This week I'm looking out for lanky stormtroopers, skating on risqué ice and scrounging chocolate biscuits from Jezzer

“Apparently the clue is their height, so if you spot a couple of particularly tall stormtroopers you know it’s them,” reported the Radio Times, assuming for some reason that anyone who wasn't able to spot the princes when the film was released would leave the multiplex feeling they had completely wasted their £12.

But in fact the princes' height turned out to be a problem rather than a clue. With William standing on Harry's shoulders, the pair stand a cool 12ft three inches tall. Those sorts of circus skills weren't actually required in their scene – all they had to do was share a lift with stars John Boyega, Kelly Marie Tran and Benicio del Toro, and one of them had to slap del Toro on the bum for some reason – but even standing side by side both princes are over six feet tall, which is too lofty and regal for an insignificant position like stormtrooper. Imperial regulations (as interpreted by film directors and their editors, anyway) say you have to be five feet 11 inches, unless you're John Boyega, in which case you're allowed to be five foot seven inches. And so the scene was cut.

Boyega revealed this month that he had apologised to the princes, but clearly that wasn't enough. At last Sunday's Baftas, while in conversation with the editors of award-winning film Baby Driver, Prince William was reportedly caught on microphone saying he still had a bone to pick with whichever of their colleagues on the Star Wars film had left him and his brother on the cutting room floor.

Everyone's a critic, right? Still, the DVD's out next month so he and Harry could yet make the blooper reel.

A risqué business

SO farewell then Winter Olympics, you were every bit as gripping and bonkers as we'd hoped for. And then some.

No, the Nigerian women didn't win the bobsleigh. No, Eritrean alpine skier Shannon-Ogbnai Abeda didn't to get his country onto the medals table. No, we didn't get through two weeks without a Russian getting busted for drugs or a 17-year-old snowboarder sleeping in and almost missing his event. But it was all wonderful in its weird, windy, snowy way.

I'm particularly going to miss the Biathlon (known in our house as “ski-ski-shooty-shooty”), the lunacy that is snowboard cross (think demolition derby on ironing boards) and the ice skating.

Oh yes, the ice skating. Even taken in isolation it had everything, from wardrobe malfunctions to jaw-droppingly bizarre musical choices (Ed Sheeran! Sympathy For The Devil!) to Canadian pair Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir doing moves and lifts that more sober commentators called “risqué” or “sizzling” but which American GQ columnist Caity Weaver, using capital letters, described in five simple words. The first three were “The Canadians are”, the fourth was “ice”, the fifth – which began with F and ended with "ing" – I'll leave to your imagination. This is still a family newspaper. But let's just say if Prince William had been filmed trying this in a confined space on the Star Wars set, the scene would definitely have stayed in.

Mental bloc

WHAT do Jeremy Corbyn and the President of the United States have in common? Not much on the face of it, despite past claims by some that Corbyn is essentially the Trump it's OK to like. (This theory has something to do with both men peddling anti-establishment messages and pulling off unlikely election results, though it overlooks the fact that no crypto-fascist worth their NRA membership is ever likely to turn up to a Corbyn rally, while social sciences students in Keep Calm And Read Noam Chomsky T-shirts are thin on the ground at Trump events.)

One thing that does unite Trump and Corbyn, however, is pesky claims of association with assorted ne'er-do-wells from former Soviet bloc countries. For Trump it's all about links to Russia, of course. For Corbyn, it's the recent (and ongoing) allegation that he was a tool of the Czech secret service during the 1980s. Some tool.

The claim was made by former Czech diplomat and spy Jan Sarkocy, who says he met several times with Corbyn and describes him as having been a “very, very good source”. Of what, is harder to decide, as the keeper of the Czech secret service archives say there's no evidence for Sarkocy's claims, while a trawl of the archives of the East German Stasi reveal nothing on Corbyn either. Possibly Sarkocy meant that Corbyn was a good source of free biscuits, as two of the meetings are said to have taken place in the House of Commons. Corbyn has denounced the whole thing as a right-wing smear.

Somewhat undermining his credibility, Sarkocy has reportedly also claimed that he was the person behind a political rock concert which took place at Wembley, though in an interview with Czech news agency CTK even he didn't seem sure if he meant 1985's Live Aid or the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Concert of 1988.

Naked wakes

THE #metoo and #timesup movements continue to munch through the 21st century “entertainment” industry like a benevolent computer virus deleting all and any files deemed redundant or outmoded or just plain sexist. So gone are the “grid girls”, those female models whose job was to make Formula One marginally less boring for viewers. They won't be used when the new season kicks off (revs up?) on March 25. Gone, too, are the “walk-on girls” who fulfilled the same function for darts, meaning 2017 is the last year for which lovers of “double tops” will be able to knock together a Hottest Darts Walk On Girls compilation for YouTube. And going soon – maybe – are boxing's “ring card girls”, who strut the canvas between rounds holding up numbers that could be coded messages between Jeremy Corbyn and his Czech spy handlers but are more likely to indicate which round is about to begin.

Funerals don't generally count as entertainment in the UK. But that's not the case in China, where many families employ strippers to draw the crowds, believing that the more people you have turning up to the send-off, the more honour is conferred on the departed. The custom is popular in Taiwan, too, where there have been some spectacularly crass examples in recent years – such as the funeral of a local government official which featured a street procession of 50 pole dancers atop 50 brightly-coloured coloured Jeeps.

But now China's Ministry of Culture is trying to put an end to the practice by clamping down on what it refers to as “obscene, pornographic and vulgar performances” at funerals. It's hard to know if the #metoo and #timesup movements are a factor in all this, but either way the ministry seems serious. It has even set up a shop-a-stripper hotline so people can report funereal “misdeeds”. Anonymously, of course.