Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Showing their Of animal hues
Attenborough reveals secrets
SIR David Attenborough reveals the animal kingdom’s hidden worlds of colour in his latest documentary series.
The 94-year-old naturalist said: “The natural world is full of colours, colours that attract attention, that blend beautifully with their background and... create extraordinary displays.
“With new cameras, some developed especially for this series, we can reveal a world hidden from our eyes.”
Sir David travelled to Costa Rica to film rainforest sequences in 2019 but the butterfly scenes
were easier to get to – they were shot in Richmond Park, West London, near his home.
Here Sir David explains some of the remarkable ways in which animals use their colours.
Attenborough’s Life in Colour starts Sunday, 7pm, BBC One.
SEA SHOTS Filming at Great Barrier Reef
POP guru Alan Mcgee has told of the weird night he was introduced to Jimmy Savile by Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The strange evening at the PM’S official residence has been re-enacted for a film on Mcgee’s life which premieres at the Glasgow Film Festival tomorrow.
Paedophile Savile is introduced to Mcgee by Blair at Chequers, before the former BBC presenter holds court over dinner.
Mcgee, 60, was there with his wife Kate, having supported New Labour and become a key figure in the Cool Britannia trend which swept the country in the 1990s.
The scenes feature in the biopic Creation Stories based on Mcgee’s life.
The former boss of Creation Records had built a successful music empire, helping to steer bands including Oasis, Primal Scream and The Jesus and Mary Chain to fame.
He also donated £100,000 to the New Labour movement.
Recalling the visit to Chequers in 1999, Mcgee said: “Jimmy Savile was there and took over the meal.
“I was there with Tony Blair and the former Celtic Football Club chairman John Reid and Dame Judi Dench. Jimmy Savile was a horrible c***. He wasn’t exposed as a paedophile until years later but we knew he was dodgy. I thought he was a gangster. He just was wrong.”
With a screenplay by Irvine Welsh, the film is showing this week at the festival.
DISCOVERED
Viewers can watch it online before it heads to Sky Cinema in March.
The film also recreates the night Mcgee discovered Oasis, who were unknown at the time, at Glasgow’s King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in May 1993.
It stars Ewen Bremner as
Mcgee. Richard Jobson, frontman of the band The Skids, plays the label supremo’s father John Mcgee.
Blair, who was Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007, is played by James Payton.
Steven Berkoff stars as the late occultist Alastair Crowley.
Mcgee said: “It’s Irvine’s take on my life. Half of it happened and half of it is Irvine Welsh. Alastair Crowley didn’t come to me in a dream.
“Ewen does a really good job. At the end of the day, I’m me. He’s slightly too posh for me because he’s from posh Edinburgh, but if he spoke like me nobody would understand so it’s probably good that he did it a bit straighter.
“It was a lot more gnarly in real life than it’s portrayed, a lot more druggy.
“The film is kind even to the people who behaved really badly including my old man.
“I haven’t spoken to my dad in 20 years and it’s me and my dad walking into the sunset at the end of the film.
“This is Irvine Welsh’s version of my life and it’s quite a Hollywood ending.”
The dinner party, which Mcgee wrote about in his book Creation Stories: Riots, Raves and Running a Label, took place at the Buckinghamshire retreat in 1999.
Mcgee, left, introduced Blair to Oasis founder Noel Gallagher at No10 following the 1997 election, before their relationship soured.
Savile once boasted he spent “11 consecutive Christmases at Chequers”, which is four miles from Stoke Mandeville Hospital, where he abused many of his victims.
He is thought to have visited Chequers only once while Blair was in office.
DUBAI’S missing princess was taunted by a guard who gave her a stopwatch to count down her time in captivity, it is claimed.
Princess Latifa, reportedly abducted more than two years ago, said she was told by the woman she could be held in the villa complex for another 12 months.
Friends of the 35-yearold say that she is being imprisoned in Dubai by the powerful ruler of the emirate – her father Mohammed Al Maktoum.
David Haigh, a human rights lawyer representing Latifa, received the texts about the stopwatch last year.
He wants her to be brought to the UK and says she has been denied medical care by alleged captors.
Mr Haigh added: “When I received the message about the timing device and the picture from Princess Latifa, I was devastated.
“I knew it meant they planned to keep her there for a long time. I also realised it was part of a cruel game, part of a long programme of torture.
“People need to realise how dangerous this situation is and that Latifa urgently needs help and support.” Latifa wrote: “Guard woman told me to prepare to stay one more year and got me this [the stopwatch] to make the time go faster.” Below the text was a picture of a yellow electronic counter still in its plastic packaging.
She also drew a diagram of the sprawling building she is said be held in – believed to be yards from Dubai’s tourist beaches popular with British celebs. It shows her small room is on the first floor of the main villa building behind trees and gates, not far from blocks on either side where on-site police are based. In videos filmed last year from the bathroom and released last week, Latifa claimed the villa has been converted into a jail, with bars on the windows. She said she is not allowed outside.
Friends of the Princess state that she was kidnapped by her father’s elite commandos from a yacht while sailing in the Indian Ocean in 2018.
The United Arab Emirates embassy in London said last week that Princess Latifa is “being cared for at home, supported by her family and medical professionals”.