Ephraim Hardcastle

BBC’s Test Match Special team was interrupted with a knock on the door of the makeshift commentary box at Southampton’s Hilton Hotel beside the Ageas Bowl stadium during the 4th Test. It was a very damp Alastair Cook objecting to suggestions that he should hang his bat in the attic. He’d been having a shower in his bathroom next door to the temporary studio and heard every word about his lack of form. Nothing to do with his retirement surely! ANY plans the Queen had of gifting her grandson Harry and his wife Meghan a country home have been delayed by the horrendous cost of refurbishing their Kensington Palace bolthole, Nottingham Cottage. Roof repairs costing £1.4million gave HM a sharp intake of breath. She’d already gone off the idea of gifting homes as wedding presents. Charles didn’t need one, Princess Anne got Gatcombe Park, Andrew bagged ‘SouthYork’ – selling it for £15million – Edward got a lease on Bagshot Park, and William and Kate got Norfolk’s Anmer Hall. At the end of the royal food chain, bride-to-be Princess Eugenie got a lease on KP’s Ivy Cottage. RADIO 4 presenter and former BBC executive Matthew Bannister, 61, responds to Chris Evans’s announcement that he’s again quitting the corporation, remarking: ‘Very dignified! Not quite how I remember it happening last time round.’ Bannister was in charge of Radio 1 in 1997 when spoilt Evans quit the breakfast show after his request to have Fridays off was refused. He charmingly referred to Bannister as the ‘Fat Controller’. TETCHY polymath Jonathan Miller, 84, pictured, has a talent for making sculptures from random pieces of wood and metal. Some featured in BBC2’s Absolute Rubbish. That is exactly what Camden council dustmen thought when they removed them from his front garden by mistake. He wasn’t pleased. HAVING undergone treatment for kidney cancer in May, Andrew Marr now proudly announces to viewers on his BBC1 Sunday show: ‘I’m off the booze!’ Marr, 59, refused to abstain when he first suffered a health scare in 2013, defiantly announcing: ‘After the stroke there are so many things I can’t do. I can’t go running. I can’t go cycling, so I’m back on the booze and probably drinking a little bit more than I did.’ SHARING a Chelsea mews home with singer Georgia Brown in the Sixties, permanently thirsty actor Peter O’Toole, who died aged 81 in 2013, was thrown out in the rain after vomiting on her carpet. Recalls screenwriter Frederic Raphael, 87: ‘There was a dustbin by the front door which became animated when opened some time later. O’T had been huddled in it during the whole period since his exit and now craved return.’ LAMENTING the fact that Helen Mirren and Sue Johnston scoop all the older women roles in film and TV, Maureen Lipman, 72, tells Radio Times: ‘You’re in a position where you’re just happy to die on Holby City after a few weeks.’