Ephraim Hardcastle
THE BBC’s diplomatic correspondent James Landale announces he has rejected overtures to become Theresa May’s communications chief, tweeting: ‘I was asked if I would consider a job at No 10. Nice to be asked but have decided not to apply. Have a great job at BBC.’ How kind of Old Etonian Landale, 47, to keep his fans updated on his career options. Or is he just desperate to make the point that he was No 10’s first choice?
WHEN Stephen Fry bolted to Belgium in the middle of a West End run of Simon Gray’s play Cell Mates in 1995, he set a bad example for fellow luvvies. Dame Harriet Walter, 66, says she had a similar urge while performing a Shakespeare trilogy in a temporary theatre next to the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras station last December. ‘When it got really terrifying,’ she recalls, ‘I did think that I could just walk across the road and get on the Eurostar. A couple of times, I came close to doing a “Stephen Fry”.’ We’d miss you Harriet, whereas bumptious Fry made the mistake of returning.
FRUITY TV property presenter Kirstie Allsopp, 45, pictured, daughter of the sixth Baron Hindlip, takes angry aim at viewers who complain that she films too many programmes in the capital, tweeting before heading northwards: ‘Just left eight-year-old who’s very upset I won’t be back for his school concert. Next git who complains we do too many London shows can f*** off!’ She adds: ‘Put that in your “you focus too much on the South East” pipe and bloody smoke it.’ Oh dear!
WHY is neat vodka the preferred tipple of la-di-da theatre producer Thelma Holt, 85? Her former assistant Sweetpea Slight, in a memoir, blames Holt’s generously sized posterior. ‘One night in the Roundhouse bar,’ writes Slight, ‘as Thelma was about to add the tonic, Lady Diana Cooper clasped her wrist with a claw-like hand and said, “Not with your a**e, dear.” She has drunk only neat vodka ever since.’
THE BBC says there have been few complaints about Frankie Boyle’s New World Order, in which the unpleasant comic attacked the DUP as ‘homophobic Right-wing religious fanatics’, adding: ‘The DUP hates sodomy, whereas I love it.’ On his BBC2 show transmitted just before Newsnight on Fridays, Boyle, 44, also cracked jokes about Christ, adding: ‘Who was gayer than Jesus? Jesus is the gayest character in all of fiction.’ Strange to think the BBC severely reprimanded Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond for calling Mexicans ‘lazy’.
JANET Leigh, born 90 years ago today, always tried to avoid taking showers after her terrifying scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror classic Psycho, in which she was slashed to death in the Bates Motel. Leigh, who died in 2004 aged 77, admitted: ‘I stopped taking showers and I take baths, only baths.’ And if she had to take a shower in a hotel? ‘I’m always facing the door, watching, no matter where the shower head is.’