Diana’s Lawyers Battle Tell-All Television Project

Forget your cheap souvenirs, the lawyers who run the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund are facing an even bigger problem.

A proposed television movie.

Already battling to have complete control over the late Diana’s likeness, thereby earning money from any trinket bearing the former beauty’s portrait, the lawyers now want to stop production on a made-for-TV movie titled “People’s Princess.”

The film is being produced by former Brit newspaper editor Kelvin MacKenzie and concerns Diana’s relationship with the also dead Dodi Al-Fayed.

The lawyers claim the film is “inappropriate and insensitive.” MacKenzie dubbed their remarks as “outrageous” and has vowed to continue.

Loose talk

Joan Baez on the human faces of modern saints (to the Times of London): “I remember being with Dr. (Martin Luther) King once when he’d had too much to drink, and I’d been in bed with one of his cohorts, and he said, ‘Now you know I’m not a saint,’ and I said, ‘Now you know I’m not the Madonna.”’

No doubt she’ll party in a ‘Northern Exposure’

Janine Turner turns 35 today.

We won’t know until they pull out the paddles

At least one critic has overdosed on “ER.” According to New York magazine’s Daniel Mendelsohn, “The diagnosis seems clear: ‘ER’ is suffering from advanced ‘MASH-itis,’ a prime-time condition characterized by the irreversible humanization, moral rehabilitation and eventual cutesification of TV characters initially distinguished for their bracing unpleasantness.”

The winner must compose the cleverest limerick

The prize: Dylan Thomas’ bed. The bidders: Mick Jagger and Pierce Brosnan. The source: The Express of London (which reports that the bed of the late poet is now owned by a Welsh hotel owner).

Even then, he did things his way

It’s common these days for audiences to go crazy over musical groups. But Michael Barson and Steven Heller, co-authors of “Teenage Confidential,” claim that it first occurred during a 1942 Frank Sinatra concert. According to Benny Goodman, who was at New York’s Paramount theater, “I thought the damn building was going to cave in. I never heard such commotion, with people rushing the stage.”

You could even say he had an excess of the stuff

From the surprise-surprise dept.: Michael Hutchence had generous amounts of drugs and alcohol in his system when he died. That information comes from the late rock singer’s girlfriend, Paula Yates, who saw a copy of the coroner’s report.

Are we sure that it wasn’t his trigger finger?

It took doctors more than four hours to sew back on Mickey Rourke’s severed finger. The occasional actor-of-sorts had cut off part of his left little digit while cutting up a piece of frozen chicken.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Dan Webster