Diary

Seen the pics? Now watch the series

AS BRYCE Taylor calculates his losses and gains after the Princess-of-Wales-in-the-gym affair - he is thought to have made pounds 100,000 from the Mirror and hundreds of thousands more from foreign rights, but also resigned as director because of the outcry - I hear an added bonus has fallen his way. Last Friday, Bryce received a sum just under pounds 1,500 when he allowed his Isleworth gym, LA Fitness, to be used as a location for a new BBC series, Chandler & Co.

Cameras - known about this time - were in situ on Thursday and Friday last week filming gym scenes for the programme, which centres on two women setting up their own detective agency. 'We had booked the gym months in advance,' says a BBC spokesman, Alan Ayres, 'which was obviously well before it came notorious. It would have cost us thousands of pounds to have moved elsewhere. We never even thought about reconsidering.'

None the less, the camera crew will not be returning in a hurry. 'It was just one scene in one episode,' says Ayres. 'Without wishing to give anything anyway, I don't think there will be much focus on gyms in the series.'

NEW laws on compulsory seatbelts in coaches would not work in Britain, according to the Roads Minister, Robert Key, because continental coach companies could defy British law by citing European Union directives. Fine, as long as they refrain from citing their own laws while hurtling down the A3 on the righthand side of the road.

A Major nuisance

BE IT in Bermondsey campaigning for the homeless, or at the General Synod protesting at the Church's views on homosexuality, Peter Tatchell is always looking for likely targets, and just such a one hove into view last Friday at Scotland Yard. Asked by a policeman not to chain his bike to the railings outside the Yard because the Prime Minister was about to arrive, Tatchell lurked in a bookshop waiting to pounce. As John Major stopped to be interviewed on camera, Tatchell charged out of the shop, over a barrier, and through the security guards. 'Why, Mr Prime Minister, if you believe in a classless society, do you believe in an unequal age of consent?' he yelled. Confused by the commotion, Major was hustled inside as Tatchell was sent on his way. Not for long, however. 'I was just retrieving my bicycle,' says Tatchell, 'when I saw the party re-emerge to redo the filming.' This time his charge was more cavalier. Leaping on to his bicycle, Tatchell again found himself within 10 feet of the Prime Minister, and once again, the Prime Minister, looking pale, was hurried indoors. 'Once again, I was forced to leave,' says Tatchell. And once again, I suppose, the cameramen had to re-film.

READERS of the South Wales Echo thought the object looked familiar as they peered at the picture captioned 'Mars in the Frame', and purporting to be of the planet. As noted in the UK Press Gazette, it was familiar. The picture of a Mars bar was removed after early editions.

Revenge of the CBI

THE Government may not have taken kindly to the recent attack on it by Howard Davies, the director-general of the CBI, but at least the attack was only one-barrelled. Another barrel had been lined up by Mr Davies's predecessor, Sir John Banham, in a book due to be published this autumn.

However, Sir John tells me that publication has been postponed until next spring, giving the Government - not that this is his intention - plenty of time to heal its wounds from the earlier attack. Fully endorsing Mr Davies's remarks last week, he was reticent about the book. Not so my sources. It deals with 15 areas of national life and pulls few punches. At least Howard Davies, on Europe, only attacked the Government on one.

A DAY LIKE THIS

16 November 1924 J M KEYNES writes to Lydia Lopokova: 'I am a little sad at the death of Edwin Montagu. I owed nearly all my steps up in life to him. It was he that introduced me to the great ones (I first met Lloyd George in a famous dinner party at his house). It was he who got me invited to the dinners of the inner-secretaries during the war (where secret news was exchanged and the big problems of the war discussed after dinner). Thus for 20 years I had reason to be grateful to him; and there was a certain affectionate relation between us. He was so moody and temperamental and unhealthy and ugly to look at, that I daresay he wasn't very sorry to die. But he had a big talent in his way; one of the Jews of divided nature - half artist and lover, and half consumed with extravagant desires and ambition. He was an Emperor, a tout and a child; also a wit, an actor and a gambler; he ate and drank too much and always had indigestion afterwards.'