Many of this blogger's comedy heroes seem to be dropping like flies at the moment, dear blog reader. There was Terry Jones a few days ago and now, Nicholas Parsons is the latest to leave us. Although, at ninety six, it was hardly a shock. 'People ask how I've survived so long,' Nicholas once said. 'I was in The Blitz and there was stoicism in adversity. And humour. Humour sustained me.'
Nicholas Parsons' early acting experience as a comedy straight-man made him ideal as the unflappable presenter of one of BBC Radio 4's longest-running programmes, Just A Minute. For more than fifty years, Nicholas asked his guests to speak for sixty second (or, as long as they could) without hesitation, repetition or deviation on topics as diverse as burglars, Birmingham, biscuits in bed and, infamously on one occasion, Nicholas Parsons. Each week, Parsons tried, sometimes unsuccessfully, to keep a bevy of celebrity panellists in check including Clement Freud, Peter Jones, Derek Nimmo, Kenneth Williams, Sheila Hancock and Paul Merton. Always neatly coiffed and invariably immaculately dressed in blazer and flannels, Parsons' smooth voice on Just A Minute and, more particularly, his image on the popular TV quiz show Sale Of The Century, made him a dapper reminder of a bygone age and a ripe target for other comedians.
Christopher Nicholas Parsons was born in October 1923 in Grantham, the son of a doctor. His father's patients included the Thatcher family, although there is no definitive proof, as has been suggested, that Doctor Parsons delivered the future Prime Minister. Nicholas described himself in his autobiography as 'the unconventional child of conventional parents.' His early schooling was hampered by dyslexia and the insistence of his teachers that he should write with his right hand, despite being born left-handed. He was also hampered by a stammer which he finally managed to overcome. He had early ambitions to be an actor but his parents opposed the idea, his mother believing that showbusiness was fit only for 'drunks and low-lives.' Instead, a few strings were pulled through family contacts and he joined a shipbuilding company on Clydeside to train as an engineer. Thrown into a tough working environment, he was forced to resort to jokes and impersonations to win over the Glasgow shipbuilders who regarded him as a Sassenach posh boy. The experience helped launch his comedy career. Illness prevented him from joining the merchant navy during the war but, by this time, he had begun taking small parts in local theatres around the Glasgow area where he also did impressions. Moving to London, he worked in repertory, cabaret, on the West End stage and at the Windmill Theatre as a comic. He appeared in various radio shows including the popular Much-Binding-In-The-Marsh. In the 1950s and 1960s, he appeared in many supporting roles in British films including An Alligator Named Daisy (1955), The Long Arm (1956), Brothers In Law (1957), Happy Is the Bride (1958), Carlton-Browne Of The FO (1959), Too Many Crooks (1959), Doctor In Love (1960), Carry On Regardless (1961), Murder Ahoy! (1964), The Wrong Box (1966) and The Ghost Goes Gear (1966). In the late 1960s, he portrayed David Courtney in the short-lived American sitcom The Ugliest Girl in Town.
His big breakthrough came when he began working as a straight man for Arthur Haynes, whose ITV show had made him, for a while, one of the most popular comedian in Britain. Parsons excelled as the authority figure in sketches during which Haynes, often in his nominal role as a tramp, railed against the establishment. Many of the scripts were written by Johnny Speight. Nicholas was so successful that Haynes began to perceive him as a threat and the pair parted company shortly after an appearance in New York on The Ed Sullivan Show. In 1960, Nicholas voiced the character of Tex Tucker in the puppet series, Four Feather Falls, produced by Gerry Anderson. During the late 1960s, Nicholas created and presented a satirical programme on Radio 4 called Listen To This Space, which by the standards of its time was rather avant-garde and he received the Radio Personality of the Year Award for his work on the programme in 1967. Just A Minute was first broadcast on 22 January 1967. Parsons had originally wanted to be a panellist but the BBC insisted his experience as a comedy straight man made him ideal for the position of chairman. 'As a good straight man,' he once said, 'you know how to throw out the lines so the comic will have a good springboard to come back. You also know how to take a joke at your expense.'
It remained one of the hallmarks of the show as Parsons, with varying degrees of success, dealt with panellists such as Williams, whose treatment of his chairman ranged from toadying sycophancy to outright torrents of furious abuse. Later a younger generation of comedians like Paul Merton and Stephen Fry kept the regular audience of two million listeners entertained while Parsons - who never missed a recording in the first five decades that he fronted the show - remained the butt of a series of gentle jokes. Sale Of The Century made him one of Britain's most familiar faces. Announcer John Benson's '... And now from Norwich, it's the Quiz of the Week' was the introduction to the Anglia game show which ran for twelve years from 1971. With its glamorous 'shop assistants' and the fixed grin of its host, the programme became one of the most successful television shows of its time, with up to twenty million viewers. Parsons robustly rejected suggestions that his appearance on the programme amounted to dumbing-down. 'I'm proud of the fact I helped create a huge success,' he said. 'You don't buck success.' However, he later admitted the programme had made his career take something of a dip because people assumed he was now merely a quiz master. Parsons continued his straight man role when he joined The Benny Hill Show in 1969 where he remained for three years. He later put himself at the mercy of Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson in The Comic Strip Presents ... episode Mister Jolly Lives Next Door, in which he appeared as himself. This willingness to share the joke, appearing on television programmes like Have I Got News for You, a superb turn in the 1989 Doctor Who story The Curse Of Fenric as a country vicar haunted by his declining faith and a spell narrating The Rocky Horror Show on stage all helped Nicholas accrue a definite cult status and a surprisingly youthful fan base.
He was also successful away from the microphone. He set up his own production company which made short films for cinema, wrote two volumes of autobiography (1994's The Straight Man and 2011's With Just A Touch Of Hesitation, Repetition & Deviation) and made it into The Guinness Book Of Records in 1978 for the longest ever after-dinner speech, more than eleven hours. He was also a regular at The Edinburgh Fringe where his Nicholas Parsons' Happy Hour featured his own stand-up routine and a series of guests, many of them budding performers. However, his annual star turn at The Fringe was cancelled in 2019 after Parsons was admitted to hospital. He had been due to perform four sold-out shows. It followed a rare no-show on Just A Minute episode with what the BBC said at the time was 'a bad back.' It was only the second time he had missed a taping in the panel show's fifty two-year history.
'We are rogues and vagabonds waiting by the phone, there to hire for our talents' Nicholas was once quoted as saying. 'A bit like prostitutes.' He also noted that 'I get quite resentful when people ask me if I am going to retire. I am in a profession that retires you. If you are no longer hacking it, you won't be asked back, or the public won't come and see you. They will let me know soon enough if I am not doing what I should: I'd be out on the rubbish dump.' Parsons was fanatical about cricket, both as a player and supporter and spent a period as president of The Lord's Taverners. 'The saddest thing about getting old is seeing my cricket bat in the corner and wondering if I will ever play again,' he said. He also served as rector of the University of St Andrews and was a prominent supporter of the Liberal Democrats. He was invited to stand as a Liberal candidate for Yeovil in the 1970s, but he turned down the opportunity in order to remain in the entertainment industry. He married the actress Denise Bryer in 1954 and they had two children, Suzy and Justin. The couple divorced in 1989 and he subsequently married Ann Reynolds. He was once asked what drove him to continue working at an age when most people would have been happy to potter about in the garden. He said he did it because it was fun. 'You can't take yourself seriously. I learned that being a straight man. That's what I do on Just A Minute - laugh at myself and they make jokes at my expense. But that's what life's about, isn't it? Having fun.'
Huge Laurie has said that he and Stephen Fry 'often' discuss reforming their comedy double act, twenty five years after their sketch show, A Bit Of Fry & Laurie, ended. 'Actually we talked about doing it on stage for a long time, so long in fact we passed the date we'd set for ourselves,' he told Radio 2. 'We see each other a lot and we talk about it often.' The pair became TV favourites when the show ran from 1989 to 1995 and went on to co-star in Jeeves & Wooster. They forged hugely successful solo careers after going their separate ways, but Laurie told Steve Wright that a reunion is, possibly, on the cards. 'I think it might happen, yes, but I don't know why we're both being sort of coy about it - "No after you, no after you" - I don't know why we do that. Somebody's got to take charge, I think, and say, "I've booked us in, we're doing this. We've got a month to get ready."' The pair met at Cambridge in 1980 and did reunite for a special programme on Gold in 2010 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of their partnership. Huge Laurie can currently be seen in two new projects for writer and director Armando Iannucci - a film adaptation of Charles Dickens'David Copperfield and the SF TV comedy Avenue Five. Last year, Fry embarked on his first tour since he went on the road with Laurie in the 1980s. This time, he was speaking about his book Mythos, while he has just released the second series of a podcast, Seven Deadly Sins and appeared in the new series of Doctor Who (in which he was great).
This blogger's favourite quote of the year so far came from the very great Frank Skinner during an interview with the BBC's Paul Glynn. 'There's only one thing more embarrassing than the celebrities talking about politics and that's politicians talking about anything other than politics.'
Yer actual Keith Telly Topping thought Doctor Who, Nikola Tesla's Night Of Terror was great, dear blog reader. And, it was proof of what this blogger had always secretly believed; that AC/DC were much better than Scorpions.
This blogger also thought that Fugitives Of The Judoon was great. Mad-as-toast, too which is never a bad thing.
So, dear blog reader - remember that scene in Spyfall where the chap whom we now know to be The Master offered to show Graham a dossier he had compiled on The Doctor? This blogger wonders whether that's got anything to do with a certain plotline in the latest episode? Keith Telly Topping is over-thinking this, yes?
Oh, and speaking of the Godlike Genius that is Bradley Walsh, the bit in Fugitives Of The Judoon where a certain returning guest-star started coming on to Graham might, just, be this blogger's favourite moment of TV. Ever. Bar none.
It's the terror in Bradley's eyes that made it art!
Last week, this blogger also watched the first episode of Picard. Gosh, that was really rather impressive dear blog reader and, not at all what this blogger expected ... although, Keith Telly Topping is not entirely sure what he did expect, merely that wasn't it. This blogger is very much looking forward to seeing how that one develops.
This blogger had a mad-busy morning last Thursday on his day off; it went bus, post office collection office, post office itself (to pay the rent), Morrison's, a bus into town, Boots (in an effort to get something to soothe this wretched hacking cough which this blogger has acquired of late), M&S, the bank, other the bank, Poundland and, then, having a thoroughly excellent lunch on Stowell Street. Because, this blogger really deserve this Cantonese shredded beef with ginger and spring onion and fried rice.
This blogger enjoyed a fascinating discussion with a work colleague about the alleged 'I'll believe it when I see it' latest proposed (and alleged) takeover of this blogger's beloved (though unsellable) Magpies allegedly by a consortium allegedly involving Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. This blogger noted that it says so much about the level to which Mike Cashley is loathed and despised on Tyneside that many people would, seemingly, prefer to see a member of one of the most repressive ruling royal families on the planet, with a human rights record slightly worse than Attila The Hun and who is (allegedly) heavily implicated in the arrangement of at least one (alleged) murder of a prominent dissident in charge of their club than, you know, 'the shit who owns Sports Direct.''Yeah,' said this blogger's colleague. 'That sounds about right!' Others, of course, are more conflicted by the issue. Or, at least, claim to be. Like the man once said, 'be careful what you wish for, it might just come true.'
And, finally dear blog reader, normally when this blogger returns to his gaff after a hard day's graft in the windswept mid-evening chill of a Tyneside January, Stately Telly Topping will be in total darkness - an unwelcoming, lonely and cold-looking place full of foreboding and dark secrets and that. One night this week, however, from half-a-street away this blogger could see the drum was lit up like a Christmas tree. 'Well y'bugger,' Keith Telly Topping thought to himself, 'some evil thieving fekker had burglarised the gaff and nicked all me gear.' Fortunately, the answer was somewhat simpler, this blogger had merely forgotten to turn the light off in the living room before leaving at the crack of dawn. The light must, therefore, have been on all day. A minor waste of cash admittedly but, infinitely preferable to having all of one's stash pinched by some wicked toerag.

It seems, dear blog reader, that the only times we get to converse these days is to mourn the passing of some people whom this blogger (and, he trusts, his dear blog readers) really rather admired. Which is sad - in every sense of the word.
Indeed, there may be times during this latest bloggerisationisms update where dear blog readers might wonder if they've accidentally wandered into the final scene of The Masque Of The Red Death such is the unremitting gloom of much of the following. Sorry, dear blog readers, this blogger just reports the news as he gets it, you know?
Heather Couper, one of the UK's most prolific astronomy broadcasters and writers and someone who inspired many to take up stargazing, has died at the age of seventy. Heather came to prominence in the 1980s, writing and presenting two landmark Channel Four series, The Planets (1985) and The Stars (1988), as well as 1989's The Neptune Encounter for ITV, which was made under the auspices of her own production company Pioneer Productions, which she founded with her long-time friend and collaborator Nigel Henbest and the director Stuart Carter. Heather also narrated Pioneer Productions' award-winning Channel Four documentary Electric Skies (1994), about lightning, as well as the ten-part Raging Planet (1997) and Space Shuttle: Human Time Bomb? (2003). Couper has also presented numerous radio documentaries, including Radio 4's Cosmic Quest about the history of astronomy and the long-running Seeing Stars on the BBC World Service, presented alongside Henbest. She won the 2008 Sir Arthur Clarke Award for Britain's Space Race on Radio 4. She also presented the 1981 ITV children's series Heavens Above.
     Heather Anita Couper was born in June 1949 in Wallasey, the only child of George Couper, an airline pilot and Anita. She was brought up in Ruislip and fell in love with astronomy as a child and recalled a day, in 1968, when she realised astronomy was not just 'for shambolic old men in tweed jackets any more.' She went home and wrote in her diary: 'I want to help knowledge. I want to ... publicise science.' So she left her job to become a research assistant at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. Her big break came when she was asked to appear as a guest on Sir Patrick Moore's The Sky At Night. Sir Patrick later recalled: 'She wrote to me when she was a little girl and said, "Is there any future for me in astronomy?" And I said: "Of course there is."' Heather attended St Mary's Grammar School, Northwood, where the careers mistress advised her that she could not be an astronomer unless she made a discovery. 'I wrote to Patrick Moore about it, adding: "PS I'm a girl,"' she recalled. 'He wrote back, saying that was no handicap but you did need maths.' In fact, she achieved just two A-levels - an A in geography and an E in physics - and after leaving school enrolled as a Top Shop management trainee. But she refused to give up and at nineteen landed a lowly one-year post analysing data at the Cambridge Observatories. While there she managed to get a mathematics A-level and won a place to read Astrophysics at Leicester University, where she became president of the University Astronomical Society ('an excuse to have amazing parties'). She graduated with a BSc in Astronomy and Physics, although by her own admission in an interview for the Independent (for whom she was also a columnist), she was not a model student at school or university. However, it was her passion for astronomy, having witnessed a green meteor as a child, that spurred her on. After leaving research halfway through her PhD studies at Oxford, she joined the planetarium at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich as Senior Lecturer, where she remained until 1983 when she departed to pursue her media career. Couper helped break down boundaries for women in astronomy. The year after leaving Greenwich she was elected President of the British Astronomical Association - the first woman and the second youngest person (at the age of thirty five), to hold the position. Between 1987 and 1989 she was President for what is now as The Society for Popular Astronomy. She was one of the speakers at the very first European AstroFest conference in 1992. In 1993, she became Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College in London - the first female professor at Gresham in its four hundred-year history (Carolin Crawford and Katherine Blundell have since followed in her footsteps) - where she gave public talks on astronomy for three years. And of course, as one of the public faces of astronomy on television, she inspired many girls, as well as boys, to take an interest in astronomy. She was also a prolific writer alongside Henbest, with dozens of titles spanning forty years, including companions to The Planets and The Stars, The Secret Life Of Space and her most recent books including Philips' 2020 Stargazing Month By Month and The Universe Explained: A Cosmic Q&A, published by Firefly. In 1994 Couper was elected to serve on the Millennium Commission, which awarded money raised by the National Lottery to good causes. She remained on the commission until it closed in 2009; in 2007 she was awarded a CBE for her work on both the commission and her life-long mission to promote astronomy. She and Doctor Henbest co-wrote monthly astronomy columns for the Independent, the last of which was published on 6 February. The pair even applied to be the first British astronauts, Doctor Couper told the Guardian in 1993, but were quickly rejected. 'They wanted someone technologically on the ball, someone who would know what buttons to press in an emergency,' she said. 'If something blew up, I would think, "Oh Christ! What wire goes where?"' She also has an asteroid named after her, asteroid 3922 Heather. Couper and Henbest lived and worked together in what an interviewer in 1993 described as 'a life of blissful celibacy': 'Nigel is absolutely my best friend and we share so much,' she explained. She had never wanted children: 'What Nigel and I would really like is a dog.' She died in her sleep at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire, following a short illness.
The voice of the actor John Shrapnel, who has died aged seventy seven after suffering from cancer, was instantly recognisable on stage or screen over the past fifty years. He was, therefore, much in demand for voice-over work on documentaries or TV adverts. But his glory was on the stage, often with the Royal Shakespeare Company or the National Theatre, for whom he played leading and prominent supporting roles from 1968 onwards, including a clutch with Laurence Olivier's NT company at the Old Vic - Banquo in Macbeth, Pentheus in The Bacchae and Orsino in Twelfth Night - between 1972 and 1975. His NT debut came as Charles Surface in Jonathan Miller's 1972 production of The School For Scandal. He worked often with Miller: as a notable Andrey in Chekhov's Three Sisters at the Cambridge Theatre in 1976 and in Miller's BBC television Shakespeare series of the 1980s, where he played Alcibiades opposite Jonathan Pryce's Timon Of Athens, Hector in Troilus & Cressida and Kent to Sir Michael Hordern's King Lear. Shrapnel was always interesting in these 'solid' roles because he played them with such force and intelligence. He oozed gravitas and could make dullness seem virtuous, as he did with Tesman in a 1977 Hedda Gabler with Janet Suzman at the Duke of York's Theatre or, later, as Duncan in the Kenneth Branagh Macbeth for the 2013 Manchester international festival. Unusually, he was marvellous as both Brutus (Riverside Studios, 1980) and Julius Caesar (for Deborah Warner, at the Barbican, 2005). And he made a final indelible impression as an archbishop in the 2017 televised version of Mike Bartlett's King Charles III, starring his friend Tim Pigott-Smith in his final TV appearance.
    Shrapnel was born in Birmingham, the elder son of the Guardian's parliamentary correspondent Norman Shrapnel and his wife, Myfanwy. One of his ancestors, Lieutenant General Henry Shrapnel, invented the exploding cannonball and gave his name to the shards of metal produced in the impact. John was educated at Mile End School, Stockport and, when the family moved South, the City of London School, where he played the title role in Hamlet. He took a degree at St Catharine's College, Cambridge and made a professional debut as Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1965. His film debut was in Franklin J Schaffner's Nicholas & Alexandra (1971) starring Suzman and Michael Jayston and he scored a string of big successes on television as the Earl of Sussex in Elizabeth R (1971) with Glenda Jackson - he would be Lord Howard to Cate Blanchett's Gloriana in Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth: The Golden Age in 2007 - as Sir Percival Glyde in The Woman In White (1982) with Diana Quick and Ian Richardson and as Semper in Tony Palmer's Wagner (1983) alongside Richard Burton in the title role. An intensity of presence on the stage, as well as a forbidding authority, made him a natural Claudius in Hamlet, but he added something else in Miller's production of that play (with Anton Lesser) at the Donmar in 1982: a moving and almost sympathetic study of a man seriously under-endowed with imagination. This ability to convey psychological layers in powerful figures served Shrapnel well both in John Barton's ten-play epic, The Greeks, at the Aldwych in 1980, when he doubled a laconically wry Agamemnon with an imperious Apollo and, especially, as the monstrously unflinching King Creon in Sophocles'Oedipal Theban trilogy, a role he played twice - first, in Don Taylor's BBC adaptation in 1986 (Juliet Stevenson as Antigone and John Gielgud as Tiresias) and then for the RSC in Timberlake Wertenbaker's version directed by Adrian Noble in 1992. In the second of these his tyrant, with a face of granite and a voice of gravel, became strangely battered and susceptible to emotional pleading. Creon does not cave in and nor did Shrapnel, but he always found colour and humanity in his inhumanity. He played a jovial Samuel Pepys in Palmer's England, My England (1995), written by Charles Wood and John Osborne and starring Michael Ball as Henry Purcell and Simon Callow as King Charles II; a non-speaking, dog-hunting taxidermist in the 101 Dalmatians film (1996), Julia Roberts's British press agent in Notting Hill (1999) and another Greek worthy, old Nestor, in Wolfgang Petersen's Troy (2004) opposite Brad Pitt. He was a Russian admiral in K-19: The Widowmaker (2001), Kathryn Bigelow's gripping movie, with Harrison Ford, about the Russian nuclear submarine malfunction. One of Shrapnel's sons, Lex, also appeared in that film, but their blood relationship was more movingly mined in a 2015 Young Vic revival of Caryl Churchill's A Number. In this poignant piece about cloning and parenting, John played a father turning to a scientist who is meddling with genetic material, in order to clone his son, played by Lex. Later in the same year Shrapnel rejoined Branagh in his season at the Garrick, playing Camillo in The Winter's Tale and a mutinous old actor in Terence Rattigan's Harlequinade. His CV also included appearances in Merlin, Waking The Dead, New Tricks, The Palace, The Last Detective, Spine Chillers, Foyle's War, Jonathan Creek, Inspector Morse, Between The Lines, Selling Hitler, GBH, For The Greater Good, Centrepoint, Blackeyes, My Cousin Rachel, Private Schultz, Edward & Mrs Simpson, Z Cars, Space 1999, Good Girl and Justice. Outside his acting work, Shrapnel loved mountaineering, skiing and music. He is survived by his wife, Francesca Bartley, a landscape designer (the daughter of Deborah Kerr), whom he married in 1975, by their three sons, Joe, Lex and Thomas - and by his younger brother, Hugh.
Although she became one of the most reliable of character actors on stage and television, Frances Cuka, who has died aged eighty three, seemed destined for stardom when her career took off in the late 1950s with Joan Littlewood at Stratford East and George Devine at the Royal Court. For Littlewood, she originated the role of the pregnant teenager Jo in Shelagh Delaney's A Taste Of Honey (1958), acclaimed by Kenneth Tynan for acting 'with a shock-haired, careless passion that suggests an embryonic Anna Magnani.' On joining Devine's Royal Court she appeared in John Arden's Live Like Pigs (1958) - a study of working-class factions on a Northern council estate - and in Beckett's Endgame with Devine and Jack MacGowran, before hitting the West End in A Taste Of Honey and, in 1961, succeeding Joan Plowright as Jo on Broadway. In between, she was a notable firebrand in Peter Hall's 1960 season at Stratford-upon-Avon which heralded the birth of the Royal Shakespeare Company, appearing with Peter O'Toole, Diana Rigg, Dorothy Tutin, Eric Porter and Ian Richardson. She was Jessica in The Merchant Of Venice (with O'Toole as Shylock) and Maria, one of her signature roles, in Twelfth Night. Small, energetic and red-haired, she was always a powerful and sympathetic presence, especially good in comedy. But, unluckily, she missed out on the film version of A Taste Of Honey to Rita Tushingham just as, years later, having been initially cast as Peggy Mitchell in EastEnders, the role was reassigned to Jo Warne (for ten episodes) before, subsequently, Barbara Windsor took over. Cuka's career seemed to settle into a pattern of welcome familiarity, but occasionally she would come into sharper focus and assert her true pedigree - most memorably, perhaps, when starring opposite Michael Crawford in Bernard Slade's Same Time, Next Year (1976) at the Prince of Wales, in which a one-night stand between a couple married to other people is replayed once a year. The discreet sexiness of the role suited Cuka, who was encouraged to unbutton more extravagantly on television as Doll Tearsheet in Henry IV, Part Two in the BBC Shakespeare series, or as the homeless Mrs Bassey in Casualty, suffering a grisly death from burns in an explosion in a shopping mall. Her last television appearance came in Channel Four's sitcom Friday Night Dinner (2011 to 2017) as Nelly Buller, the mother of Jackie Goodman (Tamsin Greig), another vibrantly awkward elderly customer.
    Cuka was born in London, the only child of Joseph Cuka, a process engraver of Czech antecedence and his wife, Letitia, a tailor. She was educated at Tollington prep school in Fortis Green and, when her parents moved to the South coast, Brighton and Hove high school. As a child, she appeared in BBC radio broadcasts as part of Children's Hour. She trained at the Guildhall school of music and drama and made her stage debut in 1955 as Effie in a murder thriller, Meet Mr Callaghan, at the Royal Court, Warrington. Two years in repertory around the country took her to Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, with whom she toured to the Zurich festival and the Moscow Art theatre in 1957. In the heady next few years she played (and sang) Becky Sharp in a musical of Vanity Fair (1962) by Robin Miller and Julian Slade which flopped at The Queen's Theatre. She was back at the Royal Court, London, for the 1965 to 1966 season playing Mary Godwin in Ann Jellicoe's Shelley, Annie in Jane Howell's revival of Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance and Mrs Allwit in William Gaskill's stylish revival of Middleton's Jacobean comedy A Chaste Maid In Cheapside. Her association with the RSC continued at the Aldwych in the late 1960s in Marguerite Duras's Days In The Trees with Peggy Ashcroft, the Pinter double bill of Landscape and Silence and Seán O'Casey's The Silver Tassie with Ben Kingsley, Helen Mirren and Patrick Stewart. Her most notable film performances followed: as Mrs Cratchit in Scrooge (1970) with Albert Finney and Edith Evans and as Catherine of Aragon in Henry VIII & His Six Wives (1972), Keith Michell reprising his performance from the BBC television series. She succeeded Barbara Leigh-Hunt in Tom Stoppard's Travesties in the West End and on Broadway. After Same Time Next Year, there was a 1979 revival of NC Hunter's Waters Of The Moon at The Haymarket, in which she again kept first class company with Ingrid Bergman and Wendy Hiller. At the same theatre in 1985 she scored a delightful cameo as Boss Finley's wife in Pinter's revival of Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird Of Youth, led by Lauren Bacall. Cuka went to New York in 1981 with the first RSC production of Nicholas Nickleby and joined the 1986 RSC revival as Mrs Nickleby and a wheezy Miss Knag at Stratford-upon-Avon before touring to Newcastle, Manchester, Los Angeles and New York again. Her stage work in the 1990s included appearances in a revival of Ibsen's The Wild Duck at the Phoenix, with Alex Jennings, the 1930s French comedy Tovarich starring Natalia Makarova and Robert Powell at the Piccadilly and as Hugh Bonneville's mother in George Bernard Shaw's US war of independence comedy The Devil's Disciple. An eclectic roster of film roles included The Watcher In The Woods (1980), Bob Rafelson's Mountains Of The Moon (1990), a Gothic horror twist on Snow White (1997) with Sigourney Weaver as the wicked stepmother, Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist (2005) with Kingsley as Fagin and Closer To The Moon (2014) a Romanian heist comedy starring Mark Strong. Her television CV included appearances in Adam Adamant Lives!, Hammer House Of Horror (in the episode Charlie Boy), The Champions, The Ruth Rendell Mysteries, Within These Walls, Play For Today, Sky, Zodiac, The Wednesday Play, Thirty-Minute Theatre, Knock On Any Door, Emergency Ward Ten and Minder. It was typical that she should have made her last stage appearances in North London fringe theatres as Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell and 'a blousy Bermondsey broad' in a play called Carry On Brighton. She suffered a stroke a few years ago and was then diagnosed with cancer. Cuka had a fascinating private life, with two significant long-term relationships with married men. She was a voracious reader and a dedicated gardener in the large ground floor Hampstead apartment she occupied for the past fifty years.
The list of Andrew Weatherall's achievements as a DJ, musician, songwriter, producer and remixer could fill a far larger blog than this. His career took him from working as an acid house DJ in the late 1980s to being a celebrated remixer of songs by Happy Mondays, New Order and Primal Scream. His production work on Primal Scream's Screamadelica (1991), creating a revolutionary mix of indie, hard rock, house and rave, helped the CD to win the inaugural Mercury music prize the following year and remains Weatherall's most memorable calling card to a mainstream audience. Then he moved on to an assortment of collaborative projects such as Blood Sugar, Two Lone Swordsmen and The Asphodells. More recently he had released a sequence of solo CDs including Convenanza, Consolamentum (both 2016) and Qualia (2017). Weatherall, who died of a pulmonary embolism this week aged fifty six, was regarded as a figurehead of electronic and techno music, but he was also a widely read man with whom a conversation might range from the Thirteenth-Century Albigensian Crusade to obscure mystics from the 1920s. He possessed a scalpel-sharp sense of the absurd which enabled him to maintain a wry scepticism about his own abilities. 'I never meant this to be a career,' he said in 2012. 'It was just a job that paid for new clothes and records.' Weatherall cited Donna Summer's 'Love To Love You, Baby' (1975), produced by Giorgio Moroder, as a record which helped fire his enthusiasm for music. His parents, Robert, a businessman and Carol usually preferred middle-of-the-road pop, but were big fans of Summer's record. 'I like that there was something risque about it ... I just knew it was something taboo,' said Weatherall. He was also intrigued by his parents saying that 'it wasn't real music because it was made by machines.'
    Born in Windsor, as a pupil at Windsor grammar school he spent his teen years going to soul weekenders and disco clubs. 'I was into Brit-funk, Olympic Runners and Hi-Tension, things like that,' he explained. 'The initial punk scene in London was a load of bored soul boys who liked dressing up and that's what I was at the age of fourteen.' After leaving home at eighteen he did a variety of jobs including labouring on building sites, working as a carpenter's mate and shifting furniture. In 1987 he moved to London, where his record collection and encyclopedic musical knowledge soon brought him many invitations to DJ at parties. Nicky Holloway ran The Trip Club at the Astoria and recruited Weatherall, who played a lot of Northern Soul and indie records. Then he caught the ear of Danny Rampling, who hired Weatherall to DJ at his South London club Shoom, which had brought Balearic rave to the UK and helped to pioneer acid house. Having earlier tried his hand at freelance journalism, Weatherall had joined with Farley, Cymon Eckel and Steve Mayes to form Boy's Own Crew, an organisation which ran raves, produced records and printed a fanzine which probed the nooks and crannies of British youth fashion, politics, football and dance culture. In 1990 Weatherall set up his own label, Boy's Own Productions, through London Records and began to find himself in demand doing remixes. A key moment was his work (with Paul Oakenfold) on Happy Mondays''Hallelujah' (1989) and another career highlight was his remix (with Farley) of New Order's World Cup anthem 'World In Motion' (1990). Weatherall's remix of My Bloody Valentine's 'Soon' (1990) topped the NME's list of the fifty best remixes. His connection with Primal Scream began - after he had reviewed the band's live show for the NME - when he remixed their song 'I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have', transforming it with an array of loops and samples into the masterpiece, 'Loaded'. This became the lead single from Screamadelica (partly produced by Weatherall), the band's first commercially successful CD. Weatherall resisted the temptation to cash in on the remix boom which he had helped to create. 'I could have cleaned up after Screamadelica but I'll only work on tracks I like by bands I'm into,' he said. 'If a band sound like wankers, I won't work with them.' Other artists who passed the Weatherall quality threshold included Björk, Siouxsie Sioux, The Manic Street Preachers and Saint Etienne (for whom Weatherall created the celebrated 'A Mix Of Two Halves' of their version of Neil Young's 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart'). His production work on Beth Orton's Trailer Park (1996) helped define the mix of hip-hop and electronica that became known as trip-hop. Weatherall's energies continued to expand in all directions. His Sabres Of Paradise project, which began in 1992, encompassed a label, a band and the Sabresonic club night. Two Lone Swordsmen (1996) was a collaboration with Keith Tenniswood and the pair later collaborated on the Rotters Golf Club label (2001). It was on this imprint that he released his solo EP The Bullet Catcher's Apprentice (2006), followed by his debut solo, A Pox On The Pioneers (2009). He teamed up with Tim Fairplay as The Asphodells, releasing Ruled By Passion Destroyed By Lust in 2012, while The Woodleigh Research Facility was a joint effort with the composer and producer Nina Walsh, who had been his partner during the 1990s. They released The Phoenix Suburb (and Other Stories) in 2015. Andrew is survived by his partner, Elizabeth Walker, his father and his brother, Ian.
Moving away from death on a large scale at last, dear blog reader, now it's time for a bit of this ...
... and, it's not a long list because this blogger had been working some decidedly odd hours this week.
'History is vulnerable tonight.' The best Doctor Who episode of the series thus far (and, it's had some stiff competition), The Haunting Of Villa Diodati. In which Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin wrote the first Cyberman story, Percy Bysshe went on a trip to another planet, baby and George Byron lost his heart to a starship trooper. This blogger thought it was bloody great. 'Arise like lions after slumber, in an unvanquishable number, shake to Earth these chains like dew, which in sleep have fallen on you, ye are many, they are few.' Words matter, as a very wise Time Ladygirl once said.
Star Trek: Picard also had its best episode of the series so far this week. Cos, Borg's with really big fek-off phasers ... You know, sexy.
Endeavour, having reached the 1970s. On several levels.
And, that's about it, really. As this blogger has noted, now that he's become a vital cog in The Capitalist System once more, 'having a life' has taken second place to that whole 'work comes first, I'm sure you understand' thing.
Nevertheless, being A Working Man does have some compensations, mainly in terms of this blogger being able to indulge in his other favourite hobby besides telly, feeding his stomach. Whether that is via occasional trips to the on-site Bento Box outlet for something to get him through the afternoon ...
... or, Wednesday-in-town-masquerading-as-Saturdays-in-town, which really don't feel anything like Saturdays-in-town. On account of it being Wednesday, fairly obviously. Nevertheless, they do sometimes feature an 'I really deserve this' moment. Like this one, fr instance.
Or, this blogger's first Big Boozy Lads Night Out in quite a while with his good pal, Young Malcolm. Of course, we would have chosen the wettest night since Noah took up shipbuilding to have it on, wouldn't we?
Or, a rather fine Thai sweet-chilli takeaway, after a particularly stressful days graft, ordered from a new place in Byker delighting in the name Sauce Warrior and delivered to Stately Telly Topping Manor in record-quick time.
Or, indeed, this well-delish Deep Fried Salt and Chilli Chicken Egg Fried Rice malarkey on yet another midweek-day-off-in-town-masquerading-as-a-Saturday-in-town.
Since From The North was last updated, dear blog reader, sad to report that this blogger has also suffered from more than a few general health woes; Keith Telly Topping had really bad headaches for a week or so combined with a general 'feeling bloody 'orrible' vibe, an off-on fever and a hacking cough. Then, one night about three weeks ago when waking up for a pee around 3am, something which at the time was really troubling occurred. This blogger had what his dear old mam always used to call 'a bit of a funny turn' - he felt light-headed and (briefly) passed out (luckily he was sitting on the bed at the time and fell backwards so he had a soft landing). It's called Vasovagal Syncope for those interested in the technicalities; it can be caused by stress, blood pressure fluctuations, pain or several other contributing factors. Anyway, it was - even before that but, certainly, afterwards - a night of virtually no sleep and more than a bit of worry. Because, you know, Keith Telly Topping has, by now, got to that age where whenever one gets a headache one immediately thinks, 'is that just a headache or is it a brain aneurysm?!' First thing the next morning (well, 8am, when they opened), this blogger hotfooted it up to the walk-in medical centre in Byker where he was seen quite quickly and the doctor whom he saw managed to diagnose the cause of the headaches (a really nasty flair-up of sinusitis, which this blogger had kind of suspected anyway). Various other symptoms were also linked to this (a bit of earache, chiefly); the doctor prescribed an industrial strength decongestant plus painkillers and keeping well-hydrated. She also checked all Keith Telly Topping's vitals - blood pressure was normal(ish), heart and liver were fine, but she was concerned enough about the occasional light-headedness to take a blood sample for checking. Which, thankfully, this blogger subsequently heard was normal (it is blood apparently so, that was a relief, Keith Telly Topping thought it might've been snot or something). So, dear blog reader, if you're wondering this blogger is alive. Though unlike Johnny Thunder, he is not exactly 'seein' things mighty clear today.' You may express your sympathy, incredulity or cold-hearted cynicism now if you wish!
On his day off last week, dear blog reader this blogger was watching some documentary on the Yesterday Channel (it was about the German occupation of the Channel Islands) and he heard the phrase 'nefarious skulduggery' used. Without any apparent irony being involved. There are nowhere near enough usages of that particular phrase in modern parlance, I think.
On a, somewhat, related note, current reading at Stately Telly Topping Manor is Ben Macintyre's award-winning Agent Zigzag.
Although, this blogger disagrees with Macintyre's rather dismissive attitude towards the 1966 movie Triple Cross, based - extremely loosely, let it be noted - on Eddie Chapman's wartime exploits as a double agent. This blogger thinks it was a fine movie. Historically ludicrous, maybe, but very entertaining.
After much - careful and thorough - consideration and research this blogger can confirm that the extended version of 'Chime' by Orbital is the perfect soundtrack when you're sitting on the top deck of a number twelve on the way into town on a cold Saturday morning in February. Without question. And, the ideal soundtrack for the return journey is, unquestionably, Kraftwerk's 'Ruckzuck'. Cold, glacial, imposing ... Just like the Byker Bridge, in fact.
And finally, dear blog reader, Sunday is the day of rest, they all reckon. So, thus far on this particular day of rest, this blogger has, in addition to updating From The North, done the weekly Stately Telly Topping Manor washing, cooked some breakfast, charged up the vacuum cleaner battery to do some cleaning this afternoon, changed the sheets on the bed, been to Morrison's to get some food shopping done and now, having done all that, he's taking ten minutes off before carrying on with all this 'rest.' It's a dirty job, dear blog reader, but someone's got to do it.
This blog will, again, be updated the next time that The Grim Reaper comes a'calling on some people this blogger admires. Once again please note, it's a dirty job ... and all that.

So, dear blog reader, here is the sitch (by which, of course, this blogger is desperately trying to sound all young and 'with it' when, instead of explaining all of this to you, he could have just written out the word 'situation' in full and saved us all a lot of time and energy). Yer actual Keith Telly Topping is now, as it were, somewhat akin to Italy. In that Stately Telly Topping Manor is in effective lock-down under a self-isolationists-style(e) regime and all that. And no, it's not because this blogger is over-seventy ... Although there are days where he feels like he is.
Thing is, this blogger - as he has probably mentioned more than a few times on From The North when he's been fishing for sympathy - has had a nasty on-off cough for about four months; he had a cough, in fact, before it was fashionable amongst the Coronaistas to have one. However, on Tuesday night Keith Telly Topping was also running a bit of a temperature. To be honest, this blogger felt a bit of a fraud ringing into work on Wednesday morning to tell them about his - somewhat trivial - medical woes because Keith Telly Topping is pretty sure this is merely a cold and, in a couple of days he will be feeling fine and dandy. However, because this blogger has got a couple of potentially serious underlying health conditions (Type Two Diabetes and Hypertension) this blogger is taking, to the letter, Bashing Boris's advice and keeping the world safe from Keith Telly Topping's germs for the next seven days.
Work have actually been very good about it; this blogger is to stay off till next Thursday. Officially. So, the four walls of Stately Telly Topping Manor (and its telly) are about all this blogger will be seeing for the next week. Fortunately, he did get in a decent-sized weekly shopping trip on Saturday, the rent is more or less up-to-date and, barring a desperate need for a bit of fresh-air, this blogger has no reason to leave the gaff for a while as he recovers and makes absolutely one hundred per cent sure that hasn't got the full-blown dreaded lurgy.
It is, admittedly, a good excuse to put ones feet up and watch a bit of daytime telly. Sadly, this blogger's first port of call on days off would normally have been the various Sky Sports channels. But they are also, currently in effective lock-down. And, the Gruniad Morning Star's not-very-helpful Daytime Telly Choices For Middle Class Hippy Communists Off Work Through Corvid-Nineteen piece - which you can check out here - is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard. Nevertheless, there's always Dave, Yesterday, Talking Pictures and BBC4. And, this blogger has got plenty of books and DVDs. Plus, he is even, as you may have noticed, taking the opportunity to update this here very bloggerisationisms for the first time in a while (almost a month, in fact). It's an ill-wind and all that ...
When this blogger was doing his - last, for the time-being - weekly shopping on Saturday, he was shocked - shocked, he notes - into shame to discover that Morrison's were rationing the purchase of various items, including both toilet rolls and bacterial wipes. Customers were allowed a maximum of two (of each) per person. As it happens this blogger only needed one of each but it was very nice of the lady on the till to ask if Keith Telly Topping wanted to take his full allowance of the 'restricted items.'
Police have been informed about this lavatory roll shortage-type malarkey, dear blog reader. But, they say, they have 'nothing to go on.'
    Hey, be fair, this blogger is working with limited material here ...
It is, however, always nice to see a bit of Thatcherite-style enterprise culture at work in the economy. Someone spotting a potential hole in the market and, you know, going for it. Good on you, sir. More power to yer elbow. And, your sphincter for that matter.
This blogger's own bit of panic buying, Keith Telly Topping freely admits, was getting three - yes three - multi-packs of Fry's Raspberry Cream from Poundland. This blogger is, of course, thoroughly ashamed of his very self and his selfish and disgraceful panic buying actions and Keith Telly Topping intends to turn his very self into the authorities. Just as soon as he has eaten all of the chocolate, obviously.
Also on Saturday, as the current remake of Survivors continued apace, please let it be noted that this blogger only went and increased the bank balances of The Lord Thy God Steven Moffat (OBE) and Mister Big Rusty Davies (also OBE) with the following purchases. Keith Telly Topping noted on Facebook with what proved to be some uncannily accurate Mystic Meg-style powers of foresight, 'I'll be needing something to read whilst waiting for Pestilence and his three mates (and, their horses) to rock up at Stately Telly Topping Manor.' This blogger also urged Steven and Russell to 'use your royalties wisely gentlemen. Though if you're planning on buying any toilet rolls, I've got some bad news for you ...'
The Moff his very self more of less immediately replied: 'Well I've got a lot of spare copies of the book, so ...' Which was funny. A day later, he posted the following on his own Facebook page along with the observation that some of his fellow writers thought he was crazy in going for a larger page-count for his Target novelisation of The Day Of The Doctor but, who's laughing now, eh? Which was even funnier.
Getting back home to Stately Telly Topping Manor on Saturday, of course, meant an afternoon for this blogger in front of the telly. However, just to reiterate, this blogger's default channel of choice on days off tends to be Sky Sports News. And, what with all football in the UK (except a handful of National League games) having been 'postponed due to an almost biblical pandemic from which we're all, probably, going to die,' Soccer Saturday was looking like being a little light on content - in the event, it too, became a victim of one of the Ten Plagues of Exodus. Though, this blogger was led to understand that Sky, at one point, were actively considering live coverage of Jeff, Kammy, Tis, Merse, Thommo and Champagne Charlie having a kick-about in the staff car park ...
This blogger's good mate Barnaby noted that one of his local pubs had, at least, been getting creative with their rearranged schedules for the big screen.
Ever the pedant, this blogger was obviously moved to point out that they had spelled 'Midsomer' incorrectly. Unless Mid Summer Murders is a new Channel Five documentary series about murders being committed on or around 21 July. You know what they say, summaer is-a cummin in ...
It must be said, dear blog reader, Newcastle city centre was unnervingly quiet on Saturday. Particularly on what should have been a match-day. This was taken just before one o'clock on the day that The Mighty Boys Of English Soch-Her didn't take on AFC Bournemouth. One had seldom seen Gallowgate so quiet.
This blogger had worked six out of the previous seven Saturdays so, being able to say 'I Really Deserve This' on that particular Saturday was jolly welcome. Particularly as, due to not only Keith Telly Topping's own self-isolationist stance but, also, the government advising everyone and their dog to avoid restaurants like this plague, it'll be God only knows when this blogger is going to get to enjoy a nice sit-down meal in an eatery of this choice again.
Or, indeed, the opportunity to pop over to the local Asian fusion gaff for a nice Bento Box as his weekly work-treat on Friday lunchtimes. Oh, the inherent tragedy of it all.
So, no more of this for a while, sad to say. Whether this blogger really deserves it or not ...
Thankfully, though, there will still be plenty of this as all of the takeaways local to Stately Telly Topping Manor remain open and, best part, are still delivering.
So, dear blog reader, fear not for yer actual Keith Telly Topping, for he shall not starve that's for sure.
Also, in the news this week, this blogger's big brother, Colin Telly Topping, made a brief-but-memorable appearance on The ONE Show being vox-popped on Northumberland Street by Alex Riley on the subject of the morality of having CCTV cameras in pub netties.
Pfft. Call yerself a TV star, Our Kid? When this blogger goes on TV, he gets his own caption! A necessary difference, one feels.
So, the world continues to turn on its axis, dear blog reader. Despite the terrible suspicion this blogger has that we've all woken up one morning to find ourselves characters in a Terry Nation-penned post-apocalyptic nightmare TV drama with a memorably sinister title sequence. Expect a conspiracy theory that this is all the work of dark forces within the BBC to start very soon. In the Daily Scum Mail. Probably.
On a slightly brighter note, real, actual living things have recently appeared in the ground outside Stately Telly Topping Manor. Perhaps, dear blog reader, this seemingly endless winter is coming to an end and those of us who manage to survive the current remake of Survivors can look forward to warmer, brighter days ahead. Or, is that optimistic metaphor a case of this blogger reading too much into the appearance of a few manky crocuses?
One lyric yer actual Sir Macca (MBE) never wrote (but, probably should have) was 'Venus and the Moon are dead bright, tonight.' As this - admittedly, rather lo-fi and shaky - photo taken on the estate one day last week when this blogger was on his way home from a late shift ably proves.
The following was spotted in the window of a - rather fine - sports book shop in town recently. This blogger doesn't know about anyone else, but he finds a (topless) mocked-up imagine of the late Sir Bobby Robson to be one of the more disturbing things Keith Telly Topping has ever seen in his entire life. And, every time he see Sir Bobby's picture from now on, this blogger is never going to be able to get this image out of his mind!
Blog rant time, dear blog reader, so strap yourselves in for a potentially bumpy ride. This blogger reckons this is a sodding ludicrous country - we get about two inches of snow three times a year and, each time, without fail, the whole bloody country grinds to a standstill. Exactly that happened on the morning of 24 February - the Sixty Two bus was fifty three minutes late arriving at Longbenton. Fifty three minutes. This blogger should have been half-an-hour early for work, in the end, he was twenty odd minutes late which, despite this being 'an act of God,' he still had to work a bit later that day because of it. The traffic chaos on Chillingham Road had to be seen to be believed (far worse than anything Keith Telly Topping has seen since ... well, about this time last year, the last time it snowed). Worse, on the previous Friday this blogger - as he usually does - had ordered a week's top-up on his bus card online and received an e-mail in confirmation. Getting on the Twelve first thing, the card didn't work and this blogger ended up having to spend another fifteen quid to update it so he could board the bloody bus. He then spent half of his lunch time on the phone to a very nice lad at Stagecoach, Matthew, who said that he was going to, hopefully, help this blogger get his fifteen quid back. In the end, that took three weeks, several very annoyed e-mails and a second 'I've ordered a week but the card didn't work so I had to pay again' type scenario before this blogger finally got a cheque from Stagecoach. And, whilst we're about it, a cheque? Who the Hell still uses cheques these days? Well, Stagecoach do, fairly obviously, but apart from them ... Anyway, back to the events of the 24 February. Add in the fact that this blogger didn't have time, all day, for a cup of coffee, or to pop over to Gregg's for a sandwich (his lunch that day consisted of two chocolate bars and a packet of Hoola Hoops) all he needed was some rectal surgery and it'd've been MY BEST DAY EVER! Hateful, horrible day. Ooo, this blogger was mad-vexed and all of a kerfuffle, so he was. You'd managed to work that out, right dear blog reader?
This blogger's usual commute to work under normal (non-'ooo, look, it's snowing') circumstances is about an hour in each direction. Which means that he gets a couple of hours quality reading time each day (that is when he's not on his mobile phone checking out Facebook or his e-mails, obviously). Recent reading material from the Stately Telly Topping Manor library have included the following ...
An hour in each direction except for one day last week, that is. This blogger left work at 7pm and, through a combination of a lift to Four Lane Ends from his old mate Paul Cook, running to - and just getting - a Sixty Two there and then, a Twelve turning up far earlier than expected in Byker, that was, by a considerable distance, Keith Telly Topping's quickest commute ever. Less than thirty five minutes, door-to-door. That'll never happen again.
Glorious Newcastle on a Thursday night last week, though. Not one but two (seemingly entirely separate) fights kicking-off outside The Raby on Shields Road, dear blog reader. And, both of them apparently involving extremely drunk women saying things like 'are ye ganna let her talk t'ye like that?' at the top of their - not inconsiderable - voices. European City of Culture delusions - look upon our works, ye mighty and despair.
And so, finally on this latest From The North update, Keith Telly Topping can start talking about television. First up, there's that two-part Doctor Who series finale. You know the drill and what this blogger thought by now, dear blog reader. And, nothing has changed in that regard.
Apparently, some of The Usual Suspects didn't like it very much. Their loss, frankly.
Though, this blogger is somewhat saddened by the news that yer actual Bradley Walsh will be leaving the show in the next Christmas/New Year special. One sincerely hopes that Graeme gets a happy ending.
This blogger has also been very much enjoying Picard. As previously noted Keith Telly Topping wasn't too sure what to expect from the series at the start (except that it would, in all likelihood, be an epic nostalgia-fest for old Next Generation fans like this blogger; which it is, admittedly, but in a good way). What this blogger likes most about it is that it's a continuous narrative, a heroes journey and a character piece all rolled into one. But, also includes examples of big fek-off set-piece violence about once per episode. Cos, let's face it, dear blog reader, one can never have too much of that.
And, as for the return this week of Westword, well, they already had this blogger long before Evan Rachel Wood got on a motorbike. Oh, sweet mother ...
Plus, the tool-stiffeningly violent gunfight at the end of the episode was almost worthy of Picard. This blogger has absolutely no idea where they are going with the Westworld story now, but there was more than enough intrigue and cleverness in the series opener to keep him in it for the long haul.
We end this latest - mostly health-related - bloggerisationisms update, dear blog reader, with a couple of obituaries for people that this blogger really admired. Which now seems to be a regular occurrence on From The North.
      Genesis P-Orridge, founding member of cult experimental rock and/or roll collectives Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, has died. The musician and artist, who had been battling leukaemia for over two, was seventy. With Throbbing Gristle, Genesis helped to pioneer the genre of industrial music. In later life, s/he became a 'body evolutionist,' proposing a new gender that was beyond male and female. The death was confirmed by Genesis's daughters, Genesse and Caresse. In a statement, they said their father 'dropped he/r body early this morning. S/he will be laid to rest with he/r other half, Jaqueline "Lady Jaye" Breyer who left us in 2007, where they will be re-united.' They concluded their post by thanking people for their 'love and support and for respecting our privacy as we are grieving.' Born Neil Megson in Manchester in 1950, Genesis P-Orridge's career began in Hull in 1969 with the radical art outfit COUM Transmissions. They once supported Hawkwind at St George's Hall in Bradford in October 1971, where they performed a piece called Edna & The Great Surfers, which reportedly went down fantastically badly with the audience. Alongside his then-partner Cosey Fanni Tutti (Christine Newby), the group played an abrasive brand of industrial rock, often combined with sexually-explicit live shows. COUM's earliest public events were impromptu dadesque gigs performed at various pubs around Hull; titles for these events included Thee Fabulous Mutations, Space Between The Violins and Clockwork Hot Spoiled Acid Test. COUM's music was anarchic and improvised, making use of such instruments as broken violins, prepared pianos, guitars and bongos. As time went on, they added further theatrics to their performances, in one instance making the audience crawl through a polythene tunnel to enter the venue. Their 1976 exhibition at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, titled Prostitution, scandalised the art world and prompted some knobcheese Conservative MP, Nicholas Fairbairn, to denounce the group as 'the wreckers of civilisation.' Shortly afterwards, Genesis and Tutti formed Throbbing Gristle with Peter Christopherson and Chris Carter, releasing their debut LP The Second Annual Report in 1977. Crude, uncompromising and deliberately malicious, it was not an easy listen - based around multiple versions of the songs 'Slug Bait' and 'Maggot Death', which detailed sadistic acts of violence and murder. Only seven hundred and eighty copies were pressed, but the LP was a key influence on the industrial movement, a more antagonistic second-cousin of punk. 'In terms of being shocking, punk was pretty tame in comparison,' said Simon Reynolds, the author of Rip It Up & Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984. 'They were writing songs about serial killers and cutting themselves onstage.' Indeed, Throbbing Gristle's best-selling single was 'Zyklon B Zombie' (1978), the title being a reference to the Zyklon B poison gas used at Auschwitz extermination camp. Their masterpiece, however, was 'Discipline' (1980), a terrifying slab of minimalist electronica with some of Genesis's most extreme lyrics. Live, the song ranged in length from eight to twelve minutes, although it could be stretched out much longer: a version from one of their last shows at the Lyceum in London was over half-an-hour long. The band upped the dread on their second LP, D.O.A, but discovered a more accessible side on 1979's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats, recorded on a sixteen track recording console they had borrowed from Paul McCartney (Christopherson had previously designed the cover for Wings' Venus & Mars LP).
Two years later, Genesis formed another band, Psychic TV, which explored the singer's interest in the occult and fetishism and even scored a minor hit single with the anthemic 'Godstar', a tribute to one of Genesis's heroes, the late Rolling Stone guitarist Brian Jones. The band's output was prolific - releasing more than one hundred LPs and entering The Guinness Book Of World Records after issuing fourteen live records in the space of eighteen months. In the early 1990s, Genesis's house in Brighton was raided by Scotland Yard's Obscene Publications Squad. Having been encouraged by Christian groups involved in propagating the moral panic about alleged Satanic ritual abuse, the Channel Four documentary series Dispatches claimed to have discovered videotapes depicting P-Orridge sexually abusing children in a ritual setting. Police confiscated several tonnes of art work. At the time, P-Orridge was in Thailand undertaking famine-relief work; fearing arrest and loss of child custody upon return to the UK, P-Orridge stayed out of the country for several years, settling in the United States. P-Orridge believed that the negative press and police attention were the result of a vendetta conceived by a right-wing fundamentalist Christian group. It was subsequently revealed that the footage obtained did not depict child abuse. Instead, it was a video artwork titled First Transmissions that had been made in the early 1980s - partially funded by Channel Four themselves; the footage depicted sex-magic rites between adults, blood-letting performances and scenes of the filmmaker Derek Jarman reading passages from the work of Geoffrey Chaucer. Embarrassed by these revelations, Channel Four retracted their accusations. In the US, Genesis met Jacqueline Lady Jaye Breyer, a dominatrix, nurse and soon to be muse. Together they launched a 'Pandrogeny Project' - surgically altering their bodies to resemble each other as closely as possible, becoming a single 'pandrogynous' being named Breyer P-Orridge. The couple also adopted genderless pronouns - s/he and he/r - explaining that they wanted to create a third gender. 'It's not male or female, not either/or - just complete,' Genesis told Paper magazine last year. 'We thought it was important to remind people of that idea, and as artists, we figured the best way to do so was visually.' In 1995, Genesis nearly lost an arm while escaping a fire at the Los Angeles home of the producer Rick Rubin. S/he was awarded one-and-a-half million dollars in damages and used the money to bankroll experiments in photography, collage, sculpture and cosmetic surgery. Having been a fringe artist for years, Genesis began to find he/r work embraced by the fine art world, including Tate Britain, which acquired several pieces. In recent years, however, the musician's legacy was called into question by Throbbing Gristle bandmate Tutti, whose memoir revealed allegations of abusive and domineering behaviour. The guitarist claimed that Genesis threw a concrete block at her head from a balcony and ran at her with a knife after she attempted to end their relationship. Genesis always denied the accusations. After Lady Jaye died of an acute heart arrhythmia in 2007, Genesis continued their Pandrogeny Project and recorded a final CD with Psychic TV, Alienist, in 2016. Genesis is survived by two daughters, Genesse and Caresse and first wife Paula P-Orridge, now known as Alaura O'Dell.
The great Swedish film and stage actor Max von Sydow, who has died aged ninety, will be remembered by different people for different roles: the title role in The Exorcist, Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told and his Oscar-nominated part as the slave-driven Lasse in Pelle The Conqueror, but his passport to cinema immortality will be his many remarkable performances under the direction of Ingmar Bergman. The tall, gaunt and imposing blond Von Sydow made his mark internationally in 1957 as the disillusioned Fourteenth-Century knight Antonius Block, in Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Returning from the crusades to his plague-stricken country, he finds that he has lost his faith in God and can no longer pray. Suddenly, he is confronted by a personification of Death. Seeking more time on Earth, he challenges Death to a game of chess. Von Sydow's portrayal of a man in spiritual turmoil demonstrated a maturity beyond his years and was to exemplify his solemn and dignified persona in further Bergman films, even extending to some of his less worthier enterprises.
Although it was the actor’s first film for Bergman, they had previously worked together at the Municipal theatre in Malmö on several plays and would continue to do so between films. From 1956 to 1958, for Bergman, Von Sydow played Brick in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, the title role in Peer Gynt, Alceste in The Misanthrope and Faust in Urfaust. In the same company were Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom, who, with Von Sydow, were to become part of the Bergman repertory company of the screen. He was born Carl Adolf Von Sydow to an academic family in Lund. His father, Carl Wilhelm, was an ethnologist and professor of comparative folklore at the university of Lund; his mother, Maria Margareta, was a school teacher. He attended a Catholic school before doing his military service. From 1948 to 1951, Von Sydow attended the acting school at the Royal Dramatic theatre in Stockholm; while still a student there, he had small parts in two films directed by Alf Sjöberg, Only A Mother (1949) and Miss Julie (1951). After graduating, Von Sydow, who had married Christina Olin in 1951, joined the Municipal theatre in Helsingborg before moving to Malmö, which resulted in the significant meeting with Bergman. Following The Seventh Seal, Von Sydow played in six sombre films in a row for Bergman; he was quite content to play supporting roles when asked. He had a small part in Wild Strawberries (1957) and was rather peripheral in Brink Of Life (1957), as Eva Dahlbeck's husband, waiting calmly for his wife to have a baby (which she loses), but was central in The Face (1958). As Vogler, a Nineteenth-Century mesmerist and magician, Von Sydow embodied admirably the part-charlatan, part-messiah character. It was back to medieval Sweden in The Virgin Spring (1960), with Von Sydow as the vengeful father of a girl who has been raped and murdered. In Through A Glass Darkly (1961), he was the anguished husband of Harriet Andersson, watching his wife lapsing into insanity and in Winter Light (1962), he was a man terrified of nuclear annihilation. Von Sydow refused offers of work outside Sweden, even - according to ast least one source - the title role in the first James Bond movie, Dr No (1962), though two decades later he played Blofeld to Sean Connery's Bond in Never Say Never Again. He finally gave in when George Stevens begged him to play Jesus in his epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) even managing to keep a straight face when John Wayne turned up as the Roman Centurion who says 'awww, truly he was the Son of God!' Max's next two Hollywood movies were not much better: The Reward (1965), in which he was an impoverished crop-dusting pilot trapped in the Mexican desert and Hawaii (1966), as an unbending and arrogant missionary who makes no effort to understand the islanders. Von Sydow's two sons played his son in the film, aged seven (Henrik) and twelve (Clas). The scheming German aristocrat in The Quiller Memorandum (1966) was the first of many bad Germans he would play well. Complex roles in four films for Bergman temporarily stopped the rot: as an artist subject to terrible nightmares and hallucinations in Hour Of The Wolf (1968); as a big, gangling innocent forced to face reality in Shame (1968), a powerful parable in which he was allowed to improvise some of his dialogue for the first time; as a man whose peaceful seclusion is disturbed by a woman recovering from the car accident that killed her husband and son (Liv Ullmann), as well as a warring couple and a homicidal maniac in The Passion Of Anna (1969) and as the cold cuckolded doctor husband of Bibi Andersson in The Touch (1971), Bergman's first English-language film. Von Sydow and Ullmann suffered beautifully as poor Swedish peasants trying to survive in Nineteenth-century Minnesota in Jan Troell's diptych, The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972). It was almost inevitable that Von Sydow should be cast as the Jesuit priest, Father Merrin, in William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973) after having gone through so many metaphysical crises in Bergman films. His craggy features haunt the film and its ratyher preposterous sequel The Exorcist II – The Heretic (1977).
On the whole, his films tended to oscillate between the very serious and the rather silly. Among the former were Steppenwolf (1974), in which he played Hermann Hesse's alter-ego Harry Haller, a disillusioned man going on a spiritual journey; Duet For One (1986), in which he was the callous, death-fearing psychoanalyst and Woody Allen's Hannah & Her Sisters (1986), where he was a prickly, antisocial artist. Allen has said that the only two actors he directed of whom he found himself in awe were Von Sydow and Geraldine Page. On the more ridiculous side were his so-far-over-the-top-he-was-down-the-other-side Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon (1980) and King Osric in Conan the Barbarian (1982). He felt much more in his element in Bille August's Pelle The Conqueror (1987), which won the best foreign film Oscar. Von Sydow elegantly captured the simple grandeur of an illiterate widowed farmer who leaves a poverty-stricken Sweden for a Danish island with his nine-year-old son, to find himself almost a slave on a farm. Von Sydow reconnected with Bergman when he played the latter's maternal grandfather in The Best Intentions (1992), directed by August from Bergman's autobiographical script. However, his portrayal of the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun in the biopic Hamsun (1996), directed by Troell, was far too sympathetic for a man who tried to rationalise his admiration for Hitler. 'Why me?' was Von Sydow's reaction to the director Jonathan Miller, after he had been cast as Prospero in The Tempest at the Old Vic, in 1988. 'Do you have to cross the river to fetch water when you have so many wonderful actors in England?' But Miller was entirely justified in his choice because Von Sydow brought the aura of the Bergman films to the role as well as authority and warmth. In 1988, he directed Katinka, a simple tale about a woman stifled by a loveless marriage, which made little impact. Von Sydow was glad to have made it, but said that he would never direct again. He continued to alternate between mainstream Hollywood (he was in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report in 2002) and more challenging material such as The Diving Bell & The Butterfly (2007), mostly in small scene-stealing roles. He was a sinister German doctor in Martin Scorsese's psychological thriller Shutter Island (2010); a mysterious mute in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011), for which he received his second Oscar nomination; Lor San Tekka in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and the Three-Eyed Raven in the sixth series of Game Of Thrones (2016). His last film role came in Thomas Vinterberg's Kursk (2018). He and Olin divorced in 1979; in 1997 he married the French film-maker Catherine Brelet and they settled in Paris (Von Sydow became a French citizen in 2002). He is survived by Brelet and their sons, Cédric and Yvan and by Henrik and Clas, the sons of his first marriage.

