When Ian Hislop was rude about Piers Morgan on Have I Got News For You many years ago, the then Daily Mirror editor was anxious to get revenge. First, he sent a reporter to get some dirt on the Private Eye editor from his vicar — being CofE, there was no individual confession, not that he would break a confidence — and then he placed a photographer outside his house. Hislop tells The News Agents that he asked the snapper what he was after. “I want a picture of you looking happy so we can put it in the paper after some disaster so it looks like you’re callous,” he replied. Hislop was amused at the cynicism but refused to play ball at first. “Then he got a puncture,” he said, “and I laughed, so he got the picture.”
Yesterday’s item about Adrian Dunbar trying to use his celebrity to get out of jury duty brought an email from the former BBC news presenter Andrew Harvey, who was twice excused service. The first time, he argued that as a reporter he had met the accused during the investigation. On the second occasion, later in his career, he was told by a court official: “His worship doesn’t want anyone in the court who is better known than him.”
History for Americans
Mary & George, a new Sky TV series about the love between James I and the Duke of Buckingham, has been sold to America, which is not too hot on Jacobean history. Asked by The Hollywood Reporter to explain the importance of James I to an American audience, Liza Marshall, the producer, said: “He was the man who commissioned the translation of the Bible that’s in all the motel rooms in America.” How prescient of him to predict the Gideons by 300 years.
Shock for English siren
Nothing brings an ego down to ground like a rude cabbie. The former model Twiggy tells the Rosebud podcast of her first visit to New York when she was at the peak of her fame. “I’d been all over the news, the papers, on telly and everything,” she says. “And I could see this cab driver looking at me through the rear view mirror.” Suddenly he asked her if she was that girl from England, that Twiggy. Coyly she replied that she was. “Well,” he declared. “You’re no Marilyn Monroe, are you?”
The late OJ Simpson was an American sports hero who became an actor, but he was never going to win any awards. David Zucker, who directed him in the Naked Gun films, once compared his acting in the police slapstick comedies to his performance on a murder charge at the Los Angeles County Superior Court in 1995: “He got away with it but no one really believed him.”
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Wilson’s rump manoeuvre
This week’s revelation of Harold Wilson’s affair with a Downing Street press officer reminded Keith Graves of a drinks party for Westminster reporters in 1974, attended by his political secretary, Marcia Falkender, with whom he was said to be enamoured. After a few glasses, talk turned to an MP accused of “goosing” a female colleague. “What is goosing?” Falkender asked, then yelped as Wilson grabbed her bottom. Curiously, this threw the press off the scent. Graves recalls that as they left a colleague remarked that the PM was clearly not having an affair with Falkender. “You don’t goose your mistress in front of a dozen hacks,” he said.
