OLIVER STONE’S much vaunted trip to Turkey to apologise for his last great film, Midnight Express, has been ridiculed as a publicity stunt by none other than Sir Alan Parker, who directed it.

The 1978 film featured powerful images of appalling prison conditions and brutality that have haunted Turkey’s tourist trade ever since.

Visiting Turkey last week for the first time since it was released Stone admitted “overdramatising” the screenplay, which he wrote.

Stone’s belated apology, made in interviews with the country’s media before he met the Turkish Culture Minister, came only days before the EU's crucial talks on whether to begin negotiations on membership with Ankara.

Cynics suggested that the apology owed more to the promotion of his latest work as a director — Alexander — a film which, coincidentally, has caused fury in Turkey’s neighbour and historic rival Greece for reference to the hero’s bisexual early life.

Parker called into question Stone’s act of contrition. He told me: “Frankly, I find it highly unlikely that Oliver Stone was capable of apologising for anything. It sounds like a dopey ‘local distributor’ piece of nonsense if you ask me and not credible.”

The script, which won Stone an Oscar in 1979, was based exclusively on interviews with Billy Hayes, the American sentenced to 30 years in prison for smuggling drugs into Turkey. In the film Hayes, who was played by the actor Brad Davis, eventually escapes. The film was banned in Turkey for more than a decade.

Parker, who also directed Angela’s Ashes, Evita, The Commitments and Fame, said: “Alexander was financed by selling it territory by territory around the world and it’s probably wishful thinking on behalf of the poor distributor who bought that film. Oliver wasn’t there when I made Midnight Express, so can hardly apologise for it anyway. Perhaps he would be better off apologising to the Greeks for Alexander.”

“No, I won’t be apologising, I’m very proud of the film."

And so he should be.

Domingo stalls over big night at the opera

PLACIDO DOMINGO was spotted in the stalls at the first night of Das Rheingold at Covent Garden, which was the musical director Antonio Pappano’s first Ring cycle. Domingo is scheduled to sing Siegmund in the second leg, Die Walküre in the summer. In the audience were Joanna Lumley, Kenneth Branagh and Nicholas Payne, the former artistic director of the English National Opera. Before the show, one bold fellow asked Domingo: “Here to check it out first?” Domingo waved, smiled and did not answer. A diplomat and a tenor.

Olympian effort at Eton has them rolling in the aisles

TO ETON CHAPEL on Saturday night for a traditional carol concert in aid of Macmillan nurses, which was hosted by the Tory peer Lord Carrington who was Margaret Thatcher’s first Foreign Secretary. The Duke of Kent read the first of nine lessons followed by the divine actress Patricia Hodge. But the showstopper was the four-times gold medal-winning Olympian Matthew Pinsent who read, to much hilarity, an extract from Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. It could not have been more appropriate.

• IS TONY BLAIR a modern-day Scrooge? His Sedgefield constituents could be forgiven for thinking so. He may have been Prime Minister for nearly eight years but his Christmas greeting has not grown with his stature. In fact you would need a magnifying glass to find it in his local paper, the Northern Echo. The advertisement, measuring a mighty 4in x 2½”, is squeezed between ads for Christmas Day lunches and mountain bikes on page nine.

  PS

• Robbie Williams would still be taking drugs if they did not make him fat. The singer, once referred to as “the fat dancer from Take That” by Liam Gallagher, says in an interview with Real Radio for Christmas Day: “I think that when I was drinking and doing drugs ... I think I’d still be doing it if I could make good judgment calls, and I’d still be doing it if I didn’t blow up to the size of an aircraft hangar.”
  
  Lee Evans, who has been propelled to instant A-list status by his acclaimed performance in the hit West End show The Producers, joins the all-star cast for the film remake of The Magic Roundabout. Alongside Robin Williams, Kylie Minogue and Sir Ian McKellen, it was announced yesterday that Evans will provide the voice of the new character — “the plucky and courageous Train”
  
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