Ephraim Hardcastle
SHOULD the Queen attend the opening of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new musical Cinderella she might find some of the tunes surprisingly familiar. Melodies written by ALW for Cricket, a musical commissioned by Prince Edward to mark his mother’s 60th birthday in 1986, have been plundered by his lordship for some of the nine musicals he has composed since. Cricket has only been seen twice since its private premiere before the Queen at Windsor Castle. ‘It is unlikely to be performed again,’ says Sir Tim Rice, Lloyd Webber’s lyricist. ‘Some of the tunes have found their way in to other Lloyd Webber extravaganzas. It is easier to recycle tunes than words.’
RETIRED TV meteorologist Bill Giles laments the lockdown hairiness of BBC weathermen, telling Radio Times: ‘We were obliged to have neat, short hair. There was even a BBC make-up department lady on hand with scissors to snip us if our hair went over our collars.’ He adds: ‘When barbers open again some BBC weather presenters who now look like shaggy sheepdogs will be allowed to have their hair cut.’ Too gallant to mention the laydees, Bill?
WHILE Dame Joan Collins, pictured, delights in looking ravishing at 87 she hasn’t always clarioned her age. Actor Johnny Briggs, who has died, played Skinny alongside Joan in Cosh Boy, Britain’s first X-rated film, in 1953. ‘She was older than me when we were making the picture,’ he remembered. ‘I never understood how she became six years younger than me later on.’
BRIGGS, who played Coronation Street clothing factory owner Mike Baldwin, met the Queen when she visited the Granada TV set in 1982 and jokingly asked if she could have a dress run off. He recalled: ‘When I got home and excitedly told my wife Christine she said, “How lovely. I’m so pleased. But can you take the dustbins out.”’
SALLY Bolton, chief executive of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, confirms that this summer’s Wimbledon championships will go ahead, adding that players will not be prevented from supporting Black Lives Matter by kneeling. Shouldn’t pose a problem for the ball girls and boys. They’ve been taking the knee since tennis was played with cat gut-stringed rackets.
IS The Taming of the Shrew misogynist? Professor Lynda Boose, of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, says Shakespeare’s shrew, ‘by exercising either her sexuality or her tongue under her own control, situates female speech as a symbolic relocation of the male organ, an unlawful appropriation of phallic authority in which the symbolics of male castration are ominously complicit’. Scholars await an English translation of Boffin Boose’s woke theory.
CAPTAIN Sir Tom Moore’s epitaph ‘I told you I was old’ is a variation on Spike Milligan’s inscription ‘I told you I was ill’ on his gravestone in Winchelsea, East Sussex. The church authorities initially vetoed Spike’s message, finally permitting it in Gaelic: ‘Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite.’ Should Tom’s family face similar difficulties his final elegy translates as ‘Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé sean.’
Email: john.mcentee@dailymail.co.uk