Ephraim Hardcastle

SACKED by the BBC in March 2015 for thumping a Top Gear producer and now earning £9.6million from his Amazon show, Jeremy Clarkson got a friendly mention in Philip Hammond’s Budget speech yesterday. Can it be long before the pugilistic presenter is gonged in an honours list? BBC TV is repeating the 2016 Christmas episode of the bawdy Irish comedy Mrs Brown’s Boys tomorrow. It was alleged recently in the Paradise Papers that actors Patrick Houlihan, Martin Delany and his wife Fiona transferred their generous fees into companies in Mauritius and sent the money back as loans. Performers on the show sometimes ‘corpse’ – burst into unscripted laughter. Is it any wonder? KEN Burns’s 18-hour, ten-episode documentary The Vietnam War – shown here on BBC 4 – is under attack by Vietnam Veterans for Factual History, an interest group which complains that it’s ‘very negatively slanted against both the nation of South Vietnam and American involvement’. Some viewers might have been more shocked by the lies told by successive US presidents (Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon) justifying a war in which more than three million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans were killed. CELIA Johnson, pictured with Trevor Howard, with whom she starred in the classic 1945 British movie Brief Encounter, hated film-making, according to letters that have come to light. ‘We have to go up north for four weeks’ location on some horrible railway station,’ the fragrant actress wrote in 1944, referring to Carnforth, Lancashire. She deplored ‘the revoltingness of all the people who have anything to do with films, the abandoning of all (or nearly all) that I hold dear, the fact that a film always takes weeks longer than they say it will etc etc’. However, she and Howard did enjoy sipping glasses of brandy between scenes, ‘rushing out now and again to see the express trains roaring through’. THE late Likely Lads star Rodney Bewes’s feud with co-star James Bolam was not his only long-lasting quarrel. He fell out with a neighbour, Beatle George Harrison’s widow Olivia, after announcing in 2009 that his pet cat Maurice had been ‘almost killed’ by the barbed wire fence around her Henley, Oxfordshire, mansion, comparing it to a prisoner of war camp. Forced to replace the wire, Mrs Harrison, 69, cited the near-fatal knife attack on her husband at their Friar Park property, pointing out: ‘That was why the security fence was there. If this man had come and talked to me I would have explained that.’ SKY’S foreign affairs editor Sam Kiley, 53, accuses Environment Secretary Michael Gove of allowing cruelty to animals in order to secure a post-EU trade pact with the US. Pointing out that a clause saying animals feel pain was removed from the EU Withdrawal Bill, he says: ‘They feel pain and they feel emotion.’ How does he know? As a child he often accompanied his mother, animal behaviour expert Dr Marthe Kiley Worthington, when she investigated factory farming in the 1970s.