Diary – Monday 27 March 1995

Paul McKenna, the hypnotist with the grating voice, has succeeded in working his magic charms on British television producers. At least so say most of Britain’s hypnotists, who are livid at what they see as McKenna’s manipulation of two programmes about hypnosis last week. First, Carlton showed a programme that purported to be a serious documentary on the art of hypnosis, but which, in effect, turned out to be what our own television critic Tom Sutcliffe describes as “a tawdry, appalling puff for McKenna and his work”.

Second, Central Television ran a chatshow about hypnosis on Friday night, which featured only people that McKenna permitted to appear with him. When Central suggested rival stage hypnotists, including sceptic hypnotist Martin Taylor – who publicly professes that he does not believe that hypnosis alters the state of the mind – McKenna refused to appear with them. “It shows unbelievable bias on the part of the programme-makers,” says Taylor. The programme-makers themselves, however, were unavailable for comment – hypnotised, doubtless, into a state of muteness.

What a relief that the Daily Mail has finally tracked down Luce Danielson, the companion of Winston Churchill MP. Not, I hasten to add, because I was on the edge of my seat waiting to find out who she was, but because I felt sorry for friends of mine who live in Tite Street, Chelsea. They were growing fed up with the Mail journalists who ensconced themselves there as long ago as Thursday. At that stage the search for Ms Danielson looked far from promising. “We’re ringing every doorbell in the vicinity,” the reporters told my friends from the doorstep, “because we don’t know her name.”

A final word on Mary Ellen Synon, the mistress who bonked in the Bank. Facts that you don’t already know: 1) “Roo” actually put down the deposit on her ivory tower in Ireland (a desperate attempt to get rid of her perhaps?), and 2) if only he’d listened to some of her previous boyfriends, he’d have realised the ploy wouldn’t work. “M E [her nickname] clings like ivy,” says a man who has known her for 20 years. “A friend of mine who’d tried endlessly to end a relationship with her many years ago, thanked his lucky stars when, by dint of the gods, he was posted to New York. Phew, he thought, I’ve escaped. But no sooner was he seated at his desk than the telephone rang. “It’s Me,” said M E. “I’m here – at JFK airport.”

The first sign of the type of pendantry which occurs when institutions get privatised appears in the letters page of this month’s issue of Local Transport Today. Simon Eden, a press officer for one of the 25 newly founded train operating groups, writes: “Your story headlined `First Eight Franchises on Offer’ refers to Network South Central. For the record, we are in fact Network SouthCentral … ”

To the Lloyds Private Banking Playwright of the Year Awards at the London Marriott Hotel, where my knees turn to jelly upon encountering my thespian hero, Jeremy Irons. In most unBridesheady fashion he embraced the prospect of a future Labour government. “It will provide much-needed funding for all those young people currently struggling,” he said. Coincidentally, their number includes the singer Emma Cooper, daughter of the chairman of Lloyds Private Banking, James Cooper. Ms Cooper, 25, is understudying Marti Webb in the title role of a touring production of Evita. “That’s why she wasn’t available to take part in the cabaret which followed the prize-giving,” said her proud father, adding hastily, “although I wouldn’t really have approved of such obvious nepotism.”

Sadomasochistic opera lovers are doubtless revving up for the ENO’s forthcoming production of Schnittke’s Life With an Idiot, an unusual opera which contains defecation, decapitation, masturbation and buggery on stage. At least the ENO has the sense to warn the audience in the programme: “The production contains strong language and scenes of sexual violence, which some members of the audience may find offensive.” In Edinburgh, however, where the production goes next, they clearly expect a more dubious audience. “Life with an Idiot,” the programme says, “contains scenes and language which may cause offence to some people and will give pleasure to others.”

Speaking of sex, a friend was driving his son, six, and a chum to school yesterday morning when the Today programme mentioned the fact that the ITC is upholding a complaint that advertisements featuring a transvestite and a teenage sex survey respectively were shown during a recent screening of Home Alone. The boys nudged each other and my friend’s son whispered: “D’you hear that? They mentioned `sex’ on the radio.”

