BACK in the 1970s, John Lennon met some aliens. Those aliens gave him a little brass egg. He gave that little brass egg to Uri Geller, who has kept it ever since. In his living room.

Come again? “I believe it,” says Geller, who has allowed the egg to go on show as part of a John Lennon shrine at the flagship Virgin Megastore in London. “John said he had been lying in bed, when a bright sphere of light appeared in one corner of his room. An alien hand came out of it, and gave him the egg. And he gave it to me. And he wasn’t even drunk. I asked.”

Geller, born in Israel, has just been abroad. He hugged a Palestinian and shook hands with a Syrian ambassador. “Call it coincidence if you like,” he says, “but John loved peace.”

• The latest in our occasional series entitled “Ken Livingstone Arrives Late For A Radio Interview As A Result Of Travelling On His Own Tube Network”.

  Yesterday, Ken Livingstone . . . well, you can probably work this out for yourselves.

  “The Tube was never built for people to go around London,” the Mayor of London protested, to Nick Ferrari, of LBC. “I mean you go in and you come out . . . ”

  Ferrari is now so accustomed to the mayor’s tardiness that he made a bet on his late arrival with an internet bookie. He won £32.27. Which should pay for a taxi, next time.

• Tell the practitioners of some world religions that their main man is fundamentally the same deal as Tony the Tiger or Mr Ed, and they may get rather sniffy. Not so Christians with Narnia.
  
  

  “It means so much to see a film that conveys the Christian message in such a gentle and redemptive way,” God’s sometime mouthpiece (Sir Cliff Richard) explained, when we ran into him at the premiere afterparty. Needless to say, he didn’t have much time for secular objections to the movie’s themes.
  
  

  “It’s rubbish,” he raged. “Nobody would ever say anything like that about Islam or Hinduism, would they? I mean, Christians are the most loving people in the world! All we have ever done is . . . build hospitals.”

• A breathless phone call from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

  “Great story,” says the press office. “Pamela Anderson has sent a hugely explicit video to 535 branches of KFC.”

  Really? Pammy? Video? Explicit? We’re all ears.

  “It was filmed undercover. It’s all about the treatment of chickens in . . .”

  Click. Sorry. Crossed wires.
  
  

• At the Narnia premiere the illusionist Derren Brown was thrilled to pose for a picture with a starstruck family. “We just loved your Mr Tumnus costume in the film,” said the mother. Sadly, James McAvoy played Mr Tumnus in the film. Brown wasn’t in it. “It was mortifying,” he says. “Not least because Mr Tumnus was my nickname at university.”

  Ps

  On the Almeida Theatre website for a new version of Molière’s The Hypochondriac, by Richard Bean: “Due to cast illness, the matinee is cancelled.”

• “Are you enjoying the job?” Simon Mayo asked the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, on Radio 5 Live yesterday. “Depends which day of the week you ask me, really,” replied the hirsute cleric. How about Sunday?

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