Ephraim Hardcastle
APPREHENSION over Donald Trump’s possible reaction at his portrayal in Spitting Image is being blamed for the failure of any US network to take up the new series of the satirical puppet show. NBC, one of the networks giving the rebooted series the thumbs down cites the late president Ronald Reagan’s fury at being depicted as a trigger-happy buffoon in the original run. Confides a source in production company Avalon: ‘It was the only show in NBC’s history where a sitting president phoned up and asked for a show to be cancelled.’
PRINCE Charles was represented at the funeral of playwright Ronald Harwood by Dame Maggie Smith. Harwood imposed a ban on women playing the men’s roles in all his works including The Dresser. So who was there on Camilla’s behalf? ‘I went,’ says Gyles Brandreth. ‘Both as a friend and representing Camilla. In a woke-aware, gender-fluid way, that would have much amused Ronnie.’
SOPHIE Wessex, pictured, maintains a dignified silence in the face of claims, in Sasha Swire’s diaries, that she disliked ‘doing functions with Edward because she gets frozen out’ and rues the loss of her pre-marital public relations career. Sasha writes: ‘[There is] regret in her eyes and sadness that this part of her life is gone and not allowed to return.’ And we thought the only way was Wessex.
DAVID Dimbleby shamelessly lobbies for a chance to show his dancing skills on Strictly, saying he was taught the tango by Dame Margot Fonteyn and waltzed with Princess Diana. ‘I’ve stopped doing Question Time. I’m available,’ he says. ‘I’m ready to do anything for anyone,’ adding: ‘I think it was Margot who dubbed me Dimbletoes.’
PERFORMANCE artist Marina Abramovic’s bid to make history as the first woman to have a solo show at the Royal Academy of Arts has been postponed until next year. Fortuitous? The Belgrade-born Marina planned a version of her 2010 New York excitement when she sat motionless in a chair for eight hours a day for three months while 850,000 people queued for hours to sit opposite her.
THE perceived lack of passion in Tom Stoppard’s plays exasperated distinguished actor Nigel Hawthorne, who, appearing in Hapgood, wrote an angry letter to the playwright stating: ‘I love you as a man and puzzle that the warmth you give out so constantly and effortlessly is excluded from your plays.’ As the Yes Minister star died in 2001, there is no record of Tom’s response.
NEW Jersey-born warbler Jon Bon Jovi tells an American podcast that U2’s Bono was terrorised by marauding Orangemen when growing up in Dublin, adding: ‘I never had the Orangemen walking through my neighbourhood saying, you know, get the Catholic kid and beat him up’. The only orangemen Mr Bono encountered in his native Finglas were from Del Monte.