Ephraim Hardcastle

PNEUMATIC Baywatch bimbo Pamela Anderson, 49, is leading another of her campaigns to persuade the Queen’s bearskin-clad guards to switch to fake fur hats. She has tried before without success. It takes one black bear to make each hat, with the MoD buying around 100 a year at £650-£700 each. Does Ms Anderson have an agenda? Maybe it is a coincidence that she is working with Russian faux fur manufacturer Only Me. DONALD Trump openly sneered at Jon Sopel, the BBC’s North America Editor, during his surreal press conference last week. Sopel, 57, is not the first BBC man to be derided by a US president. In 2007, former BBC political editor Nick Robinson, 53, incurred the wrath of George W Bush at Camp David. Bush: ‘You’d better cover up your bald head, it’s getting hot out here.’ Robinson: ‘I didn’t know you cared.’ Bush: ‘I don’t.’ It seems the BBC gets on better with the Democrats. Funny that! BBC bigwigs clamour to pay tribute to The Media Show presenter Steve Hewlett, who has died from cancer aged 58. But the Beeb didn’t escape his criticism. Reflecting last year on a leaked report by Dame Janet Smith into the BBC’s conduct following the Jimmy Savile revelations, Hewlett commented: ‘Here is an organisation that doesn’t look like your friend any more. It looks like an organisation that once upon a time at least, was up to no good.’ DAISY Goodwin, 55 (pictured), the creator of ITV’s Victoria, has a solution to SS-GB star Sam Riley’s mumbling. She tells Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘You can remedy this by asking the actor to go back and re-voice some lines.’ Surely it’s too late for that. Modern actors mumble more than their predecessors. As an old ham used to complain to me: ‘They can’t do the work, dear!’ WHO’LL play the Queen in her later years for Netflix’s serial The Crown? Prince Philip used to have a soft spot for Barbara Windsor. At the unveiling of statues of both himself and the Queen at Canterbury Cathedral in 2015, he reportedly said that his looked more like Boris Karloff and the Queen’s reminded him of Ms Windsor ‘after Henry Higgins (of My Fair Lady fame) had got to work’. NIGEL Havers merits a footnote in both BBC and Conservative Party history after disclosing that he set up Margaret Thatcher’s first interview with Radio 2’s Jimmy Young after her election as Tory leader in 1975. Nigel was a 24-year-old researcher on Young’s show and – via his father Michael who was then shadow attorney general in Thatcher’s team – went to see the newly elected Tory leader in her Westminster office. He recalls: ‘I was armed with a list of questions. She said she would answer number one, seven, eight and 19 and so on. Jimmy originally didn’t want her on the show saying he didn’t do politics. But when she did her first interview he fell in love with her and she appeared in all 14 times.’