Stella’s 13-point plan on listicle
As befits the trendiest candidate in the Labour deputy leadership contest (against a thin field, admittedly), Stella Creasy made a pitch for the youth vote yesterday by posting a 13-point “listicle” on the Buzzfeed website. Her manifesto includes banning Coldplay’s dreary pap from party conference and never having a song by the Lighthouse Family as an election theme. She also proposed sending members a monthly picture of a kitten (or a Q&A with a member of the shadow cabinet, “whichever is more entertaining”) and promised that she would stop the party from sending out emails asking for money all the time “unless you really want them to”. How refreshing, if a little nauseating.
Oresteia, the Almeida’s take on Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy, has just moved to the Trafalgar Studios where the producers almost had a riot on their hands after strictly enforcing the ten-minute interval despite a huge queue for the ladies. “Never mind the Furies in the play [who torment Orestes for killing his mother],” an audience member tells me. “You try telling desperate women to cross their legs if they want to see the next act.”
Advertisement
Radio times
The actor David Timson, who may hold the record for the most number of BBC radio plays after appearing in more than 1,000 since joining the corporation’s Drama Rep in 1971, recalls in a blog the daunting producers he has known. They include Reggie Smith, famed for his three-hour lunch breaks, who would often return from The George with a few extras he had picked up, many of whom had never acted before. Then there was the legendary radio actress Marjorie Westbury, who spent all her time between takes knitting. Timson said there was graffiti in studio B10 saying: “Marjorie will never die: she’ll simply unravel.”
George Osborne’s boast about fixing the roof while the sun is shining doesn’t apply to Portcullis House, the Commons office block, which has had persistent problems. The deluge yesterday finally overwhelmed the atrium ceiling. Buckets were laid down everywhere and one worker complained of a stream of water landing on his lunch. Jonathan Isaby, head of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, has called for a leak inquiry.
Advertisement
Pre-judging Ronnie
Norman Harris, who has been following my series of legal tales, passes on one he was told by Ronnie Kray’s defence counsel, the late John Platts-Mills, regarding the trial’s judge, Mr Justice Stevenson. Near the end of the trial, over an evening tipple in chambers, Stevenson gave Platts-Mills his view of the case. “There is only one thing Kray has said in the entire trial that I believe,” he said. “And that is that the judge is biased against him.” Platts-Mills was not surprised when his client got a life sentence.
Rotten to the core
With all the chemicals the Sex Pistols pumped into themselves, it is no surprise that John Lydon, the former Johnny Rotten, doesn’t want to be cremated. It would be a fire hazard. He doesn’t want to be buried when the time comes, either. “My body will be dedicated to science,” he tells Uncut magazine, but only if his wife dies first. “She couldn’t tolerate the idea of me being laughed at by medical students,” he said. “But if I go second, then I want it on National Geographic.”