A couple of years after The Simple Life ended, I witnessed the Paris Hilton savvy first-hand. She was over in London to promote Paris Hilton's British Best Friend, her reasonably entertaining follow-up show, and I was one of around 30 journalists offered a three-minute video interview with her. Now, it's tough to have any kind of meaningful conversation with someone in three minutes, but my editor at the time figured this was Actual Paris Hilton FFS, so we did it. Throughout our brief encounter, Paris barely seemed to look up from her BlackBerry and said nothing that sounded like good copy. I came away wishing I'd come up with some better questions, thinking the whole thing had been a waste of time. But the next day, our videographer showed me an edit of the interview and I was pleasantly surprised. You couldn't see Paris playing on her BlackBerry because she'd worked out her angles before we began filming, and on camera, her answers were actually pretty engaging. She'd just conducted an interview while simultaneously emailing a business associate or texting one of her mates. And she totally got away with it. I'll bet she did the same thing 30 other times that day.