Rhianna encounter stranger than fiction

International pop sensation Rhianna was this week confronted in a County Down cornfield by a DUP councillor who told her to “cover up” while she was on his farm.

Rhianna had been given permission to carry out a video shoot in a field outside Bangor ahead of a series of three concerts in Belfast.

Rhianna had removed along checked shirt to reveal a red patterned bikini, when the sight apparently became too much for Alan Graham’s Christian beliefs and he politely asked her to leave.

“I realised things had got to a stage which were not acceptable to me,” said the unionist hardliner. “Things became inappropriate and I asked the film crew to stop.”

The bizarre exchange made papers and showbusiness magazines across the world, and totally captivated the Six-County media. It also led to the popstar being followed by huge crowds of press and public as she continued her video work, in the nationalist New Lodge area of Belfast.

NOT A GAME

The surreality of Rhianna’s strutting through the streets of north Belfast was not helped when a British television documentary maker admitted that a video clip, supposedly showing a helicopter being shot down by the Provisional IRA, actually came from a video game.

The film, purportedly taken from one of the IRA’s own videos, was shown during a programme which dramatised the organisation’s international links.

ITV apologised after it emerged that the footage, came from a game called ‘Arma’. The clip was labelled on screen “IRA film 1988” and was said to show the IRA sitting on the back of a camouflaged armoured vehicle with a rocket launcher strapped to it.

The film then showed the helicopter falling to the ground in a cloud of black smoke and bursting into flames on the ground.

In a statement released this week, ITV said that “the correct clip of the 1988 incident was not selected and other footage was mistakenly included in the film by producers”.

Urgent Appeal