Ephraim Hardcastle
STEPHEN Fry confides to Pink News that the Queen approves of same-sex marriage. He says a palace flunkey told him she remarked after signing it into law in 2013: ‘Well, who would have thought 60 years ago that such a bill could come to pass. Isn’t it wonderful?’ Fry adds: ‘After all, she has met lots of fruity, peculiar people in her life, many of whom have been family friends.’ No doubt about that!
TEETERING as ever on the frontier of bad taste, blond-mopped Tory MP Michael Fabricant, announces: ‘I am in mourning. Doris Day – on whom, keen West minster watchers will be aware, I have modelled myself – has passed away.’ We can imagine Doris’s pride at having fellow blond Fabricant as a devotee.
MEANWHILE Doris enjoyed recalling an awkward encounter with Oscar-winning screen star Colin Firth. ‘He told me when he was a kid he fell in love with me and wanted to meet someone like me. It was so cute because I had to say I really didn’t even know who he was!’
THE renewed Lady Chatterley’s Lover’s brouhaha reminds Joely Richardson, pictured, of her energetic romping with Sean ‘Mellors’ Bean behind an Oxfordshire country estate wall when she played her lustful ladyship in Ken Russell’s 1993 TV adaptation. ‘ Every now and again,’ she recalls, ‘a bus would go past and you’d see all these heads peering out of the top deck at the lunatics running about naked.’
TIME Out’s theatre critic Andrzej Lukowski deplores a ‘profoundly unmomentous’ Henry IV Part 2 at Shakespeare’s Globe. Rival reviewer Mark Shenton, at the same show, claims that Lukowski fell asleep. ‘A critic who couldn’t keep his eyes open delivers a damning verdict,’ harrumphs Shenton, who claims critics were given wine at lunch. Shenton himself is teetotal, quite the model of virtue.
BRITT Ekland says she spent Mother’s Day in the US with ‘my lovely Victoria’ – her daughter by late comic Peter Sellers. Victoria’s relationship with Sellers was troublesome. He once flew into a rage when, as a teenager, she wore a purple dress. He considered the colour unlucky. Disinherited, Victoria has since claimed Sellers has ‘apologised’ to her – via a medium.
RESPONDING to Ian Hislop’s claim that his Have I Got News For You partner Paul Merton thinks he’s a stuffed shirt, Merton tells Waitrose magazine: ‘I’m always interested to hear Ian’s self-analysis. I mean, let’s face it – I’m the only working-class person he speaks to, apart from the taxi driver.’
ASTROLOGER Debbie Frank, still dining out on her association with the late Diana, Princess of Wales, spouts some astral argle-bargle about baby Archie’s rising sign Taurus being the same as his sun sign, concluding: ‘He’s definitely going to be somebody who loves attracting publicity.’ Who’d have thought it!