The Gossip - Edinburgh, Alan Parker and Marje Proops

Alan Parker, set to make his first film in five years

Every fortnight, columnist Ben Dowell gives us exclusive chit-chat and whispers from the world of the arts and media.

Your correspondent is currently at the Edinburgh festival Fringe fighting through a sea of leotards and women in bonnets aggressively selling their one woman show about Dorothy Wordsworth.
Biggest shock so far?
Well, Apollo/Dionysus at the C Venue about the collision of order and chaos in Greek myth which consisted of penises, bottoms, breasts – and far too much bending over for me to stomach.
The best comedy so far has come from Brendan Hunt, a sharp eyed Chicago funnyman telling us about his five raucous  in Amsterdam at the Pleasance Dome.
And favourite drama so far? Has to be Dai at the Pleasance, Iris Bahr’s moving, profound and superbly performed one-woman show in which she plays various people in an Israeli cafe telling their life stories just before a suicide bomb goes off. It was spellinbinding. But still, there’s lots more to see…. I’m just off now to see a show called The Swingers which may just tip my breasts and bums quota over the limit.

The BBC has started filming Thatcher – Long Walk to Finchley about the Iron lady’s rise to power. I’ve had a sneak view of Richard Cottan’s script and I can tell you that, contrary to what I reckon would be most people’s expecations, its going to be very understanding and sympathetic, beginning with Thatcher as a determined child at school and ending with her being booted out of Number 10.
Her personal assistant Cynthia Crawford is a major character and the early draft I saw contained many scenes with “Crawfie” and Thatch sitting up late in their jimmy jams sipping whisky and showing female solidarity over the beastly men in grey suits who deposed the old girl.

One other BBC drama that could, like Thatch, be on its last legs is cop show favourite Dalziel and Pascoe.
I gather from her agent that scriptwriter Val Windsor has been commissioned to adapt the new novel….and there’s a clue that it could be the last in the book’s title: Death of Dalziel, The BBC say they are adapting it and that after that the show will be “given a rest”.
They cannot guarantee it will return, but with the kind of logic only the BBC press office is capable of, tell me that it’s not the end as “Dalziel doesn’t in fact die”.
My sources tell me differently by the way and my guess is the BBC don’t want a Dalziel is  axed story and are trying to bury it quietly.


A funny story from Simon Gray not included in his latest diaries.
Gray has been telling friends about recently being sent one of his old chum Harold Pinter’s short acerbic four line poems. He wasn’t sure how to react but when Pinter called him up a week or so later to demand what he thought about it, Gray replied: “I haven’t finished it yet”.


Ricky Gervais is in dispute – with his local paper.
The Hampstead and Highgate Express ran a picture of his front door in a story about a neighbourly dispute (he’s having some building work done and there are complaints about the noise and mess.).
Well anyway, Ricky was none too pleased that his door number could be seen in the picture and feared being swamped or even robbed.
The matter is still to be solved.


Legendary British film maker Alan Parker is currently in LA adapting Jamila Gavin’s 2000 novel about British foundlings, Coram Boy which he hopes will be his first film in five years.
A film Parker recently hoped to make with Charlize Theron fell through so he’s hoping for better luck this time.
After five years he may need it.
Though the signs are good – Helen Edmundson’s  adaptation for the National in 2005 was a cracker.

I’m getting a bit tired of the BBC adapting the lives of increasingly obscure people for cheap biopics on BBC4.
Most of them have been awful, with the one on Kenneth Tynan featuring a terrible impersonation by Rob Brydon sticking in my mind as a real turkey.
Well I hear they are really scraping the barrel this time, with a biopic of Seventies agony aunt Marje Proops on the development list.
Give me strength. That really could be agony.

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