Despite his reputation as one of our sharpest comedians, Lee Mack yearns, like so many funny men, to be known as a serious actor. He tells Richard Herring’s podcast that he let his agent know that he fancied doing some of the straight stuff and was delighted when they brought in the goods within weeks. “I’ve got you a part in a proper, serious drama called National Treasure,” the agent told him. “It’s about historical sex crimes.” Mack was delighted to get his teeth into something meaty but his enthusiasm faltered when he asked who he would be playing and was told: “Yourself.” Fortunately, on this occasion, it was not the lead role.
Peer’s political mountain
Matthew Elliott, who took his seat as a Tory peer on Tuesday, chose a mountain in the Pennines as the name of his title. It reminds him of the party’s task ahead. “I climbed Mickle Fell this month,” he told the New Statesman. “It’s steep and there are no paths. You have to navigate using a compass, and trudge through deep heather and peat bogs to get to the summit. I suspect that’s what the coming months will feel like.” From the top it is possible to see for 100 miles. On a clear day he may even spot a Conservative voter.
Touchline cry-baby
Rugby players are usually a resilient bunch, unlike those prima donnas in football, but at a City lunch, the former Ireland wing Shane Horgan admitted they had their pain thresholds. One team-mate yelped as the doctor forced his dislocated shoulder back into place on the touchline. “I helped a woman to give birth this morning and she didn’t complain as much,” the doctor told him. To which the injured prop replied: “Well, I’d have liked to hear how much screaming she would have done if you tried to pop it back in again.”
Discussion of the 546 words the English have for being drunk reached the letters page on Thursday, where a reader noted PG Wodehouse’s many synonyms for blotto. The author had also considered the after-effects. In The Mating Season, Bertie Wooster, accusing his pal Catsmeat of being “lathered”, observes that there are six varieties of hangover: “The Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie.”
Grizzly college roommate
The actor Pip Torrens will lead a 24-hour “Byrothon” at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 2pm on Friday, to mark the forthcoming bicentenary of the poet Lord Byron’s death. There will be readings from the works of the man whose lover described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, including a letter he wrote to his aunt at the age of ten (“I hope you will excuse all blunders as it is the first letter I ever wrote.”). Byron was a student at the college from 1805 to 1808, where he described life as “a villainous chaos of din and drunkenness, nothing but hazard and burgundy, hunting [and] mathematics”. He was best known then for keeping a tame bear in his room when the college banned him from having a dog. Asked what he meant to do with it, Byron replied: “He should sit for a fellowship.”
