Bbc: Abdication Not On Queen’s Things-To-Do List

Queen Elizabeth is moving toward modernizing the monarchy, but neither abdicating nor having the succession pass over Prince Charles for Prince William is in her plans. So said a former senior royal aide in a BBC documentary televised in Great Britain.

“It’s an extraordinary idea - abdication, generation skipping,” noted Simon Gimson, former assistant to the queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes. “It isn’t going to happen.” But he added: “I think that the palace is looking very carefully at specific changes, at radical changes, at gentle changes.

“People have been demanding a slimmed-down monarchy for a long time. It’s going to happen inevitably.”

He noted that the royals have slashed costs 39 percent the last seven years, to $67 mil budgeted for the 1998-99 financial year.

Loose talk

Comedian Drew Carey hasn’t forgotten who gave him his big break in 1991 with a guest spot on “The Tonight Show”: “I would now take a bullet for Johnny Carson. That man is God.”

Another comedian who owes a debt to Johnny Carson

Dick Cavett turns 61 today.

No word how Jimmy fared in wet T-shirt contest

Jimmy Carter was the losing pitcher for a winning cause.

The former president pitched in a softball game Sunday that raised money to help a Secret Service agent with brain cancer.

Carter’s Secret Service team lost 22-21 to his alma mater, Plains High School.

He blamed the loss on the guerrilla tactics used by the high school’s cheerleaders, who sprayed him unmercifully with water pistols.

It didn’t hurt that Babs has a new album out

“I guess the incessant begging worked,” Rosie O’Donnell said after Barbra Streisand agreed to be a guest on her talk show this Friday.

“She’s the best entertainer around and a role model for women in every way,” O’Donnell cooed.

Streisand will stay for the full hour of “The Rosie O’Donnell Show,” and her fiance, actor and producer James Brolin, will appear, too.

His other good news: ‘I just got a real haircut!’

A robust-looking Robert Urich offered a message of hope as he dedicated a $12 million cancer institute the other day.

“Cancer is a survivable disease,” said the “Spenser: For Hire” star, who has survived a yearlong battle with synovial sarcoma, a rare cancer that affects the joints.

“It cannot destroy hope. It cannot destroy love.”

Watch out, Socks … you could be next

Humphrey, resident cat at 10 Downing Street under Margaret Thatcher, John Major and now Tony Blair, has gotten the heave-ho.

Blair’s wife, Cherie, is not a cat-lover.

An unidentified cabinet member has taken him in.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Michael Guilfoil