Ephraim Hardcastle
NOTING reports about the Duchess of Sussex’s alleged disapproval of royal bloodsports, Darren McGrady, Diana’s former chef, tweets: ‘Yikes! If Meghan is not in favour of a couple of days shooting at Sandringham she may have made the wrong choice moving to Windsor.’ Indeed so. In just one year, vermin control operatives from the Crown Estate there killed 1,161 rabbits, 118 parakeets, 56 roe deer and nine moles.
SIR Ringo Starr and Sir Paul McCartney were briefly reunited on stage during the latter’s show at London’s O2 over the weekend, pictured. But Ringo’s offer to tour again with his only surviving Beatles bandmate (the last time was 1966) never meets with an encouraging response. Sir Paul has remarked: ‘Actually tour together? Leave well enough alone.’ Ringo has observed: ‘We’re the only two remaining Beatles, although he [Paul] likes to think he’s the only one.’ Deep waters.
THIS week the Queen is due to travel by ordinary (as opposed to royal) train to Sandringham, via King’s Lynn, for Christmas – a one hour and 40 minute journey followed by ten miles by car. This was conceived as a one-off photo-op years ago to show that HM could rough it, and has since become as much a part of her public year as the Christmas message. ‘Frankly, I think she’d prefer to go by helicopter,’ says my source.
FOR the Sports Personality Of The Year ceremony in Birmingham, the BBC employed classical musicians to help perform the boastful 1996 anthem Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home) – it didn’t – about the England football team’s performance in this year’s World Cup. Having comedians Frank Skinner and David Baddiel ‘sing’ the verses of their ‘anthem’ reminds me of Waldorf and Statler, audience members in The Muppet Show, witnessing another distinctly below-par act. Waldorf: ‘They aren’t half bad.’ Statler: ‘No, they’re ALL bad!’
TELEVISION’S bodice-ripper king Andrew Davies, 82, who has adapted Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables for the BBC – due to be aired early next year – has also penned 40 drama series and 32 single dramas as well as six films, five adult novels, nine children’s novels, 14 stage plays and 11 radio plays. He says in Andrew Davies: Rewriting The Classics, to be shown on BBC4 on December 30: ‘I might just be on a gentle decline to decrepitude. And there’s a lot of writers who will be glad to see my career come to an end and say, “Let’s give him another award and tell him to climb into his grave and give more work to the rest of us!” ’
THE first Australian-born Nasa astronaut, Andy Thomas, says that Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic flight to the edge of space is pointless, adding: ‘He can’t stay there; he falls right back down. It’s really just a high-altitude aeroplane flight, and a dangerous one at that. As a technology to get humans out into space, it’s a gonowhere, dead-end technology. You can’t grow it.’ Too harsh, surely?