The sporadic timing of this week’s Radio 3 series Diary of a Composition – the taped thoughts of composer Simon Bainbridge as he wrote his latest work, Ad Ora Incerta: Four Orchestral Songs from Primo Levi, to be premiered at the Festival Hall on Wednesday – is causing Italian speakers some amusement. Instead of putting out the diaries, as promised, at 9.30 every evening this week, each episode is at an entirely different time from the others. “Ah well,” sighed the producer, “it’s entirely in keeping with the title.” It means, after all, “at an uncertain hour”.

Whether it’s because they know my Alma Mater, Cambridge, is superior, or because they are bored, the Oxford boat crew has resorted to some unusual training tactics this year. A week before the big race they attended the West End musical, Ain’t Misbehavin’, where they were spotted clapping along to “Spreading the Rhythm around”. “It’s the only way I can get any rhythm into them at all,” said long-suffering cox Abbie Chapman afterwards.

Thank goodness for the Prime Minister’s brother, Terry Major-Ball, with whom I lunched on Friday. “Elizabeth Hurley,” he mused when I touched on her recent court case, “now, which one is she?”

Jobs for the Wives: Typing for Togetherness

A Thoroughly Modern Mistress

Expensive Lessons in Getting the Best Out of You

Diary – Monday 20 March 1995

Even the French don’t believe the official French excuse for cancelling, at the last minute, the televising of the Scotland-England rugby match on Saturday: the advertising of alcohol and tobacco at Twickenham.

How do I know this? I was there – in Picardie, northern France. At the appointed time, the France Deux channel was showing nothing but the ultra- boring Milan-San Remo cycle race. The same race was still going on an hour later, when the presenter at least apologised for departing from the schedule. Our host, accustomed to the ways of French sports coverage, explained without batting an eyelid: “Of course they aren’t showing the rugby: a Frenchman is winning the cycling.”

Talk of Bill Clinton’s controversial handshake with Gerry Adams put the American wife of my weekend host in mind of the hand-shaking technique of her old college friend, Bill Clinton’s wife, Hillary. (They are kindred spirits: Mrs Clinton christened her daughter Chelsea, while my host’s wife named hers London.)

For the socially active, Mrs Clinton’s technique is worth studying. According to my friend she sticks her right hand out firmly, looks deep into your eyes and for a fraction of a second concentrates on you 100 per cent. She then removes her hand from your grasp and transfers it to the small of your back. “Without actually doing something so unseemly as pushing you away,” says my friend, “she makes it quite obvious that your turn is up.”

I hope the receptionists at the Daily Telegraph are suitably embarrassed. An article in that paper last Friday told how European noblemen with long titles have long been treated with a certain scepticism on these shores. It went on to describe the experiences of Prince Oskar von Preussen, an international publisher who also happens to be the Kaiser’s grandson. Visiting a London firm recently, the prince gave his name to the receptionist, who frowned and eventually gave him a visitor’s sticker labelled “Oskar, Prince”. What the article omitted to mention was that the “London firm” in question was … the Daily Telegraph.

The recent heavy rain up in Yorkshire has been making life difficult for the Government’s Funding Agency for Schools, newly installed in offices on the banks of the River Ouse in York. They have already had to evacuate their premises several times in the past three weeks because water has come over their doorstep.

Their head of finance recently devised what he thought was a foolproof plan to ensure nobody got trapped. He worked out that if the life-buoy on a post on the opposite bank began to float up within its frame, it was time to leave. This timing device worked well – until last week, when agency workers looked up from their desks and found it had floated away altogether. Happily, nobody drowned.

Disappointing news. The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition of New York photograher Richard Avedon’s work, which opens on Thursday, will not, after all, be showing a series of pictures of the late great ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev in the nude.

Peter Watson’s new book on Nureyev alleges that these photographs, which no one has seen, were taken after Avedon and Nureyev downed a vodka or three one evening shortly after Nureyev defected from Russia. There was speculation these would finally appear in one of Avedon’s exhibitions after Nureyev’s death.

