Ephraim Hardcastle
THE Queen’s isolation at Windsor torpedoes a colourful Royal Family Christmas lunch tradition. Every year HM’s guests queue at oldfashioned industrial-sized weighing scales to submit to the curious custom of being weighed before and after lunch. It is a practice that goes back to Edward VII. The corpulent king, who breakfasted on roast chicken and lobsters, and had an eight-course lunch, 12-course dinner and cakes before bed, wanted to ensure that his guests had properly indulged themselves by being heavier after lunch. And the silver lining? On Friday HM is spared waggish son Edward bellowing the racing lingo: ‘Weighed in. Weighed in.’
MARGARET Tebbit, who has died, was furious that her husband Norman was portrayed wearing a leather jacket on the satirical puppet show Spitting Image. ‘Norman’s always wanted a leather jacket,’ revealed Lady Tebbit at the time. ‘And now he feels he can’t buy one.’
NAOMI Watts, playing a paraplegic who befriends a magpie in Penguin Bloom, endured a real-life scene reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds while filming. Assailed by magpies when horse-riding, her boyfriend urged action. ‘I was like, “What? Throw my arms up? I’m holding on to the reins.” And he’s like, “Quick! Quick! Do it because they’ll get you.” So we had to pick up the pace and race out of there. I was quite traumatised by it.’ Less stressful was the behaviour of her feathered Penguin Bloom co-star. ‘I got pooped on the head,’ says Watts, pictured. ‘And the poop slid down my face. It was a definite ice-breaker moment.’
DR Who writer Russell T Davies thanks Kate Bush for not charging a fortune for the use of one of her songs in his forthcoming Eighties Aids drama It’s a Sin. Confirming that he ran out of money because of the cost of using Eighties music, he tells Empire magazine: ‘There are loads of songs we had to drop. Try getting a Queen song in there, for example. If you see a show with a Queen song on the soundtrack, you know that it’s made by millionaires.’
SPARE a thought for any libidinous teenage boyfriend of Jennifer Saunders with wandering hands in a darkened cinema. ‘There was a bit of that when suddenly the arm would be flopped,’ the Ab Fab star tells ITV documentary Memory Lane tonight. ‘They would try to grapple with the tit! And you would go, “Oh please, we are trying to watch the film!”’ To paraphrase Auf Wiedersehen Pet: Sex was in its infancy in Jennifer’s native Sleaford, Lincolnshire.’
HAS Robert Midgley, who luxuriates in the rather grand title of Videographer to the Prime Minister, exceeded his brief by calling for Harry and Meghan to be stripped of their HRH titles? ‘They still feel the need to preach to the British people what is right and wrong from their California mansion,’ he tweets. ‘Removing the HRH does not seem enough.’ As the Queen’s predecessors dispensed with the official title Groom of the Stool, might Boris abolish his videographer?