Richard and Judy
Britain's best-loved TV couple, Richard Madeley and Judi Finnigan are prominent British television presenters, authors and journalists, most recognised for co-hosting the popular talk show 'Richard & Judy'.
ONE of my all-time favourite books is Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.
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For me, it's the perfect women's novel; the tale of a poor orphan despised and bullied by her rich relations and then sent away to an horrific charity school for parentless girls.
With all the odds stacked against her, Jane triumphs and as a young woman becomes governess to a little French girl at Thornfield House, home of the mysterious Mr Rochester. He falls for Jane, proposes and at the altar is dramatically unmasked as a bigamist. He already has a (mad) wife living secretly in an attic at Thornfield.
After a long separation and many trials and tribulations, Jane and Rochester are finally reunited, he now blind because of injuries he received when his wife set fire to the house. The good news is she dies in the fire, leaving Rochester finally free to be with Jane.
And as we all know, Bronte then penned one of the greatest lines in literature: "Reader, I married him."
Hurrah! Jane Eyre is a wonderful, passionate and deeply sexy novel, all the more so because of its understated nature, adhering to the conventions of the time. I always think the Bronte sisters novels make Jane Austen's seem bloodless, witty though they are.
And now it has emerged that Bronte was inspired to write Jane Eyre after a visit she made to an ancient stately home in 1839. The mansion was Norton Conyers in North Yorkshire. While staying there, Charlotte was told the story of a mad woman who had once been kept in a secret attic in the house.
Captivated, Charlotte was moved to write Jane Eyre. Rochester's insane and murderous wife Bertha and the attic she lived in with only a gloomy, drunken, ill-tempered servant to care for her, came to life in Bronte's head. Now the owners of Norton Conyers, Sir James and Lady Graham, whose family have lived there since 1624, have rediscovered the secret attic while the house was being restored as part of a conservation project.
The Grahams managed to find the attic only after years of knocking on panels to locate the rumoured staircase in the farthest corner of the mansion's other extensive attics.
At the top of this narrow and precarious stairway is a tiny stone garret with a single porthole-shaped window. The space was nicknamed Mad Mary's Room. It looks appropriately sinister and austere and Charlotte Bronte was said to have been "very taken" with it.
I love to think of her travelling back to the vicarage she shared with her siblings in Haworth, fleshing out the details of my favourite novel in her head. I do wonder about Mad Mary, though. Who was she? Why was she locked away in the attic? What did her family (her husband?) have to hide? Next year, Norton Conyers will be open to the public. I can't wait to see that gruesome garret.
JUDY
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THE BBC has been criticised for spending £5million last year sending out 25.1 million "bullying" letters demanding payment of the TV licence fee. We've just paid ours, but really, for how long will the Beeb be able to rely on the licence fee for its existence.
In our house we both still watch TV but our adult children rarely do. They are constantly on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. They catch up with what they want to watch online. Our daughter has a TV screen in her room but only watches Netflix, never mainstream telly. Even our baby granddaughter watches children's programmes on her daddy's iPad.
Inevitably the licence fee will soon become obsolete as there will be no one to pay it. And what will poor Auntie do then? Obviously a subscription system where viewers only pay for programmes they want to watch is the way ahead.
Meanwhile they won't win many hearts or viewers by threatening them with jail unless they pay up. The whole system is out of date, heavy handed and doomed.
RICHARD
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IT MAY be perilous to open your yap about Scottish independence but the whole nightmare in Gaza is where angels fear to tread. Penelope Cruz was a co-signatory of an open letter published in the Spanish press, denouncing Israel's comprehensive retaliation against Hamas's rockets. The letter described Israel's Defence Force as the "Israel Occupation Army".
Cue fury from other, pro-Israeli actors, among them Jon Voight. He accused Cruz of inciting anti-Semitism. A flustered Cruz backtracked, admitting she's not an "expert" on the crisis.
If it's any comfort Penny, no one is. That's why it's all such an endless, slow-motion car crash. No one has a clue how to stop it.
