BODY LANGUAGE Shane Watson The January issues of the glossies go on sale soon, jostling for our attention with the usual cocktail of sex, glamour and celebrity. Vanity Fair has attempted to top last months Brad Pitt calendar-boy cover with a picture of a bare-chested Tom Cruise. GQs gone for Heidi Klum in a bikini and covered the celebrity angle with a picture of Neil and Christine Hamilton posing as Adam and Eve. The Hamiltons were photographed in body stockings and the garments digitally removed at a later stage, but what do we care? Theyre naked! Particularly Neil you can almost see one of his bottom cheeks! And, all right, theyre only above-the-waist shots of Tom, but still, hes really giving it some, raking his hair with his fingers in such a way as to make those pocket-sized pecs gleam under three kinds of moisturiser. Theres a funny thing about nudity: we, and the Americans, consider “in the buff” to be fantastically naughty. The average age for starting a sex life is now the same as for losing your milk teeth; switch on the telly and the only programme that doesnt guarantee an interval of graphic sex is Porridge, yet you cant beat a bit of clothing removal for getting our attention. Nothing like it! How much do you bet is the going rate for a surprise nudie shot of Madonna, the woman whose nipples are, by her husbands own admission, as familiar to us as our own? In what other capital would the recasting of Mrs Robinson in The Graduate be the cue for another set of furtively taken photographs of that towel-dropping moment? Where else in the world would you have a gala theatrical night, attended by the head of state, whose high point was a Full Monty. And, of course, naked, or semi-naked, men on account of us being slightly less used to seeing the undressed male form are the naughtiest of all. This will have been the flawed reasoning behind the Tom Cruise himbo photo shoot. Its not that Toms torso isnt appealing it could be if glimpsed through the doors of the mens changing room but this posed, pert, self-conscious, polished-up little torso is surely the visual equivalent of the guy who says: “Thats enough about September 11, lets talk about me.” Please, Pat (his publicist), this is the man trying to shrug off a reputation for chronic self-love; did we really think abandoning the shirt and striking the Johnny Weissmuller poses was going to make him seem like the knockabout kind of guy the interview would have us believe? Robbie Williams has fallen for the same narcissists trap time and time again. Before wed seen it all the bum, the chest, on the cover of the album, on the cover of Vogue you could at least imagine that there might be a desirable part of Robbie, but all that flashing and tattoo-waving has long since put paid to the possibility of any enigma-building. Ask yourself, Robbie, how many times did Frank Sinatra appear on the cover of Variety wearing nothing but a smile? Its one of those cruel laws of nature that women with great bodies and zero personality have a head start over the rest of us in the sexiness stakes, whereas men given the equivalent looks-to-character ratio are doomed. Jennifer Lopez loves herself every bit as much as Tom loves Tom, but while preening and pouting and demanding extra blusher for your upper arms is no barrier to sexiness in a woman, itll always be trying in a man. (None of us can begin to imagine what went into those pictures, the hours of discussion about Cruises fringe separation, the rolls and rolls of film discarded because there wasnt quite enough definition under the armpit, and you can bet those armpit hairs had their very own stylist.) Still, maybe we shouldnt be too hard on Tom. Clearly hes got wind of the buzz surrounding Clive Owens performance in the soon-to-be-released Robert Altman movie, Gosford Park. You know Clive Owen: weve seen him in every state of undress, not to mention starkers all the time in that film with Saskia Reeves. But not until now, when hes never wearing less than a vest and trousers, have we appreciated quite how thumpingly sexy he is. This film is going to shunt him up into the major league and put him head to head with Cruise in the star stakes. Lets just hope that when he gets his magazine cover he has the sense to keep the shirt on.