Ephraim Hardcastle
JEREMY Paxman, interviewing Sir John Gielgud on the stage of the Old Vic on the occasion of his 95th birthday, respected the venerable thespian’s wish not to mention his 1953 shame when he was arrested in a Chelsea men’s lavatory for sexually importuning. Now, 22 years later, Jeremy reveals that before sitting down for their BBC Newsnight chat he had helped Gielgud find a toilet backstage, fumbled with his trousers and, er, handled his marital equipment. ‘I got the impression that I was not the first man to have held his c***,’ Jeremy tells comedian Richard Herring’s podcast with a straight face. ‘He just wanted to pee.’ Sir John, who died a year after the interview in 2000, is unlikely to convey celestial thanks to Paxo for his frankness.
THE Queen’s honeymoon at Lord Mountbatten’s Hampshire pile, Broadlands, was enhanced when she brought her own chocolates, according to former lady-inwaiting Pamela Hicks. She recalls: ‘The Queen was late for dinner and said: “I don’t mind Neola [the family’s pet mongoose] coming into my room – in fact, I enjoy it. And I don’t mind Neola opening my box of chocolates. But does he have to take a bite out of every one?”’
SIAN Phillips, once married to Peter O’Toole, reveals that her recollections of the marriage to the late hellraiser in her memoir upset her so much that she never read the 2001 book until asked to write the foreword for its forthcoming reissue. ‘I didn’t read Public Places after I wrote it,’ she says. ‘So now I’m having to read it for the first time, and I keep having to stop and read a bit of PG Wodehouse. It’s so depressing.’ She adds: ‘Would I do it again? I haven’t a clue!’
VICTORIA Derbyshire, pictured, has outed BBC presenter Paddy O’Connell for wearing a flat cap while presenting his weekly Radio 4 show Broadcasting House. She says: ‘I mentioned on air that I never knew he wore a cap when presenting. He admitted disguising the mess he had made of cutting his own hair in lockdown.’
TRYING to ring his church bells at St Mary Newington for victims of the pandemic, broadcaster the Rev Giles Fraser suffered a mishap. ‘During the prayers I was going to toll the bell 126 times, each for 1,000 dead,’ he says. ‘At 53, the bell rope broke and fell down on my head.’ Could this be categorised as a Covid-related injury?
LYRICIST Tim Rice was so upset at his failure to find rhymes for the musical Jeeves that he wrote to creator PG Wodehouse, apologising. ‘To my great relief,’ he recalls, ‘I had a letter saying, “Dear Mr Rice. I am sad at the thought that your Jeeves show has fallen through, but as the fellow said, that’s showbusiness”.’ Andrew Lloyd Webber subsequently found another lyricist for 1975’s By Jeeves, which flopped. Fortuitously, Wodehouse had departed just months before for his Blandings in the great beyond.