The BAFTAs Are Coming

The BAFTAS are coming. The Orange British Academy Film Awards usually play something like third fiddle to the Golden Globes and the Oscars, perceived as being quaintly British while striving to be international. This year, as Hollywood blinks and winces under the onslaught of the writers' strike, they have attained a refulgence that has attracted the screen's gods and goddesses like moths to a flame. "The talent bookers' telephones at Bafta have not stopped ringing," according to the UK Times. "The agents are determined to make sure that their star gets a spot."

Not being able to wear couture on a red carpet, even a damp, London one, running down Floral Street to the side of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, seems like more than the nominees can bear. So we anticipate no video links from LA swimming pools at all this year. Cate Blanchett might not come, but simply because she is pregnant and in Australia. Every major US television network will be vying for space too. Every year, we send a presenter for GlamourTV, but she will have to be more sharp-elbowed and determined than usual to get the interviews we need.

I have detected a lot more PR flurry around them this year as well, and found myself in the Dorchester - in a suite shaped rather like an Edwardian railway carriage. Narrow though it was, its walls were panelled and the ceiling held up by miniature Corinthian columns. In a tiny bathroom Nicky Clarke, one of our most starry hairdressers, wedged himself modestly against the marble wall and applied his genius to the assembled journalists' hair. He will be in charge of a team of tonsorial specialists who will not only inhabit a much bigger Dorchester suite to glorify the tresses of the lesser stars, but also fan out over London, visiting the supernovas in their own suites and homes.

With Nicky Clarke

I, meanwhile, drifted past into the Lancôme area to have my face done in the red carpet style. Lancôme is launching a special mini-range to celebrate the BAFTAs this year, including mascara with a hint of glitter. As I am a complete sucker for glitter, I was gagging to try this out. In 2006, when I was acting features editor of British Vogue, I visited beauty director Anna-Marie Solowij in her potion-lined lair to ask if she thought I was too old for glitter eyeliner. Her gratifying response was to look at me as if I was mad, and hand me four tubes of the stuff.

Then, back to Nicky, his barley-sugar mane of thick, gorgeous hair still just as it always was, his hips just as slinky in low-cut jeans - still exuding a strong whiff of Warren Beatty in Shampoo. As he blow-dried and flicked my hair, creating 'volume and movement' we reminisced about Vogue magazine, as it was when I first arrived in the early 1980s. We discussed Princess Diana's hair, which he did for her engagement pictures - but always felt that she was behind the times hair-wise after that. And his early days with the legendary Leonard, the gypsy hairdresser of Mayfair. A nice man, highly skilled and modest, fun to talk to. Lucky BAFTA stars, I say. They will be gorgeous.

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