But it seems Nureyev’s wishes are to be respected from beyond the grave. According to Watson, when Nureyev sobered up he regretted what he had done and got Avedon to promise that the pictures would never be displayed. But the question remains: has somebody destroyed them, or are they being hidden somewhere?

The prosthetically-challenged chap shown above is an 18th-century “ship’s cook”, a centuries-old naval ranking that has often inspired literary minds. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver was a ship’s cook (and Treaure Island was almost called The Sea Cook after him), as was the traitor in Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October.

Sadly, the ship’s cook’s days are numbered: from April the rank is to be abolished and replaced by the title “chef”. A Defence Council instruction explains that the change “is designed to reflect an increased professional knowledge in cooking and catering skills beyond that expected of a cook.”

Or, as a navy spokeswoman rather more succinctly put it: “Chef sounds posher, doesn’t it?”

The charming old Etonian historian Philip Ziegler was the star speaker at last Thursday’s opening of the Imperial War Museum’s spectacular exhibition London at War 1939-1945. Ziegler, author of a recent book on that subject, was explaining his researching methods. “I spoke to former doctors from Brixton, dentists from Hampstead, plumbers from Putney …”

Just as he reached the “plumbers” bit, a well-known historian in the audience was heard to whisper: “and marquises from Eton”.

We’re off on a Spree to Gay Paree

Cedric Brown, Fat Cat in the Dog House

Diary – Monday 13 March 1995

Hernan Errazuriz, the ambassador for Chile, is as mysterious as he is sociable. On 19 April, Index on Censorship, the pro-free speech organisation, is sponsoring the British film premire of Death and the Maiden, about a Chilean torture victim who meets her former torturer after the return of democracy there. So IoC was pleasantly surprised when Sr Errazuriz agreed, in his private capacity as a wine importer, to supply the hooch for the event. After all, it has been only two years since Ariel Dorfmann, the exiled author of the original play of Death and the Maiden, has been allowed back into Chile. As far as IoC is aware, the ambassador is to attend the film premire at the Curzon Mayfair, along with the stars Ben Kingsley and Sigourney Weaver, undisguised. Nevertheless, he is clearly a man who likes to keep his private dealings private. When I rang his secretary to inquire about his wine business, she replied: “What wine business? In two years he’s never mentioned it.”

You probably thought you’d heard the last of the fiasco at last Thursday’s live radio concert at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho. (It was supposed to star Stevie Wonder – but for most of it the blind singer- songwriter, who maintained that he didn’t know the show was live, refused to perform. This made the broadcaster Simon Mayo sweat: he spent much of the weekend referring to “the skills” that enabled him to cope so well with the disaster.) But there is more. Once Wonder did get going, he was accompanied by that well-known British actress, but not remotely well- known singer, Catherine Zeta-Jones. Could Ms Zeta-Jones have been seeking a recording contract? It certainly sounded like it, for she actually managed to drown the Wonderkind out.

He gave as good as he got, however. A few bars into “Lately”, in which he assumed for the first time the role of backing singer, he turned to Ms Zeta-Jones and, smiling all the while, whispered gently to her: “My turn.”

The Panorama researchers working on a programme about Michael Portillo and the Tory right’s alleged conspiracy to lose the next election (that’ll be hard) and install their hero as leader are having a tough time of it. The only dirt they’ve got on his time at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, is that he belonged to an all-male college dining society, called the Grafton.

Perhaps I can help them here. The Grafton was not the most exclusive of Cambridge male dining societies. Portillo, after all, did not go to public school. But what it lacked in exclusivity it made up for in pretension. The members would adorn themselves in morning dress for a five-course champagne breakfast and afterwards stroll around the college in their finery, the spectacle of which was somewhat at odds with the college’s professed policy of egalitarianism. Eventually, the college authorities snapped and banned it. But members still meet regularly for champagne breakfasts in London hotels, kitted out in their morning coats. Portillo,though, no longer joins them – presumably he just doesn’t have the time.

