Ephraim Hardcastle
FOURTEEN months after his death, aged 85, Ronnie Corbett will be remembered at a Westminster Abbey service of thanksgiving today. Will four candles be lit? At the Abbey service for his co-star, Ronnie Barker, who died in 2005, aged 76, reference was made to their famous joke in which customer Barker tries to buy ‘fork handles’ from shopkeeper Corbett, who thinks he has said ‘four candles’. When (if?) John Cleese, 77, has his Abbey thanksgiving service, will they reprise his ‘dead parrot’ sketch?
FORMER royal butler Paul Burrell, 59, is to share his ‘inner demons’ on a Channel 5 celebrity counselling show, In Therapy. Burrell, married recently to lawyer Graham Cooper, says he still ‘feels Diana’s presence’ and ‘suppressed my sexuality’ while in palace service. Oh dear, hasn’t Paul delighted us enough?
PRINCE Harry is immortalised in a new American children’s book as a superhero who uses hidden rotors in his hands to fly. Helicopter Harry And The Copter Kids, by Jon W Faust, also features Harry’s pilot girlfriend, Carlita, who is based on Harry’s real companion, US actress Meghan Markle, pictured. Faust says: ‘Carlita was created several years prior to Prince Harry meeting Meghan Markle.’ Neither was he influenced by the ex-Duchess of York’s successful Budgie The Little Helicopter series, I am sure.
CHARACTER actor Peter Sallis, who died on Friday aged 96, was told by the Queen in 2007, when he collected his OBE, that she liked his show, Last Of The Summer Wine. HM, he mentioned afterwards, also said that she had enjoyed Waiting For Godot – the absurdist play by Samuel Beckett. A palace source says: ‘The monarch almost certainly meant Waiting For God, the TV sitcom about an old folks’ home.’
THE title of an upcoming, laudatory film documentary about preening Left-wing Labour MP Dennis Skinner, 85, The Nature Of The Beast, salutes his nickname, The Beast Of Bolsover. But this was updated in 1994 to The Beast Of Legover by the News Of The World when they revealed how he’d separated from the mother of his three children, Mary, and had set up home with his US-born researcher, Lois Blasenheim, now 70. It is said £18,000 was raised by ‘crowdfunding’ to make this film. Couldn’t more have been raised NOT to make it?
MEERKAT-like Newsnight presenter Evan Davis, 55, who says the BBC ignores complaints about political bias, remains a favourite with Corporation chiefs. Sadly he has failed to revive the fortunes of the easy-to-ignore show, which once had over a million viewers but just 606,000 when he succeeded Jeremy ‘Mad Dog’ Paxman in 2014. Now it’s likely to be below 500,000,
DAVID Cameron’s ex-director of strategy, Steve Hilton, 47, blames Theresa May for the London terror attack and demands her resignation. Apparently Cameron referred to Hilton – who padded around No 10 in his bare feet, as befits a guru – as his ‘little Hungarian fascist’.