As the man who revived Doctor Who, Russell T Davies knows a thing or two about time travel.
So perhaps we should not be surprised that he has found love with someone almost four decades his junior.
I can disclose that Davies, whose hit television dramas include It’s a Sin and A Very English Scandal, is going out with Australian waiter and aspiring model Oliver Cole.
To celebrate Oliver’s 27th birthday last month, the scriptwriter treated him to a spin in the Tardis on the Doctor Who set, sparking ill-founded speculation among the show’s obsessive fans that he could be the next Time Lord.
Davies, who turns 63 in April, shared a festive selfie with Cole online, wishing their social media followers a Merry Christmas.
A close friend of the couple tells me: ‘Oliver has brought a great deal of joy into Russell’s life and they make each other genuinely happy. Despite the age gap, they’re very much on the same wavelength – this relationship feels like one for the long haul.’
It’s Davies’s first serious relationship since the death of his husband, Andrew Smith, from a brain tumour in 2018. The couple had been together for more than 20 years. Davies took two-and-a-half years away from work to care for Smith, a customs officer, during his battle with the terminal illness.
‘I was surprised by how many people were surprised that I did that,’ he later reflected.
Davies has often said that, given a time machine, he would travel back to the night he met his late husband. ‘If I had a Tardis, I would go to Canal Street in Manchester and be a bystander in Cruz 101 on April 12, 1998, as I was standing by the railing, and he [Andrew] was standing at another railing with his friend, and we caught eyes,’ he said.
King Charles receives bags of letters every year, and now he wants someone to help him reply to them all. Buckingham Palace is seeking a senior correspondence officer on a two-year contract, starting on £32,000 per year. ‘It’s drafting a letter that someone will never forget,’ says the advert on the royal website. ‘Thousands of letters are addressed to the Monarch and Royal Family every year… Your challenge will be to ensure that each one receives a timely and well composed response.’
Alan and Amanda plot ‘raucous’ New Year
Alan Carr’s relationship with Amanda Holden is just as close off screen as it is on their popular BBC property renovation series.
I hear that the pair are planning to spend New Year’s Eve together. And, to celebrate Carr’s victory on Celebrity Traitors, the party will be at a castle in Scotland and have a Traitors theme. ‘Alan made a plan with Amanda ages ago that he wanted to see in the new year with her,’ a source tells me.
‘Her daughters will be joining, as will a select group of their friends. They are planning a six-course meal followed by dancing. It’s going to be raucous.’
Will Kate accept Strictly proposal?
Princess Diana memorably danced with Wayne Sleep on stage at the Royal Opera House.
Now Strictly’s Aljaz Skorjanec hopes that the current Princess of Wales follows in the footsteps of her late mother-in-law.
‘I would love to dance with her,’ the dashing Slovenian tells me. He met Catherine at an awards ceremony in 2018 and she later took her two younger children to visit the Strictly studios. ‘I was taken aback by everything she knew about the show,’ Aljaz says.
Pain in the glass for Rishi
Rishi Sunak is in a battle with conservationists over his bid to fix leaky windows at his North Yorkshire manor house.
Council officers at the council have objected to his plan, saying it will cause harm to the Grade II listed building, a former vicarage which features 18th-century sashes and crown glass. One said: ‘The proposed works would result in the loss of a finite resource which positively contributes to the building’s special architectural and historic interest. It is considered that the necessary justification for the wholesale removal and loss of historic glass has not been provided.’
A previous bid by a former owner to replace the windows with double glazing was thrown out in 2007. Brrr!
Pointing out that the late Dame Maggie Smith was on an annual contract for her role as Downton Abbey matriarch Violet Crawley, producer Gareth Neame reveals there were nervy negotiations to coax her back each year. Recalling his and Downton creator Julian Fellowes’s annual meetings with the actress, Neame says: ‘Julian would already have written about three-quarters of the episodes for the next season before we even knew if Maggie was coming back. So I remember December and January being quite stressful times.’
Melody reveals tiny Christmas miracle
She was left ‘scared, alone and broken’ after being dumped by her fiance when she was five months pregnant with their first child.
But now Melody Gardot is celebrating a ‘miracle’ Christmas baby. ‘We made it. He made it,’ the American jazz singer says of her son, whose name she has not disclosed. She posted a photo of his tiny feet online.
After her unnamed fiance left her, Melody declared: ‘At 40 years old, this pregnancy is already under scrutiny, but I refuse to let a man turn a miracle into a mistake.’