There’s talk of closing down Spitting Image, the ageing satirical puppet show, but the rubbery mannequins seem unlikely to lie down and die. Satirical puppetry has caught on in many places abroad, where the Fluck and Law creations are often leased out. In Greece, two puppets are particularly popular with TV producers – those of Jeremy Paxman and the Duke of Edinburgh. Of course, these puppets do not satirise their live originals. “Nobody in Greece has ever heard of Jeremy Paxman,” a Spitting Image spokeswoman says. “Instead, he’s used to portray the stereotypical Greek waiter.” And the Duke, who hails from the Greek Royal Family? “Nobody’s ever heard of him either; he’s used to portray the stereotypical degenerate drunk.”

The film world has never seen the like. Three weeks ago MGM invited about 50 top American exhibitors (as cinema owners are known in the US) to a dinner in London celebrating the impending release of Rob Roy – a film about the hardships of village life in 17th-century Scotland – starring Liam Neeson. The guests were invited to a dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel, Park Lane, but instead of imposing a dress code, MGM asked for their measurements. The guests assumed they were getting a free dinner jacket (this is Hollywood, after all) and acquiesced.

Upon arrival, however, they discovered, to their dismay, that a kilt had been made up for each guest. “They all started ringing each other’s hotel rooms,” says one of the British guests who was in on the joke. “They deliberately arrived at the dinner in pairs, in case anyone took the mickey, but they ended up having a whale of a time.” Clearly refreshed by the Scotch whisky on offer, some of the exhibitors went off together to Piccadilly. There a bunch of American tourists, and later a group of Japanese, mistook them for genuine Scots and took their pictures, but only after the wily Americans charged £5 a go. “They made over £100,” says a spokesman for the distributors, UIP, adding hastily, “but I’m sure they gave it all to charity.”

Memo to British Rail: May I suggest a new staff position among your ranks – something like a Countryside Consultant – perhaps a reincarnation of William Boot? That you are in need of one is evident from your latest poster, on display at Euston station, featuring an enticing view of a castle in the great British countryside and starring a pretty butterfly (see below). The thing is that the butterfly has been extinct for 15 years. When it existed, it was called, for the amateur lepidopterists among you, the Large Tortoisehell.

Disaster was neatly avoided at Saturday night’s opening of Richard Strauss’s Salome at the Royal Opera House, thanks to the strong arms of the Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel. Just as the lead soprano, Catherine Malfitano, stepped forward to receive her thunderous applause the curtain (black for this performance) descended directly on top of her. Just in time, Terfel reached up and stopped it, in a pose reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty. He stood firm as the diva basked in her bravas and bouquets, receiving hearty applause in particular from – Panorama researchers get your notebooks out – Michael Portillo.

Diary – Monday 6 March 1995

That last vestige of British Communism, the Morning Star, (daily circulation 6,500, compared to 200,000 just after the Second World War) has appointed a new editor. John Haylett, the paper’s deputy editor, is set to take the helm in April – but only, it emerges, after a brush with what couldn’t possibly have been some very old-fashioned nepotism. When the People’s Press Printing Society committee, which thought it ran the paper, convened to elect Mr Haylett, Mary Rosser, the paper’s chief executive, stalled the vote, claiming that ultimate power in fact resided with the four-member management committee – which includes Ms Rosser. Enter her son-in-law, the paper’s 33-year-old news editor, Paul Corry, as new candidate. Eventually it was all sorted out and the fuss has gradually died down. But I gather there are those who still refer to Mr Corry as “Baby Kim” – after the son of Kim Il Sung who succeeded his father as ruler of North Korea last year.

Three weeks ago I revealed how the former Save Eldorado campaigner, Gwendoline Lamb, was persecuted in her local town of Middlesbrough after a tabloid newspaper revealed that she was on a blacklist of callers banned from Radio 4’s Call Nick Ross show. The BBC has subsequently apologised but the indomitable Ms Lamb is threatening to sue unless they pay her compensation for the harassment. The Beeb is clearly alarmed. Only yesterday morning Ms Lamb received two unctuous missives – one from Dave Stanford, head of radio, and one from Nick Ross himself – both of which were written, quite obviously, under the instruction: “Grovel.” It may not do any good, for Ms Lamb is obviously no push-over. “I’m still going ahead,” she says. “There are some very clever lawyers around … and I’m extremely bright myself.”

