Pick of the week’s Gossip

Richard E. Grant has been entertaining fans by reprising his role as the struggling actor in Withnail and I. In clips on social media, Grant revisits lines from the film that have acquired new resonance in lockdown, such as “I feel like a pig shat in my head”. On Easter Sunday, when it emerged that Boris Johnson had watched Withnail and I as he recovered from Covid-19, Grant recalled Withnail’s assertion that “the only programme I’m likely to get on is the f***ing news”.

Presenter Steph McGovern is no stranger to the perils of live TV, she told Louise Gannon in The Daily Telegraph. One outdoor interview was curtailed by “the very clear sound of a couple having sex in an upstairs room with the window wide open” (the clip is now used to train BBC staff about the pitfalls of live broadcasts). On another occasion, a man who mistook McGovern for a prostitute offered her £10 and four cans of Stella for a sex act as she was filming at Grimsby Fish Market. Was she outraged? Apparently not. “If he’d have offered me £15 and a Grolsch, I would have done it!”

Robert Downey Jr. was widely mocked for his attempt at a Welsh accent after choosing to model the title character in film remake Dolittle on a druid from Pontypridd: the website Wales Online, for example, said his accent veered into Irish, Scottish and “even Indian”. Now, his co-star Michael Sheen – who hails from Port Talbot – has revealed that Downey Jr. enthusiastically sought his advice about acting during filming. “There were many, many questions,” said Sheen. “All except the most important one, which was, ‘Should I be doing a Welsh accent?’”