Ephraim Hardcastle
MANY people who worked with disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein knew about his ‘seriously lewd behaviour yet so little comes into the public domain,’ muses Newsnight’s Evan Davis on air. Might the BBC’s own creative expert, Alan Yentob, have been one of them? He partnered Weinstein on several projects and attended a lunch party on a yacht at Cannes hosted by Horny Harvey.
RE Harvey Weinstein, our celebrated international reporter, Ann Leslie, describes in her autobiography, Killing My Own Snakes, visiting London’s Connaught hotel to interview actor and ‘perfect English gentleman’ David Niven, pictured. ‘Do you mind coming up to my suite for a few minutes – I’m expecting a call from LA,’ he told Miss Leslie. Entering his suite, she found the scoundrel sans trousers, sans underpants. ‘Making hopefully urbane and witty excuses, I left and thought no more about it,’ she adds.
PRINCE Charles is likely to approve the cull of more than 30,000 badgers. In 2005 he wrote to then PM Tony Blair urging ‘a proper cull’. Poignantly, the heir to the throne’s shaving brushes are made with silvertip badger hair. ‘Perfect for applying his Penhaligon’s Blenheim Bouquet Shaving Cream,’ adds my source.
A POLICE source says Sir Edward Heath once became wedged in the bath tub at Arundells, a manor house in the grounds of Salisbury Cathedral he acquired for a song from the Church of England. A duty police officer, alerted by the sound of Sir Ted thrashing in the water, managed to extricate the ex PM, who told him: ‘We never mention this again.’
CABINET-minister-turned-TV-entertainer Michael Portillo tells the Cheltenham Literature Festival: ‘I’m a member of the future prime ministers’ club... and I hope Boris Johnson will be joining it.’ The Won’t Be Prime Minister Club, I presume he means.
THE annual rugby match between Croydon’s Whitgift School (£36,411 a year to board) and their state rivals at The John Fisher, Purley, is cancelled after fears of class antagonism. Nothing new here, says an Old Whitgiftian, who remembers hailing the Fisher lads as ‘the Combined Oiks’.
KEN Burns’s moving, ten-part history of The Vietnam War garners critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic but why is it being shown on little-watched BBC Four without any of the promotional ballyhoo the BBC devotes to its ratings-chasing, end-of-the-pier showbiz dross? Says a spokesman: ‘We are delighted with the response the series has received.’
GORDON Ramsay having declared war on fellow chef Jamie Oliver, will rival cook Marco Pierre White join the fray? He says of former protege Ramsay: ‘I will never speak to him again,’ and describes Oliver as ‘a fat chef with a drum kit’. Keeps them in the public eye, I suppose.