Russia Today Salisbury rap
TV news channel RT has lost a High Court challenge over a £200,000 fine for “serious” impartiality breaches in its coverage of the Salisbury poisonings.
Ofcom sanctioned the Kremlin-backed broadcaster, formerly Russia Today, in October for seven shows about the novichok attack and the Syria war.
Rejecting its claim of freedom of expression, Lord Justice Dingemans said: “The need [ for impartiality] is as great, if not greater, than ever.”
Pair sing in 1983 film
MICHAEL Palin has told how he sang Terry Jones a classic Monty Python song on his last visit to his former costar… but forgot the words.
The actor dropped in on his fellow comedy legend at home in January this year, shortly before he died from dementia, aged 77.
Palin, 76, told The Oldie magazine: “He clearly was very unwell.
“But I talked to him as I always did. I wouldn’t accept that the dementia had shut his understanding up. It had shut his communication up.”
Palin said he decided to duet with Jones’s wife Anna and added: “We sang Every Sperm Is Sacred from The Meaning of Life. “Unfortunately we couldn’t remember all the words.
“So if Terry was hearing me at all then, he just heard what a complete shower we were.” In the 1983 movie, which Jones directed, Palin plays a devout Catholic with dozens of children. He sings the song to explain why he cannot use contraception and has so many children that he has to sell them.
A year before his last visit, Palin read Jones extracts from a book they co-wrote, and noted that Terry only laughed at his own jokes and not Michael’s. The duo had been friends since meeting at Oxford University in the 1960s.