Ephraim Hardcastle
THERE is weeping and gnashing of clerical teeth at Westminster Abbey, where Dean David Hoyle braces himself for staff redundancies after £12million in lost visitor revenue due to the pandemic. Only a trickle now pass through the turnstiles rather than the usual 1,000 an hour. Predecessor Wesley Carr introduced an entry fee, drastically reducing visitor numbers by more than half from two million annually. He said he would be content if he were remembered for ‘restoring the calm’ at the Abbey. He might now be enjoying a celestial grin.
PRINCESS Anne chortles in tonight’s ITV documentary about an unscheduled encounter in a hotel lift with her parents and a lady-in waiting en route to a function, explaining: ‘We were only supposed to be going two storeys. And it went up to about the 19th floor, and this chap [in a dressing gown] got in thinking he was going for a spa treatment. He was slightly surprised!’ Perhaps he thought he’d wandered into Madame Tussauds!
ACTRESS Emily Mortimer, pictured, follows in the footsteps of her late dad John writing an adapted version of Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel The Pursuit of Love for BBC1. Fingers crossed she fares better than pop, who was hired 40 years ago to write the screenplay for the acclaimed TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Alas, Mortimer’s version was largely junked.
INTERVIEWING one-time Cabinet colleague George Osborne for radio, Amber Rudd explains she’s speaking to him from her ‘flat in London’. George cheekily responds: ‘That’s where we plotted the downfall of Boris Johnson!’ Amber awkwardly laughs: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Adds George: ‘That went well.’
ANDREW Neil notes the axing of his BBC2 show coincides with the departure of DG Lord Hall, who insisted on it running at 7pm. He adds: ‘In 25 years of doing weekly shows for BBC1 and BBC2 I have never once met or been contacted by, for praise or criticism, the controllers of either channel.’ What a charming bunch!
MICHAEL Portillo tonight credits his birth to the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. Basque children were evacuated to Oxford, where his refugee Spanish father Luis met his undergraduate mother Cora looking after them. Viewing Picasso’s painting Guernica in a Madrid gallery for BBC2’s Continental Railway Journeys, Michael says: ‘Without Guernica they would never have met. For me personally this painting depicts the event without which I would not exist.’
AFICIONADOS of the Duchess of Windsor’s sexual gymnastics might chuckle at the title of the new ITV drama Singapore Grip. While based on JG Farrell’s novel about the Japanese conquest of Singapore, it also describes a sexual technique mastered by Wallis Simpson. According to the Oxford dictionary ‘it makes a matchstick feel like a cigar’.