When From The North was last updated, dear blog reader, you may recall that yer actual Keith Telly Topping had just gone into self-isolation due to his sincere wish not to catch the deadly killer coronavirus and, you know, die. A little over a week on and, this blogger is back to report that he is still well-isolated. The fever which this blogger mentioned he had developed last time finally broke a few days later, though this blogger was still then - and, actually, remains now - feeling more than a touch grotty; the general consensus (from NHS One-One-One) seemed to be that it's merely been a nasty bout of bronchitis rather than influenza (or, indeed, anything apocalyptically worse). A diagnosis which would certainly help to explain that bloody annoying cough which this blogger had for weeks before he locked the doors of Stately Telly Topping Manor behind him. So, it looks like this blogger not going anywhere for a bit - not that he could even if he wanted to without getting Pinched By The Fuzz for general loitering. Especially as 'coughing at a policeman' is now, seemingly, an arrestable crime. About time, too.
To be fair, dear blog reader - and not wishing to blow off his own cornet nor nothing of the sort - but this blogger was self-isolating long before it was fashionable to do so. You know, before members of royalty and leading politicians starting testing positive for this ghastly lurgy.
Of course, not unexpectedly, whilst this current health crisis has highlighted, if any highlighting was needed, how great and vastly under-appreciated many people are in life, the reverse has also been true. So, whilst we - rightly and uncynically - applaud our brilliant NHS staff and also praise those working in perhaps less glamorous industries like carers, the retail sector, transport, finance and broadcasting - those who, whilst we've all been sitting in our collective gaff feeling sorry for ourselves, have been getting on with their jobs and keeping the country from collapsing completely, let us also have a jolly big round of appreciation for others. Like, for instance, the boss of Weatherspoons who is reported to have refused to pay suppliers until the crisis is over. Big applause for you, mate. Or, for that matter, let us all stand up and salute That Awful Branson Individual who is expected to get out the begging bowl and demand a government bailout worth hundreds of millions of knicker for Virgin Atlantic. This, just a few days after asking (for which read ordering) his staff to take eight weeks - unpaid - leave. Mister Branson, you beardy git, we totally salute you.
Nevertheless, all of the sick profiteers and hypocrites happy to get their greed right on and put money before the safety of their staff, of course, fade into utter insignificance when compared to yer man Mike Ashley. Within moments of the government announcing the decision to instruct all retail outlets that didn't provide 'vital services to the public' to close, the loathsome, twattish Sports Direct boss and owner of this blogger's beloved (though tragically unsellable) Magpies grandly announced that Sports Direct would be staying open whatever the government said as Ashley considers selling cheap trainers is providing 'a vital service' to the public. Which it isn't, or anything even remotely like it although, arguably, it does provide a vital service to greed-bucket Mike Ashley's vast pockets. It didn't take long for a massive backlash against this crass misjudging of the public mood to cool Ashley's jets somewhat and produce a grovelling u-turn. Followed, a few days later, by an allegedly contrite Ashley humbly begging the government's pardon for the error of his ways and claiming he was 'led stray by older boys'. Probably. This blogger will leave it entirely up to you, dear blog reader, to decide for yourselves whether you believe there is so much as an ounce of sincerity or genuine regret in Ashley's apology or if it is no more than an example of 'I'm sorry I got caught.' This all came during the same week that supporters of Newcastle were given another timely reminder of Ashley's uncanny ability to score embarrassing metaphorical own goals. On the same day that fellow Premier League club Brighton & Hove Albinos announced payment holidays for their supporters, NUFC opted to take direct debits for 2020-21 season tickets from the bank accounts of existing ticket holders despite a good chunk of the 2019-20 season remaining to be played and no one having the slightest idea when (or, even if) the 2020-21 season will actually kick-off. Having already caused dismay with clumsy attempts to keep his shops open and imposing online price rises, it came as little shock that another Ashley enterprise has placed profits above people. Quick to publicise their own 'generosity' when giving away tickets when it suits them, the club are rather less forthcoming about plans for those who have already stumped up for match tickets for games that have been postponed. It's satisfying to know that even in these uncertain times, some things remain reliably consistent. The fact that there are many good people in the world and then, there are some who are, simply, scum being one of them.
So, anyway, dear blog reader. Self-Isolation Diary, Day Two in the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House: This blogger was, by that stage, 99.999 per cent certain it is was merely a (heavy) cold he was suffering from rather than the dreaded coronavirus - although bronchitis would not be diagnosed for another couple of days. Entertainment-wise, already Keith Telly Topping had watched the previous evening's excellent BBC4 Steve McQueen/Le Mans doc, the latest episode of Picard and then had a second viewing of the Westworld series opener (this time when this blogger wasn't half-asleep, occasionally being shaken awake by that dress Evan Rachel Wood was almost wearing), followed by one of this blogger's favourite movies, Orson Welles's F For Fake. And, all that took him up to about eleven o'clock on the first morning of self-isolation.
In the meantime, this blogger had a quick check to make sure that he had enough food in the house to last for at least a week and noted that he did, aside from a few perishables like bread, milk and eggs. So, Keith Telly Topping thought to himself, 'at least I can always get Morrisons to deliver those, given that they were making such a fuss the previous day about all of the extra driving and delivery staff they're taking on.' This blogger, therefore, went onto the Morrisons website, registered his very self and, it was only at that point, he noticed the 'minimum delivery forty smackers' bit in the small print. This blogger lives alone in the crumbling splendour of Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House, dear blog reader, so, he is lucky to get through forty quid's worth of purchases in a month, let alone seven days. This blogger did drop Morrisons a quick e-mail enquiring, basically, 'are you taking the feking piss, or what?' Keith Telly Topping will let you all know the reply when - or if - he gets one. So that, of course, meant this blogger did have to go out to ALDI and back a couple of days later. Which was no great hardship - it's only a five minute walk, after all - but it did, rather, make this whole 'avoid contact with anyone' thing a bit of a nonsense.
Self-Isolation Diary. Day Three: This was the day's self-isolation entertainment sorted. The horror.
This blogger went for The Masque Of The Red Death first, followed by The Satanic Rites Of Dracula. Then he dug out The Andromeda Strain, The Satan Bug, the opening episode of Survivors, that episode of NCIS where Tony and Caitlin get the plague and the last episode of series two of Millennium. Plus Monty Python & The Holy Grail. Just, you know, to take his mind off the current world situation.
It was only at about this stage - Monday - that many people started to realise just how really serious the whole situation had become. Bashing Boris's address to the nation was more than a touch like Chapter Eight from the Book of Revelation, was it not? 'My fellow Britons ... The Seventh Trumpet shall sound, The Horned Beast shall appear, The Temple shall be rent in twain and cast into The Bottomless Pit. And there will be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth. So, to sum up, then ...'
Boris Johnson's statement announcing strict new coronavirus restrictions was watched live by more than twenty seven million punters, according to overnight figures. Which does rather make one wonder what the other thirty five million of the British population were doing at the time? Contemplating on the inherently ludicrous nature of existence, perhaps? I mean, they can't all be working in 'vital public services,' can they? His televised address to a terrified nation was seen by over fifteen million viewers on BBC 1, while 5.7 million tuned in to ITV and 1.6 million saw it on Channel Four. An additional 4.4 million watched the thing on the BBC News Channel and on the Sky News Channel.
That figure makes it the most watched broadcast in the UK for several years, probably since the Closing Ceremony of London Olympics in 2012. The statement was also streamed live on Amazon Prime. To about four confused Grand Tour fans who wondered where Jezza and the boys had got to.
Amol Rajan's article on the BBC News website, Coronavirus & A Media Paradox explains a significant problem that all broadcasters are currently facing. 'It's obviously not the most important thing happening right now, but with millions of people working from home, ratings for television channels and streaming services are soaring. Demand for news and entertainment is surging. It's not just the BBC. In news terms, ITV and Channel Four News are seeing both the sort of absolute numbers and audience shares that, in normal times, they would dream of. But there are a couple of paradoxes here. The first is that though demand is surging, it is going to get harder and harder to supply fresh material to meet that demand. ITV has now suspended [production of] Coronation Street and Emmerdale. The BBC had already suspended Eastenders, Peaky Blinders, Line Of Duty, Casualty, Holby City and many others. Netflix has suspended all productions across the globe, which is of course unprecedented. It is impossible to overstate the anguish and turmoil this will cause for members of an industry which is largely staffed by freelancers on short-term contracts. With no job security, and no other productions to turn to because of the far-reaching consequences of the virus, this will cause widespread immiseration.'
Still, at least Wor Canny Jodie Whittaker is helping people through these dark and dreadful times. Thanks, Jodie. Appreciated.
Day Four of Isolation by Joy Division was, indeed, the first time since the previous Tuesday evening that this blogger was forced to venture beyond the walls of Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House and have a stroll down to ALDI for bread, milk, eggs, ham and ... biscuits. And pizza. This blogger was there and back inside twenty minutes, dear blog reader and managed to thoroughly avoid physical (or, indeed, emotional) contact with anyone. Which was helped due to the shop being virtually empty when this blogger got there except for the lass on the till. And even she was wearing rubber gloves (something, one imagine, which was becoming de rigueur in shops across the country by that stage). 'They'll be having you in a hazmat suit next' this blogger joked. If she saw the funny side, she kept it to herself.
This blogger was able to do all of the above on that particular day because the delivery of the new Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House kettle, ordered the previous day online from Argos, was satisfactorily completed at an obscenely early hour of the morning. She's called Kelly, if anyone was wondering ... And, she lights up blue when one jiggles her button.
Still, to be fair, telephone conversations like the following were still possible: 'Hello. Do you deliver? Specifically to Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House where yer actual Keith Telly Topping is currently self-isolating and in desperate need of some decent grub?''Yes sir, we do.''That's excellent to know.''And, why's that, sir?''Because, I really deserve this king prawn curry with egg-fired rice.'
Of course, it says so much about our society that one of the main 'oh, no, that's awful' aspects of the announcement that Prince Chas has tested positive for Covid-Nineteen and is currently self-isolating, wasn't that he might have passed this potentially deadly virus onto his parents - both of whom are in their nineties - but, rather, that he attended an event with Ant and/or Dec the previous week and, although they didn't shake hands, he was within two metres of them. Take the Daily Mirra's report for example. Or the same story appearing in the Daily Scum Express. This is the Twenty First Century we've created, dear blog reader.
Of course, this blogger was not completely isolated from the outside world. He spoke to his brother on the phone, for example. And, he is glad to report that everyone over there is fine, albeit, self-isolating as best they can, just like the rest of us. And then, there's always the interweb ...
So, this 'name one band and/or artist that you've seen live for every letter of the alphabet' thing which is currently whizzing around Facebook like a ... big whizzing thing. Okay, then. Aztec Camera, The Bodines, Edwyn Collins, Doctor Feelgood, Echo & The Bunnymen, Fun Boy Three, Goldfrapp, The Housemartins, Icicle Works, james, Kraftwerk, Lindisfarne, Paul McCartney & Wings, Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Oasis, Pixies, The Quads, Rockpile, The Smiths, The Teardrop Explodes, Underworld, The Velvet Underground, The Wonder Stuff, XTC, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, The Zutons. And, typing all of that out alleviated the self-isolationisms boredom for about thirty seconds.
Mind you, it could equally have been ... Ash, The Bootleg Be-Atles, The Clash, Denim, Everything But The Girl, The Fall, Goodbye Mister MacKenzie, Hawkwind, I Am Kloot, The Jam, Killing Joke, The La's, The Mighty Lemon Drops, New Order, Orbital, Primal Scream, The Quads, R.E.M, The Specials, The The, U2, The Verve, The Waterboys, XTC, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, The Zutons. Either/or, take yer pick.
And, you know what dear blog reader? Keith Telly Topping his very self regrets almost none of the above gigs attended across the years. Well, except for The Wonder Stuff, maybe. They were a big disappointment. Get yer hair cut, hippies.
So, dear blog reader, it would appear to be that time again ...
The return of The Blacklist and, particularly, this week's episode a kind of testosterone-snorting variant on ... And Then There Were None in which guest-star Joely Richardson got to deliver one of the best lines in the history of television: 'You really know how to show a girl a good time, tell me do you do autopsies during all your dates or am I special?'
The Picard series finale. Well, that was emotional. Though, inevitably, some whinging whingers hated it. And other whinging whingers reallyhated it. This blogger, needless to say, thought it was great.
To celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of its first first broadcast in 2005, Rose. And, you know what, it still looks great - with, or without that Graham Norton interruption.
Ashes To Ashes repeats on the Drama channel.
And finally, dear blog reader, this blogger has always been - and will remain long after this current crisis is over - a big fan of the National Health Service; it didn't need a national emergency to remind this blogger of just what a remarkable job those people do on a daily basis. Underpaid, over-worked, often under-appreciated or taken for granted by scum politicians and those for whom paying for their own health care is no problem, the post-war creation of the National Health Service remains one of this country's proudest ever achievement and those who work in it should be safe in the knowledge that the majority of us in this country do not forget that fact for a single second. But, of course, this is the real world and we, sadly, do. And, for that reason, it very was gratifying this week to see millions demonstrating their appreciation for the NHS in loud, highly attention-grabbing ways. It's easy to be cynical about this sort of thing, of course, or to try and score some cheap political points on the back of it - and true to their usual form, the Middle Class hippy Communists at the Gruniad Morning Star did both simultaneously. But this week has, perhaps, been a timely reminder to politicians of all stripes that, whilst they can mess around with many aspects of British life, the NHS is one of the few things that will get millions marching through the street to defend it. Perhaps it's a sad indictment of us all that it's taken a national emergency of this sort to make that point so clearly but, nevertheless, now it has been made it would be a very stupid politician indeed that would ignore it. Not that the world is short of very stupid politicians, of course. Here endeth the lesson.
So, from the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House, dear blog reader, that's another  From The North update concluded. Stay safe wherever you are, stay as well as you can, keep in touch with those you care about, occupy your time as best you are able to and, remember, you may be on your own at the moment but you are not alone.

Just, you know, for a wee bit of necessary perspective and all that, dear blog readers ... For, we are, all of us, currently living through strange, strange times. And the drums never cease.
Anyway, earlier this week the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House only went and received our long-awaited Letter From The Prime Minister, didn't we? Although, given where he was at the time of receipt, this blogger did wonder whether it was actually safe to touch it with anything other than a long pair of those wicked-looking wooden tongs they use in laundries.
On a somewhat related theme, this blogger has a serious question. This whole, hashtag 'Clap for Boris' thing? Was that what we were supposed to be doing that particular evening or was that what was keeping him in hospital at the time? This blogger must confess he was really confused on that score. Anyway ...
Tragedy, of course, strikes in often the most unexpected of places. This blogger, for instance, wasn't even aware that the former Steps singer had been ill much less had passed on. All of our thoughts here at From The North, obviously, are with his family ...
That said, let it be noted it really is jolly nice to see the social distancing message appears to finally be getting through to everyone ...
According to a piece in the ever-reliable Sun, Brits turn to telly classics such as Dad's Army for comfort during lockdown. And, of course, given the current emergency powers which are in place for the duration, anyone caught not turning to telly classics such as Dad's Army for, ahem, 'comfort' during the current lockdown will likely be pinched by The Fuzz. Or, perhaps something even worse.
Still, at least they managed to get the new -third - series of Killing Eve filmed before the world went to Hell in a handcraft, dear blog reader. It returns to BBC iplayer from 13 April. And, the trailer - Dusty Springfield soundtrack and all - looks great. A few further clips can also been seen here. Albeit, inevitably perhaps, the series has been drawing some criticism from the usual shitehawk Middle Class hippy Communist suspects at the broadsheets before it's even been broadcast to us 'ordinary people.' It's nice to know that, in an ever changing world full of doubt and uncertainty, some things remain reliably consistent.
And, if you're desperate for something to keep your mind occupied until then - contemplating the inherently ludicrous nature of existence aside, obviously - check out The Lord Thy God Steven Moffat (OBE)'s new short story (The Terror Of The Umpty Ums) published on the BBC's Doctor Who website. That should raise a wry chuckle or two. Really talented lad, that Moffinator.
So, dear blog reader, you're probably all wondering what on earth has been occurring at the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House since From The North was last updated. At that time (the end of last month), yer actual Keith Telly Topping was still well into a ten-day self-isolation period on account of him having contracted a nasty bout of bronchitis and his not wishing to spread his germs around the general population. By the start of the following week, however, this blogger was feeling well enough to venture back into the working environment and, at the crack of dawn on 30 March, this blogger left the safe and comforting confines of the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House for only the third time since this entire 'bring out yer dead' malarkey began. He travelled halfway across Newcastle into work to pick up the computer equipment that he need to be able to work remotely from the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House. Keith Telly Topping took an effing 'uge plastic storage box with him to aid him in this endeavour. And, thanks entirely to Peregrine the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House all-purpose egging 'uge plastic storage box, this blogger made it home in more-or-less one piece.
Then, it was simply a case of working out how all the parts fitted together. Work, very helpfully, sent this blogger an 'idiot's guise to what plugs into where' type e-mail. And so, hours of endless family fun in assembling the thing began that very afternoon. And, pretty soon this is a representation of the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House work-station. Yes, it was - and still is - a total health and safety bloody nightmare. But, never mind that, the commute from one side of the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House front room to the other was a mere 1.3 seconds at knocking-off time. So, that was nice.
If anyone was wondering the little white thing in the left-hand corner is, indeed, Eoin, the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House egg-timer which has found itself been pressed into service as an emergency 'make sure this blogger doesn't forget to get back to work after tea and lunch breaks if he gets comfortable in the armchair watching BBC News'-type implement. You're doing a grand job, Eoin.
Of course, somewhat inevitably, the PC that this blogger picked up from work on the Monday so he could - in theory - work from home, only went and didn't work, didn't it? Hands up whom amongst you, dear blog readers, rather expected that outcome? Okay, you can all put your hands down now, thanks - me too, if truth be told. Apparently, it was missing 'a vital bit of software'. There then followed two days of frustrated phone calls back and forth, lots of faffing about and various attempts to activate it remotely by our IT section. And, of course, none of that worked. So, on Wednesday morning at the crack of dawn this blogger had to hump the damn thing all the way back to Longbenton (on two buses). Then, it took around five hours for someone from IT to work out that particular computer was, effectively, cattled and arrange for this blogger to take another one back to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House instead (during which time Keith Telly Topping did a brief spell helping out on the phones along with the extremely skeleton staff still working on the call floor). It was, it must be noted, quite an experience to be back in the - now, virtually deserted - office. It was all very Twenty Eight Days Later.
As expected, passing through Byker on the way back to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House, this blogger discovered it was, as t'were, 'comin' like a ghost town ...' In that it resembled the morning Bill Masen wakes up in hospital in The Day Of The Triffids. On the entirety of Shields Road - not a short road by any stretch of the imagination - this blogger believes there were but six establishments which didn't have their roller-shutters down (and, two of those were the bank and the Post Office). Still, bright-side, that meant social isolation on the trip back to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House was really not a problem.
Even then, one of the shops that was open was sending out some damned disturbing signals with its window display. This blogger is not sure exactly what this message is trying to convey. 'Buy some Fanta or else Sausage-Cat's going to do you up the Gary Glitter with a skewer?' was a suggestion made by one of yer actual Keith Telly Topping's dear Facebook fiends. Though this blogger believed it was more likely to be something along the lines of the old Goodies'Cap'n Fishface' parody of the BirdsEye adverts: 'Y'don't know what's in 'em!'
Anyway, back at the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House and, bugger me buttocks but the second computer lash-up actually worked. This blogger was, therefore, able to spend roughly the last hour of what had been - up to that point - both the shortest and longest day of work he'd experienced in a long time actually doing stuff. From his own gaff. Without issue. He managed to take a couple of calls - both from delightful ladies whom Keith Telly Topping was able to help with their problems and who were both utterly fascinated to learn that he was doing all of this from his front room in the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House whilst he, simultaneously, had a batch of washing in the machine going away in the background. Who said men can't do multi-tasking.
Meanwhile, one of the takeaways close to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House has become the latest victim of yer actual lockdown fever and a-boogie-woogie 'flu and is currently all roller-shutter'd up (or, roller-shutter'd down, if you prefer). However, fortunately, the other one within easy walking distance is still thoroughly open for both deliveries and for takeaways. Which is nice. Because, this blogger really deserves the vast majority of this menu ...
Especially this one.
And this one.
Thus, a cycle of working from the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House began; one day this blogger was mainly on calls, several of the other days it was mostly answering e-mails and a few call-backs. It been all right thus far, actually - no real issues and the novelty still hasn't worn off in getting to work mere seconds after having been sitting watching BBC Breakfast. I'll tell you what, though - the biggest difference that this blogger has noted in working from home rather than from the office is that you really don't realise just how much background noise there is in an office until it's not there. The Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House is now so quiet, it's like Bjork has come to tea.
This blogger is currently working from home, dear blog reader, he might have mentioned the fact. And, at this particular moment whilst you are reading this blog, like as not, this blogger will be at lunch. This is a typical Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House lunch. And this blogger really deserves it.
Since this blogger has been stuck in the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House, he is currently rocking three week's worth of shaggy beard. (He started growing it, incidentally, several days before discovering that many of his Facebook fiends - the male ones, mostly - were also doing so and that 'grow some fuzzy facial hair whilst Covid-Nineteen is keeping you indoors' is, apparently now 'a thing' on social media.) To be honest, this blogger is rather tempted to shave the damn thing off mainly because he is still just at the very end of the 'really itchy' phase. Then there's the grey hairs which, Keith Telly Topping admits, do make him look like a member of some ghastly, tuneless prog-rock hippy beat combo of the 1970s. Then again, this blogger is somewhat minded of Billy Connolly's famous routine about him finding his first grey pubic hair and thinking that grey hair - sometimes - can suggest dignity, wisdom and prowess ('in a certain light, my pubes look like Stewart Grainger!')
This blogger, of course, does get the odd day off, dear blog reader (just in case you were worried). One such day off was last Sunday. So, for first time since going into work on the previous Wednesday (and for only the, I think, fifth time in four weeks) this blogger nervously left the safety of the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House to combine a bit of - government recommended - exercise and taking in the fresh air with the - also government recommended - 'getting the weekly shopping in at your local ALDI so you don't, you know, starve' shenanigans. There was quite a queue to get into the store and it looked formidably long to begin with - mainly because everyone seemed to be following the 'two metres social distancing' thing to the inch. But, the queue cleared remarkably quickly, this blogger was in-store within ten minutes (stopping, briefly to thank the, very cheerful, lad on the door who had the unenviable task of saying 'next five customers in, number six onwards please wait a moment!' all day. Which must have been soul destroying). Inside, this blogger got a big set of purchases - almost twenty quid's worth since it'll be another full week before this blogger gets the opportunity to venture outdoors again. In ALDI, everyone seemed to be quite cheerful (at least, those who weren't wearing face masks and, therefore, were covering their undoubted joy), the shelves mostly quite full, the staff were doing a grand job and this blogger was around and out in fifteen minutes and home within an hour of leaving the gaff. Having, pretty successfully he thinks, avoided all physical (and emotional) contact with my fellow human beings.
And now, another amusing tale from the Wild & Wacky World Of Yer Actual Keith Telly Topping (Working Chap). Last Friday this blogger didn't, as he usually does each Friday, receive a pay slip by e-mail and nothing had been paid into his bank account that day (he was expecting Statutory Sick Pay for the previous week when he was still self-isolating inside the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House). So, he waited until the following morning and checked again and, when still nothing had arrived, he dropped a - hopefully, very polite - e-mail to his line manager saying, basically, 'look, I fully realise on a list of your one hundred top priorities, this is number ninety seven, but I haven't been paid for last week'). Keith Telly Topping did add, helpfully he thought, that this wasn't a particularly urgent issue since Keith Telly Topping can't spend much at the moment anyway (takeaways and the odd trip to ALDI aside). On the following Monday, this blogger got a lovely e-mail back from his line manager profusely apologising and saying pretty much what Keith Telly Topping had expected all along, that a few people who'd been self-isolating that particular week had, similarly, fallen into a crack somewhere and had been missed by Human Resources. The situation was quickly resolved to the satisfaction of near-enough everyone. However, the bit in the e-mail that really made this blogger smile was 'be assured, making sure my staff are paid on time is my number one priority!' Keith Telly Topping likes feeling appreciated.
The legend that was the late Sir Desmond Dekker (OBE) him did once note: 'Me get up in de mornin', slavin' for brecksa/so dat ev'ry mouse can be fed/wo-ah/woooo-ah/me ears are alight ...' Or words to that effect. Dunno what the Hell that was all about but this blogger can confirm that, earlier this week, there was remarkably little slavin' going down in preparing an excellent bacon and egg sarnie and a nice hot cup of Sweet Joe for us brecksa at the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House.
Then, later than evening, for us post-commute supper at Stately Telly Topping Manor, this blogger was having some fine hot crumpet. Titter ye not, dear blog reader, it was very nice.
Somewhat inevitably, this blogger got suckered into a current popular Facebook challenge-type affair: 'What are six movies you have watched countless times and never get sick of?' To which, of course, without even thinking too hard about it, this blogger replied: Apocalypse Now, Hot Fuzz, A Matter Of Life & Death, F For Fake, Help! and Doctor Terror's House Of Horrors. And then he realised that he'd missed off Live & Let Die, The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes, Performance, The Italian Job,  Almost Famous, The Wicker Man, Goodfellas, Withnail & I and ... this could go on for a while, dear blog reader.
Do you know the single most annoying thing about the last few weeks? The fact that not one, not two or three, but four of this blogger's dear Facebook fiends sent him the following 'highly amusing' Dalek-related video link on the same day with exactly the same attached comment: 'Saw this and thought of you.' Ho, rilly? Is this blogger's life really that predictable? Okay, you probably shouldn't answer that.
Then, sadly, dear blog reader, there are people at large in society who are just, simply, scum.
Nice to see the Daily Scum Mail have managed to find an EU dimension to the current crisis, is it not?
It's interesting to know that there are, seemingly, people in the world (well, people in America, anyway) who believe that Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, the Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Tunisia all in Europe. What the actual fek?! Mind you, we shouldn't really be too surprised - look at their President, after all.
And now, dear blog reader, a George Harrison quilt blanket. Very definitely a case of want one for the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House. Obviously, purely so that this blogger will be able to - truthfully - boast that he has 'slept with George Harrison.' You will also, hopefully - if you're an insufferable Be-Atles nerd like this blogger - note that they've included the wrong cover for Living In The Material World. They've got the cover of Martin Scorsese's 2011 documentary, George Harrison: Living In The Material World rather than the - similarly-named - cover for the 1973 LP from which Scorsese took the title of his film. Pfft. Call yourselves fans?!
It's also worth remembering that in a mere two week time - on 23 April, as it happens - it will be Saint George's Day. And, as Keith Telly Topping always reminds From The North's dear blog readers around this time of the year, the following day is Saint Ringo's Day. Celebrate them both in any way you see fit.
Even - indeed, particularly - if you are, at that stage, suffering from anything potential contagious. Or shameful. Or both.
'You are surrounded by armed bastards!'Life On Mars is to return for a third and final series set in the 1970s, 1980s and an alternate present, its creator has confirmed. The cult BBC series, which was broadcast to great acclaim between 2006 and 2007 and followed a detective - presumed dead or in a coma after a car accident - who was transported back in time to 1970s Manchester. A huge ratings success with an epic soundtrack and memorable central pairing of the cantankerous, sweary boss Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) and his time-travelling sidekick, Sam Tyler (John Simm), it also led to a - rather decent - 2008 to 2010 spin-off, Ashes To Ashes, starring Glenister and Keeley Hawes. In a Twitter Interweb chat to accompany an online watch-along for the show's two series, Life On Mars co-creator Matthew Graham said: 'We would never make another Mars unless we really had something to say and could push the envelope all over again. Finally, we have something.' Seemingly confirming Glenister's return, he added: 'There are bad things and there are monsters. These things are real. But to get to you they have to get through the Guv [Gene Hunt]. And the Guv is putting his driving gloves on.' Graham said the final series would be set in Manchester and London, 'set partially in the 1970s, partially in the 1980s and mostly in an alternate now.' He hopes that as many of its previous cast as possible will return, name-checking Annie Cartwright (Liz White) and Gene's rival Detective Chief Inspector Derek Litton (Lee Ross). 'When you wonder who will be coming back for The Final Chapter - think Avengers Assemble,' Graham said. Comprising 'four or five episodes,' Graham also mentioned a possible show-within-a-show format, featuring a programme called Tyler: Murder Division. Despite posting the tweets on 1 April, Graham later confirmed that it was not an April fool. A previous revival was reportedly turned down by the BBC, according to Graham's fellow creator Ashley Pharoah. In 2018, he said it had 'not made financial sense' for the corporation to make a mooted 1970s-set Christmas special.
Philip Morris, the lost episode specialist, has reportedly said that he 'knows' of 'at least six' episodes of Doctor Who, currently missing from the BBC's archives, which are currently in the hands of private collectors. Morris, the founder of the Television International Enterprises Archive, has already returned nine - previously lost - episodes of Doctor Who to the Beeb. At a recent public event he said: 'I have a lot of friends who are collectors and I will tell you straight away now that at least six episodes - missing episodes - exist, to my knowledge, in the hands of private collectors.' It is not known whether these six are in addition to The Web Of Fear episode three, which Morris reportedly found in Nigeria but which was missing from the shipment of footage returned back to the UK in 2013.
National treasure Stephen Fry will star in a new online radio play to raise funds for the theatre industry as it deals with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Emily Atack, Sarah Hadland and Russell Tovey will also appear in The Understudy, based on the novel by David Nicholls. The play will be broadcast online in two parts in May to members of the public who have bought a five knicker 'ticket'. All of the actors involved will record their lines separately at home. Nicholls said that he was 'hugely excited' to see his 2005 novel 'come to life on a new online stage.' Fry said he hoped lots of people would 'combine a good time with support for our wonderful theatre industry.' Proceeds will be donated to the Theatre Development Trust, Acting for Others and other charities. The Understudy tells of a struggling actor who is hired to understudy a film star in a West End show. Tovey plays the lead role of Stephen McQueen, while Jake Ferretti plays the actor whose shoes he hopes to fill. Minar Anwar, Sheila Atim and Layton Williams are among the other actors involved. Produced by the Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield, the play will be broadcast on 20 and 27 May at www.understudyplay.com. For but four smackers, meanwhile, theatre fans can stream Fleabag, the original one-woman show that spawned Phoebe Waller-Bridge's hugely over-rated BBC sitcom. Waller-Bridge's solo performance, recorded at London's Wyndham's Theatre in 2019, is available from the Soho Theatre's website for just three weeks. Proceeds will be donated to UK-based charities 'on the front lines of combating the Covid-Nineteen pandemic.' Waller-Bridge said she hoped the film of her performance 'can help raise money while providing a little theatrical entertainment in these isolated times. Now go get into bed with Fleabag!' she continued. 'It's for charity!' On Monday, the Society of London Theatre announced it was cancelling all West End theatre performances until 31 May. 'We are sorry that in these testing and difficult times you are not able to enjoy the show you have booked for,' it told ticket holders in a statement.
And, speaking of online entertainment to keep our spirits up in these strange and troubled times, dear blog reader, here's another national treasure (and From The North favourite) yer actual Elvis Costello - from self-isolation - performing a stunning version of Nick Lowe's '(What's So Funny About) Peace, Love & Understanding?' as part of the Artists4NHS campaign.
Sadly, now we come to what is rapidly becoming the part of this blog which attracts the most traffic, the regular obituaries. And we start with a big one. Honor Blackman, the original feisty female agent in The Avengers, has died at the age of ninety four. The series made her a role model for an emerging generation of empowered women and an object of desire for men. The characters that Honor played were both sexy and intelligent and more than a match for her male co-stars. She was often compared to Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, although one cannot imagine them throwing villains around like her Avengers character, Cathy Gale.
Honor Blackman was born into a lower Middle Class family in Plaistow in August 1925. Her father, a civil servant, reportedly offered Honor a choice of presents for her sixteenth birthday; a bicycle or elocution lessons. She chose the latter. She described her elocution teacher as 'an inspirational woman' who introduced her to poetry and the theatre and who advised her father to enrol her in the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Honor studied part-time while holding down a clerical job in the Home Office and, with war raging, she also worked as a motor cycle dispatch rider.
Her first acting job was as an understudy in a West End play called The Guinea Pig and, when the lead actress became ill, she was asked to step in and take over. Further theatre roles followed before she made her film debut in Fame Is The Spur, starring Michael Redgrave in 1947. Her character died following a riding accident, a fate she narrowly avoided in real life when, during filming, her horse stepped on her hair as she lay on the ground. Her first major role was alongside Dirk Bogarde in Quartet the following year.
In the early 1950s, British cinema was dominated by the Rank Organisation and Blackman joined their Company of Youth, set up to promote up-and-coming actors and actresses. Dubbed The Charm School by the press, it nurtured the careers of, among others, Diana Dors, Joan Collins, Christopher Lee, Claire Bloom and Anthony Steele. Over the next ten years Honor appeared in a string of British films including A Night To Remember, which told the story of the Titanic disaster and the much-admired So Long At The Fair, again with Bogarde.
Her other movie appearances included 1949’s A Boy, A Girl & A Bike and Conspirator (also 1949) alongside Elizabeth Taylor. She also appeared in the comedy The Square Peg (1958), Life At The Top (1965) with Laurence Harvey, The Virgin & The Gypsy (1970), the Western Shalako (1968) with Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot and Something Big (1971) opposite Dean Martin. She also played Hera in the action classic Jason & The Argonauts (1963).
Having spent a decade developing her film career, Honor moved into television with a regular role - as Nicole, the secretary to Dan Dailey's character, Tim Collier - in ITV's The Four Just Men (1959). In 1961 the producers of the ATV series, The Avengers, were looking for a new partner for Patrick Macnee, to replace his original co-star, Ian Hendry, who had decided to leave the series. Blackman's character, Cathy Gale, became something of an icon for the growing numbers of women who were taking advantage of social changes to assert their rights to equality in British life. A widow and 'a woman of independent means' Cathy showed that women could have it all. She was intelligent and witty, had her own life and career (as an anthropologist) and, with her skills in unarmed combat, was capable of holding her own in both a melee and in a male-dominated world.
As the series developed, Blackman skilfully used flirting and innuendo to create an unspoken sexual tension between Mrs Gale and Steed, although they were never intimate. Both characters had far too much style and charm for anything as awkward as The Sex to get in the way of their easy, relaxed friendship and witty badinage.
During her time with The Avengers, Blackman and Macnee recorded a - cheerfully dreadful - novelty single, 'Kinky Boots'. A flop on its first release, in 1964, the record became a surprise hit when it was re-released twenty six years later, leading to an appearance by the duo on Top Of The Pops. A fact which says far more about the wretched state of the charts in 1990 than it does about any inherent musical quality to the song, let it be noted.
Blackman stayed with The Avengers for two series but left when she was offered the role of Pussy Galore opposite Sean Connery in a third James Bond film, Goldfinger (1964). The producer, Cubby Broccoli, cast her on the strength of her appearances in The Avengers, despite the fact that the series had not yet been shown in the US. 'The Brits would love her because they knew her as Mrs Gale,' he said. 'The Yanks would like her because she was so good, it was a perfect combination.' The film watered down Ian Fleming's original character - who, in the novel, is aggressively lesbian - but, nevertheless, Blackman's Pussy combined all the best characteristics of Cathy Gale, although she was eventually seduced by the womanising Bond in the final scenes.
At thirty nine, Blackman was actually five years older than Connery and, at the time, was the oldest actress to play a Bond girl. 'Most of the Bond girls have been bimbos,' she once said. 'I have never been a bimbo.'
While Goldfinger made her internationally known, it failed to provide a springboard for her film career. By now, she was forty and producers tended to overlook her undoubted skills in favour of younger actresses.
Nevertheless, in the UK at least, she remained a major figure. Blackman made use of her judo and martial arts skills on The Avengers and even published Honor Blackman's Book Of Self-Defence in 1965. She was, famously, photographed with The Rolling Stones at a reception for The Supremes in the same year. And, she was politically active from an early age. She campaigned on behalf of Tom Houston, the Liberal Party candidate for the City of Westminster in 1966.
Nevertheless, in an interview in 2009, she deplored the lack of good roles for older women. 'We have all these older men with their guts hanging out still acting - they can barely put their belts round their stomach so have to belt up round their crotch - and they all carry on getting roles and are accepted and praised, whereas older women are given rather boring parts or are cut off at their prime.' She appeared in a number of films, including Hammer's adaptation of The The Devil ... A Daughter (1976) and also in the theatre, particularly in musicals. She was in the 1981 stage revival of The Sound Of Music, which starred Petula Clark and opened to rave reviews. She also appeared in A Little Night Music, On Your Toes and Nunsense.
In 2005 she toured as Mrs Higgins, in a production of My Fair Lady, before taking over from Sheila Hancock in a West End production of Cabaret. She also returned to television including a role in the 1986 Doctor Who serial, The Trial Of A Time Lord, alongside Colin Baker. Sadly, it was a crap story, best forgotten and wasted Blackman's talents on a nothing role. She also won a new generation of fans when she played Laura West in the long-running ITV sitcom, The Upper Hand.
She had a brief spell as the glamorous Rula Romanoff in Coronation Street in 2004 and made a number of cameo appearances including a part in John Malkovich's black comedy Colour Me Kubrick in 2005 and the BBC series, Hotel Babylon, in 2009. Blackman took a guest role on Midsomer Murders, as an ex-racing driver. In 2007, she participated in the BBC project, The Verdict. She was one of twelve well-known figures who made up a jury to hear a fictional rape case. She guest-starred in Casualty and By Any Means and also appeared in a number of episodes of Never The Twain with Donald Sinden and Windsor Davies as the vet Veronica Barton and in the 2012 movie Cockneys Versus Zombies. Her final screen appearance was You, Me & Them (2015). In 2000, Blackman received a special BAFTA award along with Joanna Lumley, Diana Rigg and Linda Thorson recognising their work on The Avengers.
She also toured a number of one-woman shows entitled, Honor Blackman As Herself. Away from the set Blackman was a supporter of Republic, an anti-monarchy pressure group and was alleged to have turned down the offer of a CBE in 2002. She was also active in politics as a high profile member of the Liberal Democrats.
She was married and divorced twice, to Bill Sankey and the actor Maurice Kaufmann and had two children - Lottie and Barnaby - with the later. After her divorce from Kaufmann, she did not remarry and stated that she preferred 'being single, watching football!' Honor owned a summer home in Islesboro, Maine and also spent quite a bit of time on the US West Coast in California as a guest of her former Avengers co-star and long-time friend Patrick Macnee prior to his death in 2015.
Wikipedia have reported the death this month of one of this blogger's favourite screenwriters, the great Roger Marshall at the age of eighty six. The critic Leslie Halliwell's description of Roger Marshall as 'a writer of superior thrillers' is somewhat faint-praise for one of television's most inventive, classy authors. Cambridge-educated, Marshall's introduction to TV was as an (often uncredited) member of Ralph Smart's writing team on late-1950s ITV film series like William Tell, HG Wells' Invisible Man and Danger Man. He subsequently moved to America to work, briefly, on Sea Hunt. Returning to England, Marshall wrote for No Hiding Place, The Edgar Wallace Mysteries (including one particularly well-remembered episode, Game For Three Losers), Redcap, Armchair Theatre and The Avengers, where his witty scripts were perfectly suited to the  style of the production. That was before a - rather public - falling out with producer Brian Clemens in 1967 led to his departure from the show (which, arguably, never fully recorded from his loss). 'The name of the fecund and indefatigable Brian Clemens is all over the show,' he later noted. 'No exaggeration to say his influence pervades almost every scene. Lead writer, associate producer and story editor. In my book that was at least one job too many. I wrote six episodes for the first Diana Rigg series; Clemens and I wrote fifty per cent of the series between us, only two of which - three at the most - I can view with [any] pride and pleasure. Working on the show had started to become a chore. No longer was a writer able to write what he wanted and in the way he wanted. Wit and style were being squeezed out. It was time to say goodbye.' He also wrote, with his good friend the late Robert Holmes, one of the best - and certainly most under-rated - British science fiction movies of the era, Invasion (1965). Marshall co-created ABC's long-running Public Eye the same year and, later, became a regular contributor to Euston productions like Special Branch and The Sweeney. His attempt to create an intelligent BBC variant of the latter, however, was sabotaged by production follies and he disowned the resulting Target (1977). He worked on Zodiac, Rooms, Hunter's Walk, Van Der Valk, Kids, Survivors, The Gentle Touch and The Professionals and created series like The Travelling Man, Mitch, Missing From Home and Floodtide. Marshall also contributed to London's Burning and The Ruth Rendell Mysteries. His screenplays include Solo For Sparrow, What Became Of Jack & Jill?, Hello-Goodbye, ... And Now The Screaming Starts and Theatre Of Death. Roger was married to Jill with whom he had two sons, Rodney and Christopher. He was a noted fan of Ipswich Town and Northamptonshire county cricket club.
Bill Withers, the influential US soul singer who wrote 'Lean On Me', 'Ain't No Sunshine' and 'Lovely Day' has died aged eighty one of heart complications. Withers wrote and recorded several other major hits including 'Use Me' and 'Just The Two Of Us', before retiring in the mid-1980s and, for the most part, staying out of the public eye. He is survived by his wife Marcia Johnson and their two children, Todd and Kori. The family statement reads: 'We are devastated by the loss of our beloved, devoted husband and father. A solitary man with a heart driven to connect to the world at large, with his poetry and music, he spoke honestly to people and connected them to each other. As private a life as he lived close to intimate family and friends, his music forever belongs to the world. In this difficult time, we pray his music offers comfort and entertainment as fans hold tight to loved ones.' Withers' songs are some of the most beloved in the American songbook. 'Ain't No Sunshine' - which Bill memorable performed on the BBC's The Old Grey Whistle Test - is regarded as one of the all-time great break-up songs, while 'Lean On Me', an ode to the supportive power of friendship, was performed at the inaugurations of two presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Heavily influenced by the church hymns and gospel music of his childhood, it was his first and only number one single on the US Billboard charts, in 1972. It has also become an anthem during the coronavirus outbreak, sung by schoolchildren and in impromptu balcony renditions to show support for one another. 'Just The Two Of Us', another song of solidarity, was successfully covered by Will Smith and sampled by Eminem (as well as being spoofed by Bill Cosby and Mike Myers). The joyous 'Lovely Day', with its signature eighteen-second-long held note, was Bill's only UK Top Ten hit, reaching number seven in 1978 and then, in remixed for, number four a decade later. Withers also won three Grammy awards from nine nominations and entered the Rock and/or Roll Hall of Fame in 2015. Born William Harrison Withers Junior in 1938, he faced a difficult childhood in Slab Fork, West Virginia. A stutter held him back from making friends and, after his father died when Bill was thirteen, his grandmother helped to raise him. Withers would write a tribute to her with the song 'Grandma's Hands' from his 1971 debut Just As I Am: 'Grandma's hands used to issue out a warning/She'd say, "Billy don't you run so fast/Might fall on a piece of glass/Might be snakes there in that grass."' The intro was sampled by Blackstreet for their 1996 'No Diggity'. Withers spent nine years in the US Navy before pursuing a career in music. After moving to Los Angeles in 1967, he found a job making toilet seats and recorded demos during the night after his shifts ended. Possessed of a smooth and soulful baritone, he signed to Sussex Records and enlisted Booker T Jones to produce Just As I Am (on which he was backed by most of Booker T & The MGs). That LP spawned 'Ain't No Sunshine', which won Withers his first Grammy for best R&B song. He then poured his experiences of growing up in Slab Fork, a tough coal-mining town with a strong community ethos, into 'Lean On Me'. His time with Sussex Records didn't end well, however. 'They weren't paying me,' he told Rolling Stone in 2015. 'They looked at me and said, "So, I owe you some money, so what?" I was socialised in the military. When some guy is smushing my face down, it doesn't go down well.' He claims to have erased an entire LP that he had recorded for the label in a fit of pique. 'I could probably have handled that differently,' he said. Withers subsequently signed with Columbia Records and married his second wife, Marcia Johnson, shortly afterwards, in 1976; she became his manager. Withers continued having hit records with Columbia, including the laid-back and optimistic 'Lovely Day'. After three LPs in three years, Withers claimed Columbia's head of A&R, Mickey Eichner, prevented him from going into the studio, leaving a gap of seven years between 'Bout Love (1978) and Watching You Watching Me (1985). After the latter failed to chart, Withers went into early retirement. The 2009 documentary, Still Bill, explored his reasons for quitting the music industry and painted the picture of a fulfilled musician and human being. Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, the film critic Roger Ebert said: '[Withers] still lives and survives as a happy man. Still Bill is about a man who topped the charts, walked away from it all in 1985 and is pleased that he did.'
The former Emmerdale and Foyle's War actor Jay Benedict has died at the age of sixty eight. The American born actor's agency announced that Benedict died on 4 April as a result of contracting Covid-Nineteen. Benedict was born in Burbank but moved to Europe in the 1960s and spent most of his working life in the UK. He appeared as Newt's father in James Cameron's Aliens and as 'rich twit' in the final film of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises. He is perhaps best known in the UK for playing Doug Hamilton in Emmerdale and John Kieffer in Foyle's War. His first film role, at the age of eleven, was in the 1963 Tony Saytor movie La Bande à Bobo. In 1977, he played Deak in the Tosche Station scenes in Star Wars, which were deleted from the film before release. Subsequent film appearances include the extended, The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission, Icon, The White Knight, The Russia House, Saving Grace and Rewind. In 2003 he was third lead in Vicente Aranda's version of Carmen, playing Don Prospero. In addition to English, he also worked in French and Spanish and performed widely on the continent, appearing as Paul Matthiews in the French day-time soap opera Cap Des Pins and William Wilbur in Le Grand Charles (a French mini-series about the life of Charles De Gaulle), among many other roles. He was married to actress Phoebe Scholfield and together they ran Sync or Swim, an ADR/Loop group. They also translated and wrote movies together - such as The Card Player (Il Cartaio) - which they translated into English. They had two sons: Leopold and Freddie. Jay also had a daughter from a previous marriage.
And, finally, an 'Edited To Add' moment, dear blog reader: It occurred to this blogger shortly after posting this latest From The North update that looking back over the recent posts that I've made both here and on Facebook since this lockdown malarkey began, there has been plenty of humour - examples can be found above - but, along with most other people I suspect, there's been a slight undercurrent of grumbling. Whinging about the whole coronavirus thing and how it has affected the smooth(ish) running of my/our lives. Now, that's fair enough, don't get me wrong, we all of us want a peaceful, straightforward, relatively quiet life in which things go according to some sort of plan. But, of course, this is The Real World and every now and then, life has a habit of throwing us a nasty googly (that's a cricketing metaphor, incidentally. If you want to use baseball, football or croquet instead, be my guest). This current situation, admittedly, has been (and remains) nastier and googlier than most. Therefore, here is a necessary statement of gratitude.
I'm grateful. There, I've said it.
I'm grateful that, touch wood, I have my health more-or-less in tact when many others - through absolutely no fault of their own - do not. And that, despite some underlying health conditions, I am as safe as it is possible to be in the current circumstances.
I'm grateful that I have a job which allows me to work from home and still get paid without having to depend on the generosity of the state.
I'm grateful that I have friends and family with whom I am in - virtual ... and, via the telephone, actual - contact and who, as far as I am aware, are also managing to survive the present difficulties to the best of their abilities.
I'm grateful - and this is a really big one - that I live in a country which provides World Class universal health care for all, regardless of status or wealth, staffed by dedicated, hard-working and brilliant people. Others in the world are not so fortunate.
I'm grateful for the supermarkets which are still open, that the buses are running (even if it is a reduced service), that the banks and Post Offices haven't closed so that, on the odd occasion once a week when I do have to leave the safety of my own gaff and venture out to run some - necessary - errands, I am able to do them and get there and back as swiftly as possible. And thus, minimise my risk of exposure to anything nasty or exposing any one else to anything nasty I might have.
I'm grateful for those who are currently working their knackers off to keep this country's infrastructure up and running - the carers, the council workers, the police, the broadcasters and, yes, even the politicians; often under-appreciated, under-paid and whinged-about by those for whom the phrase 'First World Problem' doesn't seem to have penetrated their thick heads. It sometimes takes a situation as apocalyptically dreadful as the current one to make people realise just what is 'an essential service' and what is, most definitely, not.
I'm grateful that I have 'stuff to do' around the house when I'm not working to keep my mind off Covid-Nineteen for, at least, a little bit of each day. Sanity demands that you can't spend every twenty four hours thinking about nothing except this awful virus.
I'm grateful for the Interweb, for Facebook and e-mail and for TV and radio as ways of keeping in touch with the world outside the four walls of Stately Telly Topping Manor.
I'm grateful that most of us seem to have adapted to the 'new normal' and, the odd - sometimes understandable - whinge aside, we have done so with characteristically British acceptance, humour and resolution. Resolution to, hopefully, come out the other side of all this better, wiser and perhaps more compassionate people. It's asking a lot of us as a society, I krealise, but surely it isn't too much to hope for?
And, most importantly, I'm grateful that I'm alive. When many others are not.
I'm grateful. Just thought I needed to say that out loud. Once. Or possibly twice.
Stay safe, dear blog reader, be brave, be appreciative, be magnificent and, to quote someone with far more money - but also, rather more class - than myself, we will meet again. And, for the second blog running, a necessary reminder that whilst you may be on your own at the moment - on several levels - you are not alone.

