Ephraim Hardcastle
DISCUSSING his time on Top Of The Pops with the late John Peel, ex-Radio 1 DJ David Jensen says they once dressed up in Roman gladiator costumes for the show. Recalling their skimpy togas, Jensen, 68, tells Radio Times: ‘The girls were giggling outside as we tried them on, but we were aghast when we went on live TV wearing just that sheet and naked underneath.’ Is it wise after the Jimmy Savile paedophile scandal to recall these events? Peel, who died in 2004, is said to have impregnated a 15-year-old in 1969, when he was 30. A hero to pop fans, he was shown to have had a dark side when it came to young women.
SHOW-off TV historian Lucy Worsley dresses up as a Scarlett O’Harastyle southern belle, from Gone With The Wind, for her new BBC4 series on Thursdays, American History’s Biggest Fibs, but declares piously: ‘Both Margaret Mitchell’s book and the film peddled one enduring and dangerous misrepresentation that the slaves in the Old South were cheerful, contented and faithful to their owners. I’m always one for dressing up, but when you bear that in mind I don’t feel entirely comfortable.’ She looks happy enough though, doesn’t she?
WHEN Sir David Natzler, Clerk of the Commons since 2015, retires in March, will he make bullying Speaker John Bercow regret trying to block his appointment in 2015? ‘The prospects of Natzler signing a non-disclosure agreement must be zero,’ says my source, adding: ‘Did you notice the look on his face when Bercow lost control last week?’
LABOUR MP David Lammy, 46, who said on a TV quiz show that Henry VIII was succeeded by Henry VII, describes Sunday Times commentator Rod Liddle as ‘a national disgrace’ as well as ‘a walking, living, breathing personification and definition of white middle-class privilege’ for claiming that half of black children do not live with their father ‘and we wonder why they’re dying’. Barrister Lammy’s a Harvard alumnus, Liddle’s a comprehensive schoolboy from Middlesbrough. Has Lammy forgotten writing in 2012, after visiting a young offenders’ institution, ‘I found that most, if not all, did not have access to their fathers’?
FASHION blog UFO No More says the Duchess of Sussex is the highest spending royal, having bought clobber worth about £433,000. Second-placed Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden spent £93,000. Kate spent £72,599, Princess Beatrice £51,000 and Princess Eugenie £34,000. Neither the Queen nor the Princess Royal figure in the list of 14.
MARKING the 20th anniversary of the first episode of The Sopranos, its creator David Chase, who is working on a prequel due out in 2020, refuses to say if the hoodlum family were executed in the final episode, which hinted at a restaurant bloodbath but failed to show one. He jests that Tony’s brattish son AJ, who said in the finale that he wanted to be tycoon Donald Trump’s helicopter pilot, ‘might now be White House chief of staff’.