Settle down

Kelly Brook promotional photo for “Calendar Girls”

So topless model Kelly Brook is taking Jerry Hall’s place in the stage adaptation of the 2008 film Calendar Girls, and the article about it that doesn’t shout some variation of “KELLY BROOK COMPLETELY NAKED IN CALENDAR GIRLS” can scant be found. But don’t book your flight to London just yet.

By “completely naked”, the media hype machine means the Austin Powers-style of nudity that the audience can’t actually see — and this, ironically, because of Kelly’s fame as a topless model.

“A few of the girls in the cast are more game than others to go nude,” she explains, “But if I really go for it in getting my clothes off, then it will be seen in a totally different context to everyone else — as in ‘Kelly gets her kit off again’ — so I shall have some cup cakes strategically placed when I go naked on stage.”

And by “strategically”, she means she wears them like pasties. Titillating, perhaps, but after you factor in the shoes and skirt she also wears for her onstage photo shoot, Kelly is less “completely naked” than most people at the beach.

This unexpected prudery is understandable, perhaps, from someone who aspires to be appreciated for her other talents but was booted off a show called Britain’s Got Talent earlier this year after barely a week on it. Nevertheless, as a theoretical audience member, I think I’d be a wee disappointed by a play about a nudie calendar where everyone gets naked except the famed topless model, much in the same way that I’d be disappointed to see a Bruce Lee movie in which Bruce doesn’t do any kung-fu.

Of course, one can’t model forever, and the older Kelly gets, the greater the pressure will be to prove she can do other things. Which is all well and good — just as long as she tends to her base now and then on Britain’s Got Boobs, too.