QC’s explicit warning
Geoffrey Robertson, the bigwig barrister, has warned MPs not to rush through a British bill of rights. It’s a rather more serious subject than some with which the QC has dealt, including the time he defended the man who first imported the 1972 erotic film Deep Throat into Britain. At the Cheltenham Literature Festival he recalled that the all-male jury was shown the film in court to judge for themselves if it was indecent. After 90 minutes of explicit antics from Linda Lovelace, the lights went back up and the jurors were told that they could leave for lunch. Yet all 12 men, looking “red-faced and saucer-eyed”, stayed fixed to their seats, resolutely refusing to stand. Robertson recalled the judge leaving the courtroom in a “crouching position” and said: “I was thinking, ‘Now I see the point in wearing loose-fitting robes’.”
Sir Tom Jones belted out his hits in Cardiff last week, two months after being unceremoniously dumped as a judge on The Voice talent show. He seems to have put the snub behind him, but then he did dedicate Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used To? to the BBC, so perhaps it does still rankle just a bit.
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The Pryce of swearing
HR, the Radio 4 sitcom, featured Jonathan Pryce, the star of Brazil and former Bond villain. He told TMS that an hour before recording, a BBC executive stormed in to say there was too much swearing, particularly the c-word, in the script. A crude compromise was reached, Pryce recalls. “After much arguing with the BBC exec, the producer shouted: ‘You can get rid of extraneous c***s, but not my comedy c***s!’”
Until the fat lady recovers
Mobile phones have ruined fiction, claims Alexander McCall Smith, author of The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, and they aren’t the only culprits. He said at Daunt Books, in central London: “Modern technology spoils a sense of drama. Look what antibiotics would do to opera. Look at La bohème. It would be, ‘Mimi starts to cough. Here’s the penicillin . . . and she gets better!’ ”
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McCall Smith also recalled giving a talk with the writer William Dalrymple. As an audience of 400 waited, Dalrymple asked him backstage how old his readers were, admitting: “Mine are positively ancient.” It was only then that a roadie warned them their microphones were transmitting the conversation out into the auditorium. “Never mind, Willie,” McCall Smith said. “If your readers are as old as that, they won’t have heard anyway.”
A Royall mix-up
On Saturday I wrote that the ennoblement of the lingerie boss Baroness Mone had turned peers into schoolboys, with one joking that he’d be “delighted to meet the noble baroness, any time, any place”, to cries of “Oh!” To my chagrin, @LabourLordsUK pointed out on Twitter that the remarks, just after Mone’s introduction, in fact referred to Baroness Royall. The innuendoes weren’t aimed at a former model, but at a former adviser to Neil Kinnock. Even more revealing about what floats a lord’s boat.