Denise writes:

Just purchased Xmas Radio Times and can confirm that Richard is in a Victoria Wood sketch to be shown on BBC Xmas Day at 9.20. Victoria’s quote:

“I Treasure memories of Richard E Grant branching a pair of knitting needles in WI, our answer to ER.”

The mind boggles! Oh nearly forgot to mention RT says something about being topless.

Chin Chin
Denise

Thanks Denise!!

Pat did some more typing – This time it was the Serpent’s Kiss article that she sent me last month. Pat can’t find the relavent magazine information though so if anyone knows just drop me a line.The pic for it is here. Looks like REG is ready to drop it down her cleavage.

Mucking About – The Serpent’s Kiss is a costume drama with a difference: Ewan McGregor is a randy gardner and Greta Scacchi the target of his green fingers. Darren Bignell goes behind the potting sheds…

Who knows what Percy Thrower would have made of it, but for those with a penchant for fingers verde the good news is that gardening is coming to the big screen-and it’s sexy. Ewan McGregor is the hottest thing in wellies since Kurt Russell and Billy Baldwin played Fireman Sam in Backdraft, and he’s shoveling mulch in costume drama The Serpent’s Kiss.

But this production, currently filming in County Clare, is not the flouncing posh-frocked bewiggery we’ve come to expect. For a start, it has a story line so saucy you could bottle it and label it HP: a dashing young craftsman employed by a wealthy landowner to fashion a garden celebrating his wife’s beauty, finds the wife more interesting in bedding of a totally different kind, while he enjoys a blossoming passion with her daughter. The line-up includes Pete Postlewaite, Greta Scacchi, and — all snake-like grin and curly black locks – Richard E. Grant as the wife’s evil and somewhat manipulative cousin.

“It wasn’t written for Richard,” laughs producer Robert Jones,”but it could have been-he gets to deliver lines with all the venom that we loved in Withnail and I.”

Horticulture didn’t exactly feature strongly in Jones’ last film, The Usual Suspects, but there are, he says, similarities.

“I look for films which are witty, that stimulate the audience intellectually, visually and emotionally. In essence, this film is a love story, but there’s also the themes of what happens when man tries to control human nature.”

So expect carnal lust and compost, sex and shubberies, wanton desire and wheelbarrows. And much sowing of seed…

Pat got her typing fingers happening and sent me a text version of yesterday’s scanned interview from Premiere Magazine (December 1997). You can read that here. Thanks very much for that, Pat! Much appreciated!

Pat scanned a REG interview for Keep The Aspidistra Flying that should be big enough for people to read. You can see it here.

Denise also sent a pic from a Sainsbury’s article. Check it out here.

6th December 2000

Richard attended a “Supper and Carols” at the Chelsea house of Sally Greene and her husband Robert Bourne’s. Other guests included Lulu, Jerry Hall, Clive Anderson, Melvin Bragg and others.