London Notebook | 1 November 2012

What is a real woman? My difficult client, the Australian gigastar Dame Edna Everage, is seriously miffed at BBC’s cancellation of her forthcoming appearance on Have I Got News For You. She flew from Australia especially to record this show, installing herself, as usual, in the Oliver Messel suite at the Dorchester Hotel at her own expense, but the producer changed his mind yesterday and politely gave her the shove, claiming that the show only featured ‘real people’. The insult is all the more hurtful since she has, in the past, done Desert Island Discs and published a volume of autobiography which was always listed in the ‘non-fiction’ category. ‘Not a real woman!’ the Dame spluttered to me on the phone last night. ‘Tell that to Sir Howard Glove, my gynaecologist!’ The producers claimed the wags on the HIGNFY panel would be be overshadowed and discomfited by Edna’s heady and formidable personality. The matter is now in the hands of her ruthless legal team. Another headache for the beleaguered Lord Patten.

I often take friends from Australia and the USA, unfamiliar with London, on my personal tour of the city. Not seldom they exclaim at the hideous and gimcrack modern buildings. Most people know of England’s proud architectural heritage and are dismayed by the fact that there does not seem to have been a decent building erected in the capital since 1920 except for a few modernistic constructions of the Thirties, erected in the hope that they might one day be used in an episode of Poirot. Embarrassed for England, as I so often am, I usually improvise an explanation. I am at my most successful and convincing when I explain that the most promising English architects of their age were all in the RAR (Royal Architects Rifles) during the first world war and were wiped out to a man by the Hun in a Zeppelin raid, so that all construction in the post-war period was supervised by volunteers.