More Fool Me (45 page)

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Her husband, Richard, was an RAF pilot.

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I bore in mind the fact (told to me years ago by my mother, who knows these things, when watching a Mills film) that Sir John had been for fifty years on the Hay Diet. When he was a young man he had developed a stomach ulcer, then the most common cause of death of men under forty in Britain. Today, of course, suicide is the most common. Someone recommended to him the Hay Diet, in which protein and carbohydrates are never combined. Vegetables are ‘neutral’. You can have steak and salad or pasta and salad. You can have cucumber sandwiches, but not cheese rolls. Ham and eggs for breakfast or just pancakes. You get the idea. His ulcer was allayed, and for the rest of his life he remained trim.

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He had been unable to see properly for at least five years by this time and spent much charitable energy helping the Royal London Society for the Blind.

DEAR DIARY

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Almost certainly Valery Gerghiev, who has since become a kind of friend.

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Some might think the anagram rather appropriate given the astounding settlement awarded her when JC and she divorced. I couldn’t possibly comment.

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A BBC Radio 4 arts programme, forerunner of
Front Row.

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Comedy POW drama written by David ‘Reggie Perrin’ Nobbs. I had filmed it with Hugh Bonneville, Nicholas Lyndhurst and others earlier in the year.

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Usually notorious for bowing out of parties with a gentle yawn at about 9 p.m.

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Wasn’t so easy to ‘source’ a book in the days before the World Wide Web and Amazon and so on …

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TV chat-show host: a simply adorable man who died from Hepatitis B in 1988.

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Jamie struggled after Russell’s untimely death in 1988 but then wrote the wonderful
At Swim, Two Boys
, one of the best Irish novels of the past however many years.

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The wicked cad in Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park
, whose casual allusion to how good a parson he would have made had he minded to become one so shocks Fanny, the heroine, who is shocked by everything, to be honest.

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And rightly. It went on to win the Hawthornden Prize (which had been recently resurrected by the munificent Dru Heinz, widow of the 57 Varieties chap), and the author, Tim Pears, went on to write the hugely successful
In a Land of Plenty.

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Ben played Verges.

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A lot fewer than there are now, Stephen young sausage.

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Alphonsia Emmanuel and Tony Slattery, who were also in
Peter’s Friends
. Richard Curtis of
Four Weddings
fame unkindly remarked that surely Alphonsia Emmanuel is a drag name … you might think that, but I c. p. c.

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Tony S.

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Still together
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sentimental gulp
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.

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Now between £300 and £700 p.d.

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Sean Connery’s 1983 remake of
Thunderball.
Rowan Atkinson made a brief appearance in it.

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Producer of
Not the Nine O’Clock News
,
Spitting Image
,
Blackadder
and – in 2003 –
QI
.

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I meant that I usually hook.

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Now known the world over for his portrayal of the Downton butler.

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Not even
vaguely
like Boyle’s Law, Stephen, which is to do with gases.

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Last three named all BBC high-ups of the time. Checkland (known as ‘Chequebook’ as he came up through the ranks of admin and business rather than programme-making) was Director-General.

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In
The Picture of Dorian Gray
it’s a schoolroom in which the eponym hides his portrait, not – as everyone says – an attic. But only I would be so pedantic in a diary.

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Subsequently re-revived by Rowan Atkinson.

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The splendidly mad old producer of
The Goon Show
,
Till Death Us Do Part
and, in 1982, Cambridge Footlights for the BBC with me, Hugh, Emma and Tony S.

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Hemmings.

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My beloved nephew George. All three of my nephews are equally beloved of course. No nieces sadly; sister and sister-in-law just weren’t concentrating. Actually, it’s the sperm that determines gender come to think, no pun intended. Help, I’ve become infected. Writing footnotes in diary style now. It’ll be exclamation marks next!! Oh merciful heavens!! No!!!

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The painter and sculptor. She had been commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint a picture of me, which she had long wanted to do anyway.

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The sainted Edwina Curry was bringing a Private Members Bill before the House of Commons to make the age of homosexual consent equal to the heterosexual age. At the time the gay age of consent was twenty-one, the original Wolfenden Report recommendation, passed into law thirty-odd years earlier. Final equality had to wait until 2000, three years into the Blair administration.

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0-86719-371-9.

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Kim was seven thousand times more likely to know. He was a chess master and had been at school with Nigel Short. Taught him the French Defence and its many variations, Kim’s favourite for black.

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The last Governor of Hong Kong, who oversaw the rain-sodden handing over of the Crown Colony to China in 1997. At time of writing Chairman of BBC trustees and may well be the last of those too, given the corporation’s plight.

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Norman Lamont had been sacked a few months earlier as Chancellor of the Exchequer by Prime Minister John Major. He made a snidely neat resignation speech in the House: ‘This government gives the impression of being in office but not in power.’

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Supposedly the composer of Purcell’s ‘Trumpet Voluntary’, although I have heard a theory that it was by someone called Mud.

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Then Deputy Director of the BBC.

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Trying by diplomatic means to stop the slaughter in the wreckage of the former Yugoslavia.

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Blackadder the Third
’s Mrs Miggins.

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Then running the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, formally head of Channel 4.

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He was sadly to be wrenched away from the world by leukaemia six years later, while working on the musical version of
The Producers
with Mel Brooks.

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Allergic to standard champagne, but not pink. Go figure. A pink champagne socialist.

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As Wilde’s nemesis, the Marquess of Queensberry.

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Ha! We didn’t know at the time that she had had an affair with the future Prime Minister, John Major, in the mid-1980s.

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Mary Poppins
,
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
and so forth.

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I simply don’t know
what
I was thinking of. A white stretch limo? Maybe they weren’t so hen-party back then. But still …

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Producer of the first Monty Python film and impresario responsible for popularity of
Oh, Calcutta!
,
The Rocky Horror Show
and too many others to mention. Mad on tennis.

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No, Stephen, it would appear that you didn’t.

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For the 2000 Summer Games.

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Deeply unpleasant soubriquet for Cambridge’s Graduate Centre.

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Well, all right, he was Austrian, but you know what I mean.

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Perudo is a dice game that uses bluff, often called the Liar’s Dice of the Andes. I described it as the second most addictive thing to come out of South America.

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Carry on Cabby
,
Coronation Street
. Once I’d got to know her better it wasn’t that surprising she was in Maggi’s company.

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RAF station where Richard, husband to Jo and father to George, was based.

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Sadly the Newton was somewhat before its time, but it was indeed the way technology was going. Hand held, touch screen (although with a stylus) … many things to like and admire in it.

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Known as ‘The Understanding Barman’. Quite proud of it now. I think we thought it was a satire on Ronnie Barker-style innuendo, but of course such innuendo is funny:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8ko2nCk_hE
.

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My electronic calendar confirms that 10 October 1993 was indeed a Sunday.

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This is awful. I met Bernie Taupin a year or so later and found him to be just about the most endearing fellow you could ever encounter, not in the least self-deluded or spoiled by his enormous success with Elton.

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Indeed they did. Bob Spiers, now deceased sadly, was an old hand from the Golden Age who had directed dozens of episodes of
Dad’s Army
,
Are You Being Served?
,
It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum
and, crucially, the second series of
Fawlty Towers
, which rendered him holy. Jon Plowman: an old friend from Granada
Alfresco
days who would go on to be probably the BBC’s longest-serving head of comedy, ushering in
Ab Fab
,
The Office
,
Little Britain
, etc.

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Now a Labour MP and dashing broadcaster who makes fine documentaries on history.

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An earlier book of mine, a salmagundi of writings that you are sure to find delightful and a perfect gift too, for a hated one.