

The story of Lennon's last photoshoot undoes some of the mystique of how Leibovitz gets her subjects to disport themselves in daft, degrading, mildly titillating or otherwise compelling poses: sometimes at least, she has responded on the hoof to her celebrity subjects' annoying demands. She doesn't create a moment but is responsive to it, realising that the thing she's after is right there. But most professional snappers would say they could realise that too if they only had the same access to exhibitionist celebs as Leibovitz has had in the past 40 years. They, too, could have got the Queen to look wistful in a crown.

To be fair, Leibovitz can do jaunty, contrived composition, too. Her picture of Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk subverts the glumly pious Riefenstahl-Mapplethorpe black-meets-white aesthetic by sheer dint of Goldberg's joyfully cheeky open-mouthed pose. What Leibovitz often does is capture a striking image that flatters the sitter into thinking it discloses something profound, when it doesn't. Maybe that's what her lover Susan Sontag meant when she told Leibovitz: "You're good but you could be better."

But how did Leibovitz get Sting to stand in a bracingly ridiculous naked pose in the desert, covered in mud with hands coyly covering his tantrically accomplished genitals? How did she get Demi Moore to pose heavily pregnant, one hand cradling the heft of her bump, the other protecting readers' eyes from the sight of her nipple? How did she lure Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong to pose high and naked in the saddle of his racing bike? Or the voluptuous Scarlett Johansson and non-voluptuous Keira Knightley to lounge nudely in a double portrait, their daft rhyming pouts making the photo's wannabe sexy allure unintentionally hilarious? Because Leibovitz will get them on the cover of the glossies. Because, in the narcissistic cesspool of modern celebrity, she is Echo. Because she gives her subjects what they want and the rest of us, well, we get what we are given and some of us like it.

Leibovitz said that when Sontag came into her life, "I wanted to do better things, take photographs that matter." Has she? Leibovitz has taken some fine photographs of her family, children and Sontag. They are intimate, convincing and unflashy, everything her more recent celebrity work has not been. But she has become something of a hack, an obliging furnisher of kitsch. It happens, particularly when you've been doing something too long.

Earlier this month, for instance, her photo of US basketball star LeBron James and Brazilian model Gisele Bündchen caused a fuss. James had become the first African-American to figure on Vogue's cover, but some critics suggested it espoused racist stereotypes: he looked, they said, like the King Kong to her Fay Wray. James, it is worth pointing out, said he enjoyed the picture. We needn't: it brings two ho-hum stars together in a collision of cliches.

Or take her fascinatingly hideous, 2006 shot of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes en famille à l'herbe, dandling Suri Cruise. In this frame, the couple close their eyes in Hollywood's vapid simulacrum of conjugal felicity (the opposite of the real thing that John and Yoko gave Leibovitz). Even now, it makes me want to Photoshop in a payload of manure falling on to them from a swooping helicopter. Leibovitz held up a mirror to their smug narcissism and it refused to crack, damn it. No wonder she can get her subjects to do what she wants.

Channel 4 plans 'Jackass' sex education

Channel 4 is refreshing its sex education coverage for teenagers with a new project that combines "Jackass with Brainiac and the Gorillaz", it revealed today. KNTV Sex, a TV programme with related internet content, uses animated characters called Kierky and Nietzsche to discuss issues including puberty, pregnancy, fetishes and the male and female bodies.

It uses an oddball mix of factual voiceovers and Eastern European public service films and Candid Camera-style footage. The Tern Television production builds on the KNTV Philosophy series on science and philosophy, many of which were shared by fans on YouTube, and will run as a 10-part TV series with spin-off games and viral content.

Channel 4 announced last year that it would shift the focus of its £6m education budget away from TV to online as it tries to reach the 14-19 age group. Its latest projects, which have budgets ranging from £500,000 to just over £1m, include a campaigning platform called Battlefront, which will mentor 20 teenage campaigners and show them how to use the internet to raise interest in their causes.

Teens have so far initiated campaigns about gun crime, support for asylum-seekers and a school where pupils feel the level of supply teachers is impairing their education. The final projects will be chosen and rolled out in the autumn. Channel 4 is discussing collaborations with MySpace and Bebo, including the careers-focused Year Dot project.

The broadcaster also signalled a further departure from TV convention by co-funding, rather than commissioning, the online mentoring start-up School of Everything. "Broadcasters need to consider their role in the ecology of the web, and the way they work with some of these incredible tools," said Matt Locke, Channel 4's new media commissioner for education. "Users already have debates and social lives online and we have to think about how to work with rather than reinventing those. Rather than create our own social network, we have partnered with MySpace so the discussions can continue after the project. It's an important legacy of the work we do, so our projects can degrade gracefully back into the web."