EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: BBC man’s plea for silence from former staff
After Emily Maitlis criticises her former BBC employers for caving in to government complaints about her Dominic Cummings monologue, BBC journalist Christian Fraser tweets: ‘I wish longtime BBC folk (who have long stood up for the values of the organisation inside the building) would avoid doing it damage once they leave.’
At least Cummings, verbally roasted by Emily for breaking lockdown rules, had no hard feelings. ‘He texted me to offer his support,’ reveals Emily.
Emily’s talk of a Conservative ‘agent’ lurking within the BBC – aka Tory ex-spinner Sir Robbie Gibb – much amuses old Broadcasting House hands. ‘Gibb just sits on a board,’ says one. ‘Emily’s forgotten the Blair years when Labour ‘agent’ Greg Dyke was running the whole show. More like a politburo!’ Dyke formally resigned from the party after being appointed BBC director-general – but not before donating a cool £50,000 to Labour coffers.
Footage of the Scots Guards on Horse Guards Parade playing Ukraine’s Eurovision-winning hit (in honour of Independence Day) has gone viral in Kyiv. The Queen has form. As Robert Hardman records in his book on HM, she even approved a change to the royal repertoire on the day of Aretha Franklin’s funeral. Shots of the Welsh Guards playing ‘R-E-S-P-E-C-T’ at Changing of the Guard led to banner headlines across the US: ‘Queen of England pays tribute to the Queen of Soul.’
Antonia Fraser, 90 tomorrow and pictured in her prime, fondly remembers late husband Harold Pinter’s twin passions for cricket and bridge colliding when he invited his favourite bowler Shomit Dutta for a rubber at their Holland Park home.
‘Only once did Harold lose his composure, inviting his partner to take a disagreement ‘outside’,’ recalls Dutta.
‘Antonia swiftly defused the situation.’
Happy Birthday, dame!
Earl Spencer, in his Oldie review of Robert Harris’s Act Of Oblivion about the hunt for Charles I’s killers, takes issue with Harris’s invention of transatlantic time zones two centuries early, and quibbles over his description of the king as ‘handsome’, saying: ‘He was famously anything but.’ Not up to the perfection of the earl’s Killers Of The King: The Men Who Dared To Execute Charles I?
While Two Popes stars Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce remain silent on Netflix’s destruction of the £4million Sistine Chapel replica built for their 2019 movie, ArtWatch UK Director Michael Daley says that as it was based on the recent contentious restoration of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, it was not a faithful record. Daley concludes: ‘The transformed state has itself constituted a crime against art.’
Fern Britton, recalling meeting the Queen at London’s Guildhall for ITV’s 50th anniversary, tells Saga magazine: ‘She met Ant and Dec and said, ‘Are you behind the scenes?’
Source: Read Full Article