The comedian Tim Brooke-Taylor has died at the age of seventy nine from complications related to the coronavirus, his agent has confirmed. The entertainer, best known as one-third of the popular 1970s TV show The Goodies (1970 to 1982) and BBC radio's panel show I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue (which began in 1972), died on Sunday. Fellow Goodies star Graeme Garden said that he was 'terribly saddened by the loss of a dear colleague and close friend of over fifty years. [Tim] was a funny, sociable, generous man who was a delight to work with. Audiences found him not only hilarious but also adorable. His loss at this dreadful time is particularly hard to bear and my thoughts are with Christine, Ben, Edward and their families,' Garden added.
Tim's career spanned more than six decades and his comedic roots lay in The Cambridge Footlights, which he joined in 1960. Membership of Footlights first brought him into contact with Garden and Bill Oddie as well as future Monty Python's Flying Circus stars John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle. One of his biggest contributions to British comedy was co-writing and performing in the famous Four Yorkshiremen sketch with Chapman, Cleese and Marty Feldman, originally for the ITV comedy At Last The 1948 Show! The sketch later became a popular fixture of the Monty Python team's live shows. But it was as one of The Goodies that Tim found international fame, becoming a household name in Britain, Australia and New Zealand with the comedy attracting millions of viewers in its heyday. A recent release of the complete Goodies BBC collection reveals that the series could often be patchy and that many of the episodes have not aged all that well. But, to an eight-nine-ten-eleven year old in the mid-1970s, it was, trust this blogger, the funniest thing on TV by miles. As part of The Goodies, Tim also enjoyed an unlikely pop career. At a time when novelty comedy songs regularly made the UK charts, the trio achieved five top forty hits in 1975 at the height of their popularity on TV, the biggest of them, 'The Funky Gibbon'. These mostly weren't very good - especially 'The Funky Gibbon'! - although, even then this blogger must admit he does have something of a soft spot for their cover of 'Wild Thing'!
'Television loves a formula' the critic Roger Wilmut in the book From Fringe To Flying Circus (Queen Anne, 1985). 'Any idea which produces good rating is certain to promote a flock of imitators, all conceived within a tight predictable format, which can easily be written, directed and acted by a team of experienced hacks who appear to be working in their sleep. In 1970 the current formula was 'caper'-type crime series, with teams of criminals or semi-official law enforcers, lots of action and little plot. It was partly to send up this idea that Garden, Brooke-Taylor and Oddie created the formula for their own series - except that, wisely, the formula was kept as unspecific as possible.'
Timothy Julian Brooke-Taylor was born in Buxton, Derbyshire, the grandson of Francis Pawson, a parson who played centre-forward for Cambridge University and England in the 1880s, helping to explain, perhaps, Tim's lifelong support for Derby County. Tim's mother was an international lacrosse player and his fifty-nine year old father was a solicitor and local coroner, who had been wounded in the World War One and was serving in the Home Guard when Tim, his third child was born. 'I was a mistake, as far as I can gather,' Brooke-Taylor later recalled. His father died when he was thirteen and his mother got a job as a school matron. A somewhat mischievous child, Tim had - he later claimed with some pride - been expelled from primary school at the age of five. He then went to Thorn Leigh Pre-Preparatory School, Holm Leigh Preparatory School (where he won awards for his prowess as a spin-bowler in the cricket team) and Winchester College which he left with seven O-levels and two A-levels in English and History. After teaching for a year at a prep school in Hemel Hempstead and a term back at Holm Leigh as a master, he studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge. There, he read Economics and Politics - before changing to Law - and mixed with other budding comedians, including John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden and Jonathan Lynn in the Footlights Club (of which Tim became President in 1963). That year, in the aftermath of previous groundbreaking Cambridge reviews, like Share My Lettuce (1957) and Beyond The Fringe (1961), the Footlights sent out another show that was to have a profound effect on the future of comedy, H,umphrey Barcley's Cambridge Circus (initially A Clump Of Plinths). Whilst this wasn't as innovative as its immediate predecessors (though it did enjoy a successful Edinburgh residency, a West End run and, later, a world tour), rather it was the cast who were to achieve lasting greatness. These included Lynn, David Hatch, later to become head of BBC Radio comedy and Jo Kendall, along with two sets of writing partners, Cleese and Chapman and Tim and Bill Oddie. Halfway through the world tour, Chapman was forced to leave the cast to return to England for his doctorate exams and was replaced by another young medical student, Graeme Garden.
With the success of Cambridge Circus, BBC producer Trevor Nunn commissioned some of the team to record a radio series, I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again (1964 to 1973). It was also, of course, the gestation, not only for the most influential comedy series of all time, Monty Python's Flying Circus, but also for one of the great cult series of the 1970s, The Goodies.
In the mid-1960s, Brooke-Taylor performed in On the Braden Beat with Bernard Braden, taking over a slot recently vacated by Peter Cook. Tim played a reactionary city gent who believed he was the soul of tolerance despite frequent displays of right-wing bigotry. By 1967, Tim had teamed with Eric Idle as a writer on The Frost Report and Oddie and Garden were writing sitcoms for Humphrey Barley at LWT when Brooke-Taylor with John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman created At Last, The 1948 Show! for Rediffusion, produced by David Frost. As a building block in the comedy of both Monty Python and The Goodies, At Last! was vital. The series, perfected the manic exploitation of unrelated sketches, which became Monty Python Flying Circus's trademark (some sketches - most notably, The Four Yorkshiremen - subsequently become so famous via Python remakes that many fans do not recognise their true origin). It also allowed Brooke-Taylor (who co-produced the series) room to experiment with slapstick, something that was to become The Goodies most celebrated (and notorious) aspects. The series, for example, included the memorable sketch in which Tim plays a man visiting a psychiatrist because he thinks he's a rabbit. One episode featured Bill Oddie as a hospital patient, visited by a robotic, cliché-spouting Brooke-Taylor. Tim followed this by spending 1968 as Marty Feldman's straight-man in his BBC series, Marty along with John Junkin and Roland MacLeod. Brooke-Taylor had already been involved (in 1967) as a writer on the BBCs Twice A Fortnight, a late Saturday night sketch-based variety show featuring Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Oddie, Garden, Dilys Watling and Jonathan Lynn. 1968 saw a short lived BBC2 production called Broaden Your Mind - a star vehicle for Garden and Brooke-Taylor which also featured Oddie as an occasional writer/performer.
During this period Brooke-Taylor appeared as a variety of characters in the short-film One Man Band directed by and starring Orson Welles. Welles was in London and got in touch with Brooke-Taylor who recalled: 'Graeme Garden and I made two series of a sketch show called Broaden Your Mind in 1968 and 1969. We were watching the first programme of the second series in Graeme's flat. As it ended the phone rang. He answered it, said a few words, put the phone down and said: "That was Orson Welles." I remember saying "What a coincidence, I was expecting a call from The Pope." It was Orson. He'd seen some of the first series and got our phone numbers. We [met] him the next day and agreed to write and shoot some stuff with him.' The bulk of filming was completed in 1969, although assorted linking narrations and inserts were filmed by Welles in 1971. After Welles' death in 1985, all of his unfinished films were bequeathed to his long-term companion Oja Kodar and she, in turn, donated many of them to the Munich Film Museum for preservation and restoration. In 1999 the Munich Film Museum edited together the complete footage of One Man Band into a twenty nine-minute cut, which has subsequently been screened at film festivals. The full restored footage has never been released on DVD, although an unrestored print was used in Vassili Slovic's acclaimed 1995 documentary Orson Welles: The One Man Band.
As a result of collaborating with Welles on the uncompleted project, Tim worked with the celebrated auteur again on Nicolas Gessner and Luciano Lucignani's 12+1 (also known as The Thirteen Chairs). Filmed from early 1969. Brooke-Taylor remembered: 'I went to film in Cinecitta and was in the producer's office. Ed Pope was on the phone trying to persuade Orson to do the film. He was running through a list of the cast, big names but Orson was not liking them. Eventually Pope got to my name. Pope had no clue who I was and asked where I might be. I nervously put my hand up and was given the phone with the whisper "Get [Welles] to do it." A limo was ordered for me to meet Orson in a café in the Via Veneto. Orson's first words were 'This is a load of crap.' He was right but I kept pointing out the good bits as I desperately wanted him to do it. We agreed to completely re-write his scenes. He originally was going to be a magician, but we re-wrote the scene with him as a ham actor doing Doctor Jekyll & Mister Hyde. We shot most of it in a cinema in Rome and some in The Players' Theatre in London. There were evening shoots in Rome. Orson would occasionally get annoyed with the director and ask me to take over. He'd usually had a drink or two and I found myself shouting "Get over there you big fat pouf." He'd stop, glare and then smile and return to doing what I'd asked. He knew he and I were on the same side. It's not a great film, but I thought he was terrific to work with. When I got back to London we still had some filming to work on his TV project. When I disagreed over something he said "Just because you've been in a B-movie doesn't mean you know everything now." He grinned and said "Sorry, I meant an A-movie" remembering he was in it as well. I didn't see him again after that. But I always had the best memories of working with a truly great man.'The Thirteen Chairs is also notorious for being Sharon Tate's final film before her shocking murder in August 1969.
Michael Mills and Barry Took, who brought Monty Python's Flying Circus to the BBC, were also responsible for the decision to give Brooke-Taylor, Garden and Oddie their own BBC2 series in 1970. Initially, to be known as Super-Chaps Three, then Narrow Your Mind, The Goodies' ludicrously addictive premise had Tim, Graeme and Bill playing, in effect, exaggerated versions of themselves. Many episodes were written in the same kind of stream-of-consciousness manner of Python, although, with Garden and Oddie's grounding in sitcom writing on Doctor In The House, the plot element was retained and therefore most episodes would have a storyline of sorts. The characters were: Brooke-Taylor, the patriotic, arrogant and cowardly 'Tim', Garden, the epitome of the over-the-top SF Mad Scientist 'Graeme' and Oddie, the scruffy, cynical, occasionally violent 'Bill' (a subtle role model for The Young Ones) who, despite his mania would often be the one to inject a note of horrid sanity into the proceedings. Although many of the aesthetic elements that are well remembered today did not arrive in the series until later in the decade (Oddie was not bearded in the first series, Tim had yet to acquire his union-jack waistcoat and Graeme his large-framed spectacles, for example), their first pad (there would be two later versions) was firmly rooted in the 1970s. Especially Graeme's computer (a couple of cardboard boxes with spools of tape on them) and Bill's Chairman Mao poster, which remained, along with Tim's throne and portrait of the Queen, unchanged throughout the decade.
Radio Times announced before the first episode that 'The Goodies - as opposed to The Baddies - are a firm of three who lay themselves open to some very strange commissions.' Tim, Bill and Graeme (as they proudly declared in their theme song) would do 'anything, anyplace, anytime.' In their first adventure, the trio were hired by the Royal Family, via their representative (George Baker) to protect the crown jewels. Needless to say, they failed miserably, though the palace were impressed by the fact that they had 'done their best.' This began a fascination with ridiculing royalty which was to last for most of the trio's career. There were some great visual gags in the episode, though the most important scene was the opening as the trio established themselves to the audience arriving at their new office and setting themselves up in business.
Tim: 'We are The Goodies'
Graeme/Bill: 'We know that!'
Tim: 'And we are, err, going to do 'good' to people.'
Bill: 'How wet!'
Certain elements became rapidly familiar; ridiculously speeded-up action sequences, with slapstick violence and Garden's brilliant talent for mimicry. Oddie's musical ability (previously a key element in I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again), with the help of musical arrangers Michael Gibbs (and later Dave McRae) became vital to The Goodies sense of focus with chase sequences often accompanied by Oddie's low-key songs such as 'Come Back' or 'Dumb Animals'. One plot device regularly used in the first series had Bill achieving 'total awareness' with the use of 'mind-expanding lemon sherbet'! The team parodied ITV adverts (Tim's frequent appearances as the brattish, incompetent Baked Beans kid) while the first series closer, Pirate Radio Goodies, was a wonderfully surreal tale of the the trio's attempts to start a station whilst possessing only one record ('A Walk In The Black Forest'). Later Graeme 'flips' and becomes an eye-rolling Nazi, almost drowning as he 'goes down with his ship.'
Tim: 'Leave him Bill, that's not our friend out there... He would've wanted it this way.'
 Bill: 'No he bloody wouldn't!'
Interestingly that episode was one of the few in the series to have been written by all three. Brooke-Taylor was closely involved with the setting up of the series and the characterisation of the trio but he was often unable to be involved in the actual writing of episodes because of his other work (chiefly in radio comedy). Some episodes carry the credit 'written by Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie (with Tim Brooke-Taylor's biro).' Brooke-Taylor described the writing process thus: 'Bill and Graeme tend to write very fast... also, they tend to divide the show up into two halves and write half each.'
    The second series, in 1971, featured the boys tracking the Loch Ness Monster, cleaning up Britain's environment, tackling women's lib, saving the national art treasures, bouncing around the world for charity, meeting 'The Baddies', evil android replicas of themselves and, most famously, battling Twinkle, a giant white kitten, who destroyed London in a brilliant send-up of King Kong. The episodes featured guest appearances by Stanley Baxter, Bernard Bresslaw, Roy Kinnear, June Whitfield, Patrick Troughton and Michael Aspel (whose contribution ended when the kitten stood on him). Kitten Kong, in fact, was so successful that the episode was re-filmed, with additional pussy material a few months later as Britain's entry to the Montreaux Light Entertainment festival where it won The Silver Rose. Tim can be seen in the first episode of the following series - The New Office - painting the trophy gold!
Wilmut states that: 'Much of the credit of the effectiveness of Kitten Kong and other Goodies film sequences must go to Jim Franklin, who directed the filming for the first two series; thereafter he also did the studio direction, taking over from Producer John Howard Davies. With his previous experience as a comedy film editor, he was the ideal choice.' Although there was no new Goodies series in 1972, the team were still active, appearing in a regular series of sketches on, of all thing, the BBC's Sunday evening variety show Engleburt With The Younger Generation. Their short inserts formed a counterpoint to the banality of the surrounding showbiz malarkey. Additionally, at Christmas, The Goodies appeared on that bastion of BBC1 respectability, Christmas Night With The Stars alongside Mike Yarwood, The Two Ronnies and the cast of Dad's Army. 'Ideally, The Goodies will be great in seventy years time' said Tim Brooke-Taylor at the time. 'Basically, we are trying to produce the greatest half-hour of comedy anyone has ever seen, each week.' Certainly, Oddie and Garden's scripts, which were described by Halliwell's TV Encyclopedia as 'anarchic, farcical comedy; each episode starting at least as a spoof on some aspect of life, but degenerating into a hopefully hilarious mess of sight gags, one-liners and elaborate visual trickery' loaned themselves very well to the excesses of the era. In many ways The Goodies are as much a part of Britain in the 1970s as flared trousers, kipper ties, power cuts, Derby County and glam rock. Their three-seater bicycle (in reality, a modified tandem) became one of televisions most easily recognisable icons. As this blogger wrote in The Guinness Book Of Classic British TV in 1993: '[they] may have worn Star Jumpers and Hai-Karate Aftershave, but television was a better place for having known them.'
By the time that Jim Franklin took over production, in 1973, The Goodies style and structure was firmly fixed. The series targets were the establishment, especially royalty (despite the fact that Prince Charles cited The Goodies as one of his favourites and even offered to play himself in the episode Scatty Safari) and, at the other extreme, the bland industry celebrities who were (allegedly) queuing up to appear as guests on the show. A Sunday evening BBC2 institution with a large following across the country, The Goodies was especially popular with students who, perhaps, recognised the Footlights backdrop to the humour. Despite the fixed thematic targets, however, The Goodies were also content to experiment with unusual subject matter, parodying film musicals in The Lost Island Of Munga (which brought a return for Henry McGee's Moriarty-style super-villain - he had previously appeared in The Stolen Musicians), science-fiction in Invasion Of The Moon Creatures (a story that ripped-off Doctor Who to such an extent that the TARDIS even put in an cameo appearance and ended parodying A Clockwork Orange), the NHS in Hospital For Hire (guest-starring Harry H Corbett and including a memorably understated sight-gag featuring Sooty) and the police in Goodies In The Nick.
The 1973 special, Superstar - this blogger's favourite Goodies episode, incidentally - took the trio one step closer to the pop-music adulation they seemingly craved. The late DJ John Peel appeared, introducing Bill (now renamed Randy Pandy) on a mock-up of Top Of The Pops. Sadly, the fact that Peely was doing a - not even remotely flattering - impression of filthy albino kiddie-fiddler Jimmy Savile means this classic episode is unlikely ever to be repeated on TV. According to an interview with Q magazine in 1990 (a story he subsequently repeated on the Lee & Herring BBC radio show a few years later), after Peel had given one of The Goodies singles a slagging in a music magazine, he claimed that he was threatened by two of the group in London's Marquee Club before the intervention of Robert Plant saved his ass. Peely commented, dryly, that he wouldn't have minded if it had been someone fashionable, but to get threatened with a chinning by the people who gave the world 'The Funky Gibbon' was a source of some embarrassment to him. Both Garden and Brooke-Taylor subsequently - and with much humour - denied that any such incident had ever taken place. Nevertheless, for the next few years, it is true that Peel bore as many and frequent attacks through the series (he 'Bored for Britain' at the Montreux Festival d'Boring in Daylight Robbery On The Orient Express, for example) as more obvious showbiz targets like Max Bygraves, Des O'Connor and, the series particular favourite, Nicholas Parsons (who always seemed to take his slagging with incredibly good grace).
Another of the most memorable early episode of The Goodies was the 1973 Christmas special, The Goodies & The Beanstalk, featuring a plethora of guest stars (Alfie Bass, John Cleese, Eddie Waring and Arthur Ellis). The trio, having 'fallen on hard times', left their Cricklewood base for Everest and an International edition of It's A Knockout with a difference. A week later the fourth series ended with The Race, a wonderfully absurd story of the lads entering their house into the Le Mans endurance event. It included a plethora of great sight gags and (for the time) relatively impressive special effects.
     Possibly the pinnacle of the group's creative time came with the thirteen-episode series of 1975. This was the era of the trio's recording career with the year's most successful episode, Kung-Fu Kapers (a visually stunning parody of the, then current, fascination with martial arts in the UK) spawning its own spin-off song, 'Black Pudding Bertha'. A single that got the very non-BBC word 'bum' into the Top Ten and onto daytime Radio One. By this time Monty Python's Flying Circus had ended and Oddie certainly thought this helped with The Goodies audience figures: 'We have a more tolerant audience, especially since Monty Python's not on ... people suddenly realised we were all right and we've been allowed into this group. Also, we asked the BBC to put us on at nine o'clock. People do tend to be very conscious of their image as viewers, especially in this kind of area where they know, for example, that we appeal to kids. A fully blown Time Out, Sounds and New Musical Express reader would not have been seen dead watching The Goodies at that point. You've got to be a Python fan because that's clever and we're not, we're childish.' This wasn't just the province of some viewer's prejudice - something the trio themselves acknowledged via the Cleese cameo in The Goodies & The Beanstalk where he looks disdainfully at Tim, Bill and Graeme and sneers: 'Kids show!' - it also extended to the BBC. Oddie continued: 'The first two seasons went out at times ranging between twenty-past-nine and half-past ten. By the fourth we were going out at six forty-five. Consequently the BBC started labelling us as "a kids show" because they realised the kids liked it. So then they started getting uptight about content.'
The whole 'Ecky-Thump' phenomena is a classic example of the group at work, taking a currently topical theme, cleverly subverting it to their own off-centre view of the world, getting one of the group (in this case, Bill) involved in a 'flip' variant of the main theme and ending the episode with a collection of chases and high-jinx, overplayed with Oddie's music. One scene in the episode, infamously, led to a viewers - Alex Mitchell - dying from heart-attack whilst laughing at it. (In 2012, Mitchell's granddaughter, Lisa Corke, suffered a heart-attack at the age of twenty three. She was diagnosed with Long QT Syndrome and the doctors caring for her believed it was likely that her grandfather suffered from the same, hereditary, condition.)
    The Goodies took over the British Film Industry in the fifth series opener and, after sacking all of the directors (even Ken Russell despite the fact that they rather liked him for having burned Oliver Reed at the stake) clashed over what sort of films to make. Next they were turned into clowns by some unusual US Army surplus tomato soup. Wacky Wales saw the trio involved with Druids ('The Seventh Day Repressionists' led by Jon Pertwee going so far over-the-top he was down the other side) and a religious Rugby competition.
Scatty Safari (featuring a guest appearance by another of the series regular 'showbiz' targets, Tony Blackburn) was a witty rant against zoos - and Rolf Harris, making this another episode you're unlikely to see any time soon - ending in the same manner as The Pied Piper Of Hamlyn ('the other side' of the mountain, in this case, being ATV). Graeme created 'Frankenfido', a dog designed to win Crufts made out of spare parts of people '... and Donny Osmand!' The Goodies spent an episode alone on a lighthouse that turned into a space rocket at the climax, became involved in South African politics (in a controversial episode which showed that Garden and Oddie, despite often being labelled as 'childish' could produce hard-hitting satire with the best of them) and squirted each other to death with tomato sauce in the Bun Fight At The OK Tea-Rooms. The series ended with Tim chanting 'I'm a tea-pot' and the trio considering cannibalism (and worse) when their pad becomes encased in concrete in The End.
Tim: 'I want a son. I must have a son. Graeme, you're a doctor ...'
Graeme: 'Sorry, can't be done.'
Tim: 'But a man isn't a man unless he exercises his right to fatherhood.'
Bill: 'You can exercise it all you like but you won't find much use for it!'
By now, the series extra-curricular success was exemplified not only by the hit records, but also the regular spin-off books which appeared and included much of the show's wackiness. The Goodies File (1975) and The Goodies Book Of Criminal Records (1976) cannily expanded on the basis of televised episodes and, much as the Monty Python books did, brought the series to a new generation of viewers. And, while The Goodies weren't The Monkees by any stretch of the imagination, the sight of Bill, Tim and Graeme on Top Of The Pops doing 'The In-Betweenies' or 'Wild Thing'does, undeniably, have a certain nostalgic kitsch about it.
One problem that sometimes impeded the programme was its very topical nature. Whilst Monty Python's Flying Circus remains (thematically) timeless, The Goodies often set their series firmly in the, then-present mid-1970s. As previously noted, when seen today, the episodes which still work are those that are not fixed with any reference point. Goodies Rule - OK?, the 1975 Christmas episode is a good example, set in an irreverent parallel world where, having fallen on hard times (again), The Goodies become Britain's only source of income, play 'Wild Thing' at Wembley to an audience entirely made up of screaming, spliff-smoking policemen and indirectly cause the election of a 'dummy' government which bans all humour. Finally, we had the memorable sight of television's puppets taking control, giant Dougal's and Zebadee's destroying Chequers in the process. Again the Christmas episode was an excuse for a number of guest stars - Patrick Moore, Sue Lawley and returns for Waring and Blackburn along with a regular collaborator, Nationwide anchorman Michael Barrett. Early Goodies episodes had tended to feature mock news reports read by Corbett Woodall in the role of a po-faced BBC newsreader (something he would repeat in drama series like The Brothers), although once Barrett had taken over this role, later series' brought a new proto-realism to these sequences. And, when David Dimbleby introduced the election-night shenanigans of Politics, one could almost be forgiven for thinking that we had stumbled onto a (sur)real episode of Panorama.
During 1976, The Goodies got involved in the cod war by breeding the world's largest fish - the wonderful Lips (Or Almighty Cod) - started a 1950s revival in Hype Pressure ('William and Grayfunkle' reaching the 1960s just as Tim turned into a Mike Mansfield-inspired mad-director and conceived plans to 'direct' World War III), became advertising men and sold the world string and, in another genre-hop, saw their sons revive cricket in 2001 ... And a Bit ('and so it came to pass that the MCC inherited the world and so retained The Ashes!') The series ended with an 'almost live' performance of some of their best known musical numbers; check out the (unintentionally) hilarious audience participation in 'Please Let Us Play'.
However, by 1977, The Goodies were known to be upset by the treatment of the series by the BBC. And not just because of the corporation's discomfort with the South African episode's political subtext. Whilst the six-episode series that year saw an erratic mix of brilliance (Dodonuts where Graeme finds a dodo in a pet shop: 'Was it going cheap?' asks Tim, 'No,' replies Graeme, 'it was going SQUAWK!' and the hilarious Scoutrageous) and ineptitude, some episodes veering radically from the sublime to the ridiculous (notably the trio's blinkered and suspiciously jealous pastiche of the new-wave scene, Punky Business), The Goodies had problems getting script approval. This was notably evident in Royal Command Performance, another - rather - gentle attack on the royal family which was scheduled for broadcast on the day that Princess Anne was due to give birth. In the event, the BBC postponed the broadcast, replacing it with a repeat. Garden said: 'To show how "in touch" the BBC were, our administrator said "I've got a solution - instead of putting this one out, why don't you put out the one you recorded last Friday?" We said, "This is the one we recorded last Friday!"'
   The 'Tim' of the show was a patriotic coward, much given to declaiming his views to the accompaniment of 'Land of Hope & Glory'. In The End as Tim began his standard speech, Bill took off the record and smashed it saying, 'Silent revolution, Lord Timbo!' As Oddie noted: 'Tim, quite rightly, claims that he is hardly ever seen in a shirt and tie (but somehow he feels he should be). There's no question that he's patriotic in so much as he's pro-royalty and I'm not.' Brooke-Taylor added: 'We've taken little sides of ourselves. I am a coward. Once, I was doing my 'Land of Hope & Glory' speech - "We must fight them et cetera" - that originally was all it was, but I said "I'd never do that, I might say it all, but at the end I'd run away." Which is, in fact, how it finished. The other two went out and I went and hid in the cupboard.''You've got to have a right wing neo-con loony,' Tim said in a 2005 radio interview. 'And with a name like mine I don't think I can be the revolutionary.'
      The 1977 Christmas special Earthanasia is one of the finest half-hours of TV comedy ever made. Recorded live, in 'real time', in one room with just the three characters (this is also what marks out episodes like The Lighthousemen and The End for greatness). It is announced that the world is to end in half-an-hour and The Goodies attempt to spend their final moments coming to terms with their 'worthless existence.' Bill, typically, wants to go out with a bang, skateboarding to Wembley to 'bang in a hat-trick' before sitting in on a reunion concert of The Beatles and still leaving time to 'pleasure' the whole of New Edition, Jane Fonda and 'hold hands with Doris Newbold.''You've never held hands with Doris Newbold?' asks an astonished Graeme. 'No' replies Bill. 'I've done everything else but I never held hands!' The episode highlights all that is, genuinely, great about The Goodies, a dark, claustrophobic, apocalyptic and wickedly funny world-view. In Earthanasia sacrifices were made, Bill even shaving his trademark beard off to fit in with the story. It would be over two years before their next series appeared and it was to be their last for the BBC.
The eighth series began in controversy, after one of their finest episodes, Politics, a superb exposé‚ on Satcchi & Satcchi-style marketing techniques and Brooke-Taylor's Rice & Lloyd-Webber-esque rise to prominence as 'Timita' - though the episode is chiefly remembered for its dreadful pun 'Don't cry for me, Marge and Tina.' The following story, Saturday Night Grease, apart from being eighteen months too late in terms of musical fashion, also landed the series in hot water with Mary Whitehouse. The opening sequence, taken almost shot-for-shot from Saturday Night Fever, caused Mary to blow her shit, stating: 'Tim Brooke-Taylor was seen undressing, then dressing to mock John Travolta in an exceedingly tight pair of underpants with a distinctive carrot motif on the front.' She went on to describe The Goodies as 'too sexually orientated' which proved that she had been watching a different programme from the rest of us for the previous decade (presumably, she took particular offence at the 1971 Gender Education episode featuring Beryl Reid as Desiree Carthorse, a thinly-disguised and not remotely flattering parody of herself). However, the Corporation's disappointingly noncommittal reaction to such crass and ignorant criticism convinced Brooke-Taylor, Garden and Oddie that their future lay elsewhere and, after completing the series (which included the superb Spielberg pastiche U-Friend, Or UFO) the team, including Producer/Director Bob Spiers, quit the BBC to join LWT. In many ways, however, the Saturday Night Grease debacle should have told The Goodies that their days were numbered (the normally effective chase-sequence, which takes up most of the second half of the episode, being particularly self-indulgent). It seemed that The Goodies were running out of ideas.
    Although the series they made for LWT in 1982 was not a patch on their BBC work, it did at least include two classics, Football Crazy and Big Foot. Nevertheless, the disappointing reaction to their LWT Christmas special, Snow White 2, must have been seen at the time as the final straw and The Goodies ended in 1982.
Brooke-Taylor subsequently drifted into routine, bland sitcoms (Me & My Girl, You Must Be The Husband) and radio comedy (the long-running Hello Cheeky and the even-longer-running I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue), whilst Garden and Oddie continued, for a time, as writing partners (penning Yorkshire's not-particularly-good Astronauts). Later, Garden returned to medicine (in the sense that one most associates him with fronting programmes about human anatomy). Tim also appeared regularly in advertisements, including Christmas commercials for Brentford Nylons and in a public information film for the E111 form. In 1971, he had played the short, uncredited role of a computer scientist in the film Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. After the end of The Goodies, Tim also worked again with Garden and Oddie on the animated series Bananaman, in which Brooke-Taylor was the narrator, as well as voicing the characters King Zorg of the Nurks, Eddie the Gent, Auntie and Appleman. He also loaned his voice to another children's series, Gideon. His CV included acting appearances in The Upper Hand, One Foot In The Grave, Heartbeat, Agatha Christie's Marple and Doctors. In February 1981 Brooke-Taylor was the subject of Thames Television's This Is Your Life. In 2004, Tim and Graeme were co-presenters of Channel Four's daytime game show, Beat The Nation. In 2013 he appeared in Animal Antics, a spoof news programme in which he was usually upstaged by a man dressed as a dog. Tim was also the author (and co-author) of several books based mainly on his radio and television work and the sports of golf and cricket. He also took part in the Pro-Celebrity Golf series (opposite Bruce Forsyth). Brooke-Taylor appeared on the premiere episode of the BBC golf-based game show, Full Swing and also fronted his own series Golf Club With Tim Brooke-Taylor in 2001. He served the University of St Andrews as Rector between 1979 and 1982.
A gentle and sensitive man he once admitted leaving his own living room when the weekly results were announced on Strictly Come Dancing, as he couldn't bear seeing anyone thrown off the show. Tim was appointed an OBE in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to light entertainment (it was an honour his character was always angling for in The Goodies. In Royal Command Performance he craved to be made both an earl and an OBE. That, Graeme quickly pointed out, would make him 'an earlobe!') After visiting Buckingham Palace to receive the honour from the Prince of Wales, Tim admitted 'one had to bite one's tongue,' having often poked fun at the ease with which honours were handed out in the 1970s. He is survived by his wife, Christine and their sons, Ben and Edward.

