The Maggie and Shirley show is hotting up nicely

 
P16 DOWNTON ABBEY
ITV
12 September 2012

It’s a showdown of the dames on the set of Downton Abbey as Shirley MacLaine joins Maggie Smith in the new series starting on Sunday, as Cora’s invading American mother. The veteran actresses have got on just fine, though that hasn’t stopped Dame Maggie from adopting the Dowager Countess’s acid style when talking about her new co-star.

The 77-year-old actress gave a one-off interview with the Toronto Star and revealed — over a second glass of wine — some witty thoughts.

“When she talks about some of her stranger theories, you just listen. She told us in Santa Fe there were UFOs up in the mountains and the bears were coming down to visit the local Starbucks as a result. I asked if they were all drinking skinny green lattes but she never answered me.”

When questioned about her own religious views, Dame Maggie said: “I know there is something out there and like most people, I tend to believe in it more when things go bad. But I’m not like Shirley MacLaine, who probably believes we were past lovers.”

Ouch. Only last week MacLaine told the Radio Times just that. “I adore Maggie,” she gushed in the interview. “I’ve known her for years. I think we were lovers in another life.”

Former hack Baldwin joins immortalised press corps

Has Ed Miliband’s director of strategy, Tom Baldwin, a former Times journalist, achieved immortality in fiction? The character of Washington hack Nick Balden in the new thriller Rock Creek Park, by former Black Watch paratrooper Simon Conway, is based on Baldwin, according to Conway’s wife Sarah Smith. Other characters in the book, set in the US capital after the election of Barack Obama in 2008, are said to be thinly-veiled pen-portraits of journalists such as the Sunday Times’s Christina Lamb, Mark Mardell of the BBC and Channel 4’s Matt Frei.

Smith, a Channel 4 business correspondent, told the Londoner she was “hugely amused” to find that her husband had drawn inspiration from her colleagues at the launch at Soho House last night. However, the big cheeses of the media have melted a little. “We’re all disappointed not to be covering the 2012 US election,” she added.

* Plugging Caitlin Moran’s essay collection Moranthology, the Times reprints a pre-election 2010 column in which she describes George Osborne as an “Etonian baronet” not once but twice. Osborne, not yet a baronet, went to St Paul’s. And Times editor James Harding was a contemporary of the Chancellor at the west London school.

Now Sophie is reaching for the sky

Sophie Ellis-Bextor, pictured, has joined the jetset, thanks to her husband Richard Jones. The bass player in The Feeling recently got his pilot’s licence and caught an updraft when he made friends with Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, whose private plane was languishing on the tarmac. “He said to me: I’m not using it any more, do you want to use it?” he told the Londoner when attending a screening of The Graduate as part of the Disaronno Film Series at Hackney Picturehouse last night, curated by the actress Emilia Fox. “He learned to fly in it, as did David Gilmour. So I hope I don’t crash it!” Jones recently flew Sophie and their four-month-old son to France. “We ate mussels and fries on the beach.”

* Former Python Michael Palin showed a deadly serious interest in the Brazilian jungle last night when he opened an exhibition called the Plant Seekers at the Garden Museum by Lambeth Palace. He told how Victorian plant collector Sir Henry Wickham made himself unpopular in Brazil by bringing the first rubber seeds from the South American country to Kew, eventually establishing the Far East as the centre of the world’s rubber growing. “How do I know this?” he asked guests including Brigadier Parker Bowles, ex-husband of the Duchess of Cornwall, Sir Roddy Llewellyn and Robin Lane Fox. “Well, it happens to be the subject of my next TV series.” Parker Bowles revealed that his great uncle, E A Bowles, is in the show as an expert on snowdrops.

* There was an unusual flavour to the prize for best school dinners at last night’s Tatler Good School Awards. The judges at the Dorchester Hotel ceremony gave the prize to Sedbergh, a boarding school in Cumbria, saying what impressed them was the sight of a deer carcass that pupils stalked, killed and were about to butcher — bringing, as the judges said, “a new meaning to the term ‘self-service’.” Some London students felt this showed anti-metropolitan bias. As one city schoolboy said: “It’s not as if there are many deer in central London. Does that mean we’re automatically excluded?”

Schmoozing aplenty in the Booker zone

Sir Peter Stothard, chair of the Man Booker judges, explained to partygoers for the shortlist last night why his panel rejected so many big names. “It’s about novels, not novelists,” said the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. That didn’t stop Michael Frayn, whose Skios failed to make the cut, from stopping by for a glass of wine.

The judges include Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and actor Dan Stevens. Will Self, author of the short-listed Umbrella, and Deborah Levy, who wrote Swimming Home were also at the party.

* Tinie Tempah has been named GQ Man of the Year but that’s not good enough for his manager. The dapper hip hop star is on a diet. “My manager was like, ‘Ah T, even though you jump around on stage you could give it more energy. It seems like towards the last 10 minutes of the set you’re tired,” Tinie tells GQ magazine. His new regime involves protein shakes, gym visits and bowls of berries. Rock ’n’ roll ain’t what it used to be.

A musical Chapman brother

Arancini all round at the 10th anniversary party of Michelin-starred Locanda Locatelli. Among those toasting Giorgio Locatelli were fellow restaurateurs Fergus Henderson and Mark Hix and artists Sir Peter Blake and Dinos Chapman. Dinos tells the Londoner he’s about to release an album, Luftbobler, a piece of electronica in which he “twiddles the knobs”.

Funny men, one footballer at James’s stag do

Actor James Corden, above showed admirable restraint at his stag do at Mahiki in Mayfair last night. The One Man, Two Guvnors star kept himself in good form for his wedding at Babington House in Somerset to TV producer Julia Carey, leaving it to his friends and fellow funnymen to do the drinking.

Fellow guests included Jimmy Carr, footballer Jamie Redknapp, Michael McIntyre and Bad Education star Jack Whitehall.

“It was James Corden’s stag night last night,” another guest, David Walliams, tweeted, after rolling out of bed this morning.

“My head hurts …”

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