Buoyed by the Evening Standard declaring him sixth favourite to be mayor of London, Count Binface is keen to show he is one politician whose head isn’t full of rubbish. The alter ego of the comedian Jon Harvey, who beat joke candidates like Piers Corbyn and a chap from Ukip last time, has released his manifesto. It contains pledges to make Thames Water bosses take a dip in the capital’s foetid river “to see how they like it”, turning shops that play Christmas music before December into libraries, building “at least one affordable home” and replacing Sadiq Khan’s £120,000 night tsar with a night mayor. He also wants to move the hand dryer in the gents of his favourite pub, in what was once Boris Johnson’s constituency, to a better location, proving the influence of Uxbridge on yet another politician.
Would Abba have become as famous if they had won Eurovision a year earlier? The band failed to be chosen as Sweden’s entry in 1973, performing Waterloo in Brighton 50 years ago, and Bjorn Ulvaeus says it was more helpful to be “accepted in Britain” than it would have been in Luxembourg. Which is nice, except our judges gave them nul points. Basil Herwald, who was on the UK panel, tells Radio Times: “Most of us were surprised Italy didn’t win.”
Tom Hanks incognito
Being asked to narrate a new exhibition in London about space missions was one small step for Tom Hanks, who played an astronaut in Apollo 13, but one giant leap for the cabbie who drove him there. Not recognising his famous passenger, the taxi driver asked why he wanted to go to King’s Cross. “There’s a show called The Moonwalkers,” the actor replied. Suddenly, Hanks told The Rest is History, recognition dawned on the cabbie’s face. “Ah, Moonwalkers!” he said. “So is that a Michael Jackson thing?”
Ce n’est pas du cricket
The 120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale, French for drinking lime juice under canvas, was marked on Monday. GK Chesterton once wrote that “if an Englishman has understood a Frenchman, he has understood the most foreign of foreigners”, while they say all kinds of rude things about les rosbifs, but our countries get each other much more than we like to let on. The French writer Claude Gagnière, for instance, summed up our national summer sport perfectly, especially given the results in the first round of the County Championship: “The teams enter the field. The umpire whistles. It starts to rain.”
Speaking of which, the actress Eva Green, who played the British spy Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale, says that many people don’t realise she was born and raised in Paris. “Sometimes I wish my name was Dupont or something more French, so people saw how much work I put into the English,” Madame Vert tells Empire.
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Joe’s midfield enforcers
Joe Kinnear, the former manager of Wimbledon and Newcastle United football clubs who has died at 77, was known by some as J*e K*****r for his ripe vocabulary. Some press conferences may as well have been billed as the Vagina Monologues. Kinnear liked tough players and joked that his ideal midfield pairing would be Reggie and Ronnie Kray. This led the latter to write to him from Broadmoor to say: “I’d be willing to play for you if you can get me out.”