It is another melancholy beginning to the latest From The North update Keith Telly Topping is very much afraid, dear blog reader. Because, to quote yer actual Peter Davison in The Five Doctors: 'Great chunks of my past [are] detaching themselves like melting icebergs.' Which is, you know, sad.
After a spectacular start to his TV career in the 1960s, when he played leading roles in two classics by Dostoevsky, the actor David Collings, who has died aged this week seventy nine, became a cult favourite of SF fans with appearances in UFO, three Doctor Who stories and, most notably, as the popular character of Silver in the 1979 supernatural detective series Sapphire & Steel. Although he started out as a stage actor, Collings did not consolidate his reputation there until completing more than a decade of TV appearances, after which he took a string of important roles for the Royal Shakespeare Company. At the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park he was Polonius opposite Damian Lewis's title character in 1994's Hamlet, directed by Tim Pigott-Smith; David had first played a pretentious if benignly-intentioned Polonius for an RSC touring production with Philip Franks in 1987. Collings was a delicately-featured, red-haired actor with sensitive blue eyes who was equally good at playing neurotic and sweet-natured parts. On TV he also had a good line in eminent characters from history: Percy Grainger in Ken Russell's Song Of Summer (1968), Sir Anthony Babington in Elizabeth R (1971), John Ruskin in The Love School (1975), William Wilberforce in The Fight Against Slavery (1975) and William Pitt in Prince Regent (1979).
David Cressy Collings was born in Brighton in 1940 to George Collings, a greengrocer and his wife, Lillian. At Varndean Grammar School David enjoyed acting but had no intention of following the profession and, on leaving, started work as a designer in lettering, inheriting that interest from his father, a keen artist. From 1960 David was happily involved in amateur dramatics for the Withdean Players and the Lewes Little Theatre, but then was recommended by the actor Freda Dowie to director David Scase, who had been appointed to run the Liverpool Rep. After six months on Merseyside, Collings found himself pitched into TV through another unsolicited recommendation, this time from the actor John Slater, who thought he might be suitable casting in a 1964 Play Of The Week presentation of Crime & Punishment. Thus David found himself playing the impoverished Raskolnikov, murderer of an old pawnbroker, in a three-and-a-half hour existential epic alongside Steven Berkoff, Peter Bowles, Julia Foster and Sylvia Coleridge. Five years later he was in another Dostoevsky production, a six-part BBC adaptation of The Possessed, as the charismatic rabble-rouser Pyotr Verkhovensky, alongside Rosalie Crutchley, Joan Hickson and Angela Pleasence. In the same year he was the Clerk in a seven-episode BBC version of Canterbury Tales. Other early TV roles included a memorable episode of Gideon's Way - The Prowler - in which he played an emotionally disturbed man attacking young women. His movie debut came in an uncredited walk-on as one of the King's Messengers in 1966's A Man For All Seasons. David made a rare movie appearance as a lovable Bob Cratchit in the musical Scrooge (1970), with Albert Finney. In the same year as he was captured by aliens and imbued with superhuman powers in a very weird episode of UFO - The Psychobombs. In Doctor Who he was an unrecognisable alien, Vorus, with ideas of blowing-up The Cybermen with a home-made (stock-footage) rocket in 1975's so-bad-it's-brilliant Revenge Of The Cybermen, the robot-phobic Poul in the classic 1977 four-parter The Robots Of Death - which mixed an Agatha Christie-style whodunnit with hardcore SF elements straight out of Isaac Asimov - and, in 1983, the immortal title character in Mawdryn Undead. Mark Gatiss described Collings as 'the greatest Doctor we never had.' David finally got to play his own incarnation of the Time Lord in an audio adventure - Full Fathom Five - for Big Finish (2003), capitalising on his vast experience in radio drama.
Having played Legolas in The Lord Of The Rings on Radio 4 in 1981 and making a guest appearance in the final episode of Blake's 7, Collings joined the RSC for the first time as Newman Noggs in the 1985 revival of David Edgar's Nicholas Nickleby on tour and on Broadway. He also appeared in a star-studded chorus in the Don Taylor television script of Sophocles'Oedipus (1986), with Michael Pennington, Claire Bloom and John Gielgud. He voiced the eponymous lead for the long-running Japanese series Journey To The West, released in English-speaking countries as Monkey. The show was a popular hit and had a cult following, particularly with younger viewers. For the RSC subsequently, between 1996 and 2001, he played Thomas Cranmer in Henry VIII, Baron de Charlus in Tennessee Williams's Camino Real, Count Lerma in Schiller's Don Carlos, Sir Politic Would-Be in Ben Jonson's Volpone, Cardinal Pandulph in King John and Sancho in Lope de Vega's Madness In Valencia. After the millennium, he played a neat double of Sir Henry Green and the Duke of Surrey in Kevin Spacey's Richard II (2005), directed by Trevor Nunn at the Old Vic and graced a startling revival of Middleton and Rowley's Jacobean shocker The Changeling (2006) for Declan Donnellan's Cheek By Jowl company at The Barbican; the cast also included Will Keen, Olivia Williams and a then-unknown Tom Hiddleston. One of his favourite roles was appearing with his son, Samuel, in Toby Frow's 1950s revival of Marlowe's Edward II at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, in 2011; he was old Mortimer and Matrevis while Sam doubled as the king's lover, Piers Gaveston and his poker-wielding murderer, Lightborn. His CV also included guest-starring in Z-Cars, Holby City, Knock On Any Door, The Professionals, Danger Man, By The Sword Divided, Mystery & Imagination, The Troubleshooters, Love Hurts, Them & Us, The Regiment, The All Electric Music Arcade, The White Rabbit, Fame Is The Spur, The Strange Report, Take Three Girls, Breakaway, The Shadow Of The Tower, Special Branch, Sinister Street, Point Counter Point, Front Page Story, This Man Craig and Fall Of Eagles among many others. He was also noted for his children's television appearances including the role of Julian Oakapple in Midnight Is A Place. In 1989, he played the villainous Charn in Through The Dragon's Eye and had a recurring role as the headmaster in Steven Moffat's TV breakthrough, Press Gang. He was terrifying as the titular Lord Dark in Dark Shadows (part of the BBC's Look & Read strand). He also had roles in most of the major drama anthologies of the 1960s - Armchair Theatre and Play Of The Week on ITV and The Wednesday Play, Out Of The Unknown, Theatre 625, Omnibus, Play For Today and Thirty Minute Theatre for the BBC. David was married firstly to Deirdre Bromfield, whom he met at the Lewes Little Theatre, in 1962 (they divorced in 1975) and subsequently to the actor Karen Archer in 1983, from whom he was separated, although they reportedly remained close friends. He is survived by Karen, by their children, Samuel and Eliza, his daughter, Kate, from his first marriage and his sister, Nola. He was predeceased by Deirdre and two of their children, Matthew and Bethian. And, if you want to read a far better written obituary of David, check out Toby Hadoke's outstanding and touching piece for the Herald.
According to Wikipediaanother of this blogger's favourite TV actors, James Garbutt has also recently died aged ninety four. Born in 1925, in Houghton-le-Spring, James worked as an art teacher at schools in and around Newcastle and was a key member of The People's Theatre in Heaton, during the 1950s and 1960s where his contemporaries included Alan Browning and John Woodvine. He made his TV debut in Sid Chaplin and Alan Plater's acclaimed 1969 Wednesday Play, Close The Coalhouse Door, an affectionate history of the mining industry in the North East told through family drama, comedy sketches and songs. His subsequent credits included: The Troubleshooters, The Borderers, Z-Cars, The Onedin Line, Warship, Doctor Who (in the 1975 serial Genesis Of The Daleks), Bill Brand, Juliet Bravo, One By One, All Creatures Great & Small, Soldier, Soldier (in the episode Band Of Gold which launched Robson Green and Jerome Flynn's brief-but-spectacular pop career), Boon, Between The Lines, Casualty, The Witch's Daughter, Woodstock, Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?, Centre Play, The Stars Look DownCan We Get On Now, Please?, Play For Today, Floodtide, Rockcliffe's Babies, Gems, The Manageress, Spender, The House Of Eliott, Coronation Street, Badger and The Franchise Affair. He appeared in several movies including 1979's The Thirty Nine Steps (alongside David Collings), Superman (1980) and High Heels & Low Lifes (2001). He is probably best known as the proudly defiant socialist coal miner turned capitalist shop-keeper Bill Seaton in the first three series of When The Boat Comes In (1976 to 1977).
Another veteran actor and From The North favourite, Brian Dennehy has died aged eighty one. 'It is with heavy hearts we announce that our father, Brian passed away last night from natural causes, not Covid-related,' his daughter Elizabeth tweeted. 'Larger than life, generous to a fault, a proud and devoted father and grandfather, he will be missed by his wife Jennifer, family and many friends.' Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1938, Brian entered Columbia University in New York on a football scholarship before enlisting in the Marine Corps from 1958 to 1963, including a brief stint on Okinawa. Dennehy was known on the big-screen for roles in films such as Cocoon, Presumed Innocent, Tommy Boy, Romeo + Juliet and Gorky Park. His breakthrough role was opposite Sylvester Stallone in First Blood. He was also a celebrated stage presence, winning two TONY awards for Death Of A Salesman in 1999 and Long Day's Journey Into Night in 2003. Dennehy also won a Golden Globe for the TV mini-series adaptation of Death Of A Salesman. He was long associated with the Goodman Theatre in Chicago for his many performances in adapted works of Eugene O'Neill. His last appearance on stage was in 2016's White Rabbit Red Rabbit. 'Theatre is something that I've always enjoyed and that I care about,' Dennehy said in 2016. 'But as you get older, it is harder and harder to do, but it's always worthwhile.' He also amassed six EMMY nominations throughout his career, most recently in 2005 for sexual abuse drama Our Fathers. He featured in episodes of The West Wing (albeit, sadly, not a very good one), Thirty Rock, The Good Wife, Miami Vice, Kojak, Serpico, M*A*S*H, Dallas and Hunter. He starred in the popular crime drama Jack Reed TV movies and also appeared as a recurring character in the NBC sitcom Just Shoot Me! Most recently he was in the NBC series The Blacklist and he will be seen posthumously on the big-screen in Son Of The South.
     'I don't look like an actor, I don't sound like an actor, I'm just another person,' Dennehy said in 2018. 'Which really is the whole point of acting, is trying to be just another person.' Built like a truck but with the capacity to be as gentle as a pussycat, Brian Dennehy was smarter than the average bear-like character actor. The six feet three inch performer made his screen breakthrough as an adversarial small-town sheriff in First Blood (1982), the thoughtful opening instalment in what would become the Rambo series. It was the first in his hat-trick of hits from that decade: he also starred as one of a group of aliens who have a rejuvenating effect on an elderly community in Cocoon (1985) and played a grizzled but amiable cop in F/X (1986), a highly enjoyable thriller set in the special effects industry; it was popular enough to spawn a 1991 sequel - F/X2: The Deadly Art Of Illusion - reuniting Brian with co-star Bryan Brown. Unusually for a character actor, Brian had a handful of movie leads, including The Belly Of An Architect (1987), a rare foray into arthouse cinema. Dennehy's range, from cowering vulnerability to a righteous fury, was given full rein in Peter Greenaway's otherwise austere tale of an esteemed architect dying of stomach cancer; the critic Janet Maslin called it 'one of the best things' the actor had done. He also gave a complex and probing performance as the serial killer John Wayne Gacy in the TV mini-series To Catch A Killer (1992). 'I've had a hell of a ride,' Dennehy also said in 2018. 'I have a nice house. I haven't got a palace, a mansion, but a pretty nice, comfortable home. I've raised a bunch of kids and sent them all to school and they're all doing well. All the people that are close to me are reasonably healthy and happy. Listen, that's as much as anybody can hope for in life.' He is survived by his wife, the costume designer Jennifer Arnott, whom he married in 1988 and by their children, Cormac and Sarah, as well as by three daughters, Elizabeth, Kathleen and Deirdre, from his first marriage to Judith Scheff, which ended in divorce in 1974.
Norman Hunter, who died this week aged seventy six, was labelled indelibly by Leeds United fans during the 1972 FA Cup final victory over Arsenal. The slogan on the banner - Norman Bites Yer Legs - became synonymous with one of the toughest, most uncompromising defenders of the post-war era. But, this actually did a disservice to an outstanding footballer who was known for his steel, but who could also produce silk. Gateshead-born Hunter moved to Elland Road when he was fifteen, forsaking a career as an electrical fitter. He made his first team debut as an eighteen year old in 1962, establishing a formidable central defensive partnership with Jackie Charlton and going on to play seven hundred and twenty six games in all competitions in fifteen years at the club. Only three men played more matches for Leeds - Charlton, Billy Bremner and Paul Reaney.
Hunter was a key component of Don Revie's talented but little-loved side which won the First Division title in 1968-69 and again in 1973-74, the FA Cup in 1972, the League Cup in 1968 and the Inter Cities Fairs Cup in 1968 and 1971. It was at Elland Road where Hunter wrote his name into legend, a man who epitomised the style and philosophy of Revie's team that won many plaudits and - sometimes grudging - respect within the game but also attracted fierce criticism for their ruthless, win-at-all-costs approach. Nothing, however, should detract from the stature of a man who was so highly regarded and respected by his peers that he was named the first winner of the Professional Footballers' Association Player of the Year award in 1974. Off the field, Hunter was a warm and friendly personality. He was hugely popular with all he met, enjoying a long career as an astute analyst and summariser of Leeds games for BBC local radio. He was also part of a group of hard men who populated the game in the 1960s and 70s, along with the likes of Liverpool's Tommy Smith and Chelsea captain Ron 'Chopper' Harris. When he sustained an injury at Leeds, Revie's veteran right-hand man Les Cocker was allegedly informed 'Hunter has broken a leg.' The coach is claimed to have replied: 'Whose is it?' The Norman Bites Yer Legs tag stuck after Brian Clough, later to manage Hunter for an ill-fated forty four days at Leeds, referenced it in his 1972 FA Cup final analysis. Norman himself, with his noted dry humour, called his own 2004 autobiography Biting Talk.
Hunter was as tough as nails and one of the most enduring images is his full-on fist fight with Derby County's Francis Lee (an England team-mate) that saw both men sent off at the Baseball Ground in November 1975. The result of the fight, if anyone is interested, was celebrated in a memorable chant heard across the country 'Norman Hunter chinned Francis Lee!' (somewhat ruder variants also existed). But he was also a defender of the highest calibre and was perfectly at home in the top flight, as well as the more nuanced surroundings of Europe. Revie's Leeds should have actually won far more trophies than they did but were dogged by misfortune. And, losing to Sunderland, obviously. One such occasion saw Hunter sent off when his frustration boiled over in the closing seconds of the defeat by AC Milan in the 1973 Cup Winners' Cup final and he decked Gianni Rivera with a vicious right-hook. It came after a series of highly questionable decisions by the Greek referee Christos Michas and fans inside the stadium in Thessaloniki threw missiles during Milan's lap of honour in protest. Michas was subsequently banned for life. Leeds felt similarly aggrieved when they lost to Bayern Munich in the European Cup final in Paris two years later, most notably when Peter Lorimer's volley was ruled out for a dubious offside call with the score still nil-nil.
Hunter was the permanent understudy to England's World Cup-winning captain Bobby Moore, limiting his career to a mere twenty eight caps when so many more would have been collected in the modern era. But Moore was immovable in the early years and squad rotation was seldom considered. Hunter made his England debut in a win in Spain in December 1965, yet while he was a trusted member of Sir Alf Ramsey's 1966 World Cup squad, he did not play a game. Only the eleven who played in the win over West Germany in the final at Wembley received a medal, although Hunter finally got one after a successful campaign to have them awarded for all members of England's triumphant squad at a Downing Street ceremony in 2009. Hunter was also in England's squad when they defended their crown in Mexico four years later, making a solitary appearance as an eighty first-minute substitute for Martin Peters against West Germany. Sadly for Hunter, his England career is best remembered for an uncharacteristic mistake which led to their failure to qualify for the 1974 World Cup in Germany and Ramsey's subsequent sacking. Hunter had been picked ahead of Moore, whose form had been indifferent and who had also made an error leading to a goal in England's two-nil defeat in Poland. In the return game at Wembley, England needed to win but were being thwarted by Poland's eccentric but brilliant goalkeeper Jan Tomaszewski. In the second half, Hunter missed the sort of routine tackle on the half-way line that he had completed thousands of times, allowing Grzegorz Lato to run clear and set up Jan Domarski for the goal that, ultimately, stopped England from qualifying. There is an infamous image of the inconsolable Hunter trudging from the Wembley turf.
    A small piece of social history: On that same day - 17 October 1973 - in response to the escalating Yom Kippur war, OPEC, the Arab oil producing countries, summarily cut production and quadrupled the world price of oil. This, effectively, ended the relative affluence upon which, as Ian MacDonald would subsequently write in Revolution in the Head, 'the preceding ten years of happy-go-lucky excess in the West had chiefly depended.' It's a less sentimental suggestion for 'the day the Sixties (conceptually) ended' than some symbolic musical event perhaps, but, it's probably a much more realistic one. The resulting financial crisis in Europe sent inflation spiralling and led to all sorts of ramifications in unexpected places - not least, the virtual destruction of the British film industry for the next decade and a vinyl shortage which meant the record industry almost went the same way. It was the chilling moment where the Swingin' Sixties turned, overnight, into the 'Sober-and-Soon-to-be-Unemployed Seventies.' That this occurred on the same day England's football team failed to reach the final stages of a tournament they had won eight years previously may seem insignificant to some. But, just as that famous 'some people are on the pitch...' victory in 1966 appeared to encapsulate the spirit of an era - when England (and, specifically, London) was, quite literally, on top of the world - so the gloom that settled over the country during the winter of 1973-74, with its three-day weeks, powercuts, 'Cod War' with Iceland and general austerity amidst national strife and whispers of a right-wing military coup in the offing, was inextricably tied to the failing fortunes of Sir Alf Ramsey’s ageing side. And there are many that will still tell you it was all Norman Hunter's fault for missing that bloody tackle.
Hunter's final England appearance came, fittingly, in his mentor Don Revie's first game as England manager, a three-nil win over Czechoslovakia in October 1974. Hunter left his beloved Leeds for Bristol City in a forty thousand quid deal in October 1976, playing more than one hundred games for The Robins in three years before a brief stint at Barnsley. Hunter succeeded his former Leeds team-mate Allan Clarke as Barnsley manager in October 1980 and guided them out of the former Third Division in the 1980-81 season, staying at Oakwell until February 1984. He also had a spell in charge of Rotherham United and in more recent years contributed his expertise on radio, as well as a successful after-dinner speaker. Hunter's enduring footballing image may be as the archetypal hard man but those who saw his career in the wider context will attest that he was an outstanding player, one of the finest ball-playing defenders of his generation and a man who deservedly attained legendary status for his magnificent career at Leeds. In 1968 Hunter married Susan Harper and the couple had two children, Michael and Claire who survived him.
It was Peter Bonetti's sad misfortune that, despite his outstanding goalkeeping agility - his nickname 'The Cat' was well deserved - and despite the many matches he played (more than seven hundred for Chelsea), he is remembered above all for one disastrous day in Mexico in 1970. A match in which Bonetti, who has died aged seventy eight, should not even have been playing. It was the quarter-final of the World Cup against West Germany, whom England had beaten four years earlier in the final. The first-choice England goalkeeper was, of course, Gordon Banks but on the morning of the match in Léon, scheduled absurdly for the intense heat of noon so it could be shown during TV prime time in Europe and at a breathless altitude, Banks was to be seen outside the England team hotel, pale-faced and being supported by the anxious England doctor, Neil Phillips. He was suffering from a nasty case of food poisoning. So it was that Bonetti played instead of Banks, though hardly in the ideal condition to do so, as he had not had a competitive game since the FA Cup Final seven weeks earlier. Nevertheless, he made several fine saves during the first hour. When England squandered a two-nil lead to lose, however, Bonetti was largely made the villain of the piece. He was undoubtedly at fault for the first German goal, when he allowed Franz Beckenbauer's low shot to squirm under his body and into the net. The equaliser, however, scored by Uwe Seeler, was a complete fluke. When Karl-Heinz Schnellinger lobbed the ball into the English goalmouth, Bonetti, off his line, was arguably out of position, but Seeler knew little about the back header with which he scored. As for the third and decisive German goal, it had as much to do with the defenders' weariness as with Bonetti's positioning. Terry Cooper, the England left-back, was too tired to prevent West Germany's substitute, Jürgen Grabowski, from crossing. Bonetti did not get to the high ball, Hannes Löhr headed it back and Gerd Müller volleyed home from close range. It would prove to be Bonetti's seventh and last game for England. But his international record, until then, had been excellent. The first match came in July 1966, a two-nil victory against Denmark in Copenhagen and before the Léon match he had conceded only one goal in his previous six.
Standing five feet ten inches tall and weighing eleven stone, he was something of a contrast with the giant goalkeepers to whom we have become accustomed over the last two decades, but Peter was brave and spectacular and, pre-Léon, had shown no signs of nervousness. He had also been a member of the victorious 1966 England World Cup squad, although Banks had played all the matches in that tournament. Born in Putney to Swiss parents, Bonetti moved with his family, as a child, to the Sussex coast, where his parents opened a cafe in Worthing. His talents as a goalkeeper were soon apparent in local schoolboy football and he was enlisted by Reading for its youth teams. Then, after his mother had written to Chelsea asking them to give her son a trial, he was signed at Stamford Bridge. In the 1960-61 season, at the age of nineteen, he became the first-team goalkeeper. Chelsea were relegated to the Second Division but, under the managership of Tommy Docherty, they bounced back in their first season. Initially, the young Chelsea team flourished under Docherty and in 1965 Bonetti played a significant part in helping them win the League Cup final, then a two-legged affair, against Leicester City. That achievement was outshone when his inspired goalkeeping enabled Chelsea, after a replay in the final against Leeds in 1970, at last to gain the FA Cup which had eluded them since their foundation in 1905. Bonetti was just as good when, in Athens a year later, Chelsea beat the formidable Real Madrid to take the European Cup Winners' Cup. His last game in goal for Chelsea was against Arsenal in May 1979 - his seven hundred and twenty ninth for the club, during which he had kept clean sheets in two hundred matches, conceding one goal or fewer in more than two-thirds of his appearances. In 1975 he briefly left Chelsea on a free transfer for a spell in the US with the St Louis Stars, but returned the following year. He played five games for Dundee United in 1979, and on retirement he lived on the Isle of Mull, where he worked as a postman. He then became a goalkeeping coach with Chelsea, Newcastle United, Fulham, Manchester City and the England team, and in 1986, at the age of forty five, appeared for non-league Woking as they beat Weymouth one-nil in the FA Cup. Latterly he worked on match days at Chelsea in the hospitality section. With his second wife, Kay whom he married in 1992, he had a son, Scott and he had four children - Suzanne, Kim, Nicholas and Lisa - from his first marriage, to Frances Jennings, which ended in divorce.
After all that death and depression, dear blog reader, this blogger rather fancies something nice to eat. One wonders if this lady does takeaways, for instance.
On Thursday of this week, this blogger knocked off from work at 6.30pm and at 6.30pm and about three seconds he rang up the local takeaway for a nice, fattening king prawn and beef curry with boiled rice. Which was subsequently delivered to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House inside twenty minutes and scoffed almost immediately it came out of the tin-foil carton. Seriously, this one hardly touched the sides of yer actual Keith Telly Topping's stomach on the way down, this blogger was so utterly Hank Marvin at the time. Note to self for future reference; never try to get through the day on a bag of crisps, a bottle of pop and one (one!) Rich Tea biscuit. On a scale of one-to-ten in terms of how much this blogger deserved this, with one being 'I sort of quite deserve this but I could live without it' and ten being 'I REALLY, REALLY deserve this', well ... you do the maths.
So, another week of lockdown at the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House is over and this blogger currently has the novelty of two - yes two - days off in a row. First time that's happened in three weeks. This blogger must say, he is still rather enjoying working from home - the novelty hasn't quite worn off yet. The commute, in particular, is jolly impressive. But, there is one thing that this blogger misses about the office and that's when one has come off the phone from a particularly challenging or lengthy or sometimes, not even an awkward call but rather a touching or strange one, is it can be quite pleasant to turn to a nearby colleague and say 'you will not believe the call I've just had!' You can't do it when you're on yer Jack Jones, dear blog reader. Well, you possibly can, but you get locked up for talking to yourself. Hang on. I am currently locked up ... and I am talking to myself. See. Told you.
One of the most singularly melancholy aspects of wandering around a virtually deserted Newcastle city centre - as this blogger did when getting in the weekly shopping this very morning - was seeing all of those businesses that this blogger knows so well (many of them old, established firms going back decades) all completely shuttered-up. Pubs, restaurants, stores ... And this blogger couldn't help but wonder just how many of them will be reopening when all of this horrid virus malarkey is over. Because, this blogger is fairly certain that some of them won't be. Mind you, walking down Northumberland Street Keith Telly Topping noticed that signs saying 'We Are Closed' in McDonald's window were accompanied by all of the lights in the gaff being on. So, when all this is over, don't be at all surprised if the price of a Big Mac goes up by twenty pee. Cos, someone's going to have to pay for leaving the lights on.
Watching one of this week's official government Coronavirus briefing - this one led by the legend that never will be Alok Sharma - caused this blogger to reflect upon something. Listen, dear blog reader, this blogger is sure that yer man Alok is a really nice chap who is kind to his mother and all that but, every time this blogger sees him, he can't help but be reminded of Mad Frankie Boyle's description of Nick Griffin on an episode of Mock The Week: 'He looks like a shaved owl who's been fast-tracked for a management position at Greggs.'
And finally, dear blog reader, many, many (many) years ago, before most of you were born, this blogger will wager (we're talking about the 1970s, here), this blogger's beloved England cricket team spent an entire winter Down Under (when women glow and men chunder, they reckon) getting their bums thrashed and their knackers bruised by a Sheila called Lilian Thomson. Or something. It was right chastening stuff (particularly for poor Bumble Lloyd's googlies).
Nevertheless, this blogger still used to watch the Australian Broadcasting Company's nightly highlights programmes on BBC2 - introduced by Richie Benaud - which had been satellited over to the UK just to see if it was all as wretchedly horrible as the early morning radio commentaries made it sound (it was ... and then some). That said, this blogger became utterly obsessed with the theme tune from the highlights programme. It was a highly whistle-able jaunty little flute-and-synthesizer-dominated number - the Aussie equivalent of the BBC's use of Booker T's 'Soul Limbo' - and, this blogger presumed, it was some obscure instrumental either from an Aussie movie nobody had heard of or that it had been knocked up in a basement studio in Sydney by the Antipodean equivalent of a member of the BBC Radiophonics Workshop. This blogger doubted that he would ever hear it again but that tune haunted the edges of his memory for years and Keith Telly Topping tried everything he could think of to discover what the Hell it was and if it was commercially available. He wrote to the BBC. They couldn't help. He wrote - airmail - to ABC in Australia. Never even got the courtesy of a reply. He asked his cousins in Brisbane if they could find out. Nothing. It was a mystery this blogger thought would ne'er be solved. Cut forward now many, many (many) years to around 1995(ish) and this blogger was siting watching Midnight Cowboy late one night on TV (a film, let it be noted, he must have seen half-a-dozen times, at least, over the years) and blow me cornet stiff but, there it was - accompanying the Florida dream sequence of Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck running on the beach. The end credits told this blogger the tune was called - not unreasonably - 'Florida Fantasy'. And that, far from being obscure or unheard of, it was an instrumental on one of the biggest selling movie soundtracks of the decade, had been written by one of this blogger's heroes - the legend that was John Barry - and had won a bloody Grammy! The point of all this, dear blog reader, is that sometimes, the really fun part of any search for knowledge isn't the discovery, it's the search itself.
So, here endeth yet another From The North bloggerisation update from the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House. Where life, just for the moment, has taken on an aura of rampant surrealism unmatched by anything in this blogger's experience. Except, possibly, that time this blogger - with a case of bronchitis that was threatening to turn into consumption - spent a day overdosed on Benylin watching Performance, Blow Up and Scream & Scream Again back-to-back. That was a bloody odd day. I must try to repeat it at some stage.

From The North returns, dear blog reader, for yet another episode of that most unpopular of  continuing bloggerisationisms series' Death, Where Is Thy Sting? Or, even Sting Where Is Thy Death? if you prefer. This blogger knows that he, certainly does.
The Stranglers keyboard player Dave Greenfield has died at the age of seventy one after testing positive for Covid-Nineteen. Greenfield died on Sunday having contracted the virus after a prolonged stay in hospital for heart problems. He co-wrote - with his bandmates Hugh Cornwell, Jean-Jacques Burnel and Jet Black - The Strangers' biggest hit and best known work, 'Golden Brown' which went to number two in the UK singles chart in 1982. Bass player Burnel paid tribute to Greenfield. He said: 'On the evening of Sunday 3 May, my great friend and longstanding colleague of forty five years, the musical genius that was Dave Greenfield, passed away as one of the victims of the Great Pandemic of 2020. All of us in the worldwide Stranglers' family grieve and send our sincerest condolences to [Greenfield's wife] Pam.' Drummer Black added: 'We have just lost a dear friend and music genius and so has the whole world. Dave was a complete natural in music. Together, we toured the globe endlessly and it was clear he was adored by millions. A huge talent, a great loss, he is dearly missed.' The Stranglers formed in 1974 in Guildford. Greenfield, who originated from Brighton, joined within a year and they went on to be heavily associated with the punky rock era. He was soon known for his distinctive sound and playing style on instruments including the harpsichord and the Hammond organ. Critics compared his sound to that of Ray Manzarek from The Doors. In an interview with the band's website, however, Greenfield himself said he was more influenced by other famous keyboard players. 'The only tracks by The Doors I knew were 'Light My Fire' and 'Riders on the Storm',' said Greenfield. 'Before I joined, my main influences were probably Jon Lord [of Deep Purple] and then Rick Wakeman.' In the same interview he said he always considered The Stranglers to be 'more new wave, than punk' and also admitted to having had an interest in the occult, evident from him wearing a pentagram pendant in many early band pictures. 'The Pentagram represents the microcosm (as opposed to the macrocosm),' he said. 'The relation between the self and the universe. I studied (not practiced) the occult quite intensively in those days.''Golden Brown', perhaps Greenfield's finest moment, eventually won the band an Ivor Novello award; however his bandmates initially discarded the song and did not consider it a single. The band claimed that the song's lyrics were akin to an aural Rorschach test and that people only heard in it what they wanted to hear, although this did not prevent persistent allegations that the lyrics alluded to Hugh Cornwall's brief-but-infamous addiction to heroin. In his book The Stranglers Song By Song (2001), Cornwell stated: 'Golden Brown''works on two levels. It's about heroin and also about a girl.' Essentially the lyrics describe how 'both provided me with pleasurable times.' The band's other hits include their extraordinary debut single '(Get A) Grip (on Yourself)', 'No More Heroes', 'Peaches' (who else could get a song featuring the word 'clitoris' into the UK top ten?), 'Something Better Change', 'Five Minutes', 'Walk On By', 'Duchess', 'Strange Little Girl', 'Midnight Summer Dream', 'Always The Sun' and 'Skin Deep'. They continued touring and recording after Cornwell left in 1990. Cornwell posted on Twitter he was 'very sorry' to hear of his old bandmate's passing. 'He was the difference between The Stranglers and every other punk band,' wrote Cornwell. 'His musical skill and gentle nature gave an interesting twist to the band. He should be remembered as the man who gave the world the music of 'Golden Brown'.' Current Stranglers vocalist and guitarist Baz Warne described Greenfield as 'a true innovator' and a 'musical legend. The word genius is bandied around far too easily in this day and age, but Dave Greenfield certainly was one,' said Warne.
Greenfield played keyboards, sometimes several at once: nothing compared to the banks of equipment behind which his hero Wakeman plied his trade in Yes, but far more than most punk bands would have countenanced. Sometimes his playing recalled the thin organ sounds found on 1960s garage rock singles by bands like ? and the Mysterians or The Animals, which was just about acceptable under punk Stalinist rules. More often, though, he played exactly like someone who had been in a hippy prog rock band, decorating songs with complex arpeggios, which absolutely wasn't acceptable under any rules. But, whisper it, it was what set The Stranglers apart from their contemporaries and became pretty much their signature sound. His contributions were the solitary aspect of The Stranglers' music one might describe as beautiful. Everything else about them was as relentlessly, wilfully, breathtakingly nasty as their song titles suggested: 'Ugly', 'Tits', 'Bring On The Nubiles', 'Princess Of The Streets', 'Nice N' Sleazy', 'Peasant In The Big Shitty', 'Down In The Sewer' and 'I Feel Like A Wog'. If several of these, the latter in particular, make for profoundly uncomfortable listening in the Twenty First Century their music had a remarkable power, a sense of unceasing, misanthropic violence and hostility. But they sounded less like a punk band than a band that predated punk, on which sprang out of that weird period immediately prior to 1976, where the bleakness of mid-1970s Britain had seeped into rock's fringes - the tougher end of the pub-rock scene, the more thuggish bits of late-period glam - but not yet become codified into series of musical diktats. Which is precisely what The Stranglers were: they had formed in 1974 - as The Guildford Stranglers - Greenfield joining a year later. It meant that The Stranglers were always regarded with some suspicion by the music press - a state of affairs not helped much by the band's propensity for violence - but it also meant that The Stranglers weren't constrained by punk. Grimly powerful as their debut LP Rattus Norvegicus and its follow-up No More Heroes were, there's a compelling argument that the band really hit their stride on 1978's Black & White, by which time Greenfield's keyboard playing had become more expansive and experimental. It's never really hailed as such, but Black & White has a claim to be the first post-punk LP: the taut dance rhythms, jagged guitars and synthesiser tones of 'Enough Time' and 'Threatened', the attempt to meld dub reggae with Captain Beefheart on 'In the Shadows', the claustrophobic racket of 'Curfew' and the stabbing, angular, curiously homoerotic 'Death & Night & Blood (Yukio)' were all adventurous explorations beyond stripped-down rock'n'roll. On the best of their subsequent singles, Greenfield seemed ever-more integral: their extraordinary cover of 'Walk On By' - on which The Stranglers somehow contrived to turn Dionne Warwick's exquisite original into six minutes of brooding, barely contained aggression - was dominated by his organ playing; his rolling piano underpinned 'Don't Bring Harry', an authentically chilling song about heroin; on 1979's chart hit 'Duchess', his arpeggios are no longer a striking embellishment, but appeared to have consumed the band's sound entirely. Several further genuinely great LPs followed - The Raven (1979), La Folie (1981), Feline (1983), Aural Sculpture (1984 and Dreamtime (1986). And then there was 'Golden Brown', which seemed astonishing at the time - a Stranglers single that got played on Radio 2 - and seems even more astonishing in retrospect: a harpsichord-led song about heroin in a strange time signature (pitched somewhere between 3/4 and 4/4) that was only kept off the top of the UK charts by another very English early-eighties masterpiece, The Jam's 'Town Called Malice'. The lyrics were Cornwell's, but it was Greenfield's show, his performance is the song's heart. They were adaptable enough to keep having hits long after most of their peers had split up or faded away, but a certain sense of diminishing returns eventually set in. Not even their loudest detractors could have pinned on the authors of 'No More Heroes' that they would release the utterly deranged concept LP The Gospel According To The Meninblack. The Stranglers proved to be weirdly unstoppable - neither the loss of Cornwell nor the retirement of Jet Black dented their massive live following. That might have been the flipside of The Stranglers' lack of critical acclaim or latter day reappraisal and the kind of refusal to play by the era's rules that Greenfield seemed to embody: never particularly fashionable to begin with, they weren't subject to fashion's vagaries, instead building a devoted cult following born out of being outsiders. He is survived by his wife, Pam.
The actress Jill Gascoine has died at the age of eighty three. She played Detective Inspector Maggie Forbes in ITV's The Gentle Touch (1980 to 1984), one of the first British police dramas with a woman in the main role. She continued playing the character in - really spectacularly bad - spin-off C.A.T.S. Eyes and was also Letty Onedin in The Onedin Line in the 1970s. She died after a long illness, her family told BBC News. Her second husband was fellow actor Alfred Molina, who in 2016 confirmed that his wife was 'in a very advanced stage' of Alzheimer's disease. Born in Lambeth in 1937, early in her career in the 1950s, Gascoine has been soubrette in a UK tour of The Crazy Gang Show. In 1956, she was a chorus dancer in the Christmas season of The Adventures Of Davy Crockett staring Hermione Badderly at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin. Gascoine also worked alongside TONY winner Victor Spinetti in intimate revue in the Irving Theatre in London. By 1959, Gascoine had taken over from Millicent Martin in a tour of Expresso Bongo. A further stage appearances included playing Dorothy Brock opposite Catherine Zeta-Jones in Forty Second Street at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and in the musical Destry playing Frenchie. Gascoine began her acting career in theatre and had regular roles at the Dundee Rep. Her early work also included collaborations with director Ken Loach before landing roles in such TV series as Z Cars, Oranges & Lemons, Six Days Of Justice, Dixon Of Dock Green, Beryl's Lot, Plays For Britain, General Hospital, Softly, Softly: Taskforce, Within These Walls, Raffles and Rooms. She also appeared in the sex comedy Confessions Of A Pop Performer opposite Robin Askwith, who remembered her on Twitter as being 'terrific in every way.' An early film appearance has been in a small role as one of the titular schoolgirls in The Pure Hell of St Trinian's (1960). After moving to Los Angeles with Molina in the 1990s where she made appearances on US television in series such as Northern Exposure and Touched by an Angel, she went on to become a novelist. Her first novel was Addicted (1994), about a successful actress in her fifties who embarks on a destructive affair with a younger actor. This was followed by Lilian (1995), about a woman who begins an affair when she goes on holiday to California with her best friend. In 2009, it was announced that Gascoine would be returning to the UK to join the cast of EastEnders, playing the role of Glenda Mitchell. But she withdrew from the BBC drama on her first day of filming, leading to her role being given to Glynis Barber. 'Having spent the last fifteen years working in America I felt on arrival I lacked the right experience to film such a big continuing drama,' she said at the time. 'I have tremendous respect for EastEnders and the cast so I don't want to let the show or my fellow cast members down.' Gascoine married twice. Her first husband was Dundee hotelier Bill Keith, with whom she had two sons. In 1982, she met Molina when they were both working in the same theatre production. Gascoine suffered from clinical depression for most of her life which, she believed, stemmed from her unhappy time at boarding school as a child.
Hamish Wilson, who died recently aged seventy seven as a result of coronavirus, was a pioneering radio producer and gifted character actor. He was born James Aitken Wilson in Glasgow, in 1942 before his family moved to Cambuslang. His father, also James, was a sales rep for a paint company whilst his mother, Isobel, worked in the textile trade. After they divorced, Isobel married another Wilson, Robert and Hamish and his sister Jan grew up with step-siblings Leslie, Sheila and Robbie. He discovered his love of drama while at West Coats Primary School. Later, at the Glasgow Academy, this love drove him to do 'that stupidly romantic thing of running away from school to appear on the stage.' He was soon working professionally - he understudied Jimmy Logan for a summer season at The King's Theatre and appeared in Peter Duguid's 1957 Citizen's Theatre production of Enemy Of The People. He then attended the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and gained more professional experience during summer holidays. He played the title role in 1959's live ITV play, The Boy From The Gorbals, appeared in a 1960 episode of Para Handy with Duncan Macrae and met Walt Disney while he was working on the film adaptation of Greyfriars Bobby (1961). 'I was trying to chat up a pretty blonde extra, with no success at all,' he recalled. 'And this gentleman with blond hair and a little moustache came over and started chatting to me. We nattered away for five minutes and then he wandered away. The girl was terribly impressed, but I spoilt it because I didn't recognise him. I said, "Who was that?" and she stopped being impressed.' He graduated from the RSAMD in 1963, winning the award for Most Promising Male Performance and appeared on stage at Coventry's Belgrade Theatre (1965), Perth Theatre (1967 to 1968) and Dundee Repertory Theatre (1970 to 1971), where his performance in Mark But This Flea was described as 'remarkable' by The Stage, not least because he had stepped into the role twenty four hours before opening night after the original actor had broken his leg. On television he appeared in The Wednesday Play (1965), The Vital Spark (1966), This Man Craig (three different roles, 1966), Softly, Softly (1967) and The Revenue Men (1967). In 1968 Doctor Who regular Frazer Hines, who played Patrick Troughton's companion, fell ill with chickenpox while making the memorable five-part adventure The Mind Robber. After an ingeniously hasty rewrite Jamie underwent a temporary metamorphosis and, with one day's rehearsal, Wilson took over, learning his lines overnight and recording the first of his two episodes the following day. Further TV roles followed, including The Borderers (1969), Boy Meets Girls (1969), Adam Smith (1972) and The View From Daniel Pike (1972) but he found that he needed to turn his attention away from acting because 'a beautiful girl smiled at me.' Intent on marriage and starting a family, he gained more secure employment as an announcer for STV. In 1975 he went to Radio Forth as its arts and drama producer. With limited resources but boundless ambition, he broadcast original writing, late-night horror classics and a six-month serial about Mary Queen of Scots, told in one hundred and thirty twelve-minute episodes, broadcast daily. In 1979 he did an adaptation of The Slab Boys for Radio Clyde, ultimately joining the station and founding Independent Local Radio's first drama department there. His many productions at Clyde included The Bell In The Tree (1982), a series of dramas about the history of Glasgow by Edward H Chisnall; Donald Campbell's Till The Seas Run Dry (1983, with Tom Fleming as Robert Burns and Mary Riggans as Jean Armour) and Nick McCarthy's Elephant Dances (1989, with Katy Murphy). He also encouraged new talent, instigating initiatives which gave professional breaks to aspiring comedy writers and awarded contracts and Equity cards to final-year drama students. He left Clyde in 1989 and joined the BBC, where he produced a huge number of plays and series for Radio Scotland, Radio 3 and Radio 4. He really believed in radio: 'It allows you to creep inside somebody's head and paint pictures that are going to stay long after the programme is finished.' In all, he won twenty three awards for his radio productions - his 'Oscars', as he jokingly referred to them - and served a juror in the Prix Italia (where he was also the first ILR producer to be jury chairman), Prix Futura Berlin and the Prix Europa. When he left the BBC after ten successful years he went back to doing voiceover work and acting in episodes of Taggart (2004), Monarch Of The Glen (2005) and Still Game (2007). He was an active member of Equity and taught radio technique at RSAMD and at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 1996 he was awarded a fellowship of the RSAMD (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland). Though serious in his work, he was an affable, genial, unassuming man who was happy to help others and enjoyed reading and war-strategy games. The beautiful girl who smiled at him was Dianna Baron, a wardrobe mistress at Dundee Rep, whom he had met in 1972. They married the following year and had three daughters, Emma, Alice and Abigail, who all survive him, as do grandchildren Colin, Finley, Amelia and Gregor.
Tributes have been paid to the well-known Northern Irish actor BJ Hogg, who has died, aged sixty five. He was best known for his role as Big Mervyn in the BBC Northern Ireland series Give My Head Peace. He was in the comedy for more than twenty years and toured with the cast in the stage adaptation earlier this year. Hogg also appeared in several high-profile TV dramas including episodes of The Fall and Game Of Thrones. He also acted in several films shot in Northern Ireland including Hunger, Closing The Ring and Divorcing Jack. Another role was as the widower father Lexie in the short film Dance Lexie Dance, which was nominated for an Oscar in 1998 for best live action short film. Born in Lisburn in 1955, his career on stage and screen in Northern Ireland spanned almost four decades. His agent, Geoff Stanton, said 'there just weren't the words' to express his shock and sadness at the news of Hogg's death. 'He was such a great man, a big personality and a terrific actor. His family must be devastated and my heart goes out to them,' he said. 'He was just one of the nicest people I know, or knew - he is going to be such a loss.'
The soul musician Hamilton Bohannon, who backed many of Motown's greats before starting a respected solo career, has died at the age seventy eight according to the Newnan Times-Herald newspaper in the Georgia town of his birth. Bohannon was born in 1942, the son of a working-class family who ran a barbershop and cafe. He started drumming - initially on family furniture - and began playing professionally after moving to Atlanta following high school, including alongside his friend Jimi Hendrix at the city's Royal Peacock venue. He was hired by Stevie Wonder as his live drummer and came into the orbit of Motown, who later employed him as a bandleader. His group Bohannon & The Motown Sound backed numerous label stars on tour, including Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops, The Temptations and The Supremes ('I've never been to heaven, but I bet that's pretty close,' Bohannon once said of the latter). After Motown moved to Los Angeles, Hamilton stayed in the label's first home Detroit and started his solo career, beginning with the 1973 LP Stop & Go and eventually released nineteen studio LPs by the end of the 1980s. He struggled to cross over in the US pop market - only one of his singles reached the Top One Hundred - but he became a mainstay in the disco boom of the mid-1970s onwards with songs like 'Let's Start The Dance'. He had three Top Forty hits in the UK: 'South African Man', 'Foot Stompin' Music' and 'Disco Stomp', the latter reaching number six in 1975. The following year's LP, Dance Your Ass Off was particularly highly regarded, the title song being subsequently covered by That Petrol Emotion whilst The Smiths' guitarist Johnny Marr was another fan. 'In the 1970s, there was a song by Hamilton Bohannon called 'Disco Stomp' - it was a real dumb pop record. When my mates were getting into real clever guitar stuff like Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, I was obsessed by it.' He became a cult favourite among his fellow musicians, with Tom Tom Club respectfully chanting his name in 'Genius Of Love'; artists including Mary J Blige, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake and Snoop Dogg have all sampled his music. He is seen as helping to pioneer the 'four-four' beat which powered disco and later house and techno and the octave-jumping groove of 'Me & The Gang' became the core of Paul Johnson's house hit 'Get Get Down', a top five UK hit in 1999. Defected Records, one of the world's leading house music labels was among those paying tribute, saying: 'Today we lost a legend ... Hamilton Bohannon, thank you for the music.' DJ Gilles Peterson heralded his 'lopsided rhythmic brilliance.' He is survived by son Bohannon II and daughter April, born to his late wife Andrea.
Pioneering Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, a co-founder of the afrobeat genre, died in Paris on Thursday aged seventy nine, his manager has said. Eric Trosset told NPR radio that Tony had died of a heart attack. Allen was the drummer and musical director of Fela Ransome Kuti's famous band Africa 70. Fela, who died in 1997, once said that 'without Tony Allen, there would be no afrobeat,' a genre which combines elements of West Africa's fuji music and highlife styles with American funk and jazz. Allen has also been described by Brian Eno as 'perhaps the greatest drummer who has ever lived.' Trosset led tributes in a Facebook post saying 'your eyes saw what most couldn't see ... as you used to say: "There is no end."' Flea, the bassist for The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, who spent time with Allen in London, called him 'one of the greatest drummers to ever walk this earth' and described him as his hero. 'What a wildman, with a massive, kind and free heart and the deepest one-of-a-kind groove,' Flea said on Instagram. Allen's career and life story were documented in his 2013 autobiography Tony Allen: Master Drummer Of Afrobeat. Allen, who was born in Lagos in 1940, taught himself to play drums when he was eighteen. He said that he learned his technique by listening closely to American jazz drummers Art Blakey and Max Roach. He then created the distinctive polyphonic rhythms of afrobeat and was said to be able to play four different beats with each of his limbs. Allen first met Fela Kuti in 1964 and they went on to record dozens of LPs in Africa 70, including Gentleman, Expensive Shit, Afrodisiac and Zombie. Allen left the band in 1979, after reported rifts with Fela over royalties. Fela needed four separate drummers to fill the void. Allen emigrated to London in 1984 and later moved to Paris. He collaborated with a number of artists during his long music career and was the drummer in The Good, The Bad & The Queen, with Damon Albarn, Paul Simenon and Simon Tong. His 1999 LP Black Voices, produced by the DJ Doctor L, mixed afrobeat with dub and electronica and helped Allen win a new young following. He was helped by Albarn, who sang 'Tony Allen ... really got me dancing' on the 2000 Blur hit 'Music Is My Radar'. Allen returned the compliment when he invited Albarn (along with the rapper Ty) to appear on Home Cooking (2002). In 1987 Allen married his second wife, Sylvie Nicollet. She survives him along with their three sons, and four children from his first marriage.
Former Glamorgan and England cricketer and broadcaster Peter Walker has died aged eighty four after a stroke. Walker played three tests for England against South Africa in 1960, finishing on the winning side each time. He spent his entire first-class career with Glamorgan and after retirement presented sports news on BBC Wales television. He was appointed an MBE in the 2011 New Year's Honours List and served as president of Glamorgan Cricket Club. Bristol-born Walker was a true all-rounder - he batted, he bowled spin and is widely regarded as one of the best close catchers in the game. In the 1961 season he completed the double of scoring a thousand runs and claiming one hundred first-class wickets and also took seventy three catches - many taken at his specialist fielding position of short-leg off the bowling of Don Shepherd. Walker's main strength was his consistency and he scored a thousand runs in a season eleven times during a career which started in 1955. On two of those occasions - in 1965 and 1966 - he achieved the landmark without scoring a century. He was a key member of the side - led by Tony Lewis - which won the County Championship in 1969. Walker retired at the end of the 1972 season to further his already-established career as a broadcaster with BBC Wales. The director of BBC Cymru, Rhodri Talfan Davies, praised his role as one of Wales best known broadcasters. 'Peter made the switch from cricket to broadcasting in the blink of an an eye - becoming a familiar voice to millions over almost two decades with the BBC,' Davies said. 'In a distinguished career, he introduced network television coverage of the Sunday League cricket as well as presenting BBC Wales Today and numerous sports programmes on both radio and television. Peter was always the consummate professional - admired for his warmth, intelligence and forensic all-round sporting knowledge. We extend our deepest sympathies to his family and friends.' In later life Walker was appointed chief executive of the Cricket Board of Wales and helped introduce a nationwide coaching framework and plan the National Cricket Centre in Cardiff. In 2009 he was elected president of Glamorgan County Cricket Club, but resigned the following year in protest at the way the club was being run by its then-chairman Paul Russell. Current Chairman Gareth Williams said: 'Everyone at Glamorgan is saddened to hear this news. Peter was a club legend, a man who gave everything he could to the club he loved while playing and later in an off-field capacity. He gave so much back to the game.' Walker's former Glamorgan team-mate Alan Jones told Radio Cymru: 'He was one of the best cricketers ever to play for Glamorgan, Allan Watkins was a great, but for me Peter was the best. He was a great bowler, he took over seven hundred wickets for the county and with the bat he scored over fifteen thousand runs and as a fielder - close to the wicket, he was the best.'
Ex-England international defender Trevor Cherry has died 'suddenly and unexpectedly' aged seventy two, his former club Leeds United have confirmed. The defender joined Leeds from Huddersfield Town in 1972, won a league championship in 1974 and made four hundred and eighty six appearances for the club. He played twenty seven times for England, captained the side once and was part of the 1980 European Championship squad. Cherry, was also player-manager at Bradford, where he played ninety two matches. He managed at Valley Parade from 1982 to 1985, with former Leeds team-mate Terry Yorath as his assistant. Cherry guided the club to the Third Division title in 1985, a promotion overshadowed by the tragedy of the Bradford fire disaster on the final day of the season, in which fifty six supporters died when the main stand burned down. Cherry was heavily involved in the club's support for those bereaved and attended funeral services of those who died. 'Our thoughts and prayers are with Trevor's wife Sue, sons Darren and Ian, daughter Danielle and his five grandchildren at this difficult time,' Leeds said in their statement. Having progressed through the ranks at Huddersfield - he made his debut in 1965, aged seventeen, establishing himself as a classy defender who could play anywhere across the back line, making one hundred and eighty five appearances and winning the Second Division title - Cherry impressed Leeds boss Don Revie enough to seek him as a potential replacement for Jack Charlton. The versatile defender became a dependable figure at Leeds in a ten-year spell, covering for the injured Terry Cooper at left-back and then subsequently forging a partnership at the heart of the defence with Norman Hunter - who also died recently. He was part of a successful group of Leeds players to be given the freedom of the city in 2019, for their achievements on the field. Under Revie he played in the 1973 European Cup Winners' Cup final and also in the FA Cup final defeat by Sunderland that same year. The defeat against the Second Division side was famous for a remarkable double save from goalkeeper Jimmy Montgomery, the first of which denied Cherry's point-blank header. One of his most memorable performances for Leeds was the 1975 semi-final of the European Cup against Barcelona in which he brilliantly man-marked Johan Cruyff. But, he missed the final as Leeds lost of Bayern Munich, as an unused substitute. In 1976, Cherry became Leeds captain after Billy Bremner left the club and won his first England cap. He continued to play for Leeds until 1982, the year that the club were relegated to the Second Division. Bradford said they were 'mourning the loss' of Cherry, while Huddersfield described him as 'an inspiration.'