A tip for all those busily analysing the psyche of Nick Leeson: take a close look at the baseball cap he has been sporting so freely for the paparazzi. Its logo – a gothic D – is, I can reveal, the emblem of the Detroit Tigers baseball team. But do not assume that Mr Leeson is necessarily a Tigers supporter. It is more likely that he was persuaded to buy the cap, available at most sports stores, because it is the trademark of one of his childhood television heroes, the detective Magnum, alias the actor Tom Selleck, who is seldom seen without it.

Drama in the music world: there is to be a takeover at Britain’s oldest musical journal, the Musical Times, founded in 1844. Peter Phillips, director of the Tallis Scholars, has beaten music columnist Norman Lebrecht in the contest to buy it from Orpheus publications, although he stresses the deal won’t be signed until April. Still, MT staff – all three of them – are greatly relieved because Lebrecht wanted to shake the whole thing up. Phillips, on the other hand, intends to leave the format as it is.

But Lebrecht may yet be a force to be reckoned with. “I was going to put together a much broader magazine,” he admits, “because increasingly its appeal is exclusively for a declining academic readership. Its circulation has fallen to around 3,000, which is dismal. I am now in a position where I am probably going to start my own magazine in that area.”

The MT is certainly not for the musically risqu. Last year the romantic futurist composer Keith Burstein, whose work the Independent described as “of inspired beauty”, sent a programme of his concert at Southwark Cathedral to the MT editors, to have it returned with the word “Bollocks” scrawled across it in large capital letters.

Bad as they may be, things at the Musical Times cannot be as bad as they are at the Los Angeles Opera House, which is reputed in the trade for unfortunate incidents – bits of plaster falling on top of the orchestra, and the like. Still, flaky ceilings have nothing on the opera house’s latest trouble: scabies has broken out behind stage. For those who do not know, scabies is “a contagious skin infection caused by the itch mite. The sufferer experiences intense itching and the formation of vesicles and pustules” – Chambers Dictionary. The only way to rid a place infested with the mites is to call in the pest control officers. Over the weekend I called the opera house to find out how they were coping but, worryingly, I got no reply. My doctor, though, assures me that, though very nasty, scabies is seldom fatal.

I don’t often deal in smut, but some ironies are too rich to be resisted. Last week Paula Yates appeared on a repeat of Channel 4’s music show The Tube and was shown introducing Michael Hutchence of the antipodean rock combo INXS. This, of course, is the same Michael Hutchence who was recently exposed as having disrupted Paula’s marriage to Bob Geldof. After Hutchence had done his bit on stage, Paula turned to the camera and chortled: “He’s asked me back to his place, but I told him that I have my kids to think about …” Somebody at Channel 4 evidently has a rather vicious sense of humour.

I pride myself on having discovered a possible gap in Evelyn Waugh’s education: ping-pong. Listening in the car over the weekend to the HarperCollins tape of Waugh’s satire on Fleet Street, Scoop!, I noticed, bemused, that a ping-pong match played by his hero William Boot is scored thus: love- 15, love-30, love-40, game. But, as all ping-pong players know, the game is not scored like that and never has been. “It has always been the first to 21 and you have to be two points ahead,” confirmed the British Table Tennis Association when I called them yesterday. Was the error then deliberate or not? I put it to Waugh’s son, Auberon. “I’ve absolutely no idea,” he said, “but I am sure that my father never, in his entire life, played a single game of tennis or ping-pong.”

Diary – Monday 27 February 1995

One man who knows precisely what is on his walls, however, is the Prime Minister. He has been busy installing David Hockneys and the like on the walls of 10 Downing Street, formerly the backdrop for more traditional 18th- and 19th-century art. He has not replaced the Turners and Constables favoured by Margaret Thatcher so much as discreetly hung them elsewhere. “It’s to show his support of modern art,” says a spokesman.

