Ephraim Hardcastle
THE Duchess of Sussex’s trip to Dublin in 2013 – when she tried her hand at pouring Guinness – occurred only after Trinity College debating society failed to entice a more famous actor, according to a college student blog. ‘After inviting her it was decided she wasn’t important enough to become an honorary patron, so we shoved her something called a Bram Stoker Medal – named after the former society member who wrote Dracula,’ it records. ‘With hindsight, considering she might yet rival Princess Diana for fame and star power, that was bit of a mistake. But she still seemed pretty happy to get the little plastic medal in a box.’ Poignantly, she displayed the trinket proudly in her Suits dressing room.
ENTHUSING about his long-time bond with the King, throttle-bottom Stephen Fry doesn’t mention severely testing that friendship after admitting in his 2014 memoir that he’d secretly snorted cocaine at Buckingham Palace. Asked whether Charles had known at the time, Fry replied: ‘Well, of course not... but he does now. I’m certainly not expecting the Order of the Thistle or any great honour of state to be falling about my head.’
PONDERING on mortality, Gyles Brandreth says he has abandoned plans for burial. ‘Graveyards can be pretty bleak in winter. Headstones can be moved or vandalised and the inscription often fades away,’ he says, explaining that he now wants to bequeath his ashes to a notable artist... ‘and invite them to mix a bit of me into their paint so that I might end up on one of their canvases.’ Might formaldehyde aficionado Damien Hirst stuff Brandreth’s ashes into a dead shark and call it The Physical Impossibility Of Gyles Without A Silly Jumper?
ON THE eve of the Tate Modern retrospective of work by Yoko Ono, pictured, former Channel 4 arts head Waldemar Januszczak blames the TV station’s managers for scrapping Yoko’s giant marble sculpture of a woman’s leg for C4’s HQ. ‘At the last minute the management ogres stamped their foot and said no,’ wails Waldemar, who commissioned the piece. ‘It wasn’t the money: Yoko was going to pay for it all. It was the idea of a giant woman’s leg masquerading as art. They thought it silly.’ Not as doltish as Channel 4’s Naked Attraction, surely?
MUSING on the official decision not to tell Charles’s grandfather, George VI, that he had a fatal cancer, Charles Moore writes in The Spectator: ‘It remains a crime to “compass the death of the Sovereign”... meaning simply to imagine it, the reason being that such talk often had treasonable intent.’ Murky waters.
FUNERAL-faced actor Michael Jayston, who has died at 88, was a practical joker who once received a long reply from London Zoo after he posed as a pensioner with a parrot that once had a vocabulary of 1,500 words but had developed a ‘seizure of the tongue’. He wasn’t as lucky with Dame Thora Hird. She didn’t respond to the suggestive love letters he wrote in the guise of a randy retired colonel.