Will
Waspe Unlikely though it will seem to London listeners exposed to his morning chat-stint with Janet Street-Porter on struggling LBC, and to readers of his plodding new column in Punch, the unquenchable Paul Callan has fallen into no disfavour in Fleet Street. I hear that the former Daily Mail gossip columnist is now being wooed by the Express for the Hickey column.
On the other hand
Less happily, Waspe hears that the London Evening Standard's television reviewer, Elizabeth Cowley, has fallen into disfavour — at least among the family circle of editor Charles Wintour — and will not survive much longer.
Old friend
People outside show business will be intrigued by the appointment of Anthony Chardet as 'Associate' to Keith Michell in the artistic direction of the Chichester Festival Theatre. Chardet has sought the limelight as little as the late Hugh 'Binkie' Beaumont of Tennents, with whom he was associated as production stage manager for over twenty years. As it happens, his association with Michell somewhat pre-dates his Chichester appointment. The pair are involved together in a London company which has one or two lively projects in the offing, including a stage play by Z-Cars writer Alan Prior.
The easy way
Like Sir James Richards's Arts Council' Report, which doubtless prompted it, Environment Minister Geoffrey Rippon's newly-formed committee to "advise on the implications of planning proposals as they may affect the theatre" is hardly necessary as far as London is concerned. Instead of all these good and publicspirited people (under Lord Drogheda's chairmanship and naturally including Sir James) wasting their hours, a simple insistence on present rules, including the one that new threatres must be incorporated in buildings that replace old theatres, and that they should not thereafter be turned into cinemas, bingo halls or whatever, is all that is essentially required.
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