Little Richard, who has died at the age of eighty seven, was the self-styled 'king and queen' of rock and/or roll. Off-stage, he set the benchmark for a wild and debauched lifestyle. He was the devout believer in God who, nevertheless, indulged freely in the lurid temptations of fame. On-stage, he was a one-man tornado, the manic piano playing and outrageous voice appealing across the racial divides of segregated America and making him a genuine superstar in Great Britain and Europe. He lit the beacon of a revolution in music in the late 1950s and inspired a legion who took it forward. 'Mick Jagger used to watch my act,' he would boast. 'Where do you think he got that walk?' Jagger never denied the claim. The Be-Atles, Elton John and Elvis Presley all cited him a massive influence. If there had been no Little Richard, a key part of DNA would have been missing from acts as diverse as Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix - all of whom idolised him. The singer was inducted into the Rock and/or Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. An electric performer, a flamboyant persona, a shrieking vocalist, an all-round Goddamn force of nature, popular music hadn't seen the like of Little Richard before he emerged from New Orleans. With the likes of Chuck Berry and Elvis, he was one of the handful of US acts who concocted the primordial soup of blues, R&B and gospel which led to the evolution of rock and/or roll. Standing at his piano with his bouffant hair and letting rip with full-throated voice on songs like 'Tutti Frutti', 'Long Tall Sally', 'Rip It Up', 'Lucille', 'Ready Teddy', 'The Girl Can't Help It' and 'Good Golly Miss Molly', he was a rush of fresh air after a strait-laced post-war age. Little Richard, to put it bluntly, was rock and roll.
Richard Wayne Penniman was born in Macon, Georgia, in December 1932. His mother was a devout Baptist with eleven other children. She had meant to call him Ricardo but somehow a spelling error  occurred. His father was a preacher, albeit one who ran a nightclub and sold moonshine during prohibition. Richard's early musical influence was the Pentecostal Church. He loved the wild dancing and the speaking in tongues. As a child he put on his mother's lipstick and dress to entertain his sisters - a crime for which his father tied him to the bed and made hideous use of his belt. 'I was born in the slums. My daddy sold bootleg whiskey,' he told Rolling Stain magazine in 1970. The singer left home in his teens after disagreements with his father who didn't support his music. 'My daddy wanted seven boys and I had spoiled it, because I was gay,' Richard later said. He was the butt of homophobic jokes at school and walked with a limp due to a birth defect. He began singing rhythm and blues, which his parents saw as 'the devil's music.' He adopted on-stage his childhood nickname - Little Richard - despite being five feet ten inches without the heels or magnificent bouffant hair. In October 1947, Sister Rosetta Tharpe overheard then then fourteen-year-old Penniman singing her songs before a performance at the Macon City Auditorium. She invited him to open her show. Afterwards, Tharpe paid him, inspiring him to become a professional performer. In 1949, he began performing in Doctor Nubillo's Travelling show. Penniman was inspired to wear turbans and capes in his career by Nubillo, who also 'carried a black stick and Sexhibited something he called "the devil's child" - the dried-up body of a baby with claw feet like a bird and horns on its head.' Nubillo told Penniman that he was going 'to be famous' but that he would have to 'go where the grass is greener.' Richard stated that he was inspired to play the piano after he heard Ike Turner's intro on Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats 1951 rhythm and blues hit 'Rocket 88'.
He became a drag act - often forced by the police to wash the make-up off his face - and spent time in prison when a gas station attendant saw sexual activity in the back of a car. At eighteen, he was spotted in a talent competition which led to a recording contract with RCA Victor. The resulting single - a ballad called 'Every Hour' - sold well and improved his relationship with his father, who put it on his nightclub jukebox. But a year later, his father was shot dead outside a local bar. 'My best friend Frank shot him,' the singer later claimed. 'He was out of jail in a week. We never quite found out what really happened.' Richard returned home and worked washing dishes in a Greyhound bus station cafe. It was no place for a peacock. 'Can you imagine beautiful hands like these messing with pots of rice and beans?'
The way out was music. He developed a wild piano style in the manner of Esquerita, a gay New Orleans performer he'd met at the bus station. Richard began hitting the keys hard, often breaking the strings. In 1955, he auditioned for a Los Angeles-based label, Speciality Records. Richard was vocally powerful but somehow rather flat. The producer, Bumps Blackwell, abandoned the studio and, in a moment of rock and/or roll history, suggested a trip to a Dew Drop Inn. Richard spotted a piano and, more importantly, an audience. He leaped up on-stage and crashed out a new number: 'Tutti Frutti'. It began with the introduction of a brand new word into the English language: 'Awopboppaloobopalopbamboom!' It was a series of explosive yelps that 'capture the lightning bolts of love.' It speaks of the joys of sex with an accuracy that proper words simply cannot express.  It was, in the words of Charles Shaar Murray in Oz magazine, 'magnificent fuck music.' Richard delivered it fully charged with electricity. It was a demand to join the party which could not be refused. But the rest of the lyrics were filthy. A songwriter, Dorothy LaBostrie, was scrambled to write with a cleaner version - stripped of explicit descriptions of gay sex. By this time, their studio booking was running out. 'In fifteen minutes, we did two cuts,' said Blackwell. 'It's been history ever since.''Tutti Frutti' sold more than a million records in the US. His next release, 'Long Tall Sally', did even better. In the next two years, Richard recorded eighteen hit singles, including 'Good Golly Miss Molly', 'Slippin'& Slidin', 'Rip It Up', 'Jenny Jenny', 'Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!', 'Keep A-Knockin' and 'Lucille'.
He began touring with his band, The Upsetters. Richard was outrageously camp and tremendously popular. His lyrics were suggestive and the concerts often ended with black and white youths dancing together. In the segregated parts of America, this was dangerous stuff. Now rich, he bought a mansion in Hollywood. He was openly gay but also had relationships with women. He even married Ernestine Harvin, a fellow Evangelical and later adopted a son, Danny. Richard blew thousands on drugs, booze and wild sex parties. Even by rock star standards, his thirst for depravity was enormous. But it jarred with the Old Testament morality of his upbringing. He would, allegedly, take his Bible along to orgies and later condemn his own 'Satanic' behaviour during this period. In 1957, Richard - literally - saw the light. During a concert in Sydney, he saw a fireball in the sky above him. He took it as an instruction from God to repent his wicked, sinful ways. It was actually the Sputnik satellite returning to Earth but Richard threw his diamond rings into the water from Sydney Harbour Bridge, gave up sin and popular music and pledged himself to The Lord .A few days later, his original return flight to America crashed into the sea. It was a sign, he said, that God was watching.
He signed up to Bible college in Alabama, but was soon asked to leave following allegations he had exposed himself to another student. Within a couple of years, he was back on tour. A gospel LP in 1961 was followed by forays into Soul. The notorious promoter Don Arden convinced him to come to Europe where his popularity was, if anything, even higher than in the US. Richard sang gospel with a backing band that included sixteen year old organist protégé Billy Preston, to a somewhat lukewarm reception. Then he would let it rip. The crowds loved the old hits. Brian Epstein persuaded Richard and his management to let a young band from Liverpool support him. The first show for which The Be-Atles (a popular beat combo of the 1960s, you might have heard of them) opened for Richard was at New Brighton's Tower Ballroom in October 1962. The following month they, along with Swedish singer Jerry Williams and his band The Violents, opened for Penniman in a residency at the Star-Club in Hamburg. During this time, Richard advised the group on how to perform his songs - of which the did dozens in their act - and taught Paul McCartney the secret of his distinctive screaming vocalisations.
In Autumn 1963, Richard was called by a promoter looking to rescue a package tour of the UK featuring The Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley and The Rolling Stones. Penniman agreed and helped to save the tour from financial disaster. At one of the shows - probably on 28 October at the East Ham Granada - was attended by sixteen year old David Jones of Bromley, a huge fan of Richard. Many years later, David would recall a moment during up-coming South London five-piece The Rolling Stones' set when someone in the audience told them to get their hair cut' and Mick Jagger replied 'what, and look like you?' (although Bowie believed, incorrectly, that the show had been at the Brixton Odeon). 'Little Richard drove the whole house into a complete frenzy,' said Jagger. 'There is no single phrase to describe his hold on the audience.'
At the end of that tour, Penniman was given his own television special for Granada Television titled Its Little Richard. The special became a ratings hit and after sixty thousand fan letters, was rebroadcast twice. In 1964, now openly re-embracing rock and/or roll, Richard released 'Bama Lama Bama Loo' on Specialty Records. Due to his UK exposure, the song reached the top twenty. Later in the year, he signed with Vee-Jay Records, then on its dying legs, to release his 'comeback' LP, Little Richard Is Back. Due to the arrival of The Be-Atles and other British bands as well as the rise of soul labels such as Motown and Stax and the popularity of James Brown, Penniman's new releases were not well promoted or well received by radio stations but his finances took a huge boost with the number of cover versions of his old hits by British groups - most notably The Beatles' versions of 'Long Tall Sally' and 'Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!' In November 1964, a young Jimi Hendrix joined Penniman's Upsetters. A few moths later, Penniman took Hendrix and Billy Preston to a New York studio where they recorded the Don Covay soul ballad, 'I Don't Know What You've Got (But It's Got Me)', which became his biggest US hit in five years.
'I want to do with my guitar what he does with his voice,' said Hendrix. But Hendrix had his own brand of stage theatrics and, inevitably, the two clashed. Richard wasn't writing new hits. Instead, he was drinking heavily and spending one thousand dollars a day on cocaine. Religious leaders, disappointed at the abandonment of his ministry, told American radio stations to ignore his records. He concentrated, instead, on flamboyant live performance, slipping down the bill as his protégés eclipsed him. But, as John Lennon complained to Rolling Stain, it was risky going on stage after Little Richard, as Lennon did when The Plastic Ono Band played the 1969 Toronto Pop Festival. 'I threw up for hours before I went on,' claimed Lennon. 'I could hardly sing any of the numbers.' In the 1970s, Richard recorded a bewildering range of styles including blues and funk. He had little commercial success. He was held at gunpoint over drug debts and saw his brother die from cocaine abuse. Deeply shocked, Richard turned back to religion. He spent the next seven years selling bibles. In 1984, he checked into a hotel on Sunset Boulevard and stayed for twenty two years. He recorded the odd gospel LP, officiated at celebrity weddings and was re-baptised as a Seventh Day Adventist. Richard felt his musical influence was never acknowledged as it should have been and blamed the deep racial prejudice in America at the height of his career. But he was proud of his impact in crossing divides. 'I've always thought that rock 'n' roll brought the races together,' the singer once said. 'Although I was black, the fans didn't care. I used to feel good about that.'
Richard's glory days were over but, in those two years at his peak, he recorded a catalogue of era-defining tracks that helped redefine social attitudes and change the course of musical history. He was an electric live performer - with an energy and command of the stage which was often imitated but never bettered. He was a pivotal musical figure in the late 1950s. Elvis called him 'the greatest', his androgyny inspired the likes of David Bowie and the diamond-studded outfits - not to mention much of his piano playing style and stage antics - were snapped up by Elton John.
Ray Charles introduced him at a concert in 1988 as 'a man that started a kind of music that set the pace for a lot of what's happening today.' Bo Diddley called Richard 'one of a kind' and 'a show business genius' who 'influenced so many.' Richard'[s contemporaries, including Presley, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Everly Brothers, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and, moist infamously, Pat Boone, all recorded covers of his songs. Taken by his music and style and personally covering four of Little Richard's tunes on his own two breakthrough LPs in 1956, Presley told Little Richard in 1969 that his music was an inspiration to him. Boone noted in 1984, 'no one person has been more imitated than Little Richard.' R&B pioneer Johnny Otis once stated that 'Little Richard is twice as valid artistically and important historically as Elvis Presley, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones put together.'
Little Richard said that he had started singing because he wanted to stand out from his siblings. 'I was the biggest head of all and I still have the biggest head,' he told the BBC in 2008. 'I did what I did, because I wanted attention. When I started banging on the piano and screaming and singing, I got attention.' His music was embraced by both black and white fans at a time when parts of the US were still deeply - and legally - segregated and concerts had a rope up the centre of the auditorium to divide people by colour.
Richard Penniman came to popular music when it was dominated by gentle crooners. Little Richard was the flamboyant pioneer of a new and far more exciting path.
'One of a kind' doesn't even begin to describe Little Richard. They broke the mould when they made him. He was, like the heroine of Long Tall Sally, 'built for speed.' And he did, indeed, both rip it up and 'ball tonite.' In every sense of the word.
Sometimes, dear blog reader, the Gruniad Morning Star and their fellow Middle Class hippy Communists at the Independent feature headlines which are attempting to write a cheque the accompanying stories can't possibly cash. And then, every now and then, you get something like Brian May Taken To Hospital After Tearing Buttock Muscles While Gardening in one media organ and Brian May Hospitalised After 'Ripping His Buttocks To Shreds' In Gardening Accident in the other. This blogger would, he is forced to confess, love to have been in A&E when the large-hair'd pompous-rocker turned up after his allegedly gardening mishap: 'Is it Covid-Nineteen, sir?''No, nurse, I appear to have broken my arse ...'
Speaking of perfectly astonishing headlines, the BBC News website's Coronavirus: Dorset Knob-Eating Contest Held Online Amid Lockdown takes the majority of this week's prizes. For lack of context if nothing else.
Meanwhile, isn't it nice to discover - from, what this blogger is sure is an entirely authoritative source - that whilst, in this country, you can't go to a restaurant, you can't go to a pub and you can't party in the streets to celebrate the seventy fifth anniversary of VE Day without getting pinched by The Bobbies, in Switzerland, foof can be freely purchased at a foof shop of your choice? Good on the Swissies, this blogger reckons.
The whole 'name twelve LPs that were influential on you but don't say why' thing that has been doing the rounds on Facebook, dear blog reader ... This blogger was, actually, nominated by anyone but he figured it was only a matter of time. Keith Telly Topping normally avoids these sort of things like The Plague but he was feeling a bit Asperger's-esque that particular morning in the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House so ... Note: There's actually twelve, cos Keith Telly Topping can be somewhat contrary like that. Also, he limited his very self to stuff that he bought at the time or, within a couple of years of release otherwise this list would be full of records which came out when he was four. It remains, mostly, white-boys-with-guitars, this blogger does concede. And, he's actually okay with such a happenstance. And, if you're wondering, the Val Doonican LP isn't irony - it looms jolly large in this blogger's legend.
This blogger - for reasons which seem entirely justified at the time - takes photographs of some of the takeaway meals which are delivered to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House and posts them on Facebook and on this very blog. Usually with a note to the effect that this blogger has really deserved this/them.
Others, it would seem, choose to write poetry - really bad poetry, at that - about their takeaways and have them published in the local paper (in this particular case, the Derby Telegraph). Which is a necessary difference, this blogger feels. Oh, and by the way .... Cheesy chips? You're sick, Anne. Seriously, you need professional help.
So, dear blog reader, you may be wondering what's been going down at the Stately Telly Topping Plague House during the month of lockdown we've had since the most recent - none obituary-stuffed - bloggerisationism in early April? Keith Telly Topping will say one thing about this whole 'stay at home' malarkey - this little chap was the only living soul that this blogger spoke to in the previous forty eight hours (shouting obscenities when Michael Gove came on the TV doesn't really count). It is, however, this blogger's sad duty to report to you all that Sydney the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House spider expired soon after this photograph was taken. And, before anyone asks, no this blogger did not give him my shoe; instead, he was found brown bread in the sink, on his back, legs up, looking very poorly indeed. This blogger would love to be able tell you all, dear blog readers, that he died, peacefully, of old age, in his spider-bed surrounded by his large and loving family. Sadly, this blogger believes, it was actually suicide and he hurled himself from the lip of the sink to his porcelain doom below. This blogger cannot speculate on his reasons for (stately telly) topping himself thus but, Keith Telly Topping has to be honest, there are days when he feels like that too.
A couple of weeks later, dear blog reader, this blogger only went and killed a wasp which had somehow got itself trapped here in the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House. And, this blogger felt genuinely awful about it. That was the first living thing Keith Telly Topping had killed in, ooo, weeks. This blogger tried to usher the wasp out of an open window using a takeaway menu. He spent ten minutes trying to coax it out of the window which was mere inches - inches - away from it. But, the bloody idiot simply wouldn't budge. So, this blogger got his Thomson Local and, well, splat. Murder. Or, possibly, waspslaughter. This blogger will leave it up to the members of the jury on that particular regard. Let it be noted, however, that Keith Telly Topping hates killing things. He used to put spiders he found in the bath outside. Then he found out they were 'house spiders' and the cold kills then so now he just leaves them be - unless, as in the case of Sydney, above, they take matters into their own hands. But, this blogger draws the line at wasps, he has to be honest. Bees are useful, wasps are the skinheads of the insect world.
It is odd the way that attitudes are changing, generally, in the world in all sorts of ways. Whilst on a dinner break at the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House one day, this blogger happened to glance out of the window and saw the local post delivery driver sitting in his van enjoying what this blogger is sure was a jolly well-earned apple. Just a few weeks ago, Keith Telly Topping's likely first thought would've been 'look at that lazy bugger, skiving on the job' followed by this blogger opening the window and bellowing 'Get some work doen, y'slacker!' But, now, it was more a case of 'ah, look at that Essential Worker having a nice - and well-deserved - break. Good on ya, matey, you're doin' a grand job delivering them letters.' Thus, lockdown teaches us tolerance and empathy. Sometimes. Not always, though.
The plan on one particular Saturday morning a couple of weeks ago was for this blogger to get the bus into town - as this blogger does most Saturdays - do a quick bit of food shopping, get some cash out of the bank, pay the rent at the Post Office, stop off at Morrisons on the way back and then be home, quickly, without having interacted (physically or emotionally) with too many individuals. That was the plan. And, it - mostly - worked, except for the town part. What happened was that this blogger got on the eighteen at about quarter-to-ten and, although he could've used his debit card to pay for a Day Rider (four English pounds and thirty pence), he had a fiver in his pocket so he thought he'd use that. The driver - lovely chap - said 'I'm a bit low on change, mate, just get on and pay on the next bus.' Okay. But, then this blogger's mind got working - which is always a dangerous thing, needless to say. 'I can get near-enough everything I need in Byker,' this blogger thought to his very self. Thus, got off the bus, paid the rent at Shields Road Post Office and got some cash out, walked down to Morrisons where there was a short queue and Keith Telly Topping was in-and-out in quarter-of-an-hour. Then there was the part he hadn't planned on, this blogger walked all the way up Shields Road to the Poundland opposite ASDA and then, he got the free bus home. Thus, saving his very self a deep-sea-diver in travel costs, having gotten some much-needed exercise without having come even remotely close to being in contact with anyone in the process and did it in, probably, less time than he would have if he'd gone into town in the first place as originally planned. This blogger says he managed to get 'more or less' everything he needed, that was except for some tins of Heinz spaghetti and sausages (something of a necessity at the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House) which, for some reason, seem to be rarer than Faberge Eggs in Newcastle. This blogger has but three observations to make about the trip in general which the following images will, hopefully, illustrate for you all, dear blog reader. Firstly this was Shields Road at eleven o'clock on a Saturday morning in April. Jesus, even The Raby was empty. Things must be bad.
Secondly, that was probably the first occasion this blogger has ever seen a travel company telling their passengers not to travel with them and to, effectively, get-the-fek home.
And thirdly, the fact that this blogger saved his very self five notes in travel costs meant that he treated himself to a nice bottle of something fizzy and non-alcoholic. And some ladies underwear. But, perhaps Keith Telly Topping has said too much ...
Some great and marvellously excellent news in these dark and troubled times occurred just one week later, however. The conversations went something like this. Morrisons: 'No chance. Have you any idea how rare those thing are?' ASDA: 'You have t'be jokin', Bonny Lad. We're just a shop, not a shop made of gold." ALDI: 'Not us, Squire, we don't sell those.' But, good old reliable Poundland: 'Certainly, sir, how many tins would you like?' The Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House was, on that day, a House of Joy.
On Bank Holiday Monday. dear blog reader, the people next door to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House were having what seemed to be a really very nice indeed barbecue in their back garden. It appeared to be just them, though, so this blogger had no intention of snitching them up to The Filth like a dirty stinkin' Copper's Nark. However, this blogger was more than a bit cheesed off that they didn't have the decency to apologise for the smell of cooked sausages which were wafting through the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House's kitchen window whilst this blogger was trying to dry his washing. Then, they started playing music. Loudly. Really bad music too - Now That's What I Call All The Crap Of The 1980s, Volume One by the sound of it. This blogger knew he should have shopped them to The Law when he had the chance ...
At the same time, you may be wondering dear blog reader, what was yer actual Keith Telly Topping up to in his own culinary matters? Well, the answer is both unsurprising and, indeed, fairly obvious. Deserve This? Really. Oh, aye.
At the same time, the announcement that Greggs have apparently u-turned on their decision to reopen some of their local stores - 'over sausage roll rush fears', apparently - had destroyed this blogger's hopes of having his first stottie in six weeks. Oh, the inherent tragedy of it all. First world problem, admittedly, dear blogger, but this is a severe stottie withdrawal speaking ...
After another - not especially stressful but still quite heavy - day home working from the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House yer actual Keith Telly Topping was, at 4.30 that particular evening, pure dead Hank Marvin, so he was and in desperate need of some sustenance. But, as The Bee Gees once said, tragedy; it was a Tuesday and the local takeaway was closed that particular evening. Oh no, what am us t'do? Relax, dear blog reader, it was Cheeseboyyyga time.
This blogger took a pleasant stroll down to ALDI nice and early on a beautiful, sunny Saturday morning thus combining two of the things which you can't get pinched by The Fuzz for these days. And he was absolutely delighted to discover there was no queue to get in; as a consequence, this blogger was in, around, paid for and out the gaff inside ten minutes. Top marks to ALDI. Also, top marks to Keith Telly Topping's MP3 player which had, seemingly, just discovered the concept of 'irony', kicking off that day's allegedly 'random' selection of tunes-to-shop-by with 'It's The End Of The World As We Know It (& I Feel Fine)'. Followed by Electronic's 'Get The Message'! Sarky bloody electronic device, that it is ...
On the following Monday, the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House playlist was, predominantly, The Faces - Five Guys Walk Into A Bar. The following day, the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House playlist was Lindisfarne - The Charisma Years. This blogger appeared to have, a bit like Sam Tyler, found his very self stuck in 1973. Some would argue, of course, he never left in the first place ...
So, dear blog reader, you're probably wondering at this juncture ...
Good question, as it goes. Killing Eve.
The Blacklist.
Mark Kermode's Secrets Of Cinema.
Would I Lie To You?
World War Weird.
Doctor Who.
The 2005 Second Test at Edgbaston.
The Match Of The Day Podcast.
The BBC's Coronavirus Daily Update.
The West Wing.
The Goodies.
Africa.
Walkers - who haven't been nabbed by The Bobbies for being out-of-doors in an untoward manner - have been urged to 'keep off the grass' as Lichfield RUFC 'carries out pitch preparation work' ahead of new rugby season. Whenever that happens.
A woman has been extremely arrested after an elderly man died and three others were injured during a knife attack in a village Co-Op in South Wales.
Another candidate for From The North's Headline of the Week award is: City Official Resigns After Drinking Beer & Throwing Cat During Zoom Meeting.
Or, indeed, from the same website - Mandatory - Motorcycling Monkey Tries to Steal Kid, Most Unlikely Biker Gang Initiation Yet.
A Florida man reportedly stabbed his roommate 'in attempt to release Satan,' before turning the knife on himself.
Onto a slightly more serious matter, dear blog reader. 27 April marked the seventh anniversary of the death of this blogger's late mother. The following day marked the twenty ninth anniversary of the death of his father in 1991. As a consequence around this time each year Keith Telly Topping can - and usually does - get rather melancholy and introspective during a period of quiet reflection. And, this year was no different. Except that this blogger was trying his best to be slightly less melancholy and introspective than unusual since these are strange and troubled times generally. And if Keith Telly Topping started getting more melancholy and introspective, he likely wouldn't get out of bed.
And finally, dear blog reader, Angelo Badalamenti's 'Twin Peaks Theme' as performed by The Cats & Friends Choir. All four minutes and fifty four excruciating second of it. This is what the Internet was invented for ... Probably.

Astrid Kirchherr, the photographer whose shots of the savage young Be-Atles (a popular beat combo of the 1960s, you might've heard of them) helped to turn them into WorldClassSuperFabs and all that, has died at the age of eighty one. The Be-Atles chronicler and biographer Mark Lewisohn confirmed the news on Twitter, posting: 'Intelligent, inspirational, innovative, daring, artistic, awake, aware, beautiful, smart, loving and uplifting friend to many. Her gift to The Be-Atles was immeasurable.'
Astrid was born in Hamburg in 1938 and spent the war evacuated to the Baltic coast where she remembered seeing dead bodies on the shore after the ships Cap Arcona and the SS Deutschland had been bombed and sunk. Back in Hamburg following the war, Kirchherr enrolled in the Meisterschule für Mode, Textil, Grafik und Werbung as she wished to study fashion design. But, she demonstrated a remarkable talent for photography and Reinhard Wolf, the school's photographic tutor, convinced her to switch courses, promising that he would hire her as his assistant when she graduated. Kirchherr worked for Wolf as his assistant from 1959 until 1963. She stumbled across her most famous muses on a visit to the Hamburg club where they were performing in a residency. 'My whole life changed in a couple of minutes,' she later said.
In the late 1950s, Kirchherr and her art school friends were involved in the European existentialist movement whose followers were later nicknamed 'Exis' by The Be-Atles. In 1995, she told BBC Radio Merseyside: 'Our philosophy then, because we were only kids, was wearing black clothes and going around looking moody. We got inspired by all the French artists and writers because that was the closest we could get. England was so far away and America was out of the question. So France was the nearest. We got all the information from France and we tried to dress like the French existentialists. We wanted to be free, to be different and tried to be cool, as we call it now.'
Kirchherr, along with her friends Klaus Voormann and Jürgen Vollmer had all attended the Meisterschule and shared the same ideas about fashion, culture and music. Voormann became Astrid's boyfriend for a time and moved into the Kirchherr home. In 1960, after Kirchherr had had an argument with Voormann, he wandered down to The Reeperbahn and heard music coming from the Kaiserkeller club. Entering the joint, Voormann watched a mesmerising performance by a five-piece English rock and/or roll group and later asked Kirchherr and Vollmer to come with him for a return visit. The trio had never been particularly interested in rock and/or roll previously, preferring jazz. Kirchherr later said: 'It was like a merry-go-round in my head, they looked absolutely astonishing. My whole life changed in a couple of minutes. All I wanted was to be with them and to know them.' The Exis became The Be-Atles first hardcore fans.
Kirchherr said that she and her friends felt guilty about being German given the country's recent history. Meeting The Be-Atles was something special for them. Kirchherr took the first  - subsequently famous - photographs of The Be-Atles as a group at the city's fairground in 1960, when the bassist, Stuart Sutcliffe and the drummer, Pete Best, were still members. She dated Sutcliffe and cut his hair into the 'moptop' style which became a key look for the early Be-Atles. Kirchherr is often credited with 'inventing' The Be-Atles' hairstyle although she disagreed, saying: 'All that rubbish people said, that I created [it]. Lots of German boys had that hairstyle. Stuart had it for a long while and the others copied it. I suppose the most important thing I contributed to them was friendship.'
She and Sutcliffe soon became engaged, but he died in April 1962 from a brain haemorrhage aged just twenty one, alongside her in an ambulance. She and The Be-Atles remained friends - she went on holiday with them to Tenerife and Paris in 1963 just after their first UK number one single - and took further acclaimed photographs of the band behind the scenes on the film A Hard Day’s Night. The Be-Atles met Kirchherr again in Hamburg in 1966 when they were touring Germany and Kirchherr gave Lennon the letters he had written to Sutcliffe during 1961 and 1962. Lennon said it was 'the best present I've had in years.' She also photographed George Harrison for the back cover of his 1968 solo LP, Wonderwall Music.
Her half-in-shadow portraits of the band would, subsequently, be copied by Robert Freeman - at The Be-Atles insistence - for the cover of With The Be-Atles.
Although, for many years she lost control of the copyright to many of her most celebrated photos, Astrid's best work can now be seen in the book When We Was Fab.
Her first marriage, to the Liverpudlian musician Gibson Kemp, had a Be-Atles connection - he was the replacement for Ringo Starr in Rory Storm & The Hurricanes and, later, played with Voormann in the never-legendary Gibson, Paddy & Klaus. Later in life she worked as a stylist and interior designer and opened a photography store in Hamburg. Although Kirchherr shot very few photographs after 1968, her work has been exhibited in Hamburg, London, Liverpool, New York City, Washington, Tokyo, Vienna and at the Rock and/or Roll Hall of Fame. She published three limited-edition books of photographs. Sheryl Lee played Kirchherr in the 1994 film Backbeat, a biopic about The Be-Atles' Hamburg days on which Astrid was one of the movie's advisors. She was later married and divorced a second time.
Phil May, frontman of riotous R&B band The Pretty Things - acclaimed peers of The Rolling Stones - has died aged seventy five. He died in hospital in King's Lynn from complications following hip surgery after a cycling accident earlier in the week. The Pretty Things' 1968 LP SF Sorrow, based on a short story by May about the life of protagonist Sebastian Sorrow, is credited as one of the first rock operas. The band have been cited as an influence by a wide range of artists from Pete Townshend and David Bowie to Jimi Hendrix and Kasabian. Born in Dartford, May formed The Pretty Things in 1963 with guitarist Dick Taylor, who had recently left the nascent Rolling Stones whilst studying at Sidcup Art College. The band's line-up coalesced with John Stax, Brian Pendleton and Viv Andrews, with May as frontman.
The group became a key part of the London R&B scene who were in thrall to US blues players but were also bringing in new elements of pop and rock and/or roll. They had an early top ten hit in 1964's 'Don't Bring Me Down' and other moderately successful singles including 'Rosalyn', 'Honey I Need, 'Midnight To Six Man' and 'Cry To Me' and became known for their drug-taking and raucous on-stage behaviour. May was bisexual, wore his hair long and marked himself out as a countercultural figure. He remembered in a Gruniad Morning Star interview in 2018: 'By the time The Pretty Things hit the TV screens, I was used to being abused and spat at and getting into punch-ups, because it had happened when we were art students. We'd done our apprenticeship at being outsiders.' In 1969, the band appeared in What's Good for the Goose, a bizarre sex comedy starring Norman Wisdom. During the late 1960s, the group made extra money by recording for music library company DeWolfe. Some of these songs ended up in low-budget films including The Haunted House Of Horror (1969) and a couple of softcore porn films. Not intended for official release, these songs were later compiled on a number of records and released under the alias Electric Banana.
The band earned their most enduring fame for their 1968 LP SF Sorrow. Although not a huge seller at the time, it is regarded as the first rock opera LP ahead of similar experiments like The Who's Tommy. May later admitted that his usage of LSD had a major impact on the LP, saying 'It was like a sharpening of the imagination for me. I don't think SF Sorrow would have been impossible without it, but there's a lot of acid [in] the imagery.' The record was released in the US by Motown offshoot Rare Earth, making them the Motown organisation's first UK signing. It subsequently became an influential cult favourite. The band were revered by artists as diverse as Jimi Hendrix, Aerosmith and The Ramones. David Bowie covered two of their songs on Pin Ups. The Pretty Things were one of the first acts signed by Swan Song Records, the label created by Led Zeppelin and Peter Grant became their manager. While there were spells of inactivity, the band never split up, enjoying a fifty five-year career. They played their final concert in 2018, with guest appearances by David Gilmour and Van Morrison. May also released a solo LP as Phil May & The Fallen Angels in 1976, which had a fraught gestation - half the LP was written and performed with band members from Fleetwood Mac and Humble Pie, who later quit, leaving May to finish it with a fresh set of personnel. In 2014, he was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and emphysema and took a break from touring. He recovered and the following year the band released their most recent CD, The Sweet Pretty Things (Are in Bed Now, of Course ...).​ A CD of new material is slated for release this year. Phil is survived by his son Paris, daughter Sorrel and partner Colin Graham.
It is said, dear blog reader, that every picture tells a story (not-least by Rod Stewart if not anyone who has actually made a halfway decent record since the late 1970s). The following dozen-or-so images do tell the story of yer actual Keith Telly Topping's - entirely government-suggested - morning being 'A Lert' and getting both his weekly exercise quota and the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House shopping done on Friday 15 May. All of which was, in fact, done to a soundtrack on this blogger's MP3 player of The Be-Atles (a popular beat combo of the 1960s, you might've heard of them).
Number One: This blogger got a number twelve bus - paying contactless, as advised by Stagecoach - to the Shields Road Post Office to pay the rent. The staff are always dead friendly and there is seldom a queue (that morning being no different). A canny start to the day, then.
Number Two: This blogger usually saves his shopping at Morrisons till on the way back home. But, wonder-of-wonders there was no queue on Friday morning at around 9.30am (well, there was about three people in total waiitng for enter). Thus, twenty eight knicker was dropped into their coffers and much shopping was actioned therein. As the Godlike genius of Eddie Izzard once said: 'We will do well here.'
Number Three: A bus into town followed and thence to Lloyds to pay in some cash to cover next month's Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House direct debits and standing orders. Yer actual Keith Telly Topping, please note, did manage to avoid going into Warhammer (despite it being 'open as usual', just in case you weren't aware of the fact). Mainly, he should stress, because he didn't want to be confronted by an angry Roy Hodgson. (This blogger's fine old mucker Mick The Mod Snowden at least will understand this last allusion. For everyone else, get thee to Bob Mortimer and Andy Dawson's Athletico Mince podcast. Instantly. If not sooner.)
Number Four: Round the corner to Poundland. And, there was a queue to get in here. This blogger. Keith Telly Topping firmly believes that the lad on the door was only doing it 'for a laugh' to brighten up his otherwise dull day.
Number Five: A short walk to Marks & Spencer. Because those M&S cocktail sausages are more addictive than crack. And, equally as expensive. They reckon.
Number Six: To the Haymarket Halifax. To get some of the money this blogger paid into Lloyds earlier in the day back out again. Because, takeaways which this blogger really deserve don't pay for themselves, you know.
Number Seven: So, this was Northumberland Street on a 'busy' Friday morning around 10.30am dear blog reader. There was, admittedly, a smallish queue to get into Barclay's, but everywhere else ...
Number Eight: McDonald's are still pure dead sorry that they're closed (one imagines Poor Ronald is in floods of clownish tears at the very thought of the lost billions). But, as noted some weeks ago on this blog, all of the lights inside the Northumberland Street store are still on full-blaze. Their electricity bill when all of this is over is going to be a sight to see, dear blog reader. Do not, therefore, be at all surprised if the price of a Big Mac goes up exponentially when they reopen after all of the lockdown malarkey is over.
Number Nine: Sometimes, dear blog reader, messages can get mixed. Case in point; Yeah ... but not very fast, you're not.
Number Ten: Proof that there is at least one Greggs open in the wide, wide world (well, on Welbeck Road if that counts as Planet Earth - debatable, this blogger is aware). Tragically, they had no stotties left in store by the time this blogger rocked up to the gaff (and, believe him, Keith Telly Topping did check).
Number Eleven: And so, back to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House. Where, dear blog reader, this blogger really deserved these items - and lots of other stuff besides. But, especially the bottle of Malibu.
Now, you may be aware of the current 'Penguin Classics Cover Generator thing that's doing the rounds on social media, dear blog reader. Something which allows authors to reimagine their own works as though they were part of this august range. If you not, you can find it here. This blogger certainly enjoyed fiddling about with this for one or two of his own tomes. I don't know whether this one would have sold more if it had looked like this, but it would certainly have been a conversation-starter at dinner parties.
Or, on a similarly Fabbish theme ...
Early last week, this blogger had an out of the blue - and very pleasant - telephone call from a lady from the local housing office who had, seemingly, been tasked with ringing up everyone in social housing in the general North Tyneside area to make sure that they were, you know, all right. All whilst doing so, from her home, with her three year old daughter screaming her head off in the background. This blogger assured her that yer actual Keith Telly Topping was and, indeed, still is very much alive, currently working from home, very happy about his current daily commute and getting out to purchase the weekly shopping (and, pay the rent, importantly) when required. This blogger was also jolly happy to discover that he is actually in the third group of people to call (apparently, it goes, 'One: vulnerable and at risk,'"Two: over seventies,''Three: everybody else). That cheered this blogger up no end!
This blogger has, in fact, really struggling with work at times this week. Keith Telly Topping doesn't normally mind the 11.30am to 8pm shift which he does about one week in four but, for some reason, on a couple of days this week it felt like this blogger simply hit a brick wall around lunch time and, the final three hours or so were like wading through treacle ...
Still, the day ended in a most satisfyingly worthwhile way ...
You all pretty much know how much this blogger deserved that, dear blog reader, yes?

The people that live next door to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House (the ones who were having a big barbecue a few weeks back which so caught the attention of this blogger) also have a swimming pool in their back garden. It's an inflatable one, admittedly, but it's still pretty damned big - you can get a couple of supersized adults and several small children in there with some ease. And, on a day like today when it's too damned hot and steamy to think, it looks really enticing.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch ...
Welcome, therefore, to the latest From The North bloggerisationisms, dear blog reader. And what a - frankly Goddamn queer - time it has been since last we spoke upon matters of concern to yer actual Keith Telly Topping.
But first, before we get onto issues of a more personal and discombobulated nature there is, of course, this to take care of :-
The return of Qi.
The return of Springwatch.
Match Of The Day Podcasts.
Kermode & Mayo's Home Entertainment Service.
Killing Eve.
BBC4's repeats of The Joy Of Painting.
The First Team.
Normal People.
Sky Documentaries' Busby.
The Cricket Show.
Yesterday's War Factories.
Dunkirk: The Forgotten Heroes (yes, it's a repeat, but it's a good one).
Dam Busters: The Race To Smash The German Dams (another repeat and, again, a cracker).
Sky Arts'The Directors.
Anyway, dear blog reader, shortly after the last From The North bloggerisationisms update went live - on 17 May - this blogger received, somewhat out of the blue, a telephone call from his doctor. Asking yer actual Keith Telly Topping to come into the surgery on the following Thursday for a blood test - and, 'some other tests' - related to possible prostate cancer. Not really the kind of thing which one wishes for when one is trying to concentrate on working at home, frankly. Chances were, of course, even at this stage that it was all going to be fine and this was merely a precaution as this blogger has reached an age where it's better safe than sorry. This blogger is in a couple of 'at risk' groups, of course, hence the caution. Nevertheless, this blogger spent the next couple of days in a state of some understandable anxiety.
So, three days later, this blogger turned up at the surgery - having first organised a couple of hours off work to go and get anal-probed. It was, needless to say, a case of 'bring out yer dead.'
And then, stab them with needles till their arm resembles a sodding dart board. Twelve days later, this blogger still has a massive bruise caused by the right of these two puncture wounds.
Getting back to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House after the examination had concluded, this blogger sent a quick message to his line manager, Danny. Just to let him know that this blogger was now available for work again after his medical shenanigans. 'How'd it go?' Dan asked, not unreasonably. 'About as well as can be expected given than I had a finger up my sphincter for most of the time,' this blogger replied. That got a laugh. Though not from this blogger, obviously.
It was, this blogger should note, lovely to see his late mum's (and, indeed, his own) family medic, Doctor Chris again for the first time in at least a couple of years (actually, probably closer to three). And, even though we were both masked(!) we did have a pleasant - albeit, briefish - chat about this blogger's (physical and mental) health in general. And, the state of his ringpiece in particular. Following the exam, Doctor Chris didn't seem to think there was too much for Keith Telly Topping to be worrying about but, nevertheless, he confirmed that they would have the results of the blood test through by the next day and that he would call this blogger and give him the lowdown.
What can this blogger say, dear blog reader? Having spent part of the day with someone's fingers rammed up his Gary Glitter, this blogger really deserved this KFC takeaway once work had finished. It seemed rather appropriate.
The following day, thankfully, this blogger received two bits of good news. Firstly, Doctor Chris confirmed that - through a combination of significant rectal probature and vampire-like blood letting - this blogger appears not have a cancer-ridden bumhole. Which both he and Doctor Chris were jolly pleased about (Keith Telly Topping's blood PSA level was under two; it has to be above four before any alarm bells start ringing, apparently).
The good news, part two, was that this blogger's blood sugar level is currently still well within acceptable type-two diabetes levels (it was forty eight last time he was checked in December 2019. It was forty nine this time) and this blogger's weight is almost exactly the same as the last check (a raise of but one kilogram).
Thus this blogger appears, once again, to be a veritable walking advert for 'living dreadfully and still, somehow, surviving.' Which, dear blog reader, as you can probably appreciate, is very nice.
This blogger's mate, Christopher, did offer the observation that it was good it had been someone this blogger knew who had to job of doing the prostate examination. 'Well, it had to be,' this blogger replied. 'I don't let just anyone ram their digit up my back passage, I'm not that sort of boy.'
'I remember the last time I had a prostate exam,' a Facebook fiend of this blogger added. 'The doctor said, "Okay, I'm now going to insert my finger into your rectum." I replied, "Normally I'd expect flowers and dinner first."''When I went for my prostate exam, the doctor said "You're going to have to stop masturbating,"' claimed another Facebook fiend of Keith Telly Topping. '"Does it affect the result?" I asked him. "Well, it’s distracting while I'm trying to examine you," he said.' This blogger could merely reply that his attempt at a pithy witticism during the exam by Doctor Chris amounted to: 'Normally, you have to pay good money for this sort of thing down in Soho. Or, so they reckon ...'
(It occurs to this blogger that he has spent far more time than either he intended or that he's entirely comfortable with discussing his sphincter with you all, dear blog reader. Indeed, at least one - now former - acquaintance of this blogger has let it be know that he believes yer actual Keith Telly Topping has 'an obsession' which discussing that particular part of his anatomy. What can this blogger say, dear blog reader? He's very attached to his sphincter.)
Anyway, dear blog reader, there followed a couple of very satisfying days in general at the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House. Particularly that following weekend. Curry, fried rice and chips, a nice glass of blackcurrant pop and Diamonds Are Forever on ITV4. Ah, Sundays. This blogger loves you the mostest of all the days.
Admittedly, the borderline hate mail postcards (yes, postcards) which are currently being sent to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House during lockdown have been something of an amusing distraction from other aspects of yer actual Keith Telly Topping's terrifying life.
This blogger, let it be noted, has his own suspicions as to whomsoever is sending them. But, he thought he would give the well-naughty recidivist responsible the chance to confess, in public, before this blogger - potentially - names and/or shames the culprit. The fact that the person in question, seemingly, can't spell'recidivist' does, rather, narrow down the field of potential suspects.
Even that, though, was not going to spoil or put any sort of dampener on this blogger's first full weekend off work in a month.
Having a brief - government-allowed - exercise walk on Sunday morning this blogger spotted, in the middle of Sandy Crescent, a discarded bra just laying there, all unwanted and abandoned in its loneliness. Sadly, this blogger didn't have his camera-phone on him at the time otherwise he would have taken a photo of it for posterity. However, subsequently, he could only Conceive of two potential reasons for it being there. Firstly, it being an unsuccessful attempt by someone at fashioning a homemade anti-Coronavirus mask. Or, secondly, someone was spending their Saturday night on The Estate getting their tits fondled right there in the road. If it was the latter, though - and, hey, this is Walker we're talking about, this blogger certainly wouldn't be surprised - then it brings up all sorts of questions about a potential lack of social distancing ...
The things that some people get up to during a global pandemic, dear blog reader. It shouldn't be either encouraged or, indeed, allowed. Unless it's between consenting adults, or course. In which case, hey, go for it.
This blogger also spent some time playing on the Interweb with various 'change a photo of yourself into a portrait' type websites. Like this one, for instance. Though, let it be observed, if this blogger had paid someone to paint this, he would have sued over the results ... And, that's just the one on the right. Post-impressionism my arse.
Keith Telly Topping knocked off Tuesday's shift at 4.30 and then went straight out down to ALDI to buy something for us tea at the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House. This blogger doesn't know why, dear blog reader, but he really fancied a beer that particular evening.
So, therefore, he had one. And, why ever not? This blogger is, after all - and despite occasional appearances to the contrary - a grown adult and legally entitled to drink alcohol. Though he chooses not to most of the time.
But, there were more than a few times during the following few days where this blogger thought 'Jeez, is this week never going to end?' This blogger is normally all right with the 8am to 4.30pm shift but the last couple of days Keith Telly Topping was completely running on empty and, on Friday, a stotting headache wasn't helping in the slightest. Especially when some disgraceful hipster driving a BMW coupe decided it would be fun to drive up and down outside the opened windows of the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House playing his housy-housy, trippy-hoppy baseball-cap-on-backwards music. Really loudly.
This blogger really hates hipsters, dear blog reader. He may have mentioned this on one or two previous occasions.
A couple of hours after that however, at last, this blogger finished work for the week with the rewards of three days off in a row for the first time in God knows how long (nine weeks, at least). The thought of which was, frankly, just about the only thing that got this blogger through the majority of Friday afternoon.
Never, dear blog reader, not never in the field of his own human existence, has this blogger really deserved King Prawn and Mushrooms in Oyster Sauce from the - recently re-opened - Royal Sky quite as much as he did that particular evening. Gosh, it was well-nice.
So, we reached Saturday and, early that morning, this blogger informed his dear Facebook fiends: 'I'm going out, now (yes, in my "three-quid-bought-from- Poundland-vest"). I may be some time.'
They say (whoever 'they' are), that every picture tells a story. The following sixteen pictures tell the story of yer actual Keith Telly Topping's - government-encouraged - pure-dead-hot last Saturday morning in May 'gannin' t'Toon' adventure, his continuing to be 'a lert' and getting both his weekly exercise quota and the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House shopping out of the way at the same time. All of which was, once again, done to a soundtrack on his MP3 player of The Be-Atles (a popular beat combo of the 1960s, you might've heard of them). And frankly, dear blog reader, if you've never bought some Canestan cream in Boots to soothe a minor fungal infection to a soundtrack of 'Here Comes The Sun', you have simply never lived.
Smothered - smothered, so he was - in Ambre Solaire Factor Fifty, yer actual Keith Telly Topping sallied forth from the comforting safety of the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House and had a pleasant stroll through Monkchester Park, along to Welbeck Road to grab a couple of bottles of cheap pop from Herons.
Thence, it was up the road to the Post Office to pay the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House rent - this blogger actually dropped two weeks rent since he is not sure how much time he'll have next Saturday. Plus, it always pays to be a bit in advance so that you don't get threatened with being turfed out the gaff into the street by your landlord if you happen to miss a week.
This blogger then got the Forty bus up to Byker and popped into Home Bargains to buy a replacement USB-powered desk mini-fan to replace the one which he left at the office when he went into self-isolation and which, he presumes will have, during the last nine weeks, been half-inched by some thieving toerag. Sadly, whist in Home Bargains, he got stuck in the queue with the new lass on the tills who needed to ask her superiors about everything. And, he also found himself in the queue behind a couple of abject planks who, seemingly, didn't know their collective arse from their collective elbow when it came to simple questions like 'how are you paying for these?' Otherwise, this blogger would've been in-and-out of the gaff in seconds. Instead, that's ten minutes of this blogger's life which he'll never get back.
This blogger then walked across to the Byker Business Park and Poundland (Argos, sadly, remains thoroughly shut). For coffee, Fry's Raspberry Cremes (yes, Keith Telly Topping is still completely addicted to the latter) and another 'three-quid-from-Poundland' XXXL vest. Except this one was actually 'five-quid-from-Poundland.' The effect on the economy of the government's handling of the Coronavirus crisis in a nutshell, dare one suggest. Hyperinflation, dear blog reader. It can only be a few weeks away.
Keith Telly Topping then got a bus that he hadn't come across before - the A1 which isn't a Stagecoach routemaster but, nevertheless, had a very nice driver. One who, when this blogger showed him Keith Telly Topping's Day Rider Stagecoach ticket said: 'Yeah, no problem. Hop on brother, I'll take you to th'Toon!' Thus, this blogger arrived at a virtually deserted Northumberland Street in an unreasonably good mood. On what was, just to repeat, the hottest Saturday morning in the entire history of hot Saturday mornings. It was ten-past-ten by this stage (you can tell that, dear blog reader, because of the clock on Northern Goldsmiths, obviously).
This blogger's next stop was Marks & Spencers. To buy a box of those thoroughly addictive cocktail sausages, plus some marinated chilli, garlic and paprika prawns and smoked spiced Proscuitto ham and cheese 'rollettess.' In a 'three-for-seven-quid' deal which took Keith Telly Topping's fancy greatly for us Saturday brunch at the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House.
To Lloyd's, next, up at the Haymarket Metro. To get a mini-statement.
Round the corner to the Halifax after that. To get some money out of the cash-point. And, for another mini-statement. Percy Street, incidentally, was looking just as deserted as everywhere else in the centre of Newcastle.
... as, indeed, was Monument. Even poor old Earl Grey, up atop of his vast column, was looking mighty lonely in the spring sunshine.
Despite being eyed-up rather suspiciously by a door-watcher type individual in a mask, Keith Telly Topping (also masked) was allowed into yer actual Boots so that he could purchase the a'fore-mentioned cooling, itch-relieving Canestan cream. And various other ephemera of the pharmaceutical variety.
Eldon Square, meanwhile, was also looking very pretty but also very deserted. And still, the sun beat down. Whilst taking this photo, incidentally, the Twelve extremely arrived and Keith Telly Topping was able to hot-foot (and, indeed, hot everything else) it back to Byker.
... where, he stood in a short-but-necessary queue to get into Morrisons and buy some Nice biscuits (that's Nice the biscuit company, not 'nice' what they taste like - although, hopefully ...) Plus, bread, Young's Breaded Prawns (for the next day's lunch at the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House), a fresh cream waffle (as a treat for surviving the preceding awful week just about in tact) and a new pasta bowl to replace one which has seen somewhat better days.
Sadly, most of Newcastle's Greggs stores remain extremely closed and thus, Keith Telly Topping still cannot sate his overwhelming craving for a stottie cake. Which, sad to report, is now assuming outrageous, dangerous, crime-inducing proportions.
... and causing yer actual Keith Telly Topping (wearing his new 'five-quid-from-Poundland' vest) to scowl all over his mush like he'd just sucked on a lemon.
What can this blogger say in justification, dear blog reader? He just wants a bloody stottie, is that too much to wish for? It's been so long, this blogger has almost forgotten what they look like. But not what they taste like.
Anyway here, dear blog reader, is but a small sampling of some of the morning's purchases. Is Keith Telly Topping the only person currently keeping the British economy afloat? (The answer is 'probably not' but it sometimes feels like that.)
And, still there was time to do a quick bit of strimmage on the (not particularly manicured) lawns of the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House during the afternoon.
Then, on Sunday, a darza new pair of FILA trainers were delivered by DPD to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House.
Followed, just a few hours later, by the day's second delivery to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House. A long-overdue update of the Stately Telly Topping Manor shaver.
So, the garden strimming was done. The vacuuming was done. The washing was done. The Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House lunch was sorted. The two expected deliveries to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House were delivered. And, yer actual Keith Telly Topping sitting around the house with the front room fan on full blast wearing just this blogger's 'three-quid-from-Poundland' vest, a pair of shorts and his new trainers? That was very much a work-in-progress type affair. And a pleasurable one at that.
And now, dear blog reader, it's time for ...
Isn't it nice to see that, despite all the hot weather, the social distancing message is still getting through? Mostly.
And, speaking of messages finally getting through ...
Of course, we must never forget that there are some freedoms which are worth fighting for, dear blog reader.
Tributes have been paid after the death of Michael Angelis, one of this blogger's favourite actorsd who will be remembered as the morose rabbit-obsessed Lucien from The Liver Birds, the desperate Chrissie in Boys From The Blackstuff and as the narrator of Thomas The Tank Engine. Angelis died suddenly while at home with his wife on Saturday, his agent said. He was sixty eight. One of Angelis's most memorable performances was as Chrissie Todd in Alan Bleasdale's Boys From The Blackstuff, the Liverpool-set drama which attempted to show the devastating blight of 1980s unemployment. In a row with his wife Angie, played by Julie Walters, Angelis's character says with mounting fury: 'What do you think it's like for me? A second class citizen. A second rate man. With no money and no job and no place!' The episode ends with him shooting his geese and pigeons to provide dinner. Angelis once described the drama as 'possibly the finest thing I've ever done' and it changed his career. Before it he had experienced signing on.
In the 1970s Angelis first became a familiar face on British TV as the gloomy, philosophising Lucien in the Carla Lane sitcom The Liver Birds, a character who always wished he had stayed home with his beloved rabbits. He had a melodic voice which made him the perfect replacement for Ringo Starr as narrator of the Thomas The Tank Engine TV shows, a role he had for thirteen series from 1991. Other notable roles included the gangster Mickey Startup in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Martin Niarchos in Bleasdale's Channel Four drama GBH and Robert Rocksavage in the BBC drama Good Cop. Angelis also had roles in Minder, Z Cars, Giving Tongue, Thirty-Minute Theatre, Rock Follies, Hazell, The Professionals, Reilly, Ace of Spies, Bergerac, Playing The Field, The Marksman, Wail Of The Banshee, Between The Lines, Casualty, September Song and Harry Enfield & Chums. Michael also appeared in films such as A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square (1979) and Bleasdale's No Surrender (1985). In 1983, he appeared at the Royal Exchange, Manchester in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker. He narrated John Peel's autobiography, Margrave Of The Marshes, which was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2005. In 2007 he appeared in episodes of Midsomer Murders and The Bill. Born in Dingle, Angelis was married to the Coronation Street actress Helen Worth between 1991 and 2001 and, later, married Jennifer Khalastchi. He was the younger brother of fellow actor Paul Angelis.

In keeping with much of the rest of the planet, dear blog reader, this blogger's general mood at the moment can, roughly, be summed up thus.
Bleak. But, more on that later ...

Still, on a slightly more positive note - let it be noted, it's not very often that this blogger can actually say he is, hand-on-heart, proud of his beloved (though still tragically unsellable) football club. But this week has been something of an exception ... Good on ya, lads.
Also on the subject of this blogger's beloved - though (seemingly) unsellable - Magpies, regular From The North readers may have noticed that this blogger has said almost nothing about the ongoing saga of the - at the time of writing, still-proposed - takeover of his local football club. Except a brief note a few bloggerisationisms back. And, that was merely to observe it says much about the way in which the current owner of the club is so despised by the majority of supporters that they would, seemingly, prefer to see the club majority-owned by members of one of the most harsh and repressive political regimes in the world. Because, compared to the bloke who owns Sports Direct, Saudi Arabia's a haven of integrity and enlightenment, right? If this blogger was Mike Ashley, dear blog reader (which he most definitely isn't, just in case you were wondering), he would be laughing his non-cotton sports socks off at such thinking. Before going back to counting his vast wads of moolah and laughing some more.
    Anyway, the latest twist in the ongoing - and, seemingly, never-ending - saga is that the Premier League chief executive Richard Masters has, reportedly, said he will 'fully consider' calls for Newcastle United's proposed takeover to be blocked. Which this blogger somehow doubts ... and he's not alone in that belief, it would seem. Hatice Cengiz, the fiancee of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has written to the league to oppose the deal. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund is financing a three hundred million knicker takeover along with some marginally more morally-acceptable partners like the businesswoman and financier Amanda Staveley and the Reuben Brothers. Western intelligence agencies have publicly stated they believe Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who heads the PIF, was behind Khashoggi's shocking murder in 2018 - claims which bin Salman himself denies. Though, to paraphrase Mandy Rice Davies, 'well, he would, wouldn't he?'
      In a letter seen by BBC Sport, Masters told Cengiz's lawyer: 'I assure you and your client that her representations are being fully considered in our process.' Cengiz's legal team say it is the first acknowledgement by the Premier League that her views are 'being taken into account' in the takeover, which is being checked under the league's owners' and directors' test. In the letter, Masters also writes to Rodney Dixon QC to say that although he 'remains extremely sympathetic to your client's position' a requested meeting between the parties is 'not possible, particularly in light of correspondence appearing in the media.' Checks under the league's owners' and directors' test have been going on for more than six weeks and show no sign of being decided - one way or another - any time soon. In a statement to BBC Sport, Cengiz said: 'I'm cautiously optimistic the Premier League will make the right decision. I'm sure that if the Premier League follows its own rules and charter, especially the owners' and directors' test, it will block the sale of Newcastle United to Mohamed bin Salman and the Public Investment Fund he chairs. Until Bin Salman is held accountable for his role in Jamal's brutal murder, everyone must refrain from doing any business with him.''In addition to concerns about Saudi Arabia's human rights record, broadcast piracy claims have also been raised,'BBC Sports notes. Actually, that's not true in the slightest - questions have, indeed, been asked in parliament by at last two MPs on this subject but neither have even mentioned Saudi Arabia's human rights records. In May 2020, two Conservative MPs called on the government to scrutinise 'aspects of the deal,' with Karl McCartney calling for the sale to be 'blocked' and Giles Watling demanding the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport hold 'an oral evidence session' regarding media piracy in Saudi Arabia. It would be extremely hypocritical for any British politician - particularly a Tory - to go down the human rights route given that the UK is amongst the biggest trading partners with Saudi Arabia and that members of the Saudi royal family are regular visitors to both Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. Rather, the main highlighted issue - as with almost everything else in the football world - is financial. The broadcaster beoutQ has, allegedly, been illegally showing matches - mainly in Saudi Arabia - despite the Premier League rights in the region belonging to Qatar-based beIN Sports. Saudi broadcaster Arabsat has always denied that beoutQ uses its frequencies to show games illegally. One or two people even believed them. Dixon, on behalf of Cengiz, has previously written to Masters saying there should be 'no place in English football' for anyone 'involved in such abhorrent acts.' Cengiz has also written an open letter to Newcastle fans urging them to 'unite to protect' the club from the proposed takeover, for which the PIF is set to provide eighty per cent of funds. The Newcastle United Supporters' Trust has been publicly sympathetic to Cengiz's stance - and, indeed, one would have to possess a heart made of stone not to - and says that it 'understands' concerns about Saudi Arabia's human rights record. However, it says it has 'no influence' on who takes over the club. They say they will raise issues about Saudi Arabia's human rights record even if they support the prospective takeover. In an online forum, which involved over two thousand supporters, NUST chair Alex Hurst said: 'We exist to be a critical friend of the club, and hold them to account.' Last month, a NUST poll of three thousand plus members found ninety six per cent were in favour of the new consortium to replace current - hated - owner Mike Ashley, who has been in charge of Newcastle for thirteen inglorious years.
   This blogger's own view on this complicated malarkey? If this were purely a human rights issue then it's difficult not to be hugely conflicted by the whole deal - despite the obvious potential win-win situation of saying goodbye forever to the loathsome Ashley. But, of course, it isn't. Despite occasional evidence to the contrary, not everything in life is black and white, dear blog reader.
To the other great love of this blogger's life; there is a very good piece by the Gruniad Morning Star's Martin Belam, 'I've Made A Studio Outside My Bathroom': How Doctor Who Lovers Took On Lockdown in which Martin notes that: 'Covid-Nineteen hasn’t stopped the writers, stars and fans of the show coming together to watch along, raise funds and even release a moving tribute.' It's well-worth a few moments of your time, dear blog reader.
And now, some terribly sad news. Steve Priest, the bassist and co-founder of glam rock band The Sweet, has died at the age of seventy two. Steve was known for his playful sense of humour and outrageous costumes when The Sweet played hits like 'Block Buster!', 'Teenage Rampage' and 'Wig Wam Bam' on Top Of The Pops in the 1970s. Priest also sang the memorable lines 'there's a girl in the corner that no-one ignores/cos she thinks she's the passionate one' in 'Ballroom Blitz' and 'We just haven't got a clue what to do' in 'Block Buster!' His death was confirmed by the band, who shared a statement from his family on social media.
Bandmate Andy Scott paid tribute, describing Priest as the best bassist he had ever played with. 'From that moment in the summer of 1970 when we set off on our musical odyssey the world opened up and the roller coaster ride started. I am in pieces right now,' added the guitarist, who is now the sole surviving member of The Sweet's classic line-up following the deaths of singer Brian Connolly in 1997 and drummer Mick Tucker in 2002. 'His wife Maureen and I have kept in contact and though his health was failing I never envisaged this moment. My thoughts are with his family.
Steve Priest was born in Hayes in 1948, and became a musician after building his own bass guitar in his teens. After playing in local bands like The Countdowns and The Army, he formed The Sweet (then known as Sweetshop) in January 1968 with Brian Connolly, Tucker and their original guitarist Frank Torpey. Following a few line-up changes and a false start with Parlophone Records, the band signed to RCA in 1971 and teamed up with the songwriting/production team of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, whose bubblegum melodies and power-pop riffs propelled them into the charts. Their initial success was with somewhat lightweight material like 'Co-Co', 'Poppa Joe' and 'Little Willy' (their biggest hit the US). Subsequently, influenced by the glam rock of T-Rex and David Bowie, they released a sting of brilliant campy rock and/or roll singles. In total, they scored thirteen Top Twenty hits in the UK, with songs like 'Teenage Rampage', 'Hell Raiser', 'Wig-Wam Bam', 'The Six Teens' and their sole number one, 1973's 'Block Buster!' As the band became a regular fixture on Top Of The Pops, Priest turned into the epitome of glam rock androgyny, known for his flamboyant outfits and heavy mascara. 'The make-up thing, I can't remember what started that,' he told the Phoenix New Times in 2018. 'Marc Bolan, maybe? Top Of The Pops was a stupid show in some ways but it was like, you had to outdo everyone else. I was the first one to wear hot pants on Top Of The Pops,' he added. 'A year later, Bowie did it and everyone went, "Wow, David Bowie wore hot pants on Top Of The Pops" and totally forgot the fact that I did it the year before!'
But the bassist landed himself in hot water when he appeared in a German military uniform and sporting a Hitler moustache on the 1973 Christmas Day episode of Top Of The Pops. 'It's amazing how everyone still talks about the Nazi uniform,' he said in 2010. 'Good old BBC wardrobe department. People always want to know if I was serious. I mean, a gay Hitler. Hello?!'
The Sweet parted ways with Chinn and Chapman in 1974, determined to write their own material. Influenced by their heroes The Who, their new sound was harder and more experimental and yielded further hits like their masterpiece 'Fox On The Run', 'Action' and 'Love Is Like Oxygen'. And at least two genuinely great LPs, Desolation Boulevard (which included their covers of 'My Generation' an 'The Man With The Golden Arm') and Sweet Fanny Adams. After Connolly departed the group in 1978, Priest took over vocal duties and The Sweet continued as a trio until 1981.
In recent years, there had been two competing versions of The Sweet: Priest had the right to use the band's name in the US, where he lived, while Scott toured the UK with an alternate line-up. Their biggest songs continued to get radio play - while 'Ballroom Blitz', a song inspired by a Scottish gig where the band were bottled offstage, gained a new lease of life in the 1990s after featuring in the movie Wayne's World. Several of the band's songs were also used to great effect in the BBC time-travel series Life On Mars. Tributes to Priest have poured in since his death was announced, with many sharing their memories on social media. 'When Sweet were on [TV] you sat there in awe thinking, "sod the school careers adviser that's the job for me,"' wrote The Damned's Captain Sensible. 'And they wound your parents up something rotten too, which was a bonus.' David Ellefson of Megadeth said that Priest was 'without parallel.' He added that The Sweet 'gave me one of my earliest memories of great hard rock on the radio as a kid and Desolation Boulevard still holds up as one of rock's greatest albums from that period.' Priest is survived by his wife, Maureen, whom he married in 1981, their three daughters. Lisa, Danielle and Maggie and three grandchildren, Jordan, Jade and Hazel.'
Tony Scannell, who died last week aged seventy four, will be best remembered as the fiery Ted Roach in The Bill, debuting in its second episode in 1984. During his time, the programme metamorphosed from a one-hour post-watershed series to a twice and then thrice-weekly year-round fixture of ITVs primetime schedule, regularly pulling in more than ten million viewers. The Bill was a deliberately unglamorous depiction of British policing, portraying its officers as ordinary, flawed individuals. Roach was a hard-nut cop of the old school - a dogged investigator unafraid to bend the rules. Scannell's performance was highly watchable, making the detective a dyspeptic, spiky but likeable man, delivering his dialogue with a splenetic energy and jabbing finger, his sharp copper's instinct often battling the effects of the previous night's whisky. Roach's testy relationship with the top brass matched Scannell's own with the programme's producers and he left the series in 1993. His final episode provided an apposite departure involving fisticuffs, a clandestine romantic assignation, drinking on duty and the culmination of his long-running feud with the by-the-book Inspector Monroe (played by Colin Tarrant). Ordered to apologise for thumping his nemesis, Ted refused and quit, storming out of Sun Hill station with a snarling lament about the changing face of the force. Scannell's authentic, committed turn made Roach a very popular character with viewers and he reprised the role for two episodes in 2000 before being killed off in 2004, setting in motion a storyline for three of his ex-colleagues. Born in Kinsale, County Cork, Tony was the eldest of the five children of Tommy Scannell, a professional footballer who was capped for Ireland and his wife, Peggy. When Tony was five his father signed for Southend United and the family moved to England. However, Tony stayed behind in Cork to live with his grandmother so that he could be educated at the local Presentation Brothers college. After school he served briefly as an apprentice toolmaker before moving to England at the age of fifteen to rejoin the rest of his family, who were by then living in Folkestone. There, he worked as a TV salesman, a singing bingo caller and a deckchair attendant before a five-year stint with the RAF, serving as a reconnaissance photographer in Cyprus. He became a radio disc jockey for the British Forces Broadcasting Service there and helped out backstage at the camp's theatre group in order, he claimed, 'to avoid guard duty.' When he left the forces that experience, along with the encouragement of future Bill co-star Larry Dann, secured Scannell employment as an assistant stage manager at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in 1968. He trained at the East Fifteen Acting School in Loughton and, immediately upon graduating, played Elyot in Jack Watling's showcase production of Private Lives (Frinton, 1974). He then joined Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, appearing at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in, among other productions, Dracula (1974) and Bloody Mary (1975). He toured in Happy As A Sandbag (as Max Miller and Winston Churchill, 1977) and Hull Truck's The New Garbo (1978) and performed in Four Weeks In The City for the National Theatre (Cottesloe, 1978). He made his TV debut in 1976 and played small roles in Enemy At The Door (1978), The Professionals (1979) and the movie Flash Gordon (1980) before getting better parts in Armchair Thriller (The Circe Complex, 1980), Strangers (1981) and The Gentle Touch (1981). When the call came to audition for The Bill he was working as a salvage diver. In later years he was a regular in the Channel Five soap Family Affairs (as the conman Eddie Harris), played Tony Booth – opposite Sue Johnston's Pat Phoenix – in the TV movie The Things You Do For Love: Against The Odds (1998), displayed fine comic timing in Charlie Brooker's Unnovations (2001), guested in a fine two-part Waking The Dead (2007's Wren Boys) and starred in the film The Haunting Of Harry Payne (also known as Evil Never Dies, 2014). His CV also included appearances in Cribb, Up The Elephant & Round The Castle, Rock Power Telly, Noah's Ark and Monkey Trousers. He made his West End debut in Wait Until Dark (Garrick Theatre, 2003) and became a regular in pantomime (his Abanazer was a particular speciality). No stranger to tabloid intrusion - and despite being declared bankrupt in 2002, he had few regrets – he said thathe enjoyed the celebrity life to the full even if he had not always known how to handle it. He met the actor Agnes Lillis during a 1993 production of An Evening With Gary Lineker at the Jersey Opera House - she introduced him to Buddhism and he became a member of the Buddhist movement SGI-UK. This and settling with Agnes to enjoy a quiet family life in Suffolk in 1995, gave him a contentment which had eluded him in his more hedonistic days. They formed a theatre company - Eastbound - which performed short tours of local theatres and taught adult acting evening classes at the Seagull Theatre in Lowestoft. He is survived by Agnes and their children, Tom and Sophie, a daughter, Julya, from a relationship with Penny Ansell and a son, Sean, from his 1971 marriage to Melanie Self, which ended in divorce.
Leigh Francis has apologised for playing black people in his Channel Four comedy, Bo' Selecta (a particular favourite of this blogger). Using masks, the actor created exaggerated versions of the likes of Michael Jackson, Craig David and Mel B. Leigh says that when the show started, in 2002 he 'didn't think anything about it.' Leigh's apology was prompted, he says, by 'a weird few days.' Strangely, Francis did not also use the opportunity to apologise for inflicting his wretchedly unfunny Keith Lemon character on the unsuspecting pubic.
From The North's Headline of The Week award goes to BBC News for Porn Star Nacho Vidal Held In Spain After Man Dies In Toad-Venom Ritual.
Although, Berwick & Whitley Bay Dolphin Harassments Prompt Police Warning also probably deserves a mention.
Shortly after this blogger posted the previous From The North bloggerisationisms update - like the big clumsy clot that he, frequently, is - this blogger only went and managed to trip over his own feet whilst going downstairs to take the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House rubbish out to the bins. Fortunately, he managed to stop himself from going flying arse-over-tip - and, quite possibly, killing himself on the uncarpeted stone steps. Unfortunately, in doing so, he jarred his back really badly causing much pain, much discomfort and, indeed, much swearing. The following morning, once he'd rang into work to tell them what a bleeding clown he'd been, this blogger was on the phone to the very lovely Doctor Patricia (Doctor Chris is currently on holiday), who distance-diagnosed at least one, possibly several torn lumber muscles. She then prescribed rest, plenty of heat and massage and some heavy duty painkillers (to be sent out, obviously; they took two days to arrive during which time this blogger suffered i silence. No, to silence, what's the opposite of silence?) This blogger was also promised a two week sick note (also to be sent in the post, because email is not a secure medium, apparently). So, dear blog reader, yer actual Keith telly Topping appears to be the only person on the sodding planet who can manage to do himself a mischief whilst completely self-isolated. Mind you, on reflection, let it be noted 'rest, heat, massage and industrial strength drugs ...' A lot of people pay a fortune for that sort of thing, you know, recreationally ...
For those who are wondering, the answers are both of the next two questions are 'yes.' Yes, this blogger is still in sodding agony with his back (and, probably, will be for a while to come). And, yes, he did really deserve these chilli, garlic and paprika prawns on brown toast with black pepper. This blogger would love to tell you all that he had a nice glass of red wine with them, dear blog reader. But, since he is on diazepam at the moment, alcohol's rather off the menu and he had some blackcurrant pop instead.
And, the same also applies to this chilli and garlic crispy beef. You know how much this blogger deserved that withoutr him having to tell you, surely?
And, this chicken and king prawns in hoisin sauce, with spring onions and egg fried rice. Much needed. And, really deserved. Obviously.

