Ephraim Hardcastle
NINETEEN years after the Queen’s sensational intervention in Paul Burrell’s Old Bailey trial, when he was accused of stealing Princess Diana’s possessions, the ex-royal butler risks offending HM by claiming she saved him from jail ‘because i was her boy for 11 years’. Burrell, who has spent the intervening years cashing in on his royal Family connections, breaks down in tears during saturday’s Channel 5 documentary secrets of the royal Palaces. ‘Never before had a monarch intervened in a criminal court case,’ wails Burrell. ‘she saw me grow and she saw me marry and have two children. And... she cared about me and what would happen to my family.’ As the Queen has never explained her unprecedented action in rescuing him from the calaboose, what’s the chances of her confirming the superannuated booby’s lachrymose TV meanderings?
WILL Alan Bennett take part in tonight’s resumed Clap for Carers after his experience last time? Realising his neighbours were applauding the NHS as he strolled on the road near his Primrose Hill home, The History Boys writer embarrassingly appeared to be acknowledging the applause, adding: ‘I try to disavow this by feebly smiling and shaking my head but this just looks like modesty. It is an absurd and inexplicable incident.’
IDENTIFYING late superman actor Christopher reeve and her Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman co-star Joe Lando as her two favourite on-screen kissers, four-times divorced Jane seymour, pictured, saucily adds that she enjoyed romances with both men away from the cameras. the frisky former Bond girl, 69, adds: ‘On and off-screen, i’d say. We got to practise!’
SOON to replace Olivia Colman as the Queen in The Crown, Imelda Staunton says she has an additional challenge that was not faced by Claire Foy, who played the young monarch. ‘I’m now doing the Queen that we’re all familiar with,’ she says. ‘With Claire, it was almost history, the Fifties. Now I feel when I play her, people can say, “Well she doesn’t do that! It’s not like that!”’ No pressure Imelda!
A YEAR in advance of Lucian Freud’s centenary, roger Lewis, biographer of Charles hawtrey, discovers an unlikely friendship between the Carry On star and the painter. ‘they both liked a drink’, says Lewis, confirming that Freud played an art student in George Formby’s 1942 farce Much too shy while hawtrey, as a surrealist painter, is asked by Formby: ‘Where’s his arms and legs?’ ‘Oh,’ mewls hawtrey, ‘We abstract.’
SIR NICHOLAS Soames has outed himself as a childhood knitter, confessing to a podcast: ‘My mother opened the school report and the only thing it said of any note was that my knitting was not very good.’ What would his grandfather, wartime PM Winston make of his purling?