Gyles Brandreth has seldom met a famous name he hasn’t dropped and so when he was asked to speak on Just a Minute about “my secret crush”, he had to aim high. Brandreth told a recent Christmas lunch that he narrated a story about being at boarding school and seeing a girl from the house next door, hiding in the bushes as she furtively dragged on her favourite smoke. “She really was attractive,” Brandreth sighed. “Blonde hair, jodhpurs…” and then made some untranscribable animal sound. He later befriended his inamorata but didn’t realise that she was a Radio 4 addict. Queen Camilla, as she became, collared his wife at a party soon after it was broadcast. “Please tell Gyles that I don’t deny that I was in the bushes and I don’t deny that I was smoking,” she said. “But I do deny that they were Woodbines.”
The broadcaster is not to everyone’s taste, including Martyn Davies, who writes this in the letters page of The Oldie: “Once a month you remind me how glad I am not to be famous. The thought of Gyles Brandreth claiming to have met me would be too much.”
Sandringham shindig
A new guest at the royal family’s Christmas lunch this year will be the Queen’s son, Tom Parker Bowles. The food critic has been invited to tuck in to the Sandringham turkey, which will require him to wear black tie rather than his usual festive slobbing outfit for going to the pub. “I don’t think I’ll be sitting around in my tracksuit bottoms watching Where Eagles Dare,” he told Radio 2. Prince Andrew on the other hand…
Santa’s lobster surprise
While many families will celebrate together, the Royal Navy’s on-duty submarine crews are out of contact, as befits their nickname of the Silent Service. Speaking to the Navy’s charity podcast, All Aboard for Christmas, one submariner’s wife said their children’s biggest concern was not missing Daddy, but that Father Christmas would not be able to visit his sub. She reassured them that he would enlist the help of a lobster who delivers presents in a underwater sleigh pulled by dolphins. This crustaceous elf is called Lachie, though a better name would surely be Sandy Claws.
In his new memoir, Just Different, the ballet dancer Wayne Sleep writes about being gay when it was illegal. He tells of one Covent Garden grandee who made his cottaging debut at the Waterloo station gents but didn’t know the etiquette. When a note was passed under the partition asking what he enjoyed, he sent one back saying: “Maria Callas in Tosca.”
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Who do you think you are?
Brenda Blethyn came to acting later than most. The 78-year-old star of the TV detective series Vera, which is coming to an end after 14 years, tells Saga magazine that her parents were very proud when she joined the National Theatre in her mid-thirties but didn’t quite understand it. “I was late to meet Mum once and when I got there, I said: ‘Oh sorry, some students stopped me outside the National because they wanted my autograph and to take photos.’ Mum said: ‘Isn’t that marvellous? Who did they think you were?’ ”
