The veteran film critic Barry Norman appears to have cut himself off Bruce Willis' Christmas card list. Speaking to this week's Radio Times to mark his 20 years as a columnist for the august journal, Norman is clear in naming the Die Hard star as the "worst clown" he has ever interviewed "and not in a particularly nice way". He adds: "There was a special showing of 50 minutes of Armageddon at the Cannes festival [in 1998] and it came to the crucial moment when he's about to blow up the comet and save the world and he's talking to his daughter back on Earth. The whole audience fell about laughing. Willis was so furious that the next day, when he was doing interviews, he was sulking. I asked him about this and he said, 'Who cares about the critics? Nobody reads them.' He was a prat."
Monkey was going to sign off with the words "And why not?", but any mention of Norman's supposed catchphrase is liable to see you firmly on his "prat list". He explains in the same interview: "People started coming up to me saying, 'And why not?' and giggling. I was always baffled. I never said it! Rory Bremner said it when he was impersonating me on his Channel 4 show. I still defy anybody to find a programme where I did use it. I complained so much I got a note from Rory saying, 'Well, write your own bloody catchphrase in future.'" And why … wouldn't he?
