Michael Sheen, who has played Tony Blair, Kenneth Williams and David Frost on screen, is not the only mimic in his family. The Welsh actor told The Delaunay Presents that his father worked as a jobbing Jack Nicholson impersonator. “He had very little talent but lots of enthusiasm,” Sheen said. And a decent resemblance that took him around the world. He was once asked to pose as Nicholson on the red carpet at a film festival in Berlin. This was fine until he rashly agreed to do a radio interview. “You are Jack Nicholson,” the presenter began, at which Sheen Sr declared “Even better than the real thing” in a broad Newport accent. Perhaps he should have claimed to be Anthony Hopkins.
Doing I’m a Celebrity… in 2010 brought the comedian Jenny Eclair new fans but not the ones she wanted. “Turns out I’m big with primary school boys, who think I’m funny and brave,” she wrote in her new autobiography. “They swarm around me in the supermarket asking for my autograph. Typical: I’ve gained a whole new fan base who are far too young to see any of my live shows. Or buy me a drink.”
Titchmarsh’s green phase
Alan Titchmarsh wasn’t always a confident gardener. As a boy he believed that the best way to grow blackberries was to train them over a bedstead, thinking the brass had magical powers, after seeing one covered in fruit in his grandfather’s allotment. “I thought this was the norm,” he told the Rosebud podcast. “It struck me later on as being a very expensive way to grow blackberries.” He hadn’t realised the bed had just been chucked away. Perhaps they had misinterpreted the saying of “where there’s muck, there’s brass”.
Wife and young charges
Fiscal rectitude begins at home for the chief secretary to the Treasury. “My wife pointed out when I was appointed that maybe I have the best kind of personality [for the job],” Darren Jones tells Political Thinking. Such is his control of their personal gross domestic product that he has set up a spreadsheet to monitor household expenditure and has taken to calling his children Cost Centres 1, 2 and 3. “They are very expensive,” he said. Hope he doesn’t have to make one child redundant.
After writing books on the Queen and Princess Margaret, Craig Brown fears he is in danger of being seen as a “royal expert”. Despite being an Old Etonian, Brown prefers to laugh at toffs and shares some of his favourite tales on the Oldie podcast, including one about a lord who had to travel without his butler. That night he was heard screaming down the stairs: “Why isn’t my toothbrush frothing?”
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Dramatic disorder
You would probably recognise the actor Oliver Ford Davies even if you can’t recall what he has been in. That’s OK, because he probably wouldn’t remember either. Interviewed by The Stage about his latest production, he starts talking about As You Like It before breaking off with a laugh. “No, it’s Twelfth Night,” he says. “Sorry, I don’t know which play I’m doing any more.” He’s forgotten worse. Ford Davies says that early in his career he was in a three-act play called The Little Hut, each of which is a two-hander. One night, the actors confidently embarked on Act 3, only to realise after a while that they had forgotten to do Act 2 and had to go back. “Oh, that was bad,” he says. Not as bad as if the audience hadn’t noticed.