So another From The North bloggerisationisms update is - very much - upon us, dear blog reader. Which is always nice. Well, usually nice. Well, sometimes ... Anyway, how are you all doing out there in Self-Isolated Blogland in these dark, troubled and troubling times? As well as can expected, this blogger hopes. Keith Telly Topping his very self is, sad to report ... well, broken, basically. But, more - much, much more - on that malarkey later.
Firstly, the really important news. Or not, as the case may be. 'Will Doctor Who series thirteen be delayed by the lockdown?' asked the Radio Times' Huw Fullerton breathlessly in an annoyingly nothing example of space-filling recently. To which question, the sodding obvious answer is 'well, of course it willbe you stupid glake,' just like more-or-less everything else on the planet - in most aspects of life - which don't involve the use of PPE. This blogger doesn't know whether you've noticed, Huwie me auld cock sparra, but the world is currently still stuck in the middle of a global pandemic of the kind we haven't seen in a Century. TV production has, as a consequence, taken something of a back-seat. 'It's been the question on many a Whovian's lips ever since the coronavirus pandemic forced various TV productions to shut down,' continued Fullerton. Which, if for no other reason than his use of the hated and hateful'W' word puts Fullerton jolly high up on this blogger's extensive 'that plank really deserves a damned good talking-to' list. 'And, while "socially-distanced" TV is now beginning to film again, a BBC executive has cast doubt on whether Doctor Whocould return under those circumstances.'No shit? So, what you're saying if this blogger understands you correctly, Huw, is that a major BBC drama production which involves dozens of actors, crew, technicians and other assorted production staff would probably have some difficulty in being made whilst there are still government-imposed restrictions in place regarding how many people can be in one place at one time? And this nonsense revelation constitutes 'news' apparently.
'It'll be down to social distancing,' Rhodri Talfan Davies, the Director of BBC Wales, said during an online Q&A when asked about the immediate future of Doctor Who. 'A production like that, which at any point employs hundreds of people, freelance and staff, I don't believe can be made to the current standard in a socially distanced environment. So it depends when you think social distancing is going to end.' Comments which, this blogger believes, anyone - at least, anyone with half-a-working-brain in their skull - would have been able to work out for themselves without needing somebody to spell it out for them. Does anybody else remember when the Radio Times used to be written by, you now, grown-ups?
     Davies also noted that these 'production issues' could vary between Wales and England, thanks to the differing social distancing guidelines currently being enacted by the Welsh Assembly Government. 'Since 2005, Doctor Who has been made in Wales and for the last few series filming and production has been centred at the Roath Lock Production Hub in Cardiff Bay,' added Fullerton. Really? Wow. Whom amongst us knew that? 'It may well be that the rules on social distancing in Wales are different to those in England,' Davies said. Actually, they are, just in case you were wondering - there's no 'may be' about it. 'Obviously each production centre from those two countries is going to need to respond to the specific rules and regulations that each of the governments are introducing.' Currently, Doctor Who has one upcoming episode already filmed - the 2020-21 festive special Revolution Of the Daleks - with series thirteen production previously rumoured to have been scheduled to start around September 2020. 'If Davies is correct and socially distanced filming rules still apply at that time, it could be that Doctor Who fans have to wait even longer for the new episodes than previously thought,' adds Fullerton before rushing off to appear as a contestant on a new - socially-distanced - episode of Mastermind where his specialist subject is rumoured to be 'Stating The Bleeding Obvious.''However, the truth may be more complex than first appears. While the BBC declined to comment on Davies' remarks, Radio Times understands that the broadcaster still has no concrete plans to delay the start of Doctor Who production, a date for which was never officially decided anyway.' It was at around this stage of reading this shite that this blogger pretty much lost the will to live. Huw being, clearly, paid by the word to write nothing even remotely substantial in as verbose a way as possible. Nice work if you can get it - trust this blogger, dear blog reader, he's something of an expert at that very technique. As From The North frequently proves. 'It's also worth noting that social distancing measures have been changing regularly and by autumn TV production might be able to operate with fewer restrictions.' Twenty four more words into the Fullerton bank account, there, dear blog reader. Although, a tip to you, Huw, if you'd written 'it is' rather than 'it's' you would have received an extra ten pee. 'Overall, though, it sounds like there's still a bit of a question mark over the future of Doctor Who. If only we knew someone with a time machine who could go and take a look,' this utter waste-of-trees concludes. So, to sum up, then, Doctor Who is not currently in production, we don't know when it will be going into production and, even if we did, Huw Fullerton of the Radio Times probably wouldn't be told before some real journalists got the scoop instead.
Huw's bulging bank balance was, no doubt, further swelled by yet another piece of speculative tripe based on virtually nothing (a photo posted on Twitter, no less) about a 'potential new design' for the Daleks for the forthcoming festive special. Which, should you have the necessary patience for nothing-dressed-as-something, you can check out the gist of here. This blogger will leave it up to you, dear blog reader, to decide whether that is three minutes of your valuable life you're happy to waste and never get back. Or otherwise.
Meanwhile, for some odd reason, a Daily Mirrastory originally published in 2005 about the Queen allegedly being a 'secret' fan of Doctor Who popped up on a lot of people's Facebook news-feeds this week. If you hadn't previously come across the article, dear blog reader, unlike the work of Huw Full Of Himself, this one genuinely is worth a few moments of your time. For thigh-slapping comedy value if nothing else. 'Royal aides say the monarch, pictured far right, is also a fan of the Daleks and she intends to while away August evenings watching the series at her Scottish residence,' the ludicrous excuse for a tabloid claimed in July 2005.
A couple of points worth making at this juncture; firstly the Queen's alleged 'secret'Doctor Who fandom is so secret it would seem that the Daily Mirra knew all about it. Not really all that'secret' dare one suggest? But, of course, that brings up the next obvious question as one is forced to wonder how, exactly the Daily Mirra uncovered this impressive - if alleged - scoop? Although, given that at the time the article was written some journalists at the Daily Mirra - and its sister papers, the Sunday Mirra and the People - were actively engaged in the illegal hacking of the mobile phones of at least seventy one people (and that figure merely accounts for those who have, to date, successfully sued Trinity Mirra Publishing's sorry ass for positively eye-watering amounts of cash) one could, perhaps, dare to speculate about the alleged 'source' of the Mirra's alleged 'exclusive.' Secondly, are Royal Aids in the habit of casually snitching up Her Majesty's TV viewing habits to tabloid hacks like a filthy stinkin' Copper's Nark? And, if they are, do they remain in positions of trust within the royal household after they have done so? And, thirdly, given the widely-reported 2015 story about the discovery of home-movie footage from 1933 of a young, then, Princess Elizabeth apparently giving a Nazi salute (which the Mirra - along with most of the rest of the British press - gleefully reported) could the phrase 'the Queen - pictured far right' be any more potentially embarrassing?
An - alleged, though suspiciously anonymous and, therefore, almost certainly fictitious - Buckingham Palace 'source' allegedly told the Mirra in 2005: 'The Queen loves the programme and has requested a full set of DVDs. She has asked the BBC to send her copies so she can watch the series again during her stay at Balmoral.' Quoted, please note, in exactly that tabloidesque 'real people don't talk like that' way we know and recognise as, probably, a load of made-up bullshit.
Mind you, if Her Maj is, indeed, a closet Whooveriser (© Yer actual K Telly Topping, 2020 - if you use it, Huw Fullerton, you pay for it) would she still be quite so 'into' the BBC's popular long-running family SF drama if she was aware that one of the show's best scriptwriters, the late, great Malcolm Hulke. was a committed Communist. A man who would, in all likelihood, have greatly enjoyed seeing Her Maj and the rest of her family hanging from lampposts outside Buck House. All, whilst the peasant proletariat danced in the streets and celebrated the fall of a self-perpetuating autocracy and the coming of a Marxist/Leninist Anarcho Syndicalist Commune to run the country? To which Her Majesty would, perhaps, have observed: 'Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I'm being repressed ...'
And, should that have occurred, no doubt, te story would then have become a lead item on FAUX News.
Seriously, dear blog reader, it's a question that, once again, needs to be asked ...
Now, dear blog reader, a further medical update for you all - since Keith Telly Topping knows a few of you have been a bit worried about this blogger's current state of being. Firstly, Keith Telly Topping's rotten bad back is still both knackin' and, indeed, knackered; the pain-killing drugs he has been prescribed have somewhat taken the edge off the constant teeth-grinding pain but mobility remains a significant issue with this blogger limping and stumbling around the gaff like a little old man. (There's probably an 'I feel like a little old man', 'a specific one or will any of them do?' joke in there somewhere, dear blog reader.) And, for the most part, this blogger is still spending much of each day either flat on his back in bed or flat on his back on the couch watching telly (see below). Neither of which are particularly unpleasant tasks in the great scheme of things although getting from a lying position to a sitting position and then to a standing position is far more of an issue for this blogger than it ever should be.
This blogger, let it be noted, is trying hard not to feel too sorry for his very self. Since there are undoubtedly, people in the world far worse-off than he. Can't think whom just at the moment but this blogger is sure that there, indeed, are. Keith Telly Topping only been out the house but once since the accident described in the last From The North update occurred and that was to go to the surgery last week for this blogger's six monthly type-two diabetes check-up (and, to pay his rent at the nearby Post Office whilst he had the chance). The journey to and from which fair wore Keith Telly Topping out something fierce, so it did. (The check-up itself, though, was happily excellent; this blogger's blood sugar level is at forty six this time. The general consensus from the staff was: 'Whatever it is you've been doing - apart from putting your back out of joint, obviously - keep doing it'.)
This blogger has to say, mind, that whilst he remains a really big fan of the NHS in general and his own surgery in particular, getting both the first - and, this week, a second - sick note sent out via e-mail proved to be far harder than it needed to be. This blogger's blood pressure wasn't exactly helped by the trial he had in getting the first medical note so that he could forward it on to his employer (who, to be scrupulously fair to them, haven't exactly been hassling this blogger for it). Four phone calls, at least two broken promises and one outright lie later ('we can't, possibly, under any circumstances, send you it out by e-mail, no siree, Bob' - only, actually, it turned out they could and indeed - eventually - did), this blogger finally received the damned thing seven days after first contact. The latest one was slightly - but only slightly - less problematic. That only took three days, two phone calls - and an e-mail from this blogger to them - before they got their shit together to send it. However, this blogger felt it was wise to note, truthfully, in his e-mail: 'I'm sure you have far more important stuff to deal with than my bad back!' Let it be noted, this blogger still loves them and think they're doing a fantastic job like all of their NHS colleagues.
Anyway, this blogger remains off work and laid up in the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House until at least 6 July and he is still on Diazepam (and, therefore, off alcohol of any kind), Ibuprofen and Paracetamol (as well as all of the rest of the pills his takes for his diabetes, his hypertension, his embiggened prostate, his nerves et cetera). This blogger, as this latest bloggerisationisms update hopefully proves, remains surprisingly sanguine in terms of his own mental health although extremely frustrated and often really very cross and vexed indeed because he can't get around the house as easily as he would like. Hopefully, another couple of weeks laid up with industrial strength painkillers flowing through his bloodstream will sort yer actual Keith Telly Topping out after a fashion. Anyway, thank you to the various Facebook fiends and dear blog readers who have PM'd and e-mailed this blogger over the last couple of weeks (presumably to make sure that he wasn't, you know, dead. Yet).
And this blogger has, apparently, been chosen by the government and the Imperial College London to take part in a 'Covid-Nineteen in-home antibody testing research study.' Which is jolly nice. This blogger is, as a consequence, soon to become one of those statistics trotted out at the government's daily briefings. Keith Telly Topping feels like his life has, suddenly, been validated. And, it's only taken fifty six years on the planet for that to happen. Sweet.
Usually, this blogger gets out of his stinkin' pit each morning at around 7am and the first thing he does is to take the initial batch of the various - industrial strength - pain medications he has recently been prescribed. Consequently, by around 10.30am to 11am each morning the effects of the drugs have just about started to wear off but it's still a little bit early to take the next dose(s). So, what this blogger usually does is to go for a lie down in bed and either, if he can, grab a quick forty winks or, if not, then at least take his mind off the searing, agonising, incandescently awful pain he is in by sticking his MP3 player on random and seeing what interesting segues it comes up with. Friday's first three choices were Nick Drake's 'Northern Sky', followed by Girl Aloud's 'Something Kinda Ooh', followed by Toots & The Maytals''Pressure Drop'. Trust this blogger, dear blog readers, when Keith Telly Topping tells you that there are time when you don't need drugs for the world to appear, you know, a bit weird ...
Still, dear blog reader, even in this blogger's current abject misery and soul-crushing agony, there are occasional moments where the phrase 'I really deserve this' still applies. Like this one.
Or, indeed, this one. Really, really, really.
So, dear blog reader, you are probably wondering at this juncture what, exactly, yer actual Keith Telly Topping has been diverting himself with on the gogglebox, iPlayer, SkyGo and UKTVPlay during his more lucid, less drugged-up moments of late? And, if you're not then, don't worry, this blogger is going to tell you anyway ...
The Salisbury Poisonings.
A Greek Odyssey With Bettany Hughes.
What's The Matter With Tony Slattery?
We Hunt Together.
Dave Gorman's Modern Life Is Goodish.
I May Destroy You.
McMillion$.
Mrs America.
Kermode & Mayo's Home Entertainment Service.
Blackadder's History.
The Brokenwood Mysteries.
Nazi Victory: The Post-War Plan.
Deadliest Crash: Disaster At Le Mans.
Qi.
Actual proper, live, not repeated, Association Football (though, without Sky Main Event's horribly fake 'added crowd noise', obviously).
Here is the latest of an occasional From The North semi-regular series, Things We Discovered From TV This Week - this one from Friday's episode of BBC2's Later ... With Jools Holland. Dame Diana Rigg has, apparently, been spending lockdown at the home of her daughter, Rachel Stirling and her son-in-law, Elbow's singer/songwriter Guy Garvey.
This week's 'feel-good' story from the BBC News website is, undoubtedly, this one. And, it's genuinely touching. Librarians are recording an audiobook for a one hundred and two-year-old lady so she can again enjoy a story read to her decades ago by her 'wonderful' father. Doris Bugg wanted to reminisce with Francis Brett Young's 1927 novel Portrait Of Clare, but the out-of-print book was unavailable at her library in Ipswich. Touched by her memories, librarians bought a copy for her online and are busy reading all eight hundred and twenty seven pages, recorded on CDs. 'I was absolutely amazed at the kindness of them,' said Mrs Bugg. Doris regularly visited the town centre library in person until a couple of years ago and continues to borrow audiobooks online. During lockdown she has received regular phone calls from library staff checking on her welfare and to chat, which is how they heard about her memories of the book, which was the first she borrowed from the library as a child. 'The book was important to me because I had a wonderful father who taught me the value of books,' said Mrs Bugg. '[The staff] found the book and that was when they suggested they read it out loud and record it for me.' The novel is split into seven books, with three recorded so far. Library manager Charmain Osborne said that it was 'really heartwarming' to be able to help. Krystal Vittles, head of service delivery at Suffolk Libraries, tweeted about the gesture, saying 'my heart wants to burst.' She added: 'It's just so wonderful they found the book - they bought it with their own money. They were so self-deprecating about it as, to them, it's no big deal, it's just what they do.' The romantic family saga was described by Vittles as 'very much of its time.' Inspired by her colleagues' kindness, Vittles said she had just bought Mrs Bugg a DVD copy of the 1950 movie adaptation of Portrait Of Clare (starring Margaret Johnson and Richard Todd), for her to also enjoy.
Now, dear blog reader, to one of From The North's most popular semi-regular features, this blog's Headline Of The Week award. Which, this week, goes to some Middle Class hippy Communist of no importance at the Independent for The Darkness Frontman Justin Hawkins Hospitalised After Freak Accident Involving Melted Shorts. And yes, you're right, there almost certainly is a 'don't let the bells end' joke in there somewhere. If you look hard enough.
Also mentioned in dispatches in this regard and a narrow runner-up, the US magazine People's fine effort - Gwyneth Paltrow Reveals Goop's New 'This Smells Like My Orgasm' Candle: 'The Box Has Fireworks'. No further comment is necessary. Or, indeed, printable, even if it was necessary.
And, as for the Global News website's Metal Drummer Will Carroll Claims He Met Satan In COVID-Nineteen Coma ... well, stranger things have happened. Though, not much stranger, admittedly. The musician claimed that Satan would transform him into a creature similar to that of Star Wars' Jabba The Hutt and that he would 'vomit blood until he ultimately had a heart attack.'
This blogger's favourite article of the week comes, oddly, from the much-loathed Gruniad Morning Star. But, at least, it's by From The North favourite, the columnist Marina Hyde: Marcus Rashford Is Showing Our Failing Politicians How To Do Their Jobs. To quote Marina, at some length: 'We'll come to Gavin Williamson, the forty three-year-old secretary of state for education, in due course. Suffice to say Gavin has gone so missing in the biggest game of his career that the coastguard has called off the search and it has now become a matter for the Hubble telescope. As for the prime minister, shortly before Marcus Rashford was born to a single mother who he idolises for her tireless work and sacrifices, Boris Johnson was writing that single mothers were producing a generation of "ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate children." Which, let's face it, means so much more coming from him. For now, a reminder of where we were two-and-a-half months ago. Taking the podium at a government press conference, even as Covid-Nineteen was ripping silently through the care homes he'd later lie he'd put "a ring of steel" around, Gavin's cabinet colleague Matt Hancock was very keen to show he had his priorities in order. "I think the first thing that Premier League footballers can do is make a contribution," Matt proclaimed. "Take a pay cut and play their part." It must have seemed such an easy win, for politicians who know nothing about footballers, or indeed about football. Or, increasingly, about winning. Just a reminder of where the "world-beating" UK currently is: we have the third highest death toll in the world, the OECD has predicted we will have the worst-hit economy in the developed world and we are on course for one of the slowest and most socially painful exits from lockdown. If this is world-beating I'd hate to see us lose. I don't need to tell you that during this entire shitshow, under their exclusive management, the government has only suggested a single group in our society should take a pay cut: Premier League footballers. To dispense with the more irrelevant end of the housekeeping first: Premier League players were going to take a pay cut anyway when Matt was going for his headline; they announced the thirty per cent reduction within hours; and have since contributed in a vast - and mostly unpublicised - number of ways to social and charitable initiatives within their communities and beyond. But even if they had done absolutely none of that – genuinely unthinkable – imagine Matt Hancock, secretary of state for health in a time of pandemic, spending even one minute having a view on what footballers were doing. Because that actually happened. I know the buzzphrase is "easy to say in hindsight" - but on the basis that I wrote about it at the time, I'm going to have to go with "easy to say in sight." This is not a matter of retrospect - it was always a matter of spect.' What she said.
Still on the subject of ignorant shite-scum politicians using football as a political, well, football basically, a third MP - one Angus MacNeill (no, me neither) - has written to trade secretary Liz Truss to 'voice his concerns' over the proposed takeover of this blogger's beloved (though, tragically unsellable) Newcastle United. MacNeill demanded - demanded - that the government should 'block' the Saudi Arabian-led takeover (whether the government can, legally, do so even if they wanted to is something of an unknown, just in case you were wondering). Like his parliamentary colleagues Karl McCartney and Giles Watling, however, MacNeill did not do so from a human rights point of view (which, to be honest, would be difficult to argue against, even for the biggest supporters of the proposed deal - which this blogger is not, as a matter of pure disinterest). Rather, MacNeill's chief objection - as with his colleagues - is, seemingly, over the issue of TV piracy. Earlier this week the World Trade Organisation ruled that Saudi Arabia had, indeed, helped to breach international piracy laws in relation to the broadcaster beoutQ. MacNeill - like McCartney and Watling - however stopped well-short of suggesting that if Saudi Arabia are, indeed, such a pariah who casually flout international law, then the British government should, also, stop trading with them, selling them vast quantities of arms and other British-made products and making lots of lovely wonga in the process. So, is this crass, ignorant, twattish hypocrisy from a politician? This blogger will leave the answer to that question entirely up to your own sensibilities, dear blog reader. He, himself, couldn't possibly comment. But it is certainly illustrative that - as with virtually everything else involved in football - money is, seemingly, King and human rights are 'someone else's problem.'
Joelinton scored only his second Premier League goal - and the first since 25 August - as this blogger's beloved though still unsellable (even to oil-rich, alleged human-rights-abusing, alleged pirates) Magpies swept aside ten-man Sheffield United to take a huge step towards safety in their first game since all sport in the UK was suspended in March. The relief on the Brazilian striker's face was evident when he tapped in the Magpies' third goal and, although there were no fans inside St James' Park to celebrate with him, no doubt many were screaming with delight (and, probably, astonishment) from their front rooms as the forty million knicker striker ended his torrid run. And managed not to trip over his own feet in the process. This blogger certainly was. That was the icing on a properly-sweet Magpies cake, baked in an eerily quiet St James' with the only noise heard being frequent bursts of bad language coming from the Sheffield United bench which had the Sky Sports commentary team squirming with embarrassment and grovellingly apologising to viewers. Most of whom, one suspects, frankly couldn't have given a flying fuck about such nonsense. Returning to competitive action after an enforced one hundred and six day break since a victory at Southampton, ten of the eleven fielded at St Mary's by Newcastle were retained, Joelinton returning at the expense of Dwight Gayle. Despite playing their first match since the restart, Th' Toon looked far fresher and more interested than their opponents who produced one of their worst defensive displays of the season, capped off by the red card for John Egan five minutes after the break. It means Chris Wilder's side, who drew against Aston Villains in their opening match back, have taken just one point from two games. As for Newcastle, who have been dealing with that never-ending takeover saga during the lockdown (you knew that, right?), they now have thirty eight points and are eleven points above the drop-zone. Allan Saint-Maximin sent them on their way when he fired home at the far post after Enda Stevens inexplicably allowed Matt Ritchie's fizzing cross to go between his legs. Ritchie then added a second with a thunderous drive from the edge of the area. Then came Joelinton's strike from close range after Miguel Almiron delivered a pinpoint ball to his feet. Newcastle stay at home for their next match against the struggling Villains. Steve Bruccie's team selections, particularly his seeming reluctance to drop Joelinton, had frustrated many supporters and now the possibility of new, moneyed owners from Saudi Arabia has cast further doubt on the future of the manager. But now and again Brucie (nasty to see him, to see him, nasty) has confounded his critics this season (this blogger very much included) with wins over Stottingtot Hotshots, The Scum, Moscow Chelski FC and, now, this double over The Blunt Blades. His side produced a disciplined display with plenty of verve and pace provided by Saint-Maximin, Almiron and Ritchie. Saint-Maximin, in particular, was excellent. The twenty million smackers summer signing now seems a snip for the twenty three-year-old who embarrassed the visiting defence with his trickery and bursts of speed, before he got his just reward in the fifty fifth minute. Ritchie added the second fourteen minutes later with the goal of the game - a fierce drive which was too hot to handle for Dean Henderson. And, with twelve minutes remaining, Joelinton, who had arsed-up what seemed a relatively easy chance in the first half by tripping over his own feet, scored his second league goal for the club - two thousand one hundred and thirty minutes and thirty nine shots at goal after scoring the first. (To be completely fair to the lad, he has scored a couple of goals in the FA Cup during that period and another two in recent friendlies.) Wilder's post-match talk to his team might not be repeatable in polite company (or, on Sky Sports). His side's success thus far this season has been built on unwavering discipline and a miserly defence - the second best in the league before Sunday - but neither were evident here. There were suggestions something was not right early in the match when midfielder Oliver Norwood lost possession far too easily on a couple of occasions before Egan got caught up in an unnecessary altercation with Joelinton which earned him a yellow card. That became two yellows for the Irishman in the fiftieth minute when he got on the wrong side of the striker, who he pulled back as Joelinton tried to run in on goal. Referee David Coote was given an easy decision and sent Egan for an early bath. If Wilder had his face in his hands at that moment, worse was to follow. For Newcastle's first, the usually dependable Stevens got his legs in a muddle as he tried to stop Ritchie's ball finding Saint-Maximin at the back post and for the second, right-back George Baldock's reluctance to close down Ritchie gave the Scot room to shoot whilst Henderson's positioning for the shot was also questionable.
Meanwhile, dear blog reader, we've also had this fantastic news announced by Bashing Boris his very self. So, does anyone particularly fancy shacking up with this blogger over the weekend? No? To be fair, this blogger can't say he blames you.
This blogger is thoroughly indebted to his nephew, the legend that is Our Graeme Telly-Topping, who recently posted the following observation on Facebook. 'Rewatching some classic X-Files and to help me pick the best episodes (well from the first five seasons anyway) have this bad boy to refer to.' Good book, that, dear blog reader. Local author apparently.
On a slightly self-aggrandising note, one of the few good things to come out of the lockdown is the fact that more people appear to be spending time on The Interweb and, as a consequence, From The North's daily traffic has been on the rise again. It's a age-old truism, dear blog reader, but it's an ill-wind that blow's off someone's cornet. Or something like that, anyway.
Ian Holm, the versatile character actor who played everything from androids to hobbits via Harold Pinter and Shakespeare, has died in London aged eighty eight, his agent confirmed. 'It is with great sadness that the actor Sir Ian Holm CBE passed away this morning,' they said. 'He died peacefully in hospital, with his family and carer,' adding that his illness was Parkinson's-related. 'Charming, kind and ferociously talented, we will miss him hugely.' Holm's final days were documented in a series of pastel portraits by his wife, Sophie de Stempel. Holm, who won a BAFTA and was nominated for an Oscar for his role as maverick athletics coach Sam Mussabini in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire, may have looked destined for a career in colourful supporting roles on screen - especially after quitting the theatre in 1976 after a severe case of stage fright - but he found a new generation of admirers after being cast as Bilbo Baggins in the blockbusting Lord of the Rings trilogy. Earlier this month, he expressed his sadness that he was unable to participate in a virtual reunion for the film's cast, saying: 'I am sorry to not see you in person, I miss you all and hope your adventures have taken you to many places, I am in lockdown in my hobbit home, or holm.'
Ian Holm was born in 1931 in Essex, where his father was superintendent of the West Ham Corporation psychiatric hospital; he later described his childhood there as 'a pretty idyllic existence.' Falling in love with acting at an early age, he went from RADA in London to the Shakespeare Memorial theatre in Stratford, staying on to become part of the Royal Shakespeare Company on its foundation in 1960. Holm became a leading figure at the RSC, winning an Evening Standard best actor award for Henry V in 1965, part of the seminal Wars of The Roses cycle put together by Peter Hall and John Barton. He also earned plaudits for his work with Pinter, playing Lenny in the premiere production of The Homecoming (which won him a TONY award after its transfer to Broadway) and then in the 1973 film version, directed by Hall. Not least of all from Pinter himself, who is reported to have said of Holm: 'He puts on my shoe and it fits!' Holm underwent severe stage fright, which he described as 'a sort of breakdown' during a performance of The Iceman Cometh in 1976. It was, he added, 'a scar on my memory that will never go away.' Having abandoned the theatre, Holm developed his screen-acting career, which had hitherto largely been confined to regular but sporadic parts in British films such as The Bofors Gun (for which he won a Best Supporting Actor BAFTA), Oh! What A Lovely War and Young Winston. Seen as a safe pair of hands, his casting as the android Ash in the Ridley Scott-directed Alien gave him hitherto undreamed-of international exposure. This role was followed up by his turn as Mussabini, the ostracised running coach of sprinter Harold Abrahams in Chariots Of Fire.
After his best supporting actor nomination in 1982 (which he lost to John Giegud), Holm was now a bona fide acting grandee, though one whose eccentric-seeming, pugnacious qualities were best suited for memorable supporting parts. He played Napoleon in Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits and hapless Mister Kurtzmann in the same director's Brazil; other highlights included Lewis Carroll in the Dennis Potter-scripted fantasy Dreamchild, Doctor Willis in The Madness Of King George and Father Cornelius in Luc Besson's SF epic The Fifth Element. However, he did find a leading role in Atom Egoyan's adaptation of The Sweet Hereafter, released in 1997, playing the smooth-talking lawyer who persuades grieving parents to launch a class-action suit after several children are killed in a bus crash. His CV also include appearances in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Nicholas & Alexandra, Robin & Marian, Shout At The Devil, Inside the Third Reich, Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, The Browning Version, Dance With A Stranger, Naked Lunch, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, A Life Less Ordinary, Wisconsin Death Trip, From Hell, The Day After Tomorrow, The Aviator, The Treatment, Napoleon & Love, Jesus Of Nazareth, The Lost Boys, Holocaust, We, The Accused, The Bell, Game, Set & Match and The Borrowers.
Holm returned to Shakespeare in 1997, in the Richard Eyre-directed King Lear at the National Theatre and was knighted a year later for 'services to drama.' Having played Frodo Baggins in a 1981 radio adaptation of Lord Of The Rings, Holm was cast as Bilbo in Peter Jackson's mammoth three-part screen adaptation, with filming on The Fellowship Of The Ring beginning in 1999. Bilbo did not appear in The Two Towers, but Holm was back for the final part, The Return Of The King, as well as the first and third instalments of the Hobbit trilogy, which were released in 2012 and 2014 respectively. In between the two sets of Tolkien adaptations, Holm developed an unexpected reputation as a lothario, after the publication of his autobiography in 2004. Hailed by the Daily Scum Mail as 'Lord of the Flings', he candidly chronicled his serial marriages and extramarital affairs. He is survived by his fourth wife, de Stempel and five children - Jessica, Sarah-Jane, Harry, Melissa and Barnaby from previous relationships, as well as by his third wife, the actress Penelope Wilton.
Denny O'Neil, best known for writing and editing some of DC's finest comics, died on 11 June of natural causes. He was eighty one. O'Neil wrote Batman, Detective Comics and Legends Of The Dark Knight in addition to serving as an editor for DC's Batman-related comic books from 1986 until 2000. Along with editor Julius Schwartz and artist Neal Adams, O'Neil helped to bring Batman back to his original, more ominous persona after the 1960s Batman TV series had produced a campier take on the superhero. DC Comics publisher Jim Lee remembered Denny on Twitter as his 'favourite Green Lantern writer to date.' Lee continued, 'Denny was one of the earliest writers whose work and focus on social issues pushed comics to wider respectability and acceptance as an artform. Through his work and mentorship, he influenced generations of writers and artists.' Denny was born in May 1939 in St Louis and graduated from St Louis University, where he studied English literature, creative writing and philosophy. He joined the navy just in time to participate in the blockade of Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis before eventually landing a job writing columns for a newspaper in Missouri. O'Neil wrote bi-weekly columns for the youth page, and during the slow summer months he filled the space with a series on the revival of the comics industry. This put him on the radar of Roy Thomas, who helped him get his start at Marvel, at one time working as Stan Lee's assistant, where Denny wrote for Strange Tales, Rawhide Kid, Millie The Model, Daredevil, The Uncanny X-Men and other titles. He briefly worked at Charlton Comics under the pseudonym of Sergius O'Shaugnessy before he was hired by DC in 1968. While at DC, he worked on Wonder Woman, Atom & Hawkman, Justice League Of America, The Brave & The Bold and, most notably, Green Lantern/Green Arrow. O'Neil recounted that 'my journalism background and laid-back social activism had led me to wonder if I couldn't combine those things with what I did for a living. So this was my chance to see if this idea I had would work. It was a situation where nobody had anything to lose. And I think that writing about things that really concerned me pulled out of me a higher level of craft. Also, it gave me real problems to solve in terms of craft which I hadn't faced before.' In a famous sequence in issue seventy six of Green Lantern/Green Arrow - No Evil Shall Escape My Sight! Oliver Queen and Hal Jordan meet a poor Black man who asks the latter: 'I been readin' about you. How you work for the Blue skins. And how on a planet someplace you helped out the Orange skins. And you done considerable for the Purple skins. Only there's skins you never bothered with. The Black skins. I want to know how come? Answer me that, Mister Green Lantern!' At a loss for words, Jordan simply answers: 'I can't.'
In another sequence, Green Arrow laments the passing of Martin Luther King Junior, President Robert Kennedy and the problems facing 1970's America as 'a hideous moral cancer,' deserving to be addressed just as much as any cosmic-level threat. The duo - the liberal Queen and the more myopic Jordan then embark on a quest to 'find America,' witnessing the problems of corruption, racism, pollution, social injustice and overpopulation confronting the nation. O'Neil took on then-current events, such as the Manson Family cult murders, in issue seventy eight - My Kind Of Loving, A Way Of Death - where Green Arrow's girlfriend, Black Canary, falls briefly under the spell of a false prophet who advocates violence. It was during this period that the most famous story appeared, in issues eighty five and eighty six - Snowbirds Don't Fly/'They Say It'll Kill me ... But They Won't Say When' - when it was revealed that Green Arrow's ward, Speedy, had become addicted to heroin. As a result of his work on Green Lantern/Green Arrow, O'Neil recounted, 'I went from total obscurity to seeing my name featured in The New York Times and being invited to do talk shows. It's by no means an unmixed blessing. That messed up my head pretty thoroughly for a couple of years. Deteriorating marriage, bad habits, deteriorating relationships with human beings - with anything that wasn't a typewriter, in fact. It was a bad few years there.' While at Batman, O'Neil and Adams are credited with creating supervillains Ra's Al Ghul, Talia Al Ghul and Richard Dragon, as well as the characters of Leslie Thompkins and Azrael. O'Neil also helped to reinvent The Joker and Two-Face as they are seen today and was instrumental in the death of Jason Todd, Batman's second Robin. In 1980, O'Neil briefly returned to Marvel, where he wrote for The Amazing Spider-Man, Iron Man and Daredevil. He went back to DC in 1986 and continued writing and editing Batman while also working on Green Arrow and The Question. Beyond comics, he wrote TV episodes of Logan's Run, Superboy, Batman: The Animated Series and GI Joe: A Real American Hero, taught at the School of Visual Arts and authored The DC Guide To Writing Comics. In December 2018, O'Neil was the keynote speaker at The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library's Comic Books and Social Justice event and Phoenix declared 25 May as Dennis O'Neil Day in 2019. O'Neil was married to Marifran O'Neil, until her death. He was the father of writer/director/producer Lawrence O'Neil, best known for the 1997 film Breast Men.
Bob The Cat, whose special role in James Bowen's personal journey was written about in bestseller A Street Cat Named Bob, has died, having reached over fourteen years of age. Long credited by Bowen with saving his life, Bob died on Monday. Bowen, a recovering addict, first met Bob in 2007 when he found the cat abandoned and injured. He went on to take care of Bob who in turn gave Bowen a reason to get up each morning. They quickly became inseparable, busking and selling The Big Issue on the streets of London. In 2012 Hodder & Stoughton published Bowen's first book, A Street Cat Named Bob, telling his and Bob's story. The book became a bestseller, along with its sequels The World According To Bob, A Gift From Bob and The Little Book Of Bob. In all the books sold eight million copies in more than forty languages. The original story was also made into a film released in 2016 starring Luke Treadaway as Bowen. Bob appeared in the film as himself and will appear in a sequel, A Gift From Bob which is to be released later this year. Hodder released a statement: 'As James and Bob continued to find fans all over the world, Bob led an incredible life meeting well-wishers at book signings, travelling the world and coping with feline fame. He was an extraordinary cat who will be greatly missed.' Bowen said: 'Bob saved my life, it's as simple as that. He gave me so much more than companionship. With him at my side, I found a direction and purpose that I'd been missing. The success we achieved together through our books and films was miraculous. He's met thousands of people, touched millions of lives. There's never been a cat like him. And never will again. I feel like the light has gone out in my life. I will never forget him.'
And finally, dear blog reader, the other extremely widely-reported media-related death story this week was that of Dame Vera Lynn at the age of one hundred and three. This blogger cannot pretend that he has either the knowledge of Dame Vera's life or work to properly celebrate it here. But, the fact that she once, infamously, shared a bill with Hawkwind is reason enough for From The North to express our sincere collective sadness at her passing.