RICHARD
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Richard West, DWP’s head of fraud investigations
HEART-STOPPING images of a baby buggy and its tiny occupant toppling onto a tube track were flashed around the world on Tuesday. The horrified mother's lightning-quick reaction in jumping down on to the live rails to rescue her child were, astonishingly, criticised by some as being reckless; there was talk of prosecution.
What was the woman supposed to do? Wait for a Health and Safety team to arrive and make a risk-assessment?
I'm totally in her corner. Because I was once in an almost identical scenario myself.
When my daughter Chloe was 11 some of her schoolfriends came down to Cornwall to spend a few days by the sea with us.
When it was time for them to go home I drove them to Liskeard station to put them on the London train.
We were mooching about the platform waiting for it to arrive, me standing with my back to the tracks, when one of the girls piped up: "Where's Chloe?" I looked around. She'd vanished into thin air. "Chloe?" I called. "Where are you?" "Down here," came the muffled reply.
I ran to the edge of the platform. There she was, down on the tracks, tugging grimly away at something. Simultaneously I heard a sudden clicking and clacking noise as the rails vibrated with the approach of a coming through train.
A split second later I was down beside my daughter, dragging her up by her armpits and throwing her bodily on to the platform, where I followed as fast as I could scramble.
I'm not saying the train whooshed past the very next instant but it was probably less than 10 seconds. I try not to swear in front of my kids but failed comprehensively on this occasion. "What the **** did you think you were doing?!?" I roared.
Totally unperturbed, she answered: "Someone's dropped a Barbie doll down there. I was trying to get it, that's all."
Fifteen years on, my blood pressure's gone sky-high just writing about it.
RICHARD
IF you are in the public eye and you choose to go on Twitter, you're going to get trolled. I know it upsets some people and they quit the network in distress but I can honestly say it doesn't bother me in the slightest. My mental image of a troll is of a 40-something fat guy with acne and halitosis, sitting in his parents' spare bedroom in front of a laptop, wearing nothing but a pair of grubby underpants.
But this genuine insouciance in the face of the occasional foul-mouthed, ranting tweet doesn't mean I don't register certain trends. And along with anyone else who has publicly expressed doubts about the campaign for Scotland's independence, I have been deluged with insults, threats and filthy invective.
None of it is printable here and some of it is libellous. This week I was forced to reply to one rant, politely pointing out that they were laying themselves open to a writ. They haven't contacted me since. A wise decision. The 200-odd celebrities who last week signed the mildest and politest of letters appealing to the Scots to stay in the Union received a bucket-load of opprobrium and censure for daring to express a view.
Recently a senior executive at BBC Scotland admitted that journalists there feel intimidated by the extreme wing of the Yes campaign.
My own crime was to express some thoughts on what Scotland might lose if it goes it alone. This was in a relaxed and low-key discussion on TV almost a year ago. I haven't heard the last of it. Death threats; the lot. If tweets could foam at the mouth, my smartphone would be drenched.
The irony is that, like most people south of the border, I sincerely wish nothing but the best for Scotland. And if they do vote for independence I truly hope that turns out to be the right decision for them. I'm sure such a canny, resourceful nation could make independence work, if that's what they really want.
And I have a small personal stake in the matter, you might say it's a sentimental one. My late mother was born a MacEwan. So I'm one of millions of English people with a lot of Scottish blood flowing through their veins. And I'm rather proud of it.
RICHARD
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FORMER boxing manager Frank Maloney, now living as a woman called Kellie as she awaits a sex-change operation, says she found the courage to act on her lifelong conviction that she should be a woman by watching David Beckham develop into a perfectly groomed metrosexual man.
"When David Beckham admitted that footballers had started waxing themselves and everything else, I thought, this is good, I can go to the beauty parlour now, I can do things like that and say, well, Beckham does it, all those footballers do it, what does it matter?" Kellie told Good Morning Britain.
I can only assume Kellie averted her eyes from the famous Beckham lunchbox prominently displayed on those massive posters advertising underpants.
However, Kellie looks great; an attractive woman with clear skin and good hair. And that's down to hormone therapy, hair-removal electrolysis and voice coaching. She hasn't had the op yet. So whatever she and Becks have done, it obviously works.
JUDY
