Hardcastle
DAME Shirley Conran devised a media strategy for Princess Diana in 1997 to leverage her celebrity status with a series of documentaries by the award-winning filmmaker Molly Dineen. Dame Shirley, who died last week, had befriended Diana when she sought advice after her separation from Charles. Tina Brown, in her book The Palace Papers, described the plan as a ‘startlingly sophisticated vision’, offering a film every two years to generate a humanitarian campaign for one of the princess’s causes. Poignantly, Conran and Dineen were to launch the strategy during a Kensington Palace lunch with Diana on September 1 – the day after she died.
AFTER his first culture and media garden party, might King Charles take a leaf out of his mother’s playbook and mug up on the celebrities drinking Twinings behind Buckingham Palace? The late Queen created the impression that she was aware of the work of the most obscure attendees. Charles, while delighted to meet Love Island’s Maya Jama, appeared baffled as to who she was. When he finally reached the royal tea tent at the bottom of the garden, the exasperated monarch said to an aide: ‘What extraordinary people! Extraordinary!’
CELEBRATING Alan Bennett’s 90th, Mark Lawson reprised his 2009 interview in which Bennett recalled how he and Beyond The Fringe colleague Peter Cook, pictured, met President Kennedy. ‘I think Peter had an affair with Jackie Kennedy,’ he said. ‘I remember her standing next to Peter in the dressing room stroking his arm.’ Wasn’t life grand!
CONCLUDING his interview with the late US presidential candidate John McCain’s widow Cindy, the cocky Radio 4 Today host Amol Rajan awkwardly announces: ‘Before the eight o’clock news I foolishly described you as the daughter of John McCain… that was a bad error, for which I’m sorry.’ Eighteen years younger than her late husband, Cindy, 69, chuckles: ‘Thank you!’
IS life imitating art in the home of John Cleese and wife Jennifer Wade? In Fawlty Towers, Cleese’s creation Basil hides in a wardrobe to avoid discovery by wife Sybil in the bedroom of a voluptuous female guest. Says Cleese: ‘I came in yesterday and I wondered where Jennifer was. Suddenly she jumps out at me from a cupboard. She’s been hiding in the cupboard for at least ten minutes – just for the gag. I’m married to one of the silliest women in the world.’
MALACHY McCourt, younger brother of Angela’s Ashes author Frank, who has died aged 92, was once asked by Prince Philip in Manhattan how he liked living in the US. ‘I love it here,’ he replied. ‘George was foolish to let it go.’ Philip replied: ‘We all make mistakes.’