Britain's Shadow Health Secretary Ann Widdecombe hates the "filth" shown on television - but she still enjoys appearing on it.
The Tory former prisons minister told Channel 5's Kirsty Young she does not own a television because she disapproves of "certain" BBC programmes and has decided to boycott the licence fee. But she is "flattered" by her increased profile on the medium.
"I don't have a television, I don't watch it, no. It's filth," she told Ms Young during Kirsty Young Interviews, to be broadcast tomorrow.
Writer Arthur Hailey - author of Airport and Hospital - was chipper after narrowly avoiding tragedy at the hands of robbers who crashed a dinner party he attended in the Bahamas last week.
"I saw his finger on the trigger and the bullet was in the chamber," the novelist (78) told the New York Daily News from the Bahamas. "I would have been hit right in the face." After the two masked men entered, his wife Sheila "took her diamond ring off and slipped it in her mouth, keeping it under her tongue," Hailey said. However he and his wife escaped unharmed.
The owner of a John Lennon album the singer autographed just before he was killed is asking $1.8 million (£1.26 million) to part with the collector's item. Mark David Chapman asked Lennon to sign a copy of Double Fantasy before shooting him outside the singer's New York apartment building in 1980, according to Gary Zimet, who now owns the album.
King Hussein (62), undergoing cancer treatment in the United States, said yesterday he was in high spirits and that his doctors were satisfied with a "clear improvement" in his health. "My treatment is progressing and has satisfied all my doctors," the king wrote to his brother.
Lord Lucan's son believes his father is dead and plans to take up the title, it was reported today. George Bingham has conducted his own inquiries into the murder of his nanny in 1974 and concluded that his father is dead, according to the Daily Mail.