Ephraim Hardcastle
ROBERT Peston’s inamorata, Charlotte Edwardes, sheds embarrassing light on the frenetic ITV News political editor’s domestic life. ‘It’s weird stuff he obsesses about,’ she says about the News at Ten regular. ‘Like having at least four spare toothpastes, or rows of extra bleach.’ Bong! ‘I knew the pandemic was serious when I opened the fridge to find eight packets of butter.’ Bong! ‘I asked him whether we would be smearing it on ourselves to keep warm.’ Bong! And now back to the studio. Charlotte, in her interview with UK Press Gazette, reveals she had to take drastic action during the pandemic. ‘He did take up a lot of space when he was working from home. And he was very loud when he was broadcasting from the sitting room, so he now has a special shed in the garden called New Broadcasting Hut where he can shout into Zoom and we can’t hear him.’ Will obsessive Pesto banish loose-tongued Charlotte to an adjoining doghouse?
JOANNA Lumley, pictured, outs herself as a drinking buddy of the late Princess Margaret. In conversation with Gyles Brandreth at London’s Theatre Royal she recalls meeting Margaret at a theatre reception when HRH had been warned off alcohol by her doctors. ‘She quietly led me and her ladyin-waiting out of the reception and into one of the theatre boxes,’ says Joanna. ‘She promptly produced a bottle of whisky from her handbag.’ Don’t be vague, Joanna, did HRH have goblets or did she swig from the bottle?
PECKISH sting, appearing on Jonathan Ross’s ITV entertainment show tomorrow, reaches out for an orange from the studio fruit bowl, only to be told the fruit is fake. He accepts a satsuma from a member of the audience and ignores Wossie’s exhortation that he give the donor 50p. Ross feels obliged to hand her the orange peelings ‘as a souvenir’. How much is Mr sting worth? £370million.
RICHARD Harris feared, correctly, that his obituaries would headline his role as Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films. So spare a thought for Henry Woolf, whose Times obituary recalled the actor lending his Kentish Town bedsit to his pal Harold Pinter for trysts with Joan Bakewell, adding: ‘To facilitate Pinter’s assignations, Woolf passed the time taking the bus to Plumstead, south-east London, and back, a return journey of about three hours.’
MEANWHILE, Joan seizes on suggestions that the elderly may have to sell their homes to pay for social care, fuming: ‘I’ve just downsized to have money to pay for my care. Oh! Did I miss something?’ Best taken with a pinch of salt. Joan, 88, bought her five-storey Primrose Hill property half a century ago for £12,000 and recently sold it for ‘around £6million’.
FOLLOWING the Archbishop of Canterbury’s complaint that clergy are portrayed as ‘rogues or idiots’ on TV, fans of the late Derek Nimmo recall him filming Oh Brother! in costume in Rome in 1969 and being arrested outside St Peter’s Basilica by police. He was reported by a shocked nun who saw him with his arm around a mini-skirted young woman.