Michaela Coel
(Picture: Dave Benett)She’s an iconic Londoner, but now Michaela Coel is broadening her horizons. Coel, pictured, recently lived in Ghana for six months and the trial run seems to have gone well. Now she tells Vogue of her plans to build a house in a village there where her father lives. She is also considering a flat in Accra, the capital. Her first visit to Ghana was a filming trip for the series Black Earth Rising. She says “when I came here I was really seeing people who looked like me” and remembers “walking around as if I knew where I was going”. Coel was born in east London to Ghanaian parents and her breakthrough projects, Chewing Gum and I May Destroy You, were both set here. Wherever she goes, she’ll always be a Londoner.
Dimbleby’s naked nightmares
Early career jitters got the better of David Dimbleby, right, when he interviewed prime minister Ted Heath, so he imagined Heath naked. “After the programme I had a disturbing dream in which Ted Heath appeared before me naked,” he reveals in his new memoir. “I will spare you the details of that encounter, but it warned me against ever again using this particular technique for calming my nerves.”
Bite at the museums
Wrap up warm for your museum trips this autumn. Institutions across London say that, despite government help, they will have to be frugal with the heating to stay in business. The Cartoon Museum expects its bills to jump from £4,000 to £13,000 a year. Pollock’s Toy Museum in Bloomsbury is also bracing for a rise. But will the chill turn off punters? “We’re wary of putting prices up,” said the director.
Last night around town
ACTOR Rupert Everett was at the Renaissance Awards with Livia Firth in Florence last night. In London, Elizabeth Hurley celebrated Estee Lauder’s Breast Cancer Campaign. At the Design Museum in Kensington, designer Yinka Illori held a Courvoisier gala dinner where the Londoner bumped into party animal Jade Jagger. She told us her new haunt, 17 Little Portland Street: “That’s where you’ll find me on a Friday night!” Boxer Anthony Joshua turned up at photographer Chris Floyd’s book launch.