Presumably that does not apply to the portrait of the great cricketer, WG Grace. “As soon as he arrived here, the Prime Minister specifically asked for a portrait of Grace to be added to the Downing Street collection,” says the spokesman, before adding, “but I’m not entirely sure where it hangs.” Bedroom, perhaps?

A number of my City friends are congratulating themselves on leaving Barings before the disastrous events of the weekend. One friend, it turns out, left only days ago. But I, too, count myself lucky. Three years ago, for some unfathomable reason, I got down to the final eight for two or three graduate places and endured a whole day of interviews at the bank’s Bishopsgate premises. Who knows? Perhaps they might have been rash enough to offer me a job.

But I was saved, eventually, by the vice-chairman, Andrew Tuckey. He strode into my interview room, took one look at me and barked: “You don’t really want to be an investment banker, do you?” “No,” I replied, feelingly. If only, my friends sighed at the weekend, he’d said the same to Nicholas Leeson.

In the very hour that the country’s grandest universities withdrew their affiliation from their eponymous Pall Mall club, the Oxford & Cambridge, members of the University Women’s Club were enjoying their monthly club dinner.

Talk of sexual equality was not on the menu, however. Instead, Lady Longford, the octogenarian biographer, kept the guests entertained with a yarn about how she once nearly set Windsor Castle on fire (well before the palce actually went up in flames).

“I was writing my biography of Queen Victoria,” she explained, “and I was copying out certain documents in the castle by hand when I learnt that you were allowed to bring in tape recorders. So the next day I brought mine in and suddenly there was this terrible smell. A line of smoke started coming out of the machine. I had to unplug it immediately.”

Lady Longford went on to display an impressive knowledge of matters electrical. “You see, the electrical system at Windsor was still on direct current, but my tape machine ran on alternating current. No wonder there was some smoke,” she explained with a grin.

Speaking of Oxford and Cambridge, I ran into Norman Stone, the notoriously right-wing Oxford historian, last week, and found him complaining bitterly about the proposed removal of the Oxbridge entrance exam. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to test anyone’s calibre,” he moaned. But then, it seemed, an idea came to him. “I know,” he said, eyes glinting mischievously, “what about a new course to stretch the students a bit? How about Totalitarian Women of our Time?” Now who could he possibly have had in mind?

One unpleasant side-effect of the Irish peace process is, of course, the sacking of the various actors who used to do the voice-over for Gerry Adams for British television. One of the main ones was Aiden McCann, a 34-year-old from Belfast, who has already found himself another role – as Charles Dickens.

“The main similarity is that they both have beards, moustaches and an obsession with combing their hair,” he says of his role in Stuffed Shirts & Marionettes, a play about Ellen Ternan, Dickens’s lover, which opens shortly at Croydon’s Warehouse Theatre. Doing Gerry Adams, he admits, was somewhat easier. “Adams sounds just like my father,” he says, “so it was simple for me to copy the “nars and thars” (nows and theres, of course.)

“But there is,” he continues, “a bigger difference still between Adams and Dickens. The latter would use 800 words to say something when the former would use one.”

Jim Dowd, Labour MP for Lewisham West, will not be jumping into his black tie again in a hurry. He recently attended a black-tie reception at Grosvenor House, and on returning to the Commons, found he did not have time to change into his suit for a reception for the International Fund for Animal Welfare. Marching in, he was somewhat taken aback when his fellow Labour MP Tony Banks introduced him to the IFAW head, Brian Davies, jokingly, as a waiter. Still, he let it rest – until, that is, Davies turned round and in all seriousness asked him how long he had been working in the Strangers’ Restaurant.

Tonight sees the opening of the much-hyped new production of Hamlet, starring Ralph Fiennes and Tara Fitzgerald. The performance ought really to put its venue, the Hackney Empire, firmly on the map of London theatreland at long last, but the administrative staff there are not optimistic. They blame the AA, which has pointed the way to the venue from the city with one of those natty little yellow signposts, but have omitted the theatre’s name and written merely: Hackney Hamlet. Alas, poor Empire.