EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: The BBC got in a tangle last week as it struggled to work out how to cover the Huw Edwards story
The BBC got in a tangle last week as it struggled to work out how to cover the Huw Edwards story. That probably explains why BBC Radio Scotland’s Breaking the News, a version of Radio 4’s News Quiz, avoided it. Host Des Clarke mentioned Edwards at the start of Friday’s show before telling his panel of comics that the story was off-limits. The allegations were widely known among staff and had prompted Victoria Derbyshire to begin researching a Newsnight expose of her colleague. She wasn’t telling too many people about it, possibly aware that it might never have seen the light of day. In 2011 a Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile was axed so it wouldn’t spoil tribute programmes the BBC had lined-up to mark his death. Even today, says my source, some at the Beeb are regarded as untouchable.
Margaret Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore celebrates a quaint link between the late Jane Birkin and the Iron Lady. Birkin’s actress mum, Judy, of Grantham like Margaret, was much admired by the future PM. ‘I had assumed that this divergence of lifestyles would have ended any link between the two families,’ writes his lordship, ‘but once, in the 1990s, I turned on the television in my Paris hotel room and caught by chance a celebrity news report of a glamorous Jane Birkin party at which Denis and Margaret Thatcher were in smiling attendance. It is pleasing to think of those two provincial neighbours both producing great stars.’
The BBC got in a tangle as it struggled to work out how to cover the Huw Edwards story
News that SNP luvvie Brian Cox is making guest appearances alongside Alex Salmond during the politician’s Edinburgh Festival shows next month, brings back awkward memories of the Succession star’s involvement in the 2014 referendum campaign. During then First Minister Salmond’s big Edinburgh speech just days before the big vote, Cox was embarrassingly seen in the audience…falling asleep.
Love Island host Maya Jama, pictured, tells Vogue she would never appear as a contestant on the show, saying: ‘I would not be able to, at any age, strut out of the house in a bikini in front of men that are judging me based on just one sentence and what you look like.’ Ms Jama, 28, adds that being half-Swedish she has learned only three phrases in the language, including ‘Can I stroke your dog?’ Form a queue, hound lovers!
Love Island host Maya Jama, pictured, told Vogue she would never appear as a contestant on the show
Addressing Forest’s pro-smoking freedom lunch at Boisdale’s yesterday, comedian Simon Evans, urging that pensioners should be given a euthanasia starter pack of Swan Vestas to help pay for the NHS, adds: ‘I was a fan of the Pipesmoker of the Year when Eric Morecambe and CS Lewis were winners. But when Stephen Fry won, it was the beginning of the end.’
One OF the late film critic Derek Malcolm’s happiest memories was, as a 14-year-old schoolboy, having tea with Laurel and Hardy after their 1947 London Coliseum show. Oliver Hardy took a bun, placed it on his chair and sat on it. Recalled Derek: ‘Laurel looked horrified, especially when Hardy offered the flat bun to me.’
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