The pubs are - mostly - open again, dear blog reader. So are some - though not all - restaurants, many fast food outlets and the majority of hairdressers. And, it's July in the UK and it's raining and extremely windy. So, 'back to normal,' then?
It is 'crystal clear' that drunk people are 'unable to socially distance,' the chair of the Police Federation said as pubs reopened in England on Saturday. And, in other news, apparently, bears do defecate in the woods and the Pope is a Roman Catholic. Straight up.
Government ministers had 'urged caution' ahead of hospitality venues reopening in England after three months of lockdown. Yeah, cos that was always going to happen, wasn't it? John Apter of the Police Federation claimed that he 'dealt with naked men, happy drunks, angry drunks, fights and more angry drunks' on shift in Southampton. Definitely'back to normal', then?
Hundreds of punters - desperate for a pint - gathered in Soho, with media images showing packed streets into the early hours of Sunday morning. Devon and Cornwall Police said that they received 'more than a thousand' reports, most of which were 'drink-related.' No shit? In North Nottinghamshire, four people were extremely arrested and banged up in The Slammer for their wild and naughty drink-related ways and several pubs decided to close early after 'incidents of alcohol-related anti-social behaviour.'
There were further lockdown restrictions relaxed in England on Saturday, including hairdressers reopening. Long queues were reportedly witnessed outside barbers shops and there were midnight hairdressing appointments as people had their locks trimmed following months of closures and significant hair-growth.
It is time, inevitably, dear blog reader, for another From The North bloggerisationisms update. And, we kick off the latest one - as usual, of late - with something of a visual representation of yer actual Keith Telly Topping's current general state of being.
Yeah, that more or less covers it.
Or, if you prefer, this. Either will do, frankly.
So, dear blog reader, here be a further medical update for those three of you that're interested in such malarkey - to follow on from the previous two medical updates (which, in case you missed them, can be found here and here): On Friday this blogger had a chat on the old blower with Doctor Rashmi (since both Doctor Chris and Doctor Patricia were off on that particular day). He was, you'll be happy to know, very nice. This blogger told him that yer actual Keith Telly Topping was - at that particular moment - God damned pissed off with life in general and the state of his back in particular; in that, he was still having a lot of pain issues, some sleeping problems - largely because of the pain issues - and, most significantly, the same mobility issues that this blogger has had for the last four weeks since 'The Incident' (to wit: hobbling around the drum using a walking stick like a flaming Raspberry). Doctor Rashmi was, as noted, great - he suggested increasing this blogger's pain medication to codeine (which, to be fair, Doctor Patricia had also said would be the next obvious step if Ibuprofen didn't do the trick last time). This blogger has used codeine before back when he had a nasty knee injury some years ago and, as far as he can recall, he was okay with it at the time (although, Keith Telly Topping does remember that codeine produces even worse constipation than all the other painkillers put together). Thus, within just a couple of short hours, the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House drew a visit from someone from the local pharmacy delivering a two months supply of the required medication (that, this blogger concedes, was jolly impressive - getting a prescription ordered, filled and delivered inside two hours. How can anyone not love the NHS?) Doctor Rashmi has also giving Keith Telly Topping another sick note for three further weeks. This blogger has to pop into the surgery next week for something completely unrelated (an annual, outstanding blood-pressure test) so he will be picking up the SSP documentation then.
The general consensus from Doctor Rashmi was that, yes, it will be - and, indeed, is - bloody painful and yes, it was a damned stupid thing to do in the first place, tripping over ones own feet like that and, therefore, it's ultimately this blogger's own daft fault. And, that it could well remain jolly painful for a good while longer yet but it will, eventually, ease up. Also, that this blogger should keep moving as much as possible to avoid the muscles seizing up completely (again, not easy but Keith Telly Topping will grit his teeth and give it a go). And that the sleep issues this blogger is having should be eased by the stronger pain medication. We did discuss whether something even stronger than codeine might be appropriate but this blogger noted that he'd used, for example, Tramadol before - during some other back-related shenanigans about a decade ago - and it, frankly, rather disagreed with this blogger's system at the time. So, we're steering clear of that unless the codeine doesn't work (and, there are other alternatives. apparently).
Doctor Rashmi, bless him, listened politely whilst this blogger whittered on and on and on about how depressing not being able to get about the house very easily was, how this blogger has only left the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House twice in four weeks (it'll be three times when he visits the surgery next week) and how this blogger has not been able to even have a bath since 'The Incident' as he might be able to get in, but getting out again could prove a touch difficult. (This blogger should note to anyone concerned - or potentially disgusted - by the hygiene implications of all this, that he is, at least, still able to wash himself. Although, admittedly, shampooing his - by this stage long and rather luscious - hair is a bit of a challenge as bending over the sink isn't quite as easy as it would normally be).
Incidentally, for anyone that doesn't believe the 'long and rather luscious hair' thing ... Oh ye of jolly little faith. Also, does anyone know if there's a barbers shop which is open within limping distance of the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House? Because, this blogger is starting to look like a member of some disgraceful 1970s hippy prog-rock combo. And that's just not on, frankly.
Doctor Rashmi was sympathetic (not about the state of this blogger's hair, but about his back injury) and, broadly, positive ('it will start to get better, just give it time'). Thus, this blogger feels a bit (and he stresses, a bit) more positive after that; it's a touch like The Rutles joke: 'Did you feel better after seeing the Queen?''No, you feel better after seeing the Doctor.''Not my Doctor you don't!' So ... long story short, dear blog reader, yer actual Keith Telly Topping is still bloody broken. But, hopefully, he might be fixable given time, patience, some limited exercise and some very hard drugs! You may - should you wish - express your sympathies with this blogger via a social media route of your choice or, alternatively, tell Keith Telly Topping to stop being such a big baby and just get on with it. Your choice entirely, dear blog reader.
It should be noted that, the day before all this occurred, this blogger had probably his most wretched, awful, miserable day with the back pain. This blogger just couldn't get his very self comfortable sitting, standing, lying flat or slouching .... You name it, this blogger was uncomfortable doing it. Keith Telly Topping ended up taking some painkillers and going back to bed for a few hours. As this blogger mentioned to Doctor Rashmi the following day - at some length - this really is starting to become extremely tedious.
Prior to that, on Tuesday morning, for only the second time since 'The Incident', this blogger left the safety and discomfort of the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House for the lack-of-safety and total discomfort of Byker. Because he needed to pay his rent and get in a few essential supplies from ASDA and Poundland. This blogger was regretting this course of action almost before the bus arrived. Jeez that was a real trial and this blogger does not intend doing that again in a hurry.
Mind you, it hasn't all been bad news at the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House. For instance, there was that King Prawns and Chinese Mushrooms in Oyster Sauce takeaway on Tuesday - this blogger really deserved that.
After the last few days/weeks he'd just had, this blogger also really deserved this Crispy Beef in Sweet Chilli and Garlic Sauce.
And - even with the excessive delivery charges - this King Prawn and Beef in Hoisin Sauce with Bamboo Shoots and Water Chestnuts was really deserved too.
The Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House drew a visit from the local authority electrical engineer for a five-yearly check up of the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House's wiring recently. Typically, what should have taken about an hour or so ended up taking more than twice as long since there were a couple of - very minor - faults which were (in theory) easily-fixed. But, screws which wouldn't screw out and/or back in again complicated matters considerably for the engineer. Anyway, it was all sorted out eventually. This blogger spent the majority of the time the chap was in the gaff in bed furiously apologising (from a distance) because Keith Telly Topping's back was grumbling something fierce, so it was. So, no change there, then.
This blogger's gratitude to his former boss Uncle Scunthorpe Drayton is, as always, boundless and unstinting. Especially when a package arrived via Royal Mail at the door of Stately Telly Topping Manor containing twelve inches of black plastic with a hole in the middle. It was a recorded package, obviously. Nah, lissun ... Because, let's face it dear blog reader, no record collection in the world is complete without the incidental music to Time & The Rani. Keith Telly Topping loves you the mostest, Steve, baby. And, if his back wasn't giving him serious gyp at the moment, he would be happy to prove it.
On a somewhat-related note, this blogger does, genuinely, love Doctor Who: The Discontinuity Guide, the book which he co-wrote with yer actual Paul Cornell and Martin Day his very self in 1995. But, just occasionally, this blogger will read a bit of the book being quoted somewhere online and think: 'Jesus, did one - or, indeed, all three - of us really write that?'
Case in point, for reasons far too trivial to go into, one day last week this blogger happened to be reading the Wikipedia entry on The War Games (1969), which included the following comment: 'Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping wrote of the serial in The Discontinuity Guide (1995), "It might be six episodes too long, but The War Games is pivotal in the history of Doctor Who. The introduction of the Time Lords ... sees the series lose some of its mystery, but gain a new focus.' We never said that, did we? Oh, apparently we did. It's remarkable the utter crap one talks when one is young, is it not dear blog reader?
It should also be noted that the Wikipedia entry on The Time Monster (1972) is factually inaccurate when it states: 'Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping gave the serial an unfavourable review in The Discontinuity Guide (1995), describing it as being like "watching paint dry while being whipped with barbed wire."' No they did not, the very excellent Paul Cornell did; the other two were wholly incapable (then and still, probably) of writing anything quite that funny.
This blogger has considered, at various points in the past, using this blog to do a kind-of update on the Bottom Lines for the episodes covered in The Discontinuity Guide and, updating it to include the 1996 TV movie and the post-2005 episodes. But ... that would be such a massive undertaking and require so much rewatching of episodes that, this blogger thinks he'll leave such a massive project to other, younger, hungrier writers. With more time and energy on their hands. And, less back problems.
Meanwhile, three Doctors - Jodie Whittaker, David Tennant and Matt Smith - have come together in a historic online interview with IGN to celebrate the launch of Doctor Who on HBO MAX. The interview - which is very amusing and really good fun - can be viewed on the Doctor WhoYouTube channel and is highly recommended.
And now, dear blog reader, because he had to do something to take his mind of this bad back of his ...
Quite a lot, as it goes. Actual proper live Sky Sports Football (notably this blogger's beloved - though unsellable - Magpies' giving relegation-haunted AFC Bournemouth a pants-down four-one spanking).
Actual proper live from Austria Sky Sports F1.
Sky Sports Cricket's general coverage (repeats and Vodcasts).
Ten Cloverfield Lane.
The Death Of Stalin.
It Follows (a movie which this blogger had been meaning to watch for ages but had just never gotten around to until last weekend).
Perry Mason (almost entirely due to Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's glowing review in the final episode of Kermode & Mayo's Home Entertainment Service in which the Perry Mason remake was compared - quite accurately as it turned out - to Angel Heart).
Penny Dreadful: City Of Angels (mainly due to Naughty Natalie Dormer's truly awesome presence in the trailer).
The long-awaited return of From The North favourite Doom Patrol (and, especially, the - equally long-awaited - Doctor Tyme/Red Jack two-parter and the return of Willoughby Kipling).
Now, we just need them to - somehow - adapt The Brotherhood Of Dada/Painting That Ate Paris storyline next and this blogger will be a jolly happy little fanboy. Nine episodes of the second series of the From The North favourite were, reportedly, completed before production was suspended in March due to this coronavirus malarkey. Preview copies of the first four turned up at Stately Telly Topping Manor this week. Which was large.
Devs (two months after everyone else, admittedly, but this blogger got there in the end!)
Qi (Maisie Adam was terrific on the latest episode - as were Alan Davies and David Mitchell. But, my God, that Holly Walsh woman is about as funny as a really nasty scrotal rash in this blogger's opinion).
Talking Heads (particularly the wonderfully daft Jodie Comer episode, Her Big Chance).
The Great. ('Based on historical events ... Sort of!' Very sort-of ... But, it's really funny. This was another series that Kermode and Mayo's recommendation drew this blogger towards).
The Luminaries.
World War Weird (and, lots of other fine documentary series on Yesterday).
Arena: The Orson Welles Story.
Would I Lie To You?
MoreWould I Lie To You?
Even moreWould I Lie To You?
Yet moreWould I Lie To You?
MoreWould I Lie To You?
MoreWould I Lie To You?
MoreWould I Lie To You?
MoreWould I Lie To You?
MoreWould I Lie To You?
MoreWould I Lie To You?
MoreWould I Lie To You?
.... More Would I Lie To You? (Thank you, iPlayer, Dave, UKTV Play and You Tube, this blogger doesn't know what he would've done without you these last few weeks.)
There is a very fine piece on the BBC News website about Talking Pictures. The family-run Talking Pictures is, as you may already know, run out of a garden office in Hertfordshire. The TV channel - a particular From The North favourite - has, the website notes,' become a huge hit with nearly six million viewers a week during lockdown. It specialises in British-made films of years gone by.' And British-made TV too. The BBC's media and arts correspondent David Sillito went to meet the family and produced this touching report.
The same website also has an excellent feature/interview by Paul Glynn on the career of another firm From The North favourite The Goddamn Modfather his very self, yer actual Paul Weller.
And, speaking of this blogger's musical heroes, how nice it was to see Dylan (no, not the hippy rabbit off The Magic Roundabout) back at number one in the UK charts with his thirty ninth CD, Rough & Rowdy Ways. Bob became the oldest artist to reach number one with an CD of new material. At the age of seventy nine, Bob surpassed Paul Simon, who was seventy four when his Stranger To Stranger went to number one in 2016.
The Rockin' and/or Rolling Stones (a popular beat combo of the 1960s, you might've heard of them) have reportedly warned US President Donald Rump that he could face legal action if he continues using their songs at his campaign rallies. And, one imagines Sir Mick, Keef, Charlie and Rockin' Ronnie can afford some pretty good lawyers. A statement from the band's legal team said that it was 'working with the performing rights organisation,' the BMI, to stop the unauthorised use of their music. The Rump campaign illegally used the song 'You Can't Always Get What You Want' at last week's Rump rally in Tulsa (where the cowshit lies thick). The same song was also - illegally - used by the Rump campaign during the 2016 US election. 'The Rolling Stones do not endorse Donald Rump,' the band tweeted in 2016. Which is nice to know.
The latest in From The North's semi-regular Headline Of The Week award goes to the Gruniad Morning Star for what may well be the single most atypical Middle Class hippy Communist Gruniad Morning Star headline in the history of atypical Middle Class hippy Communist Gruniad Morning Star headlines. Covid-Nineteen Sparks Exodus Of Middle-Class Londoners In Search Of The Good Life: Demand For Homes & Jobs Out Of The Capital Surges, Raising Fears Of Inequality. You couldn't make it up. Well, you could and, indeed, some atypical Middle Class hippy Communist at the Gruniad Morning Stardid.
A noble second place goes to the BBC News website for their concerned piece Australia Caps Toilet Roll Sales After Panic-Buying.
Shoplifters and beggars have turned to The Sex to 'fund their lifestyles' during the pandemic, Northumberia police have claimed. Officers in the North East warned that they have also 'received increased reports' of brothels operating naughtily in Newcastle. Although, tragically, none of these appear to be within limping distance of the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House as far as this blogger is aware. Northumbria fuzz claimed there had been 'a shift into the exploitative world' of The Sex in order 'to pay rent or buy drugs.' The force added 'very vulnerable people are being targeted by predatory people.'
Sir Everton Weekes, the last survivor of the famous 'Three Ws' - the trio of West Indies batting legends whose lives and careers became irrevocably entwined, has died. Frank Worrell, Everton Weekes and Clyde Walcott were all born within eighteen months and three miles of each other in Barbados - and were even delivered by the same midwife. All three made their international debuts in early 1948 against England, were the middle-order mainstays of the great West Indies side of the 1950s - and were all subsequently knighted for services to cricket. Everton DeCourcy Weekes was born in February 1925, named after the Merseyside football team of which his father was an avid supporter. According to legend, England spinner Jim Laker once remarked to Weekes: 'It's a good job that he wasn't a fan of West Bromwich Albion.' Born in relative poverty, Weekes left school at the age of fourteen and served in the Barbados Defence Force. He appeared in ten first-class games for Barbados before being called up to the West Indies side to face England at Kensington Oval in his home town, Bridgetown, a month before his twenty third birthday. A first test century came in the final game of that series in Jamaica, the start of an unparalleled purple patch of form for Weekes, a stocky, powerful right-hander. Touring India later that year, he struck centuries in Delhi, Bombay and two in Calcutta, to complete a run of five successive test hundreds, a feat not matched before or since. He was even controversially run out for ninety in the fourth test in Madras while chasing a sixth ton. He did pass a thousand test runs though, in only his twelfth innings, another record - jointly held with Herbert Sutcliffe - which still stands. That form earned Weekes an offer to play in the Lancashire Leagues, where he was a much-loved professional for Bacup for seven seasons, averaging more than ninety. When he first arrived in Bacup, Weekes was greatly affected by the cold and took to wearing an army great coat everywhere, to the extent it became part of his image. His homesickness for Barbados was tempered by his landlady's potato pies and, also, the presence of Worrell and Walcott, who were playing for nearby League clubs Radcliffe and Enfield respectively. The three Ws would, it is said, regularly meet at Weekes's house midweek for an evening of piano playing and jazz singing. During the 1954 season he also played for neighbouring Central Lancashire League club Walsden as sub professional in the Wood Cup Final. His one hundred and fifty runs and nine wickets helped the village club to their first trophy in the seventy years. Weekes's performances were a significant contribution to League crowds, with over three hundred thousand spectators attending Lancashire League matches in 1949, a record as yet unsurpassed. He also played up for the crowds; batting in a match against Rawtenstall, Weekes waited until a ball had passed him before taking his left hand off his bat and hitting the ball around his back through square leg for four.
      Weekes' run of seven consecutive test scores of fifty or more has only been matched since by Andy Flower, Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Kumar Sangakkara. The West Indies had never won a test on English soil on three previous tours before they arrived in 1950, two years after the Windrush had brought the first large wave of Caribbean migrants to the UK. But, after losing the first test in Manchester, where Worrell, Weekes and Walcott batted at three, four and five respectively for the first time, West Indies bounced back superbly to take the series three-one with three spectacular victories. The Three Ws, as they were dubbed on that tour, became household names, while Weekes also helped himself to four double centuries against county sides and a triple ton against Cambridge University. Weekes and Worrell were named among Wisden's five cricketers of the year in 1951, as were spinners Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine who took fifty nine wickets between them. Weekes had a classic batting style, possessed a variety of shots on both sides of the wicket and is considered one of the hardest hitters in cricket history. The Times described him as 'lightly bow-legged, with a wonderful eye, wrists the envy of any batsman, and feet always in the right place to play a shot' and Richie Benaud stated that many Australians who saw Weekes in action said he was the closest batsman in style to Don Bradman. He was also compared to Bradman in his ability to keep the scoreboard moving and in using his feet to come down the pitch to slower bowlers. Additionally, Weekes was an excellent fielder, initially in the covers before moving into the slips and produced a training manual entitled Aspects Of Fielding. Despite injury problems for Weekes in the years that followed, he hit double centuries against India and England, both in Trinidad and three back-to-back hundreds in New Zealand in 1956. Weekes was affected by sinusitis throughout the West Indies 1957 tour of England, requiring five operations and broke a finger in late June. Reporting on the final day of the 1957 Lord's test where Weekes had made a rearguard ninety as the West Indies slumped to an innings defeat, The Times's cricket correspondent wrote 'It had been a day to quicken one's feeling for cricket, glowing with freshness and impulse and friendliness and it had belong to Weekes.'] Denis Compton said of Weekes following this innings; 'In every respect, it was the innings of a genius.' During the tour Weekes became only the fourth West Indian to pass ten thousand first-class runs. A thigh injury prompted his international retirement in 1958, aged only thirty three, just as the great all-rounder Gary Sobers was making his mark - and two years before Worrell became West Indies' first black captain.
       Although retired from tests, Weekes carried on playing for his beloved Barbados until 1964. He coached Canada at the 1979 World Cup and served on the Barbados Cricket Association board. A popular voice in the commentary box and briefly an International Cricket Council match referee, Weekes also represented Barbados at contract bridge and remained close to Worrell and Walcott, becoming the last of the trio to be knighted in 1995. A first-class cricket ground on the edge of Barbados is named The Three Ws Oval and Worrell and Walcott are both buried overlooking it, while a stand at Kensington Oval also bears their names. Worrell died aged forty two in 1967 after suffering with leukaemia, while Walcott, who later managed the West Indies team and served as ICC chairman, died in 2006. That left Weekes as the genial elder statesman of West Indies cricket, regularly attending games until well into his nineties. In 2019 he said: 'I'm ninety three and my doctor has only just told me to stop swimming in the sea every day.' He suffered a heart attack later that year. At the time of his death he was the third oldest surviving male test cricketer. Weekes published his memoirs Mastering The Craft: Ten Years Of Weekes, 1948 To 1958 in December 2007. Outside of cricket, Weekes became a Justice of the Peace and served on a number of Barbados Government bodies, including the Police Service Commission. Weekes' cousin Kenneth Weekes and son David Murray also played test cricket for the West Indies (the latter, a fine wicket-keeper playing nineteen tests and ten one day internationals between 1973 and 1982), while his grandson Ricky Hoyte played first-class cricket for Barbados and his nephew Donald Weekes played for Sussex.
Earl Cameron, one of the first black actors to forge a successful career in British film and television - and a particular favourite actor of this blogger - has died aged one hundred and two. Bermuda-born Cameron, who lived with his wife in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, reportedly died in his sleep on Friday. Cameron first appeared on-screen in Basil Dearden's 1951 movie Pool Of London, in a rare starring role for a black actor. His family said that he was 'an inspirational man who stood by his moral principles.' Cameron was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2009 New Year Honours. His family said that they had been 'overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and respect they have received. As an artist and actor he refused to accept roles that demeaned or stereotyped the character of people of colour,' they added. 'He will be very sadly missed.' Cameron's significance to the current generation of black British actors was underlined by many of the tributes paid to him on social media. David Harewood described him as 'a total legend,' while Paterson Joseph wrote: 'His generation's pioneering shoulders are what my generation of actors stand on. No shoulders were broader than this gentleman with the voice of God and the heart of a kindly prince.' TV historian David Olusoga added that Cameron was: 'A remarkable and wonderful man. Not just a brilliant actor but a link to a deeper history.'
Born in Bermuda in 1917, Earl arrived in the UK in 1939 after a spell in the British merchant navy. 'When I first came [to London], I would say clearly, I met with many slights and prejudices, but it doesn't bother me. But what did bother me was when I tried to get a job, that was an impossibility,' he told the British Film Institute in 2016. In 1941, Cameron's friend Harry Crossman gave Earl a ticket to see a revival of the musical comedy Chu Chin Chow at the Palace Theatre. Crossman and five other black actors had roles in the production's chorus line. Cameron, who was working at the kitchen of the Strand Corner House at the time, was fed up with menial jobs and asked Crossman if he could get him onto the show. Some weeks later, when one of the other actors failed to turn up to a performance, Crossman arranged a meeting for Cameron with the director, Robert Atkins, who cast Earl on the spot. According to Cameron, he had an easier time than other black actors because his Bermudian accent sounded American to many British ears. The following year, he landed a speaking role as Joseph, the chauffeur in the American play The Petrified Forest by Robert E Sherwood. Further roles followed and in 1945 he toured with the Entertainments National Service Association to play to British armed forces personnel in India. He gained more theatre work after the war as well as radio work for the BBC. Cameron was then cast in a substantial role in Pool Of London, a 1951 noir thriller set in the London docks in which he played Johnny Lambert, a merchant seaman. Cameron's character was also involved in a mixed-race relationship, generally acknowledged as the first such portrayal in a British film. In 2017 Cameron told the Gruniad Morning Star: 'I never saw myself as a pioneer. It was only later, looking back, that it occurred to me that I was.' Cameron was cast in Sapphire, another British-set thriller, in 1959; he played the brother of a woman found dead on Hampstead Heath, who is discovered to be mixed-race. Other movie roles in the 1950s included two films about the Kenyan Mau Mau uprising: Simba (1955), where he played a doctor and Safari (1957) in which he was a rebel commander. However, Cameron often found work hard to come by, telling the Gruniad: 'Unless it was specified that this was a part for a black actor, they would never consider a black actor. And they would never consider changing a white part to a black part. So that was my problem. I got mostly small parts and that was extremely frustrating - not just for me but for other black actors. We had a very hard time getting worthwhile roles.'
According to Screenonline, 'Earl Cameron brought a breath of fresh air to the British film industry's stuffy depictions of race relations. Often cast as a sensitive outsider, Cameron gave his characters a grace and moral authority that often surpassed the films' compromised liberal agendas.' Cameron appeared in the 1965 James Bond blockbuster Thunderball, as Bond's local contact in the Bahamas having previously been considered - and then passed over - for the larger role of Quarrel in the first Bond movie, Dr No (1962). He also had a significant part in the 1964 post-colonial thriller Guns Of Batasi, in which he played the wounded commander of a British army unit besieged by rebels in an un-named African state. Other film appearances included The Heart Within (1957), in which he played Victor Conway in a crime movie again set in London's docklands, Tarzan The Magnificent (1960) and its 1963 sequel Tarzan's Three Challenges, Flame In The Streets (1961), Battle Beneath The Earth (1967) and A Warm December (1973), in which he worked with Sidney Poitier and played an African ambassador to the UK. Earl was also able to secure regular work in television. In 1956 he appeared in an acclaimed BBC drama exploring racism in the workplace, A Man From The Sun alongside other trailblazing black actors like Errol John and Cy Grant. Later, he played the lead role in 1960's The Dark Man, another BBC drama about an immigrant taxi driver. He also made guest appearances in many popular series like Danger Man, The Prisoner, Dixon Of Dock Green, The Zoo Gang, Emergency - Ward Ten, Crown Court, Jackanory, Waking The Dead (a memorable performance as Spencer Jordan's father in the award-winning 2003 two-parter Final Cut), Kavanagh QC, Babyfather, EastEnders, Dalziel & Pascoe and Lovejoy. Earl appeared in the 1966 Doctor Who story The Tenth Planet, which introduced The Cybermen, as Glyn Williams, one of two astronauts on the Zeus IV a rocket conducting an orbital atmosphere survey mission. He is believed to be the first Black actor to portray an astronaut on any film or TV series in the world. (Sadly, according to at least one cast member, Cameron was the subject of some deeply unpleasant racism on the set from another actor, though Cameron himself subsequently stated that he was 'unaware' of the alleged prejudice shown towards him.)
He also appeared in many one-off TV dramas, including Television Playhouse (1957), A World Inside (1962); ITV's Play Of The Week in two plays, The Gentle Assassin (1962) and I Can Walk Where I Like Can't I? (1964), the BBC's Wind Versus Polygamy (1968), A Fear Of Strangers (1964), in which he played Ramsay, a black saxophonist and small-time criminal who is detained by the police on suspicion of murder and is racially abused by a Chief Inspector (played by Stanley Baker), the Festival adaptation of The Respectful Prostitute (1964), Theatre 625's The Minister (1965) and two episodes of Thirty-Minute Theatre (Anything You Say in 1969 and Soldier Ants in 1971). In 1996 he featured as The Abbott in Neverwhere, the acclaimed urban fantasy series written by Neil Gaiman. His CV also included roles in Maisie Raine, The Great Kardinsky, The Frighteners, Spyder's Web, Honey Lane, The Power Game, The Troubleshooters, Court Martial, Espionage, Armchair Theatre, The Andromeda Breakthrough, Paul Of Tarsus, The Killing Stones, Big City and Sailor Of Fortune. And, also, in movies as diverse as The Sandwich Man, Odongo, The Mark Of The Hawk, Killers Of Kilimanjaro, No Kidding and Scorpio.
Cameron became committed to the Baha'i faith in the early 1960s and subsequently moved to the Solomon Islands; after returning to the UK his acting career experienced a revival, with a key role in the 2005 United Nations thriller The Interpreter as an African president accused of war crimes. He also had small roles in The Queen and Christopher Nolan's Inception. Cameron's performance in The Interpreter was particularly praised. The Baltimore Sun wrote: 'Earl Cameron is magnificent as the slimy old fraud of a dictator' and Rolling Stone described his appearance as 'subtle and menacing.' Philip French in the Observer referred to 'that fine Caribbean actor Earl Cameron.' In 2013, he appeared in the short film Up On The Roof, his final screen appearance. In 2019 the Earl Cameron Award for 'a Bermudian professional who has demonstrated exceptional passion and talent in the field of theatre, cinematography, film or video production' was established in his honour by the Bermuda Arts Council. The University of Warwick awarded Cameron an honorary doctorate in January 2013. On his one hundredth birthday in 2017, he was interviewed by the Gruniad where he, memorably, declared 'I haven't retired yet!' Earl was married twice; his first wife Audrey died in 1994. He is survived by his second wife Barbara and his six children.

From The North's latest bloggerisationisms update begins, dear blog reader, with one of our most popular semi-regular features. This one, in fact.
Qi. The two episodes broadcast recently which were recorded without an audience, sadly, highlighted a major problem that Qi - along with most other comedy shows - faced during the lockdown; comedy needs an audience. Theres no ifs or buts, it just does. The presence in one of those episodes of That Bloody Awful Walsh Woman was an additional drawback, admittedly. Thankfully, this week's episode (which was, presumably, filmed earlier in the run) did have real, live actual people there to laugh at the jokes of the panellists and, as a consequence, it was just like old times. Particularly with sometime From The North favourite Gyles Brandreth being on especially good form; not only in, seemingly, his being related to pretty much everyone in history, but also, with his stories of meeting Mick Jagger on a Caribbean beach and John Lydon in The Midland Hotel. (And, the latter's - extremely two word - greeting!)
Doom Patrol - another properly magnificent preview episode arrived at the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House this week (Finger Patrol). This blogger particularly enjoyed Cliff's dream title sequence for his imaginary crime-fighting series, Steele & Stone.
Yellow Submarine. ('It's all in the mind!')
I, Clavdivs.
Sherlock.
Almost Famous.
The Sweeney.
We Hunt Together.
Hot Fuzz.
The Plot Against America.
War Factories.
Art Of Persia.
The Usual Suspects.
Yorkshire Walks.
Wire In The Blood.
Apocalypse Now.
The Joy Of Painting.
Actual proper live Sky Sports Cricket. (Although, how ironic was it that after months of waiting, the first day of the England versus West Indies test series was reduced to about fifteen overs due, largely, not to rain but to bad light? Did nobody think about, you know, switching the bloody floodlights on?)
... and Would I Lie To You?Obviously. Because, a week just wouldn't be a week in the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House without us all gathering round the fire to listen to various implausible - but, usually, true - stories of From The North favourite Bob Mortimer's misspent Teeside youth.
One of the things that has kept this blogger - along with, seemingly, many many others out there on the Interweb - amused during the last few months has been Toyah Wilcox and Robert Fripps's regular - delightfully mental - Sunday Lunch vodcasts published on YouTube. One of their most recent efforts was 'a visual representation of what King Crimson's 'Fracture' sounds like to Toyah. "A mouse on caffeine tap-dancing!"' Bless the pair of them for their contributions to the world's sanity. Or, lack of sanity for that mater. And, not for nothing, but by Hell that Mrs Fripp is still a fine lookin' lady.
On a similar theme, good old mad as toast Brian Blessed's regular powerful and inspiring posts on Facebook during lockdown have been exactly the sort of thing you'd expect from this remarkable man. Brian has had much going on recently in his personal life with his wife in and out of hospital, yet he still finds the time to deliver positive words of wisdom like this. His story about meeting Muhammad Ali at the BBC during the 1960s is particularly memorable. Good on ya, Big Man.
There's been lots of really fascinating stuff turning up on some of the more obscure corners of Facebook of late - many of which this blogger has been pointed in the direction of by some of his dear Facebook fiends. Like, for instance, two future Doctors almost coming face-to-face for the first time when William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton both appeared in a 1959 episode of the Harry Alan Towers crime drama series Dial 999. (The full episode, Fifty Thousand Hands, incidentally, can be viewed here.)
Also recently unearthed on Facebook's BBC Archive 'On This Day' page - on 7 July to celebrate Sir Ringo Starr's eightieth birthday - was a 1971 appearance by Ritchie Rings on Blue Peter (complete with his technicolour dreamcoat, seemingly) being interviewed by the late John Noakes to advertise some pieces of furniture he had designed.
A - potentially - significant From The North milestone occurred at 2.49pm on the afternoon on 8 July 2020, dear blog reader. This blogger is, genuinely, not sure whether he should be delighted by this blog's regular (and, newcoming) readership's continuing patronage or a bit saddened by his own Asperger's-like delight when seeing the blog's page hit counter tick from six million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine page-hits to seven million. Probably a bit of both, if yer actual Keith Telly Topping is being honest with you all (and with himself).
Which of course raises one startlingly obvious question; whether, if this blogger could - like Cher - turn back time, he would have started From The North in the first place back in 2006 had he but known that fourteen years later, seven million punters would've consumed samples of the nonsense which blogger frequently opines on this very blog? Makes you think, does it not?
It should be noted however, that, even despite the beginning of relaxation of worldwide lockdown (except in Leicester, seemingly), the last few months have seen From The North's regular daily traffic on the rise yet again. Clearly many people have had far too much time on their hands during these dark and troubled times.
Whom, in the wide, wide world was that masked - and decidedly broken - little old man, dear blog reader? Why, it was yer actual Keith Telly Topping his very self of course. On Monday 6 July 2020 at approximately 9am, attending his local medical surgery for a pre-arranged appointment and making sure he didn't, you know, infect anyone. With his lurv. Or, indeed, with anything else.
So here, dear blog reader, are some of the various things that yer actual Keith Telly Topping learned from that day's but-third trip out of the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House in exactly five weeks since 'The Incident' ...
- Firstly, it's also worth highlighting that yer actual Keith Telly Topping was travelling with his - these days, constant - companion, Willie the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House walking stick. Because, obviously, this blogger simply can't go anywhere without his Willie. Nah, lissun ...
- First, the good news. This blogger's blood pressure was/is fine (there was a slightly high reading the last time it was taken a few weeks ago, probably because this blogger had not taken his Nifedipine that particular morning before attending the surgery for his appointment, something which he did remember to do on Monday). Nurse Kimberley was jolly pleased with this happenstance (as was yer actual Keith Telly Topping needless to say). And this blogger was also able to pick up his latest SSP note at reception which he subsequently emailed into work shortly after arriving back at the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House.
- The Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House rent was extremely paid at Church Walk Post Office after a short limp across from the surgery - three weeks worth, in fact, which will at least save this blogger the pure dead chore of going through all this leaving-the-house malarkey again next week.
- This blogger is also jolly happy to reports that most Greggs stores are back open (hurrah!) But - tragically - they aren't (yet) making or selling any stottie cakes. The young lady on the counter in the Walker branch was really apologetic about this, frankly, right shite state of affairs. This blogger noted that, whilst he fully realises this is the classic definition of a 'First World Problem' if ever there was one, Keith Telly Topping haven't had a stottie across his lips since March and he is now starting to suffer from some serious withdrawal symptoms (to the point that he's almost forgotten what they taste like). 'You're not the first person to say that' the young lady noted, sadly. But, we had a nice laugh about it and this blogger subsequently bought a packet of Sweet Treats just to show that there were no hard feelings. Still, a - necessary - piece of advice. Get your shit together, Greegs! People are starting to get desperate!
- Keith Telly Topping's local barber shop (Ario's) was, indeed, open again following the latest government relaxation of the lockdown malarkey a few days earlier; this blogger didn't go on that particular day as he was only passing the gaff on the bus (and, anyway, it looked quite busy at the time). However, as he subsequently told his dear Facebook fiends, later in the week he thoroughly intended to have a limp along to Welbeck Road with the intention that the Telly Topping barnet would be getting a jolly severe cropping. Because, frankly, this blogger was getting sick of looking in the mirror and seeing the Moog player of some disgraceful 1970s hippy prog-rock combo looking back at yer actual Keith Telly Topping. Who the bloody Hell let Rick Wakeman into the gaff?
- Now, an important public service announcement: Poundland are, seemingly, doing an absolutely roaring trade in just about everything at the moment. At least three-quarters of the shelves in the Clayton Street branch were either empty or very low on stock when this blogger was in the gaff on Monday. Fortunately, of course, all of the real essentials that this blogger needed were extremely available for purchase. Which was nice.
- Two twenty five packs of Marks & Spencer cocktail party sausage were also soon to be back in the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House frigidaire after over a month of the gaff being without any. This, dear blog reader, is very much a good thing.
- Having gone to the bank to get a mini-statement, on this blogger's way back to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House whilst passing Haymarket Bus Station, whom in the wide wide world should this blogger bump into (painfully) but his old mucker Christopher Armstrong who was on his way into work (and was sporting a flaming severe haircut into the bargain, let it be noted). It was so nice for this blogger to see (and, even have a brief - probably, non-government recommended - hug with) a friendly face. The first one that this blogger had seen - apart from a few medical staff and the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House postie - in weeks. This blogger and yer man Chris had a brief natter about, you know, stuff-in-general whilst waiting for Chris's bus to arrive. And, this blogger did ask Chris to pass along to work the - presumably extremely shocking - news that yer actual Keith Telly Topping is, indeed, still alive. Albeit, more than a bit broken and feeling rather sorry for his very self.
- So, dear blog reader, this blogger eventually made it back to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House just about in one piece. And, once he'd gotten his purchases nicely stored away in the cupboard, e-mailed his latest SSP note into work and had a brief chat about his external adventures on Facebook he, gratefully, retired to his stinking pit for a couple of hours for, necessary and deserved rest. (Nurse Kimberley had said, earlier in the morning, that the only real cure for torn muscles is rest ... plus some industrial strength painkillers, obviously. And whilst yer actual Keith Telly Topping may be a crass and ignorant fool in many ways he always does what his medical care professionals advise. Well, almost always.)
- On the bus back home, this blogger picked up a copy of the Metro for something to read during the twenty minute journey. Have you ever had one of those moments, dear blog reader, where you glance at a headline and you misread one of the words of it and that one misread word completely changes the entire meaning of the story? It happens to yer actual Keith Telly Topping more often than he would like and it did again on that day. On page five of the - alleged - newspaper was a story about the Health Secretary, the vile and odious rascal Hancock's appearance on the BBC's The Andrew Mar Show on the previous day. The headline was Sweatshops Will Be Fined & Closed Says Hancock.
Unfortunately, dear blog reader, yer actual Keith Telly Topping, misread the first word as sweetshops. And, for more than few seconds, this blogger was genuinely thinking to his very puzzled self, 'I know that Chocolate Bon-Bons and Lemon Sherbet Dip aren't exactly everyone's cup Rosie Lee, but that's a bit harsh, isn't it?'
It was, this blogger must report one of those days, dear blog reader ... And, as D-Ream (a popular beat combo of the 1990s, you might've heard of them) once said ... 'Shoot Me With Your Love, Baby'. Probably.
They say that every picture tells a story, dear blog reader. Which is, frankly, a right load of old effing toot. Nevertheless, some of them undeniably do. Like this one, fr instance, which tells the story of the day later that week when yer actual Keith Telly Topping had his but fourth trip out of the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House since 'The Incident' and finally - after what seemed like months - paid to get his riah shriven'd. He is, incidentally, now considering changing his name to Shaun Telly Topping. This blogger is, of course, most delighted of all that he no longer resembles a member of The Michael Schenker Group.
Ario's was open on Thursday and the queue wasn't too long (just a couple of punters ahead of this blogger). And, the big bonus was that the five minute limp back to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House wasn't too awful ...
Particularly as this blogger really deserved this.
The - short - limp to the barber's shop and back was also instructive when this blogger spotted a sign which, he presumes, was there to advertise something which every home should have a tub of.
On a slightly more serious note, dear blog readers are pointed in the direction of a fascinating piece by the Sydney Morning Herald's Sarah Knapton, Coronavirus Pandemic May Not Have Started In China, Experts Say. Which, if only for the reason that its very existence is likely to put a geet massive scowl on the ugly mush of President Rump makes this article certainly worth a few moments of your time.
And now, for the latest of From The North's semi-regular Oh, Yer Actual Keith Telly Topping Wants One Of Those feature. This week, Keef's Richards' new tee-shirt.
So, dear blog reader, would you like to see some footage of a cow that got stranded at the bottom of a steep bank on the Northumberland/Cumbria border being freed? Of course you would, you're only human after all. The Galloway apparently got stuck at the Crammel Linn waterfall near Gilsland on Monday. It is thought some stupid shit-fer-brains numbskull of a visitor left a gate open and the cow found its way down from its field to the water's edge. The area had been hit by heavy rain for days and the frightened animal was, thus, unable to make its way back up the hill due to the soft ground. The fire and rescue service from nearby RAF Spadeadam joined other rescuers in a bid to try and guide the animal to safety but, in the end, it had to be sedated and airlifted out by an RAF helicopter. Some people pay good money for that sort of thing, dear blog reader.
The innovative and influential scores of Ennio Morricone - who died this week aged ninety one - revolutionised the music of the film industry. He became famous for scoring the Spaghetti Westerns directed by his friend Sergio Leone, such as A Fistful Of Dollars, The Good, The Bad & The Ugly and this blogger's particular favourite, Duck, You Suckers! His sparse soundtracks were a vital component of Leone's revolutionary take on the Western genre. Yet this association often pained Ennio because he was, in fact, a composer of great versatility with more than five hundred film and TV scores to his credit. Despite his Hollywood success, he remained true to his roots, composing many scores for Italian cinema.
Ennio Morricone was born in Rome in Nov 1928. His father was a jazz trumpeter and the young Morricone took up the instrument at an early age and was writing short compositions by the time he was six. At school, his classmates included Leone - with whom he would later form one of the great director/composer partnerships in cinema history. 'We weren't friends, we were schoolmates,' Morricone once said. 'I mean, we were seven years old so we were playing together, but you can't call that a friendship.' Later, his first love was scoring classical pieces but, in order to make a living, he began composing background music for radio drama. He later turned his hand to film scores, but none of them made much impact until his school friend Leone asked him to write the soundtrack for Per Un Pugno Di Dollari (A Fistful Of Dollars). With scarcely any budget, Morricone was unable to replicate the lush strings of the early Westerns, instead using electric guitars and a variety of sound effects to punctuate the often violent action on-screen. In doing so, he underlined the mythical emptiness of the surrounding landscape and the brutal realities depicted in the film, which would influence Westerns for years to come. Most famously, Morricone penned the memorable and intriguing theme to 1966's Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo, the third of the Dollars trilogy. With the sounds of coyotes, the trotting of drum rhythms and electric guitar twangs, the instrumental soon became a worldwide phenomena. A cover version by Hugo Montenegro in 1968 was a pop hit in both the US and the UK. The theme also conjured up the familiar imagery of a young Clint Eastwood riding a mule over burning deserts, re-establishing the all-American genre with a unique European irony.
Morricone went on to become one of the most prolific composers of his era, with hundreds of film scores in his repertoire. 'I am disturbed when people think about me as a specialist for Westerns,' he once said. 'They are only a relatively small percentage of the music I've written.' His desire to maintain a European bulwark against a dominant US film culture was also important to him. He even opted for handwritten scores over the newly modernised forms of computer scoring. Morricone's work was seen as influential in bringing a certain popular style to the classical sound. He used period jazz phrases in his score for Once Upon A Time In America, to set the right historical context. His score for The Mission (1986) was described as so moving that rather than complementing the film, it overwhelmed it. A no-nonsense professional, Morricone left a legacy of compositions that convey a timeless aura. In 2007 he was, belatedly according to his many fans, awarded an honorary Academy Award, only the second film score composer (after Alex North) to receive such an accolade. His six competitive Oscar nominations from 1979 to 2016 were for Days Of Heaven, The Mission, The Untouchables, Bugsy, Malena and The Hateful Eight. He finally won for the latter, Quentin Tarantino's revisionist Western. It was Morricone's first Western score for more than three decades. Some deemed his score for Leone's gangster masterpiece Once Upon A Time In America to be his best work. Another favourite was Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso, to which Morricone's son, Andrea, also contributed. In 2001, for the first time performing in London, Morricone conducted two symphonic concerts dedicated to his film scores at The Barbican Centre. Similarly, for his seventy fifth birthday in 2003, a concert of film music at London's Royal Albert Hall saw musicians conducted by Morricone playing music from a selection of his compelling scores. He never bothered to learn English despite his prominent presence in Hollywood and never lost touch with his Italian roots, remaining in Rome for most of his life. 'I was offered a free villa in Hollywood,' he said. 'But I said, "No thank you, I prefer to live in Rome."' Morricone's desire to reflect parts of his personality throughout his carefully produced compositions enhanced and transformed the emotional impact of the films and he successfully adapted his work to many different styles of cinema. He once said: 'Working for the cinema has been a precious experience because it gave me the chance to experiment with my ideas, to listen to them performed by an orchestra, and then use them for a precise aim.'
Louis Mahoney, who has died aged eighty one, was one of the first black actors to appear regularly on British television, becoming a recognisable face during a successful fifty five-year career. His charismatic performances culminated earlier this year with a terrific appearance in the divorce drama The Split (2020) as a bungee-jumping priest completing items on a pre-death bucket list. He cropped up as a guest actor in a huge number of popular dramas, from Dixon Of Dock Green to Holby City via three roles in Doctor Who (as a newscaster in 1973's Frontier In Space, a vital role in 1975's Planet Of Evil and, latterly, a touching deathbed scene with Carey Mulligan in the acclaimed 2007 episode Blink). In Fawlty Towers, his patient, professional doctor gives chase to a concussed Basil Fawlty in the episode The Germans (1975). He cemented his reputation as a reliable and versatile performer by playing recurring roles, including Delbert Wilkins' Grandfather Jake in the terminally unfunny The Lenny Henry Show (1987), Elvis in Harbour Lights (1999) and aged werewolf, Leo, in the cult series Being Human (2012). He was also an ardent campaigner for the betterment of BAME actors, serving of the council of the actors' union Equity, eventually as its vice-president. Louis was a long-standing campaigner for racial equality within the acting profession, as a member of the Equity Afro-Asian Committee (previously The Coloured Actors Committee), founding Performers Against Racism to defend Equity policy on South Africa and as co-creator, with Mike Phillips and Taiwo Ajai, of the Black Theatre Workshop in 1976. A fierce critic of apartheid he persuasively argued that members should not perform to segregated audiences in South Africa and for a boycott of TV programme sales to that country. He stepped down in 2002 with the industry, in no small part due to his dogged campaigning, a better place for emerging black actors than it had been when he started his own career. While acknowledging that there was still work to do, he was never bitter.
Born in Banjul, in the Gambia, he was the eldest of six children of James Mahoney, headteacher of St Mary's School of Gambia and his wife, Princess. Louis was educated at the Methodist Boys' high school before setting sail for Britain in 1957 to enrol at the University of London to study medicine. A childhood memory of the audience reaction and proud look on his parents' faces as he performed in a school play eventually caused him to drop out and pursue a theatrical career, training at the Central School of Speech and Drama. After graduation in 1963, he worked at Colchester Rep and four years later became one of the first black actors to work with the Royal Shakespeare Company; he returned to the RSC exactly thirty years later. He worked with directors such as Richard Eyre, Rufus Norris and Matthew Dunster and at venues including the National Theatre, the Royal Court, the Almeida and, in 2018, the Bridge (in Alan Bennett's Allelujah! for Nicholas Hytner). His big screen work echoed the subjects of his activism - he played the official who facilitates safe passage for Donald Woods in Cry Freedom (1987 - 'that film did a lot to end apartheid,' he claimed) and in Shooting Dogs (2005) he was extremely moved to be working with crew members and extras who had been caught up in the horrific Rwandan genocide depicted in the film. He also had roles in Guns At Batasi (1964), Hammer's The Plague Of The Zombies (1966), Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981), White Mischief (1987) and Captain Phillips (2013).
His CV also included appearances in Danger Man, Z-Cars, The Troubleshooters, Menace, Special Branch, Quiller, The Professionals (two roles including one in the notorious episode Klansmen which was never transmitted on terrestrial TV in the UK), Miss Marple, Yes, Prime Minister, Bergerac, The Bill, Casualty, Counterpart, River, You, Me & The Apocalypse, New Tricks, Random, Waking The Dead, Oscar Charlie, Urban Gothic, Shooting Fish, Turning World, Faith, One Foot In The Grave, Runaway Bay, Love Hurts, The Real Eddy English, Black Silk, Play For Today, The Old Men At The Zoo, The Rise & Fall Of Idi Amin, The Spoils Of War, The Final Conflict, General Hospital, Crown Court, Born Free, Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?, Adam Smith, Jason King, Softly Softly: Task Force, Slave Girls, The Man In Room Seventeen, Voodoo Blood Death, Public Eye and Sea Of Souls. Mahoney's last TV appearance was in the Tracy Beaker CBBC spin-off, The Dumping Ground.
A fit man - he used to boast about easily outrunning the National Front in Ilford in the early 1960s - Louis was a passionate cricketer. A fast bowler who had played at club level in the Gambia, he joined the Gentlemen of Hampstead and took part in charity matches (once bowling England test legend Tom Graveney). He also did voluntary work for disadvantaged young black people. He is survived by his daughter, Sashola, from a 1971 marriage which ended in divorce and three grandchildren and by his sister, Cynthia.
Jackie Charlton, a World Cup winner with England and former Republic of Ireland manager, has died aged eighty five. The former Leeds United defender had been diagnosed with lymphoma in the last year and had also been suffering from dementia. One of English football's most popular - if, occasionally, controversial - characters, Big Jack was in the team that won the World Cup at Wembley in 1966, alongside his brother, Bobby. He made a record number of appearances for Leeds and achieved unprecedented success with the Republic of Ireland. He spent his entire club career with Leeds United from 1950 to 1973, helping the club to the Second Division title in 1964, the First Division title in 1969, the FA Cup in 1972, the League Cup in 1968 and the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup in 1968 and 1971, as well as five second-place finishes in the First Division, two FA Cup final defeats (including the brutal two-game affair against Chelsea in 1970) and one Inter-Cities Fairs Cup final loss. His six hundred and twenty five league and seven hundred and sixty two total competitive appearances are both club records. He also scored ninety five goals for the club, making him ninth on their list of all-time scorers. Called up to the England team days before his thirtieth birthday, Charlton went on to score six goals in his thirty five international appearances and to appear in two World Cups and one European Championship. He, of course, played in the World Cup final victory over West Germany in 1966 and also helped England to finish third in Euro 1968 and to win four British Home Championship tournaments. He was named the football writer's Footballer of the Year in 1967. After retiring as a player he led Middlesbrough to the Second Division title in 1974, winning the Manager of the Year award in his first season. He kept Boro as a stable top-flight club before he unexpectedly resigned in April 1977. He then took charge of Sheffield Wednesday in October of the same year and led them to promotion from the Third Division in 1980. He left The Owls in May 1983 and went on to serve Middlesbrough as caretaker-manager in 1984. He was Newcastle United manager for the 1984-85 season then took charge of the Republic of Ireland national team in February 1986 and led them to their first ever World Cup in 1990, where they reached the quarter-finals. He also led the nation to successful qualification to Euro 1988 and the 1994 World Cup. He resigned in January 1996 and went into retirement.
Born into a noted footballing family in Ashington in May 1935, Jackie was initially overshadowed by the prodigious talent of his younger brother, Bobby, who was taken on by Manchester United while Jack was doing his National Service. Four of his uncles were league footballers - Jack Milburn (Leeds United and Bradford City), George Milburn (Leeds United and Chesterfield), Jim Milburn (Leeds United and Bradford Park Avenue) and Stan Milburn (Chesterfield, Leicester City and Rochdale) whilst the legendary Newcastle United and England centre-forward Jackie Milburn was his mother's cousin. The economy of Ashington was based entirely around coal mining and, though his family had a strong footballing pedigree, Jack's father was a miner. Jack was the eldest of four brothers - Bobby, Gordon and Tommy; their father, Bob, had little interest in football, but their mother, Cissie, played football with her children and later coached the local school team. As a teenager she took Jack and Bobby to watch Ashington and Newcastle United play and Charlton remained a lifelong Newcastle supporter (even after his not-particularly-successful year managing the club). At the age of fifteen he was offered a trial at Leeds, where his uncle, Jim, was full-back, but Jack turned it down and instead joined his father in the pit. He soon handed in his notice after finding out just how difficult and unpleasant life was working deep underground and he applied to join the police force whilst he reconsidered the offer from Leeds. His trial game for Leeds clashed with his police interview and Jack chose to play in the game; the trial was a success and he joined the ground staff at Elland Road. 'This part of the world produced its fair share of footballers and nobody was particularly impressed if a lad went away to play professional football,' he noted in later years. 'In fact we never used to say going away to play football, we just used to say "going away." Growing up in North East England working class culture meant working hard for little pay and becoming a professional footballer was a realistic ambition for talented players, though it still required hard work and rarely offered more than a good working wage.'
     Manager Raich Carter handed Jack his first professional contract when Charlton turned seventeen and he made his first team debut in April 1953 against Doncaster Rovers, taking John Charles' place at centre-half after Charles was moved up to centre-forward. As he had not been given any specific instructions before the game Charlton asked Carter what he was expected to do; Carter reportedly replied: 'See how fast their centre-forward can limp!' Jack then had to serve two years National Service with the Household Cavalry and captained the Horse Guards to victory in the Cavalry Cup in Hanover. His National Service limited his contribution to Leeds, however, and he made only one appearance in the first team during the 1954–55 season.
Developing into a tough, no-nonsense centre-half during the late fifties in a somewhat struggling second division side, it was the arrival of Don Revie as manager at Leeds in 1960 that was to have the most significant effect on Jack's career. Initially, Revie was not a fan of Charlton and played him up front at the start of the 1961–62 season, but Jack soon moved him back to centre-half after he proved ineffective as a forward. He reportedly became frustrated and difficult to manage, feeling in limbo playing for a club seemingly going nowhere whilst his younger brother was enjoying huge success in Manchester. Revie told Charlton that he was prepared to let him go, but never actually transfer listed him. Liverpool manager Bill Shankly failed to meet the thirty thousand knicker that Leeds demanded for Charlton and, although Manchester United manager Matt Busby was initially said to be willing to pay the fee, that deal also eventually fell through. During these discussions Charlton had refused to sign a new contract at Leeds but, frustrated by Busby's hesitance, he signed the offered contract whilst making a promise to Revie to be more professional in his approach. The 1962 season was the beginning of a new era for Leeds as Revie began to mould a team in his own image - classy, skilful, uncompromising, hard-as-nails, greatly admired but little-liked outside of West Yorkshire. In a game against Swansea Town in September, Revie dropped many senior players and played Charlton in a new defensive line-up with Gary Sprake, Paul Reaney, Norman Hunter and Rod Johnson. With the exception of Johnson - soon replaced at left-back by Terry Cooper - this defensive line-up would remain pretty much consistent for much of the rest of the decade. Charlton took charge of the defence and suggested a zonal marking system; Revie allowed Charlton to become the key defensive organiser. Aided by new midfield signing Johnny Giles, The Peacocks put in a strong promotion challenge and finished fifth, before securing promotion as second division champions in 1964. Other players that began to make their mark on the first team included Billy Bremner, Paul Madeley and Peter Lorimer, all of whom would remain with Leeds until the end of the 1970s. Like his great central defensive partner, Norman Hunter, who also sadly died recently, Jack's no-nonsense approach often disguised the great ability he had as a footballer.
Charlton caused controversy in October 1970 during an appearance on a Tyne Tees TV football programme; he claimed that he had 'a little black book' of names of players whom he intended to hurt or to exact some form of revenge upon. He had to appear before the Football Association but was found not guilty of any wrongdoing after arguing that the press had misquoted him. He admitted that, although he never actually had such book he did have a - short - list of names in his head of players who had made nasty tackles on him in the past and whom he intended to put in a hard, but - allegedly - fair, challenge on if he got the opportunity in the course of a game. With Charlton approaching his thirtieth birthday, he was called up by Alf Ramsey to play for England against Scotland at Wembley in April 1965. He was so surprised at his call-up he subsequently asked Ramsey why he had picked him. Charlton revealed Ramsey's deadpan response was: 'I pick the best team for my pattern of play, Jack - I don't always pick the best players.' Ramsey later said that he picked Charlton to play alongside Bobby Moore as he was a conservative player able to provide effective cover to the more skilful Moore, who could get caught out if he made a rare mistake. Just over a year later, Charlton was part of the only England side to date to win the World Cup. 'People say to me "was that the most memorable day of your life?" and I say "not really" because unlike our kid and Bobby Moore, I hadn't been with them for years and years aiming for this,' Charlton told Desert Island Discs in 1996. 'I'd just come in, done it and gone. The most joy as a player was winning the league championship with Leeds at Liverpool.'
After his retirement in 1973 - he played his final game for Leeds on 28 April in a three-one defeat at Southampton on the same day that his brother played his final game for Manchester United - Jack moved into management with great success at Middlesbrough and, later, Sheffield Wednesday. Jack was appointed manager of the club he had supported as a boy, Newcastle, in June 1984 after being persuaded to take the job by his cousin, Jackie Milburn. Arthur Cox had just left the club after leading The Magpies to the First Division and Kevin Keegan had recently announced his retirement. Charlton's first action was to release the popular Terry McDermott from his contract. He had little money to spend in preparation for the 1984-85 season, though he did have exciting young talents in Chris Waddle and Peter Beardsley and a teenage Paul Gascoigne was on the verge of breaking into the first team squad. However, Jack's chosen attritional style of play - and the signing of two target-men forwards, Tony Cunningham and George Reilly - was not popular with United supporters. Charlton stroppily resigned at the end of a pre-season friendly against Sheffield United after fans at St James' Park started calling for his dismissal, a decision which he later said that he had taken in haste and regretted. Jack was soon approached by the FAI to manage the Republic of Ireland. Charlton had developed his tactics, which were based on the traditional British four-four-two system, as opposed to the continental approach of using deep-lying midfielders, as he noted that most of the Ireland international squad plied their trade in the English and Scottish leagues. Crucially he instructed all members of his team to press opposition players and, in particular, force ball-playing defenders into mistakes. And, he scoured the land for English and Scottish-born players who had some Irish ancestry and, therefore, qualified to play for the Republic. He found plenty. His success in qualifying for the 1988 Euros (where Ireland, infamously, beat an under-performing England) and the 1990 World Cup (where they reached the quarter-final before losing, narrowly, to Italy) made Big Jack a legend in Eire. Ireland also qualified for the 1994 World Cup where they beat Italy in New York thanks to a Ray Houghton goal. They then fell to a two-one defeat to Mexico in Florida, during which Charlton had a memorably funny pitch-side argument with a hapless FIFA official who was preventing substitute John Aldridge from taking the pitch after his teammate, Tommy Coyne, had already left the pitch and sat on the bench. For his protestations, Jack was fined and suspended by FIFA for the final group game against Norway and had to watch the game from the commentary box as Ireland qualified with a nil-nil draw before losing to the Netherlands in the next round.
Ireland failed to qualify for Euro 96, despite a strong start to the group, when they won their opening three games. Injuries to key players such as Roy Keane, Andy Townsend, John Sheridan and Steve Staunton didn't help. After beating the highly fancied Portugal, the Irish then endured an embarrassing goalless draw with Liechtenstein, before losing twice to Austria. They finished second in the group, ahead of Northern Ireland on goal difference, but as the worst performing group runners-up they had to win a play-off game at Anfield against the Netherlands; Ireland lost two-nil and Jack resigned after the game. 'In my heart-of-hearts, I knew I'd wrung as much as I could out of the squad I'd got - that some of my older players had given me all they had to give.' Charlton married Pat Kemp in January 1958 with his brother Bobby acting as his best man. They had three children: John, Deborah and Peter, who was born just hours after his father played in the 1966 World Cup final. During the 1960s he ran clothes shops in Leeds and he also later operated the souvenir store at Elland Road. Charlton was also, famously, a keen amateur fisherman. He appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1972 and 1996 and chose to take with him The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer and Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Encyclopaedia Of How To Survive, a spyglass and a fishing rod to his mythical desert island. Charlton was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1973 and he was appointed an OBE the following year. In 1996, he was awarded honorary Irish citizenship, the highest honour the Irish state gives to foreign-born nationals. He was also made a Freeman of the city of Dublin and was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Limerick. In 1997, he was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant of Northumberland. Charlton was inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame in 2005 in recognition of his contribution to the game. There is a life-size statue of Big Jack at Cork Airport, representing him sitting in his fishing gear and displaying a salmon. An entertaining man with a happy knack for coming up with a memorable quote, Jack was a regular on the chat show circuit both during and after his playing career. His story about waking up on the morning after the 1966 World Cup final in a house in London and having no idea where he was or how he got there was a particularly good one. He did much media punditry after retiring from management whilst he made the 1975 Tyne Tees coaching series Play Soccer and made a few scattered acting appearances - usually playing himself - in TV series as diverse as Emergency - Ward Ten, They Think It's All Over and Who Stole The World Cup?. His 1972 single 'Simple Little Things'/'Geordie Sunday' (Bell Records 1247) has only a very few contenders for being the worst record ever made by anyone. Ever! Seriously, dear blog reader, particularly the b-side - once heard, never forgotten.
Jackie revealed in his self-titled 1996 autobiography that he had a strained relationship with his brother. Jack felt Bobby began to drift away from the family following his marriage to Norma, who reportedly did not get on with their mother. Bobby did not see his mother after 1992 until her death in 1996 as a result of the feud, though he and Norma did attend her funeral. Though the two brothers remained somewhat distant, Jack presented Bobby with his BBC Sports Personality Of The Year Lifetime Achievement Award in December 2008. Jack is survived by Pat and their three children.
And finally, dear blog reader, whilst From The North's obituary sections over the last few years have been extensive and have included many people whom this blogger really admired, there was one significant figure missing late last year simply because his death occurred during a period when From The North was on something of a hiatus. That's something which this blogger needs to, belatedly, put right.
     Kenny Lynch, who died aged eighty one on 18 December 2019 after a battle with cancer, was one of the few people of Caribbean origin prominent in the British entertainment world of the 1960s and 1970s. A talented singer and songwriter, with Top Ten hits to his name in both guises, he became a familiar television presence via his frequent appearances on variety shows, sitcoms and quiz programmes. He formed close professional and personal relationships with the likes of Bruce Forsyth, Roy Castle and the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, appearing as a guest on their shows. For many years he formed a double act with Tarbuck, performing with him at summer seasons in Bournemouth, the Isle of Wight and elsewhere; they also appeared together at The Royal Variety Performances in both 1981 and 1987.
In sitcoms he appeared unfazed either by the casual racism of Johnny Speight's Curry & Chips (1969), which also starred Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes, or by the more direct satire of Till Death Us Do Part. There were more substantial guest roles in drama series such as Z-Cars and The Sweeney. His CV also included appearances in The Little & Large Show, Cannon & Ball, Tickle On The Tum (as Mike the Milkman), The Kenny Everett Television Show, both the 1967 and 1979 versions of The Plank, The Chiffy Kids, Dawson's Weekly, Wink To Me Only, Room At The Bottom, No Hiding Place, Last Laugh In Vegas, The Baby Boomers' Guide To Growing Old, Flashback: The History Of UK Black Music, Pointless Celebrities, Lads Army, Never Mind The Buzzcocks, Blankety Blank, Bullseye, Treasure Hunt, Punchlines!, A Frame with Davis, Star GamesSeaside Special, Francis Howerd in Concert, All Star Comedy Carnival, The Golden Shot, Set 'Em Up Joe, The Stanley Baxter Show, Twice A Fortnight, Whistle Stop, Dee Time, Ready, Steady, Go!, Quiz Ball, Millicent, Thank Your Lucky Stars, Juke Box Jury, That's For Me, Discs A Go-Go, The Beat Room and Needle Match.
His films ranged from the pop music feature Just For Fun (1963), through comedies such as Carry On Loving (1970) and The Alf Garnett Saga (1972), to sexploitation movies like The Playbirds (1978) and Confessions From The David Galaxy Affair (1979) and even horror. In the case of the latter, there was a memorable appearance in Amicus's Doctor Terror's House Of Horrors (1965), directed by Freddie Francis. A portmanteau anthology of the kind that Amicus - Hammer's main rival of the era - specialised in, it showcased a wonderfully broad take on the theatre of the absurd strand which British horror movies used to do so well. Lynch appeared in the segment Voodoo along with his friend Roy Castle, which is sometimes criticised by modern critics as featuring racial stereotypes but is, in fact, one of the best parts of the movie - and not in an ironic or post-modern way, either - working as a clever pastiche of the white music industry's wholesale plagiarism of black delta blues. Kenny even got to sing a song in the movie, the rather lovely 'Give Me Love' backed by The Tubby Hayes Quartet which was, eventually, released in 2007.
A self-styled 'black cockney', Kenny was born to Oscar Lynch and his wife, Amelia in Stepney in March 1938 and grew up in the nearby Custom House area of London in a family of eleven children. His mother was British, of mixed-race heritage and his father was a Barbadian seaman who had served in the merchant navy during the first world war and, later, worked as a stoker at Beckton Gas Works. Kenny recalled that he did not experience much racism in his life until he was in his twenties. 'We were probably a novelty. Our neighbours would say: "We've got some black people living next door, you should come round and see them."' Lynch's first public appearance as a singer came at the age of twelve, with his sister Gladys, who later became well known as the jazz singer Maxine Daniels. He went to Farrance Street school and appeared in Peggy O'Farrell stage school shows at Stratford Town Hall and The Poplar Civic Theatre. At the same time he earned money by illegally street-selling knock-off goods; when he finished his education he took on various jobs, including as a porter in Billingsgate Fish Market. In 1957 he began his national service as a driver in the Royal Army Service Corps, where he became the regimental featherweight boxing champion and, after demobilisation, he was a barman in a Stepney pub, where he also sang. That work led to engagements with dance bands and at Soho nightclubs, where he was spotted by Shirley Bassey and the agent Jean Lincoln, who got him a recording contract with HMV.
Kenny was chosen to compete in the heats of A Song For Europe in 1962, although his entry, 'There's Never Been A Girl', lost out to 'Ring-A-Ding Girl' by Ronnie Carroll, who went on to represent the UK in The Eurovision Song Contest. In early 1963 Kenny was booked to tour with teenage pop singer Helen Shapiro; also on the bill were the soon-to-be famous Be-Atles (a popular beat combo of the 1960s, you might've heard of them) not to mention a then-unknown Dave Allen working as the show's compare. During the tour, John Lennon and Paul McCartney composed the song 'Misery', which they offered to Shapiro, who was then at the height of her popularity. When it was rejected by her producer, Norrie Paramor, Kenny recorded and released the song, in the process earning a minor place in pop history as the first singer to record a cover of a Lennon/McCartney composition. According to legend, whilst on the tour coach travelling from a gig in York to another in Shrewsbury, Lynch reportedly offered to help John and Paul write a new song, but quickly became frustrated and left them to it - at the time the duo were writing 'From Me To You'. 'Misery' failed to reach the charts - Lennon reportedly much enjoyed Lynch's soulful vocals on the cover but felt that session guitarist Bert Wheedon's contributions had 'ruined' the version - but the Be-Atles connection was maintained when Lynch appeared with other celebrities on the sleeve of Band On The Run, the 1973 LP by McCartney's band, Wings.
Lynch released a number of singles throughout the 1960s and he had Top Ten hits in the UK with a version of Gerry Goffin and Carole King's 'Up On The Roof' (1962), competing with the original by The Drifters and 'You Can Never Stop Me Loving You' (1963), which became a US hit when recorded by Johnny Tillotson. Lynch also composed or co-wrote songs recorded by Dusty Springfield ('He's Got Something'), Cilla Black (the hit single 'Love's Just A Broken Heart'), The Drifters and The Everly Brothers. He worked, briefly, as a songwriter at the Brill Building in New York, where he met the singer, pianist and songwriter Mort Shuman and the pair wrote 'Sha La La La Lee' for The Small Faces in 1966. Lynch oversaw the production for Hylda Baker and Arthur Mullard's comedy version of 'You're The One That I Want' a minor hit single in September 1978. In the early 1980s, Kenny formed a brief songwriting partnership with the former tennis player Buster Mottram, a long-time white nationalist political activist. The duo's 'Half The Day's Gone & We Haven't Earned A Penny' made the lower reaches of the charts in 1983.
In common with some other showbiz personalities, Lynch sometimes brushed shoulders with the seamier figures of London life. His circle of friends included associates of the Kray family and members of the East End boxing fraternity and in 2014 he attended the funeral of Joey Pyle, a former boxer who had worked for the Krays. In addition to his musical and acting talents, Kenny had an astute business sense. Many of his compositions were published by his own company and he was briefly an artist manager, as well as the owner of a Soho record shop and a North London restaurant. Kenny was also well known for his charitable efforts, especially in sporting circles. A life-long supporter of West Ham United, as a young man he had played football alongside Tommy Steele in a Showbiz XI, later playing cricket for a team led by Michael Parkinson and competing in pro-celebrity golf tournaments with Tarbuck and Forsyth. He also competed in - and finished - the 1982 London Marathon. He was appointed OBE in 1971.
In later years Kenny performed only occasionally, with a show at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in 2011 and a tour in 2015 with The Rat Pack, a tribute show to Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Junior. He is survived by his daughters, Amy and Bobby.

