Ephraim Hardcastle
WILL Meghan Markle be voiced by a black actor on Spitting Image? Producers of the satirical puppet show have been discussing this with ITV’s director of television Kevin Lygo in advance of its autumn revival on BritBox. While Meghan is of mixed race, celebrities including RuPaul and Beyonce will be satirised, prompting Lygo to ask: ‘Should only a black actor voice a black character? Should only black writers write for black puppets?’ His concerns follow confirmation that The Simpsons will no longer use white actors to voice non-white characters. ‘Some of the answers are unclear,’ adds Lygo. ‘It’s difficult, everybody is trying their best.’
CLASSICAL music aficionado Norman Lebrecht joins the Proms furore on Radio 4’s Today, pointing out that French President Macron’s visits are marked by playing La Marseillaise, which says let all alien blood be expunged from the soul. ‘The day we replace it with Frere Jacques we can consider replacing Rule, Britannia!,’ he adds. ‘The “slaves” in the song is innocuous, it rhymes with waves. Find a better word to rhyme and we can put it in.’ Professor Mary Beard obliges: ‘Britons never, never shall be knaves.’
INCOMING BBC DG Tim Davie is about to receive a petition organised by band leader Victor Silvester’s grandson, declaring: ‘Save Rule, Britannia! and Land Of Hope And Glory from Last Night of the Proms exclusion.’ The grandson, Christopher, is a noted lounge crooner accustomed to a multitude of flying bread rolls when he clears his throat.
PRINCE Charles offered to exchange one of his ‘rotten old’ watercolours for a Lucian Freud painting, according to William Fever in the egregiously arts establishment-friendly second volume of his Freud biography. Included is the late Lord Goodman’s remark on the suggestion that Princess Diana, pictured, pose for the priapic Freud. ‘A great, great, wonderful idea,’ counselled Goodman. ‘But I shouldn’t leave her in a room with Lucian.’
DIANA Mitford’s son Desmond Guinness, who has died aged 88, was taught the Nazi salute and to say ‘Heil Hitler’ at the age of eight by his mother in preparation for meeting her hero Adolf Hitler. The 1939 trip was cancelled due to the war. Desmond remembers being dressed up for a May Day donkey ride ‘completely smothered in swastikas’.
JOE Biden garners much admiration for quoting, in his Democratic acceptance speech, Seamus Heaney’s The Cure At Troy. Irish literary critic Professor Roy Foster explains why: ‘Biden apparently is a reader of poetry and read Yeats and Heaney to improve his stutter.’ Do hope and history rhyme for Uncle Joe?
CONFESSING to alcohol overindulgence during the pandemic, Kathy Lette observes: ‘I once had to ask the woman next door to keep her knitting down,’ adding: ‘Although the fact that I was wearing my boyfriend’s boxers on my head may have been a giveaway that I’d been on the grog.’