As an adventurous teenager, the astronaut Tim Peake went on Operation Raleigh, an overseas expedition for which participants had to raise £2,000. He annoyed the group on the first night when they were talking about how they had raised the cash. Far from washing cars or baking cakes, Peake had put £20 on Garrison Savannah to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup.
Peake told a Fane event that he is less accomplished with other vices. When training to be an astronaut in Russia, he was unable to keep pace with his captain’s compulsory vodka sessions. “There is only one thing worse than trying to survive in a Siberian forest at minus 20C,” said Peake. “And that is doing it with a stonking hangover.”
The art of palace communications is to allow one’s audience to infer whatever makes it happy. Joanna Lumley was thrilled to get a letter from the Queen’s private secretary after she sent HM a copy of her new book. “He said he would ‘place it before Her Majesty’,” the actress coos, as if it had been chosen as book of the month. Sounds more like she’s going to use it as a coaster.
Private malfunction
Michael Palin has travelled the world but there is nowhere like Yorkshire for this son of Sheffield. He particularly enjoys God’s Own Tearoom — Bettys of Harrogate — and writes in The Spectator about visiting the Ilkley branch while making Alan Bennett’s A Private Function. It didn’t suit Bennett, though, who wanted to film in the urinals. The director turned permed heads by telling the whole tearoom: “Good news! We’ve found a lavatory in London that’ll take ten.” The housewives were shocked. Not so much at talk of bodily functions, one assumes, but that anyone would want to visit London.
Upstaged by child’s play
In his latest film, Encounter, the actor Riz Ahmed performs opposite two child actors. “One has command over his craft,” he tells Empire. “He’s able to turn it on and off in a way that is inspiring.” The other is a brilliant improviser, so proficient that none of his scripted lines got used. This has made Ahmed reflect on an old theatrical rule. “When they warn you not to work with children and animals, it’s not because it’s chaotic,” he said. “It’s because they’re better than you.”
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The novelist Adam Mars-Jones reviews the new film of West Side Story in the TLS, saying he once voted the musical to be the 20th-century artwork most likely to endure. He has one problem, though, with the male lead in the 1961 film. “Richard Beymer’s Tony has nowhere near enough vitality to persuade as a love object,” he writes. “And too much to make a convincing corpse.”
Press the panic button
The Downing Street Christmas lights were switched on this year by a Labour MP, accidentally. Carolyn Harris had popped in for a meeting with an adviser and didn’t know how to open the famous black door. Spying a button on a box, she pressed it and the tree burst into incandescent glory. The New Statesman reports that after aides turned it off, Boris Johnson came out for the official ceremony, surrounded by carol-singing children. Alas, he lacked Harris’s touch. After counting down from ten, the PM prodded the button and the lights flickered briefly before fizzling out. Further evidence that Johnson is in office but not in power.
