Comedy duo back down over sketchy wording

BBC comedy tsars have been tiptoeing around the boundaries of taste since Sachsgate. Now it appears that the word “Gypsies” can no longer be the subject of mirth.

The Armstrong & Miller Show returns to BBC One next month. But Ben Miller says that a sketch lampooning “racist” public information films from the Seventies, has become a bone of contention.

Miller told FHM: “We’re having a debate with the BBC over whether we can say Gypsies because they say Gypsies is a racist term, and you think, ‘Yes it is but that’s the point that we’re making, that we were more racist in the Seventies than we are now’.” The Equality and Human Rights Commission says that “Gypsies” need not be pejorative. The term was used to recognise Romany people as an ethnic minority under the Race Relations Act.

Miller tells us that they have relented. “After discussing with the BBC, we decided to use a different word, so that the target [racism] was clearer and the joke was funnier. These discussions are a normal part of writing comedy and help to make sure we end up with something we can all have a ruddy good laugh at.”

Wax lyrical for solo masterpiece

The Face: Anish Kapoor

It’s as if the building is giving birth,” says Anish Kapoor, 55, the stately grandee of public art, of his retrospective opening at the Royal Academy of Arts this weekend. The first living artist to be given all the galleries of the hallowed institution for a solo exhibition, Kapoor has decided to fill the space with a 20-tonne slab of crimson wax on a train track that squelches through the doorways leaving a residue of goo in its wake.

Born in Mumbai to a Hindu father and a Jewish mother, Kapoor — now a Buddhist — came to London in 1973, studied at the Chelsea College of Art and never left. He represented Britain in the Venice Biennale in 1990 and won the coveted Turner Prize the following year. Possibly our most famous art export, he made the Cloud Gate in Chicago, a sculpture that proved so popular with the Windy City, it was given its own public holiday.

The Wigtown Book Festival in Galloway, southwest Scotland, which kicks off this weekend, is challenging writers to take part in a Wigtown Festival’s Got Talent competition. Max Arthur, author of Forgotten Voices of the Great War, will revive Magical Max, a knife-throwing act that he once performed in a panto alongside Cilla Black. But he can’t do it on his own. “I need a glamorous assistant from Wigtown,” he says, taking a break from sharpening his knives. “It is frightening, but they will survive. Probably.” Any ladies with strong nerves and sequined corsets should apply to www.wigtownbookfestival.com

Julia Roberts has, frankly, gone a bit overboard while filming in India and given her three children Hindu names. The star is said to have renamed the kids Mahalaxmi, Krishna Balaram and Ganesha, after Hindu gods, according to Swami Dharmdev, who welcomed the family to his ashram. We’re sure that the children, aged 2 to 4, who were previously named Hazel, Finn and Henry, will one day find a way to thank their mother profusely.

Tracey Emin was in combative mood when she addressed the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), to launch a book reproducing 1,000 of her illustrations. “If I was a male artist I’d probably be the richest in the world,” she said. “It’s still a battle. I do really think I’m a feminist. To all the people who think I’m not talented, I’m the only artist in history to do a book of 1,000 drawings. Let’s see them do it.”

Postscript

Justin Lee Collins has dared to speak ill of Bruce Forsyth. “In his day he was the best at what he did, but I think he should have given up three or four years ago,” says Collins, who once presented a Strictly Come Dancing spin-off programme. “He wasn’t particularly nice to me on that show. They do say never meet your idols and in the case of Bruce I was disappointed. He was very rude.”

Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby have both signed up for Noel Edmonds’ Cosmic Ordering iPhone App (People, September 18). Is life on the This Morning sofa not cosmic enough?

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