News about Alan Whicker

Even in the most bitterly divided of families, death tends to bring people back together. Hostilities are suspended and sorrows shared. When the 8th Marquess of Ailesbury was laid to rest in June, the atmosphere at St Katharine's church, deep in Wiltshire's Forest, the ancient woodland of which his family have been custodians for centuries, crackled with tension. For the holder of such a distinguished aristocratic title, Michael Brudenell-Bruce was a diffident and modest figure. Although naturally proud that he could trace his forebears back to the royalist cause in the English Civil War, in recent years he often liked to style himself simply 'Mr Bruce'. None of his three marriages had brought him lasting happiness and he was estranged from some of his children. But for almost four decades he shared his life with a woman to whom he was devoted. Teresa Marshall de Paoli, a vivacious former fashion model, believed she made him happy and steadfastly looked after him as dementia began erasing his other interests and clouding his memory.

EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: The Countess of Chester Hospital, where nurse Lucy Letby committed her murders, is considering a name change. It's a royal title, with the new countess being the Princess of Wales, but the King is unlikely to object. When the then countess, better known as Princess Diana, attended the opening ceremony, the hospital, which came as part of the Cheshire Lunatic Asylum in 1829, became the Countess of Chester in 1984.

Martin Sargeant, 53, was given a'second shot' after stealing from employers in the 1990s, earning a £86,000-performance job with the Archdeaconry of London. Prosecutors Joey Kwong said as the head of operations Sargeant was 'handsomely remunerated' for his service, but the church had been'defrauded' in a 'continuous, advanced, and frankly brazen way' over 11 years, from 2009 to 2019. Sargeant, the City Church grants committee charitable trust's clerk, was responsible for 33 cathedral churches, some of which were'dysfunctional' and had no life. He made fraudulent bids for upgrades or repairs and used funds from large City projects near to churches to defraud a total of more than £5.2 million.

ROLAND WHITE: Brian Cox's introduction may have come straight from Alan Whicker's lips. "My journey starts," he said, 'in the playground of the super wealthy.' The difference between Whicker's World and Brian Cox's The Other Half Lives is that the Succession actor also took time on his quest to see the super poor. In Dundee, Cox grew up in poverty. His father owned a grocery store but died when the actor was eight years old, leaving his family with only £10. 'It's been plunged into poverty's me to this day,' he said. Money is essentially my own personal demon.'

On social media, a classic BBC clip of young Australians sharing their unfiltered thoughts about England in 1961 has gone viral. Alan Whicker, a BBC reporter, interviewed the wide-eyed Australians as they prepared to sail from Melbourne to Essex, and one woman in particular has become a celebrity on Twitter for her brutal honesty. When asked for her opinion on English people, the blonde said she'd found them to be'very staid.'