Ephraim Hardcastle
PRINCE Philip’s biographer Gyles Brandreth, appearing on BBC’s The One Show, repeats his oft-told anecdote about the Queen and Philip witnessing The Full Monty striptease during a Royal Variety Performance. As the 18 naked actors took a bow, the duke mutters to a courtier: ‘You needn’t worry. She’s been to Papua New Guinea – she’s seen it all before.’ Reveals Brandreth: ‘There was a complaint. A viewer found the story “culturally inappropriate” because it implicitly makes fun of the dress and form of traditional dances among people of the islands of the South West Pacific. I am happy to drop it from my repertoire.’ No objections to Gyles adding that Philip initially assumed The Full Monty was a tribute to Field Marshal Montgomery and the Battle of El Alamein.
THE growing clamour to name a future royal yacht in honour of Prince Philip overlooks the failure to name any ship after the Queen herself. The Navy’s new aircraft carrier honours the first Elizabeth, itself the successor to a dreadnought launched in 1913. It carries the Virgin Queen’s Tudor rose crest and her motto, Semper Eadem (‘always the same’). No one thought to name her Queen Elizabeth II.
NETFLIX has yet to announce who will play Prince Andrew in the next instalment of The Crown amid industry gossip of initial difficulties finding a suitable thespian lookalike. Having advertised on the casting website Spotlight, might Netflix look no further than Stephen
Mangan, pictured above with Andrew? Perhaps the Duke of York, like so many resting actors with little in the way of gainful employment at the moment, might be persuaded to play himself?
DAME Barbara Windsor was enraged when publicly outed as gangster Ronnie Knight’s wife by barrister Nemone Lethbridge. ‘She was furious with me,’ Lethbridge tells the Britbox documentary Secrets of the Krays next month. ‘She came up to me outside court and said: “You f***ing little cow! They won’t sell me with a pound of sugar in this business now that you have let the cat out of the bag!”’ Adds Nemone: ‘But in fact, it was quite the reverse – the press fell in love with her then. They thought she was the cheeky little Cockney sparrow who stood by her man.’
TEASING Sir Ian McKellen for playing Hamlet aged 81, John Cleese muses: ‘Laertes will have to be getting on a bit, too. Otherwise the duel will look a bit lopsided. Unless they are both in wheelchairs, and Laertes could die of old age. I’ve always wanted a happy ending.’
AT the risk of imparting a household tip to Carrie Symonds: in 1908 one of her predecessors, Herbert Asquith’s second wife Margot, had the door of 10 Downing Street repainted… green. She thought it made the PM’s residence look more upper class.