Ephraim Hardcastle
eight, Prince George is the oldest of the next generation of the Royal Family’s baton carriers, highlighting the lack of young faces engaged in official duties. Only two of the eight working royals, William and Kate, are under 40. Four are well past retirement age. Contrast Spanish King Felipe’s heir Princess Leonor, 15, who has already made her first solo engagement. And Norway’s future Queen, Princess Ingrid, 17, is being pressed into service. With George making an impressive debut at the Euros, might the future king commence fine-tuning his skateboarding skills? Aged 11 for the Paris Olympics, he could show his continental cousins a thing or two…
ITV News’s excitable political editor Robert Peston appears tomorrow on Michael McIntyre’s BBC1 quiz The Wheel to help a contestant win money in what has been described as human roulette. It follows Peston’s turn on ITV’s All Star Musicals and he belted out Luck Be A Lady. Would former heavyweight political pundits Richard Dimbleby or Robin Day be seen dead (or alive) prancing about on such televisual frivolities?
THE secret of how The Omen director Richard Donner persuaded Damien actor Harvey Stephens, pictured, to smile so satanically at the camera before the final credits is revealed by screenwriter David Seltzer. ‘He warned Harvey that if he smiled he was going to be fired, then told him something about the smell of a really bad fart,’ recalls Seltzer. ‘You see the kid trying to hold the smile until the very end. The movie would not be what it was without that.’ Or the gruesome deaths of his fictional parents Lee Remick and Gregory Peck, perhaps?
DAY of the Jackal writer Frederick Forsyth announces his retirement from penning fiction, claiming that as an OAP he is now too old to visit dangerous hotspots in search of authenticity. But the real reason? Wife Sandy has decreed: ‘For heaven’s sake you’re 75. If you go off to any more hellholes and war zones, you’ll come back to an empty house.’
RICHARD Eyre’s Mary Poppins opens in the West End tomorrow with the director raging at woke US critics who accused the film Mary Poppins Returns of ‘shameful flirting with blackface’. ‘That seems to me to be chronically ignorant,’ says the former NT supremo. ‘They’re chimney sweeps!’
MEL Brooks’ autobiography All About Me! is eagerly awaited. But will the 95-year-old Young Frankenstein director address accusations by previous biographer Patrick McGilligan that he repeatedly cheated on first wife Florence Baum with singer Eartha Kitt? He was said to have what the medical profession don’t call a ‘zipper problem’.
MODEL railways aficionado Jools Holland denies any envy of the elaborate choo choo systems built by Rod Stewart and Roger Daltrey, disclosing that he gifted a model tree to the railroad set cherished by The Who’s singer. ‘I also gave him a nuclear waste danger bin,’ adds Jools. ‘But he did not seem so pleased.’