Rosie Millard

Ed Balls thrives in bourgeois version of ‘I’m a Celebrity’

Seeing the great and the good, from Edward Fox to Edward Balls, play Schumann on the piano in front of a packed house at King’s Place was rather like watching a live pitch for a bourgeois version of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Instead of reality stars (Joey Essex), or people from your distant youth (David Emanuel) doing utterly terrifying things such as eating bugs, this had thespians (Simon Russell Beale) and people from your distant youth (Fox) playing a Steinway grand in public. Which option was the more ghastly? I don’t know, but both were fascinating, since with both, you were utterly transfixed, simply thinking ‘Thank Christ it’s not me up there’.

At the piano recital things ramped up quite a bit at the beginning thanks to the compere who came on stage and said ‘We are all TERRIFIED back stage.’ Then Alan Rusbridger arrived, sat down, hammered out his piece without turning a single one of his luxuriant hairs and we all started to relax a bit.

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