Pick of the week’s

Gossip

When Donald Trump tweeted that his legal team would hold a press conference at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia on Saturday, it was assumed they meant the hotel. In fact, the briefing took place in a retail park on the outskirts, at Four Seasons Total Landscaping – a small horticultural business adjacent to a sex shop and a crematorium. The gardening firm was mercilessly mocked online over the apparent mixup, but by Monday morning it had bounced back, and was selling patriotic merchandise, including T-shirts and a $5 sticker bearing the catchphrase “Make America Rake Again”.

With his drooping jowls and heavy eyes, Geoffrey Palmer, who has died at 93, tended to play long-suffering husbands. But he insisted he wasn’t as lugubrious as he looked. “I am laughing,” he once said, “it’s just my face refuses to cooperate.” He starred with Dame Judi Dench in nine series of the sitcom As Time Goes By. On the rare occasions Dench fluffed her lines, Palmer would look to the gallery and shout: “Is Eileen Atkins free? What about Maggie Smith?”

John Fraser, the Scottish actor who was once dubbed “the most handsome man in Britain”, also died last week, at the age of 89. Fraser, who was gay, recalled the “fiasco” of his youthful attempt to seduce the actress Rachel Roberts with typical self-deprecating wit, said The Daily Telegraph. He wrote in his 2004 biography: “As our naked limbs entangled, my indifferent organ made a mockery of undying devotion... We tried again... and in the morning I telephoned the number she had given me. It was for her godfather, an eminent psychiatrist.”