Another week, another From The North bloggerisationisms, dear blog reader. And, yer actual Keith Telly Topping remains, at this present time of writing, neither a fit nor healthy chap and is, seemingly, in the middle of a lengthy run of bad luck. Either a mirror got broken somewhere in the vicinity of the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House which this blogger was unaware of, or no black cats have thought it worthwhile crossing yer actual Keith Telly Topping's path. In case they got accidentally trodden on, no doubt.
But firstly, before we get into all that malarkey, one of this blogger's favourite actors, Maurice Roëves has died at the age of eighty three. In a career spanning over six decades, Maurice acted in hundreds of TV shows and movies including The Sweeney, Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Eagle Has Landed and John Byrne's 1987 Tutti Frutti in the memorable role of Vincent Diver, 'the iron man of Scottish Rock' who ended up setting fire to himself on-stage. He also appeared in Eastenders and Irvine Welsh's The Acid House. Maurice's agent, Lovett Logan, sent a statement to the Edinburgh Evening News: 'It is with great sadness that we can confirm the passing of our wonderful client, Maurice Roëves. Maurice had a hugely successful career in both theatre and screen, which spanned several decades, starting in his home country of Scotland and moving to London and the United States. He was loved by his legions of fans for many of his performances. As well as being a truly dedicated and gifted actor, he was also a real gentleman and a delight to have as a client. We will miss him greatly and our thoughts and love go out to Vanessa and his family.'
Born in Sunderland, John Maurice Roëves was brought up in Glasgow and launched his career at the city's famous Citizen's Theatre (where he was a contemporary of Bill Patterson, Alex Norton and Billy Connolly). Roëves' most recent role was a small part in the 2020 BBC television drama The Nest. His wife, Vanessa, told the BBC that Maurice had been in ill health 'for some time.' Despite playing mostly tough characters, soldiers and villains on-screen, Vanessa said that Roeves was 'a softie' in real life and that no part was too small for her husband. And, when Tutti Frutti was repeated recently during the launch of the BBC Scotland Channel, she said that Roëves was 'delighted at having come full circle.' Vanessa also said that the family would often joke: 'Does your character make it to the end of this one?' because many of his characters would be killed off during the dramas in which he appeared.
The Roëves family moved to Glasgow when Maurice was seven years old where his father was a cotton mill manager in Partick. As a child Maurice suffered from asthma and considered his recovery from it was, at least in part, due to playing the bugle in The Boys' Brigade. He toyed with the idea of becoming a teacher but after national service in the Royal Scots Greys Armoured Corps, Maurice was persuaded to follow his father working in the flour mill and, by the age of twenty four, he had become a sales manager. But he returned to his studies and secured a place at the then Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama - now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Whilst there, he won a gold medal for his acting. After graduating he got a job at the Citizens Theatre as an assistant stage manager and found himself playing small roles in-between sweeping the stage floor. His first major role was as Lorenzo in The Merchant Of Venice when, apparently, screaming fans would gather at the stage door after the show to catch a glimpse of Maurice. Noting the buzz created by this performance Disney sent a talent scout to Glasgow to see Roëves act. He was then screen-tested and offered his first film role, Disney's The Fighting Prince Of Donegal in 1966. That led to a television debut in the BBC's Wednesday PlayCock, Hen & Courting Pit the same year. Despite launching a film and TV career, Maurice continued in theatre roles, appearing in Macbeth at the Royal Court where he played Macduff opposite Sir Alec Guinness in the title role.
His first notable television role was in a thriller series called Scobie In September in 1969 and, subsequently, its sequel, The Scobie Man three years later. He went on to appear in Doctor Finlay's Casebook, Doomwatch, Thirty Minute Theatre, A Family At War, Out Of The Unknown, Jason King, The Shadow Of The Tower, Dixon Of Dock Green, Paul Temple, a lead role in the acclaimed political thriller Scotch On The Rocks, Sutherland's Law, Oil Strike North, Play For Today, Warship, Target, Danger UXB, The Nightmare Man, a terrific performance as the mercenary Stotz in the 1984 Doctor Who serial The Caves Of Androzani, On The Line, The Chinese Detective, Magnum PI, Remington Steele, Bergerac, Days Of Our Lives, North & South, Rab C Nesbitt, The New Statesman, Spender, Moon & Son, Baywatch, Grafters, the 1998 BBC adaptation of Vanity Fair, A Touch Of Frost and Skins. He portrayed both Adolf Hitler - in the 1981 Playhouse production of The Journal Of Bridget Hitler - and Rudolph Hess - in the following year's TV movie Inside The Third Reich. He played Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield in Jimmy McGovern's 1996 TV film Hillsborough and was memorable as the gangster Vinnie Peverell in the award-winning Waking The Dead two-parter Final Cut (2003). In 2006, he appeared in the BBC docudrama Surviving Disasters, portraying Sir Matt Busby in the story of the Munich Air Disaster. He starred as Robert Henderson in BBC Scotland's drama River City and appeared as a retired police superintendent in Southcliffe. His film roles included appearances in Ulysses, Oh! What a Lovely War, A Day At The Beach, Hidden Agenda, Escape To Victory, The Big Man, Judge Dredd, Beautiful Creatures and Brighton Rock. In 2003, he appeared in May Miles Thomas's film Solid Air whilst he played football trainer Jimmy Gordon opposite Michael Sheen and Timothy Spall in The Damned United (2009).
A memorable Hollywood screen role for Maurice was in 1992's The Last Of The Mohicans acting with Daniel Day-Lewis and Wes Studi. Studi played Magua, a native American villain who ripped the heart from Colonel Munro, played by Roëves. Maurice's friendship with Studi lasted for more than twenty five years and they met often at Wes's home in Santa Fe where, according to Studi on social media, they 'shared haggis together.' In 2014, Maurice stated that he had moved to Nottinghamshire with his wife, Vanessa Rawlings-Jackson and that they spent part of each year at a condo in New Mexico. His first wife was the Scottish actress Jan Wilson. He is survived by his second wife, Vanessa and his daughter from his first marriage, Sarah-Anne.
So, dear blog reader, back to yer actual Keith Telly Topping's trials and tribulations. And, What a marvellously crap day last Thursday turned into. After a week of relatively peaceful nights thanks to the increased strength painkillers this blogger had been prescribed, the previous night, for some unknown reason this blogger just couldn't get a wink of sleep. So, he was jolly grumpy and cross they next day anyway and then, during the morning, the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House chest freezer, after nearly three decades of faithful service, chose that exact moment to go 'fzzzt' and die on this blogger. With terminal prejudice. Thus, effectively, losing about two hundred quid's worth of frozen stuff which was in there. Of course this was followed by a lengthy 'fortunately/unfortunately' list of occurrences, as these sort of things usually are. Unfortunately, this has happened just at time where it was virtually impossible for this blogger to simply go out and buy a replacement given both Keith Telly Topping's current back injury and the fact that many electrical retailers in the UK are still closed. Fortunately, this blogger had over a hundred knicker's worth of Argos vouchers and a - smaller, but still big enough for this blogger's needs - freezer was on sale on the Argos website for but one hundred and thirty quid. So, Keith Telly Topping quickly ordered that and, using is vouchers, it only cost this blogger twenty quid in total. And, it was free delivery, too. Unfortunately, the earliest that they could deliver the thing was 1 August. Fortunately ... actually, dear blog reader, there isn't a fortunately at this point, it's all'unfortunately.' This blogger supposes one could regard the 'fortunately' as being without a freezer for three weeks gives Keith Telly Topping plenty of time to throw out all of the, by now rotting, stuff that he was looking forward to eating at some stage. Trust this blogger when he says that he, honestly, could not be more sick of his entire sodding life if a two ton bucket of rancid, watery shite was to be dumped on his head.
Still, things could only get better ... And, that evening, they did. Slightly.
As part of their coverage of the first test against the West Indies, Sky Sports Cricket had their very own Jonners-and-Aggers 'Botham didn't quite get his leg over' moment. During England's innings against West Indies Michael Atherton and Rob Key had been asking people to text in with stories about the resumption of league and club cricket across the country that day. Mention in one of these texts of someone called 'Hugh Jardon' taking 'six for nine' for Cockermouth CC brought a predictable two minutes of the commentary box collapsing into sniggering (you could hear Nasser doing his finest Monty Burns 'Heh! Heh! Heh!' at the back). The irony of all of this, of course, was that at the very moment the most famous product of Cockermouth Cricket Club, Ben Stokes, was both batting for and captaining England. Ian Ward's Twitter-feed helpfully provided the moment Athers realised he'd been diddled!
It was reassuring to discover, watching the second test this week, that this blogger is not the only person whose spectacles get all steamed up whenever he is wearing a facemask. Seriously, it makes shopping a nightmare. Unlike, Bumble Lloyd, however, this blogger has never tried to navigation getting into and out of a lift in this, frankly, Helen Keller-type state.
And finally, dear blog reader ...
Doctor Who.
Black Books.
Nixon.
Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?
Help!
UFO.
The Godfather, Part II
Qi.
The Italian Job.
Doom Patrol.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
Porridge
Rutland Weekend Television.
Cabaret.
The Young Ones.
From The North, dear blog reader, will return for its next bloggerisationisms update when this blogger has something worthwhile to report (hopefully not involving the state of his shattered back). Or, if someone yer actual Keith Telly Topping really admires dies. Whichever occurs sooner.

The latest From The North bloggerisationisms update kicks off with some, for once, good(ish) news. Marginally good(ish). Slightly good(ish).
As mentioned during our last bloggerisationisms update, the Stately Telly Telly Manor Plague House freezer chose a particular day a couple of weeks ago to konk right-out on this blogger after something like thirty years of faithful service. Thus necessitating the urgent purchase of a much-needed replacement.
On Saturday of this week, a couple of very nice young chaps from Argos arrived at the gaff with Freddie the new Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House freezer. And, they were kind enough to hump Freddie up to the top of the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House stairs without any complaint. This blogger thanked both the lads and wished them a jolly good day; or, what was left of it, anyway, since it was just after 3pm that they completed the delivery. 'We will do,' replied one, 'you're our last call of the day.' Keith Telly Topping - whilst thinking 'innit typical? Why couldn't I have been first?' - nevertheless, managed to find a positive in all this and changed that to: 'Well, have a good night, instead!'
    This here, then, is Freddie the new Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House freezer in all of his still packaged and 'this-way-up' glory.
And this is Freddie the new Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House freezer, stripped, plugged in, and starting to freeze like a good'un.
Of course, the arrival of Freddie the new Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House freezer will occasion a trip to one of the local supermarkets at some stage. So that this blogger can start to replace some of the approximately two hundred quid's worth of frozen food-stuffs which were ruined and had to be chucked in the bin when the previous (oddly nameless) Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House freezer went all tits-up. Which, for reasons that this blogger will get onto at a later stage in this bloggerisationisms update, may not be for a good few days yet. Or, maybe even longer. Nevertheless, once that has been done, it may mean a few less of those - highly popular - I really deserved this-type shenanigans. Like, for instance, this one.
Or this one.
Or this one.
Or, indeed, this one.
Which may, or may not, be a good thing, dear blog reader. Don't come to yer actual Keith Telly Topping expecting a quick answer on that score. Time will tell, dear blog reader. It usually does.
Therefore, from one age-old From The North truism, dear blog reader, to another one. It's that time again.
Prodigal Son. It's been quite a while, dear blog reader, since this yer actual Keith Telly Topping has done a complete - twenty episode - series binge-watch. By and large he really rather enjoyed the - much-trailed - Prodigal Son. For all its very obvious Silence Of The Lambs riffs, the drama benefits from some outstanding performances; Michael Sheen going so far over-the-top-he's-down-the-other-side most obviously, but also a nice solid role for the always excellent Lou Diamond Phillips and a twitchy-but-fascinatingly-nuanced turn from Tom Payne whom this blogger previously knew best from The Walking Dead. Nevertheless, it's not all praise; Prodigal Son is almost - almost but ,thankfully, not quite - fatally ruined by a couple of really significant flaws. Firstly, the fact that by-and-large every episode in the first half of the series appeared to be a slight variation on a single theme. Which, by about episode twelve was starting to really get right on this blogger's tit-end. Fortunately, they brought in a couple of marginally different plotlines to some of the later episodes proving that Manhunter and Silence Of The Lambs were not to be the only serial-killer movies the creators - Chris Fedak and Sam Sklaver - had watched. (They've also seen Se7en, Zodiac and American Psycho, it would appear.) A far more serious flaw was the presence of the Christ-awful Bellamy Young, one of this blogger's least-favourite actresses. Someone whose over-emoted pouty facial expressions, mugging and shrill-voice usually conspires to stink up everything that has ever beentouched by her presence (the wretched Scandal, most notably). To be honest, she's not much better than distinctly average in this either. Though, trust this blogger, considering how low an opinion he had of her prior to watching Prodigal Son and the groan of despair which escaped his lips when she showed up in the pilot as what was going to be, obviously, a major character that's, actually, something approaching praise. Anyway, overall, the good far outweighed the bad and Prodigal Son been renewed for a second series. Hopefully, next year, they'll have watched a few more serial-killer films for additional inspiration.
Penny Dreadful: City Of Angels. One that took a bit longer for this blogger to get through than Prodigal Son but which, eventually, proved equally worthwhile. And, a few questionable plot elements aside, at the end of the day, Natalie Dormer in leather. What's not to love?
Doom Patrol. Still, by a distance, the best drama currently anywhere on TV. Their parody of The Avengers title sequence in the latest episode was a thing of joy.
The Beast Must Die.
Captain Clegg.
The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes.
The Manchurian Candidate.
The Planets.
Not Going Out.
Ripping Yarns.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
Father Ted.
Anyway, dear blog reader, today's - indeed, pretty much every day's - general mood for this blogger summed up; a visual representation of 'bleak'.
Sad to report that this blogger's troublesome back injury remains, well, a right flaming pain in both the neck and the arse and, more specifically, the larger area between those two. Even the increased-strength pain-killers which had, at least, seen the blogger manage to have a few decent nights sleep seem to be less effective these last few days. As a consequence of which, this blogger is, once again, waking up tired, grumpy and depressed most mornings. 'Oh, sod this buggering bad back,' Keith Telly Topping snarled at his dear Facebook fiends earlier in the week. 'I'm not sure I can take another sleepless, pain-filled night like last night. I'm going to take a break from this place for a bit as I just don't have the patience or the will to try and converse civilly with people at the moment.' You will, this blogger hopes, excuse such disgraceful drama-queen antics and Keith Telly Topping so publicly feeling sorry for himself. This blogger isn't usually one for overly dramatic gestures - although fishing for sympathy is one of his favourite pastimes, he will admit. Nevertheless, this torn lumber muscle (or muscles, technically) really has thrown this blogger far more of a Curtly Ambrose-style bouncer than he would ever have anticipated when he stumbled on the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House stairs whilst taking out a bag of rubbish eight weeks ago. Keith Telly Topping believed that he'd be off his feet for, maybe three or four weeks and then back to strutting around like he rents the drum. Sadly, it hasn't proved to be anywhere near as straightforward as initially hoped.
And so we reach the latest episode of From The North's Death Corner.
     Peter Green, who died this week aged seventy three, was one of the guitar-playing greats of the 1960s British blues scene as well as being a truly gifted songwriter. He was the founder of Fleetwood Mac and, although he was with the band for less than three years, they became one of Britain's leading rock and/or roll acts during that time. Their singles of that period, including the Green compositions 'Black Magic Woman', 'Albatross', 'Man Of The World', 'Oh Well' and 'The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown)', remain some of the most cherished releases of the era. The band was beginning to display major international potential by the time Peter quit in May 1970. Then, apart from a brief burst of activity in the first half of the 1980s, Green went missing from action until the late 1990s as he struggled with prolonged psychological problems seemingly caused by his use of psychedelic drugs.
   Some considered him a guitarist superior even to such rock and/or roll deities as his contemporaries Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page. Noel Gallagher described him as 'without question the best British blues guitarist ever,' while BB King said that Green was 'the only one who gave me the cold sweats.' John Mayall, leader of The Bluesbreakers, whom Green played for before forming Fleetwood Mac, said: 'Peter in his prime in the 1960s was without equal.' It was an instrumental from The Bluesbreakers A Hard Road (1967) which alerted Mayall to the breadth of Green's abilities. 'The Supernatural' was a strange, fractured piece written by Green on which he exploited various guitar tones and studio overdubbing techniques to create a sinister atmosphere of mystery. Fleetwood Mac was named after another instrumental Peter had recorded with Bluesbreakers' drummer Mick Fleetwood and bass player John McVie during some studio time Mayall had donated to Green. With a line-up of Green, Fleetwood, the guitarist Jeremy Spencer and bass player Bob Brunning, Fleetwood Mac made their debut at the Windsor Festival in August 1967. McVie replaced Brunning after their first few gigs.
Once up and running, Fleetwood Mac were soon enjoying success. Their eponymous debut LP was released in February 1968 and rose as high as number four in the course of spending nearly forty weeks on the UK album chart. It would eventually sell more than a million copies. Their single 'Black Magic Woman' reached the Top Forty, but would become better known when Santana had a hit with a cover of it in 1970. Fleetwood Mac released their second LP, Mister Wonderful, in August and went on their first American tour; while hanging out with The Grateful Dead in San Francisco they declined to sample the powerful LSD manufactured by The Dead's supplier of bespoke psychedelics, Owsley Stanley. But, in December they were in New York at the start of another thirty-date tour and this time succumbed to Stanley's product, which left them, according to Green, huddled in a hotel room enduring a collective bad trip. In the same month, 'Albatross' topped the British charts. The tune was remarkable for its lilting, oceanic quality, largely created by Green's dreamy arrangement of contrasting guitar parts, including those of the band's recently added third guitarist, the great Danny Kirwan. An acknowledged inspiration for The Beatles''Sun King' and much admired by The Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, 'Abatross' sold a million copies and added another nine hundred thousand when reissued and a hit all over again in 1973.
However, Green was in a troubled state of mind. He had begun to discuss his feelings of guilt at the band's rapidly burgeoning earnings and he wanted to give most of their money away (a sentiment which was not shared by his bandmates). Their single 'Man Of The World' was a shimmering beast of melancholy beauty, but its lyrics seemed - at least in part - to express Green's desperate feelings at his fragile mental state: 'There's no one I'd rather be/But I just wish that I'd never been born.''Man Of The World' went to number two in the UK; its b-side, Jeremy Spencer's wonderful Elvis parody, 'Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked in Tonite' was credited to Earl Vince & The Valiants - in reality Fleetwood Mac themselves showing the rock and/or roll side of their schizophrenic character. The next single, 'Oh Well' was their first to reach the US top one hundred as well as another massive UK hit. Again, Green's lyrics were playful but included more than a hint of menace: 'Don't ask me what I think of you/I might not give the answers that you want me to!' Growing success only seemed to worsen Green's condition, however. Further touring in the US had seen his consumption of acid increase and he sampled more of Stanley's concoctions when Fleetwood Mac supported The Dead in New Orleans. Green adopted a form of Buddhism-influenced Christianity and took to wearing white robes and a crucifix on stage. He became obsessed with giving away money and on one occasion donated twelve grand to Save the Children after watching a TV news report about the famine in Biafra. The crunch came when Fleetwood Mac reached Munich during a disastrous European tour in March 1970. Some wealthy German hippies took Green to their commune at a mansion outside the city, where he was plied with very hard drugs and spent hours playing improvised music. He had to be extricated by Mick Fleetwood and the band's road crew. His bandmates and manager Clifford Davis felt that he was never the same afterwards. Speaking to the BBC in 2017, Fleetwood said that he wished he had spotted the signs of Green's illness sooner. 'I wish we had been better equipped,' he said. 'Maybe we could have seen something that could've helped - not to keep him in the band, but to help this person through the beginnings of a very emotional ride that, really, he's still on as we speak. It affected his life in a very dramatic way,' he added. 'I don't think he was treated right for what turned out to be [an] illness.' Green left the band that May as his last single with them, 'The Green Manalishi', made the UK top ten. Green had written the song after waking from a nightmare not long after the Munich experience and its menacing, horror-movie soundtrack tone seemed to speak vividly of his state of mind. The title character of the song was, he claimed, a metaphor for money: 'The Green Manalishi is the wad of notes, the devil is green and he was after me.'
Born in Bethnal Green, Peter was the son of Joe Greenbaum, a postman and his wife, Anne. When Peter was ten, his brother Len gave him a guitar and taught him the rudimentary chords E, A and B7. He made rapid progress and became fixated on skiffle before gravitating to rock and/or roll and the Chicago blues of Muddy Waters and BB King. Hank Marvin of The Shadows became one of his favourite guitarists. By the age of fifteen he had dropped the latter part of his surname, having been taunted for his Jewishness at school. His first job was as a bassist in a covers band, Bobby Dennis & The Dominoes, after which he played with other nascent beat-groups, The Muskrats and The Tridents. An encounter with Eric Clapton persuaded him to ditch the bass. 'I decided to go back on lead guitar after seeing him with The Bluesbreakers,' said Peter. 'He had a Les Paul, his fingers were marvellous. The guy knew how to do a bit of evil, I guess.' In the autumn of 1965 Peter played a few dates with The Bluesbreakers when he deputised for Clapton, who had abruptly taken a holiday. In 1966, Green was recruited as lead guitarist by Peter B's Looners, whose drummer was Mick Fleetwood. Then Clapton abruptly quit The Bluesbreakers permanently to form Cream, whereupon Green took over. He overcame early hostility from strokey-beard-type Clapton fans by the expressiveness of his playing and earned the nickname 'The Green God.' The musician was humble about his skills, however. 'I didn't really know what I was doing on the guitar,' he later claimed to Guitarist Magazine. 'I was very lucky to get anything remotely any good. I used to dash around on stepping stones, that's what I used to call it.' After leaving Fleetwood Mac, whose rebuilt line-up would become one of the biggest acts in rock history, Green spent most of the 1970s in a dazed and confused state, living on a kibbutz near Tel Aviv, then back in Britain taking such jobs as a hospital orderly and a cemetery gardener. He had no permanent home, but often stayed with friends or family.
Diagnosed as suffering from drug-induced schizophrenia, he underwent electroconvulsive therapy. In 1977, during one row over royalty monies with Davis, Peter made threats about using a shotgun. He was committed for treatment at a psychiatric hospital and spent several months at the Priory clinic. He recovered sufficiently to get himself a record deal with PVK Records, where his brother Mike worked and met the American fiddle player Jane Samuels, whom he married in 1978. They had a daughter, Rosebud, but divorced in 1979. Solo LPs followed, with most of the songs written by Mike and there was further sporadic work for the rest of the decade. In the 1990s, Green was taken under the wing of Mich Reynolds, who had been married to Davis. With her brother, Nigel Watson and the drummer Cozy Powell, he formed The Peter Green Splinter Group, which released eight CDs between 1997 and 2003. They played live regularly, Green intermittently showing flashes of his old brilliance. In 2009 he formed Peter Green & Friends. Green was inducted into the Rock and/or roll Roll Hall of Fame in 1998 with Fleetwood Mac; at the ceremony he played 'Black Magic Woman' with a fellow-inductee, Carlos Santana. In February this year, Fleetwood organised a tribute to Green at the London Palladium, where stars including Pete Townshend, Mayall, ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, Gilmour, Gallagher, Aerosmith's Steven Tyler and Bill Wyman performed songs from throughout Green's career. He is survived by Rosebud and by Liam Firlej, his son from another relationship.
Singer Denise Johnson, whose rich soulful voice provided depth to the likes of Primal Scream and New Order, has died. The Manchester native, who came to prominence on Primal Scream's 1991 landmark Screamadelica LP, also featured on records of many of her home city's bands. She had been due to release her debut solo acoustic LP in September. A statement issued by her family said she had died 'suddenly after an illness.' Tributes have been paid to her on social media by some of the artists with whom she worked, including electronica act 808 State, who said that her voice 'sews so many memories together in many contexts.; In a statement, her family said that the singer had been 'ill in the week prior to her death, but told friends she was "much better" on Friday. The cause of death is not yet known, although she was discovered holding her inhaler on Monday morning.' Johnson was most well-known for her work with Primal Scream and for her formidable backing vocals, which saw her work with a host of stellar names, including Manchester legends New Order, Johnny Marr and The Charlatans. Away from music, she was a keen Manchester City supporter and also played the role of Mary in the BBC production, The Manchester Passion, in 2006.
     New Order, who were joined by Johnson on their most recent CD Music Complete, paid tribute to 'a beautiful person with a huge talent.' Her most regular collaborative work came with fellow Mancunians A Certain Ratio, with whom she sang for more than twenty five years. The band said that people should 'spend some time listening to her wonderful voice, remembering her loving nature and infectious sense of humour.' As a child, the first record Denise Johnson remembered listening to was the soundtrack to The Sound Of Music - and 'The Lonely Goatherd' in particular. 'The whole record fascinated me and made me want to sing,' she later recalled. After joining the school choir and working as a model, she ended up in a covers band playing soul classics in clubs around the UK. Before long, she was on stage at Wembley Arena, supporting US funk band Maze as the vocalist for A Fifth Of Heaven - with whom she recorded the underground soul classic 'Just A Little More' in 1989. From there, she went on to work on Screamadelica. Johnson was introduced to Primal Scream after performing with popular duo Hypnotone, but turned down the opportunity to tour with the band six times before finally accepting. She would later recall the period as 'five or so truly magical, hair-tearing-out, raucous years.'
    'There was a song Bobby Gillespie couldn't sing, which turned out to be 'Don't Fight It, Feel It',' she recalled. Her voice was also prominent on the hit single 'Come Together' and she sang backing vocals on both of the LP's most famous songs, 'Movin' On Up' and 'Loaded'. She toured with the band and also worked on their follow-up, 1994's Give Out But Don't Give Up - most notably her duet with George Clinton on the title song. The prominence and vitality of her vocals with Primal Scream meant she was in constant demand for much of the 1990s, working with Michael Hutchence, A Certain Ratio, Ian Brown, Beth Orton and Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr's project Electronic (most notably her superb contribution to their 1991 single 'Get The Message'). While her own solo music never had the success she would have liked, her voice gave character and depth to some of the biggest records of the Manchester scene - and she was well-loved and highly respected by those who worked with her.
In 2013, Alan Parker, who has died this week aged seventy six, received the BAFTA fellowship award 'in recognition of outstanding achievement in the art forms of the moving image.' Parker was praised for his energetic style, his keen visual sense and his storytelling skills and 'for resuscitating the movie musical.' He was also credited with having broken down the barriers between the American and British film industries and paving the way for fellow Britons - with Adrian Lyne, Hugh Hudson and Ridley and Tony Scott having come from advertising like himself - to pursue Hollywood careers. Although Parker directed only two bona fide British productions - Bugsy Malone (1976) and Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982) - in 1998 he was appointed chairman of the board of governors of the British Film Institute (and in 1999 first chairman of the Film Council. Yet, a little more than a decade earlier, Parker had made a television documentary called A Turnip Head's Guide To The British Film Industry (1985) in which he tackled 'the pomposity, stupidity, pretension and avarice of the film industry.'
Parker believed that British films were 'too parochial' and not commercial enough in concept, recalling that, as a child, whenever he visited his local cinema and the film opened with an image of a red London bus, he knew he was 'in for a lousy time.' Parker set out to change all that. Some of his attitudes derived from his working-class upbringing and the battles he had to advance himself. If any theme is to be found in his eclectic oeuvre, it is a consistent sympathy with the underdog. Alan William Parker was born during a wartime air-raid, on a housing estate in Islington. His mother, Elsie, was a dressmaker and his father, William, was a house painter. Alan became interested in photography at an early age, which led him, after leaving school at eighteen, to take a job as an office boy in the post room of an advertising agency. He then got work as a copywriter. 'The great thing about advertising, from a British point of view, is that it didn't have a kind of class distinction as other jobs had,' Parker recalled. 'If you were half bright, they gave you a chance. I was very fortunate that they gave me that chance.' One London agency he worked with was Collett Dickenson Pearce, where he first met David Puttnam and Alan Marshall, both of whom would later produce many of his films.
In 1970, Puttnam bought the rights to a handful of songs by The Bee Gees, which were incorporated into a story for a feature film, Melody. Parker, who wrote the screenplay, came up with a charming tale of two boys at a South London comprehensive (Mark Lester and Jack Wild) whose friendship is tested when a pretty girl (Tracy Hyde) enters their social orbit. It was beautifully directed by Waris Hussein and Parker did some second-unit direction for the film, as well as shooting the montage sequences. It remains one of this blogger's favourite movies of all time. Before making his feature film debut as a director, Parker made two shorts, Our Cissy and Footsteps (both 1974) and a TV drama, The Evacuees (1975), for the BBC. The latter, written by Jack Rosenthal, about the experiences of two young Jewish boys evacuated from Manchester to Blackpool during the blitz, won a BAFTA and an International EMMY. It was also proof of Parker's expertise in directing children.
This was consolidated with his first feature, Bugsy Malone, a slick musical with children playing American gangsters of the 1920s, one gang armed with cream cakes, the other with splurge guns. 'My script was a cinematic pastiche, with echoes and references to Astaire, Raft, Kelly, Cagney, Brando and Welles,' Parker recalled. 'It's not so much an homage as a collection of fond memories of double bills that I had devoured as a kid at the Blue Hall rerun cinema in Upper Street in North London.' The routines were well-staged and the 'gangsters' - including emerging talents like Scott Baio and Jodie Foster - talented and likeable. The film was a big hit in the UK but was less successful in America. Midnight Express (1978) was loosely based on the true story of Billy Hayes, a young American jailed for drug smuggling in Istanbul. The movie, relentlessly directed by Parker, graphically depicted how Hayes (Brad Davis) was beaten up and tortured in prison. There were sympathetic critics who interpreted the film as less about the Turkish prison system than about a general fear of otherness. Some years later, Oliver Stone, whose screenplay won an Oscar, apologised for 'over-dramatising' the story.
In contrast, Fame (1980), which again showed what Parker could do with song-and-dance routines, followed eight young people for four years at the High School of Performing Arts in New York. 'Something wonderful is happening to me, mama,' says one of the budding stars. 'I'm growing up.' For Parker, Shoot The Moon (1982), a divorce drama starring Albert Finney and Diane Keaton, was 'the first grown-up film that I'd done.' A robust dissection of modern marriage sympathetic to both sides of the battle, the film was convincing in its depiction of the minutiae of bringing up families. 'It was a painful film to make for me because there were echoes of my own life in it. It was about a break-up of a marriage and the children in the story were quite close to my own children in age.' Parker's own first marriage, to Annie Inglis whom he had married in 1966, ended in 1992. Although Parker considered the filming of Pink Floyd: The Wall'one of the most miserable experiences of my creative life,' this surreal extended pop promo, starring Bob Geldof as a disintegrating rock star, did well at the box office. The causes of Parker's unhappiness were the constant clashes with that miserable old scrote Roger Waters, who wrote the screenplay and the cartoonist and illustrator Gerald Scarfe, who did the elaborate animation sequences.
Birdy (1984) seamlessly transposed the novelist William Wharton's post-second world war traumas to a post-Vietnam setting. It concerned the devastating effects the war had on two young friends, Al (Nicolas Cage), physically injured and Birdy (Matthew Modine), psychologically damaged, who believes he is a bird. Treated with sensibility and skill, the film contains some exceptional sequences, such as Birdy's dream of flying over Pittsburgh. Angel Heart (1987), a tense thriller - based on William Hjortsberg's novel Falling Angel - was set in 1950s New Orleans. The titular private eye, Harry Angel played by Mickey Rourke, is trying to locate a missing person for a particularly sinister client, Robert De Niro. His trail leads to voodoo rites and its link with sexuality, evil and darkness. The film's release was mired in controversy in the US, where censors gave it an X rating, normally reserved for pornography. After losing an appeal, Parker cut ten seconds from a sex scene between Rourke and Lisa Bonet and the film was reclassified with an R rating. 'I figured that a few celluloid feet of Mickey's ass was no great loss to the history cinema,' he observed. Again, it would be on any list of this blogger's favourite fifty movies.
Mississippi Burning (1988) was about a couple of contrasting FBI agents (Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe) in a small Southern town in 1964, investigating the disappearance of three civil rights workers. In Come See The Paradise (1990), the FBI were the bad guys helping to round up and imprison Japanese Americans during the second world war. Parker returned triumphantly to the musical with The Commitments (1991), based on the novel by Roddy Doyle, on the efforts of a ragtag group of Dublin musicians to launch a successful soul band. Laced with superb songs sung with passion and vibrant performances by a cast of virtual unknowns, it won BAFTA awards for best film, best director and best adapted screenplay. 'I wanted to do this film because I identified with the kids in the film,' Parker claimed. 'They came from the North side of Dublin, a working-class area and I came from the North of London, a very similar working-class area. I suppose deep down that the dreams and aspirations I had when I was a kid are very close to theirs.'
Parker's unbroken run of box-office winners was halted temporarily by The Road To Wellville (1994), a hit-and-miss satire about the health crazes at the turn of the Twentieth Century, mainly perpetrated by Doctpr John Harvey Kellogg (Anthony Hopkins fitted with large buck teeth). Parker had another success with Evita (1996), adapted from the Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber stage hit. It turned out to be a glitzy entertainment, with wall-to-wall songs (well sung by Madonna in the title role) and sparse dialogue delivered in awkward recitatives (including Jimmy Nail). But whatever the quality of the content, the look was impeccable, as with all Parker's films. In fact, Parker often used the same team - directors of photography (Michael Seresin and Peter Biziou), editor (Gerry Hambling) and production designer (Brian Morris). Parker's second film shot in Ireland, Angela's Ashes (1999), based on the story of Frank McCourt's poverty-stricken childhood, failed to delve below the surface. Even more at fault for superficiality was The Life Of David Gale (2003), which followed a Texas University professor (Kevin Spacey), an advocate for the abolitionism of capital punishment, who finds himself on death row after being convicted of the rape and murder. The overwhelmingly negative critical reaction to the film convinced Parker to leave his filmography at fourteen features. He said in 2017: 'We have gone through the era of the producer, the director, now we are in the era of the studio executive. None of which bodes well if you've always had complete control of your work.' Parker was knighted in 2002. He is survived by his second wife, Lisa, whom he married in 2001, their son, Henry, four children - Lucy, Alexander, Jake and Nathan - from his first marriage and seven grandchildren.
Stuart Broad's five hundredth test wicket sent England on the way to completing a series victory over West Indies on the final day of the third Test at Emirates Old Trafford earlier in the week. Broad had Kraigg Brathwaite LBW to become only the fourth pace bowler and second England player after his frequent new-ball partner James Anderson to reach the landmark and would later take the final wicket to complete his third ten-wicket haul in tests. Brathwaite was the first man to fall, West Indies having resumed on ten for two chasing three hundred and ninety nine or, more likely, needing to bat out the day. Chris Woakes claimed five for fifty as England dodged the showers to bowl West Indies out for one hundred and twenty nine, win by two hundred and sixty nine runs and take the series two-one. After being beaten in the first test in Southampton, England have come from behind to win a three-match series for the first time since 2008 (and, the first time ever in a three test series in England). They also regained - and, indeed, now will retain in perpetuity - The Wisden Trophy and ended the series back up to third in the World Test Championship, behind India and Australia. In a congested schedule, an entirely separate England squad play three one-day internationals against Ireland in the next week before the first of three tests against Pakistan begins on 5 August.
West Indies, so competitive for much of the tour, remain without a series victory in the UK since 1988 and have now been beaten on seven consecutive trips to this country. This was not only Broad's moment to join an elite club - just six other bowlers have reached five hundred wickets in tests - but also further vindication after he so publicly voiced his displeasure at being left out of the first match of the series. Since returning, he has taken sixteen wickets at slightly under eleven runs each. In this match alone he picked up ten for sixty seven to go with the sixty two runs he scored in England's first innings. To still be so determined at the age of thirty four is typical of such a fierce competitor, whose one hundred and forty-test career has been characterised by spectacular spells and has included four Ashes wins. Broad's five hundredth test wicket came forty minutes in, after a brief break for rain, when Brathwaite was hit dead in front of middle stump by a full delivery. Broad was congratulated with a hug from his great friend Anderson, then raised the ball in the direction of the dressing room - the empty stadium denying the celebrations his achievement deserved. Fittingly, Broad returned to seal victory. The first ball of a new spell was nothing but a long hop, but Jermaine Blackwood gloved a pull down the leg side to a diving Jos Buttler to make Broad only the seventh England player to take ten wickets and score a half-century in the same test. Much of the talk around the England side during this series has been about the identity of their best fast-bowling line-up, particularly given the need to manage workloads and plan for the eventual retirements of Broad and Anderson. Despite having a better average in England than any of his team-mates, Woakes may have been left out of this match had Ben Stokes been fit to bowl, but he ended the series as the home side's second-highest wicket-taker behind Broad.
West Indies' cavalier approach made for some attractive strokeplay and regular chances for England to take wickets. Shai Hope miscued a pull at Woakes to Broad at mid-on and Shamarh Brooks' waft gave an inside edge behind, before Roston Chase was run out by Dom Bess' superb direct hit. Bowling with supreme control on a full length, Woakes had all of Jason Holder, Shane Dowrich and Rahkeem Cornwall LBW for his fourth test five-wicket haul. It is to West Indies' great credit they made the trip at all and even without Darren Bravo, Shimron Hetmyer and Keemo Paul, who opted out because of coronavirus concerns, they have played their part in producing a compelling and fluctuating contest. Beginning with both sides taking a knee as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, the tourists were superb in Southampton, securing a memorable victory by chasing two hundred to win on the final day. But they have been beaten twice at Old Trafford, opting to bowl first after winning the toss on both occasions and they gradually ran out of steam - perhaps not surprising given they have spent all but one week since 9 June in the same Manchester hotel. However, in Brathwaite, Brooks and Chase, they have at least the basis of a solid batting line-up, while captain Holder, Kemar Roach and - when he's fit - Shannon Gabriel form a potentially fearsome pace attack. Their steady improvement in test cricket is well placed to continue. The next time the two sides play, it will be for the new Botham-Richards Trophy.
'The laminated book of dreams,' was how Bill Bailey jokingly described the plastic-coated Argos catalogue. But forty eight years on from its launch, the catalogue is finally coming to an end. Bill himself took to Twitter when the news was announced. The encyclopedia-like catalogues, the basis of many a child's Christmas wishlist, will no longer be regularly printed by the end of January 2021. The catalogue was first launched in 1972 and at its peak was Europe's most widely-printed publication, with only the Bible in more homes across the UK. Comedian Alan Carr famously picked the Argos catalogue as his book choice on Radio 4's programme Desert Island Discs. 'At least there's pictures,' he said at the time. 'I feel it would help me through.' But now Argos says that online shopping offers 'greater convenience' than flicking through its print catalogue and no further take-home editions of the catalogue will be produced. Instead, its products will be only listed and displayed online. The retailer has produced more than one billion copies of its bi-annual catalogue during its forty eight-year run, which quickly became synonymous with the brand. During its heyday, its pages featured the likes of Emma Bunton and Arnold Schwarzenegger. In fact, some of the UK's best known z-list celebrities once graced the laminated pages of the retail bible. Strictly Come Dancing presenter Tess Daly modelled clothes for the company before she went on to a career in television. This Morning host Holly Willoughby also made an appearance in the late 1990s while she was still working as a lingerie model. Others who began their career within its pages included the actress Michelle Collins, model Lisa Snowdon and presenter Emma Willis. The catalogue became so popular that at one stage more than ten million copies were printed. However, that dipped to around three million copies when the now-final version was released in January this year. Customers shopping on smartphones and tablets now account for more than seventy per cent of all Argos online sales. The retailer said that it would still produce a print version of its annual Christmas gift guide. Steve Dresser, director at Grocery Insight, told the BBC that it had 'only been a matter of time' before the retailer made the shift to digital-only. 'Everyone uses the Internet for ordering nowadays and e-commerce is experiencing a stratospheric rise again,' he explained. 'Post-Covid Nineteen there is even less of a call for a catalogue. The reality is the march of technology and progression doesn't spare anything, not even the beloved Argos catalogue.' Last year, Argos made all its back catalogues available to browse online, letting consumers reminisce over everything from the 1974 hostess trolley (then priced at forty three quid) to the 1987 personal stereo (twenty knicker).
From The North's semi-regular Headline Of The Week award goes to the BBC News website for Coronavirus: Pubs 'May Need To Shut' To Allow Schools To Reopen. Correlation does not imply causation, dear blog reader. Or, does it?
Congratulations, however, also go to the Daily Mirra whose Woman Forced To Hide At Home After Lip Filler Fail Left Her With 'Baboon's Bum' Pout was a more-than-worthy runner-up.
Three Coldstream Guards are being investigated by police after they were reportedly involved in a punch-up with the Queen's footmen. The altercation was said to have happened about eight hundred metres from Buckingham Palace as a group of royal footmen were attending a leaving drinks party. And then, allegedly, it all kicked-off with kids getin' spared and aal sorts ...
Muslim pilgrims in Saudi Arabia took part in a symbolic stoning of The Devil on Friday, but maintained social distancing in a ritual that usually brings millions of worshippers from all over the world shoulder-to-shoulder. The ritual, at which pilgrims must hurl pebbles at a giant wall, has in the past been the scene of several deadly crowd accidents. In 2015, hundreds died in a crush at an intersection leading up to the site.
And finally, dear blog reader, in the least unexpected news of the year the Saudi Arabian-backed consortium has ended its bid to buy Newcastle United. As anyone as cynical as this blogger about the fortunes of his beloved (though, tragically unsellable) Magpies kind-of expected would happen from the moment the proposed takeover was first announced. The group, which included Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth-fund PIF, PCP Capital Partners and Reuben Brothers, had agreed a three hundred million knicker deal to buy the club from Mike Ashley in April. The deal was still being scrutinised under the Premier League's owners' and directors' test and it is understood PIF ran out of patience after the process has gone on and on and on. And on. The consortium said that it was 'with regret' that it had pulled out. Amanda Staveley, the British businesswoman behind PCP Partners, said she was 'upset' for the club's supporters. Though, not half as upset as the supporters themselves who are now that they find themselves, once again, stuck with the much-loathed Ashley with, seemingly, no Plan B on the table. 'It's awful,' she said, adding that there would have been huge investment in the area. 'We are devastated for the fans. We really thank the fans - I personally thank them for all their support.' Friday saw the Newcastle United Supporters Trust write to their members, pledging to 'once again attempt to engage in constructive dialogue with the Premier League to get Newcastle United supporters the answers they deserve.' Well, good luck with that. They have also released the text of a previous letter they sent to the PL - and the appallingly formulaic reply which it produced. As they rightly observe: 'A supposedly confidential process has been confidential only to football supporters, as disgraced broadcasters in the Middle East, UK broadsheet newspapers and many others have claimed to have spoken to Premier League "sources" about why this deal "should not go through."' For what it's worth, this blogger always had some moral problems with the idea of members of one of the world's most repressive human rights regimes taking over at St James' Park. However, the staggering hypocrisy of a number of MPs who have done their best to scupper the deal whilst, seemingly, having no problems whatsoever with successive British governments selling arms to the Saudis and the barely-hidden agenda of most of those opposed to the deal on entirely financial rather than human rights grounds does leave an extremely sour taste in the mouth. So, as usual, the people we've been most shafted in this protracted and, ultimately pointless, exercise have been the long-suffering supporters of the club. We get left with Mike Ashley - someone whom, according to the Premier League, at least -is a 'fit and proper person.' As Jimmy Greaves would regularly observe, dear blog reader, football - 'it's a funny old game.'

Yer actual Keith Telly Topping has been a deeply unhappy chap these last three months dear blog reader. You may have noticed this from the general whining and, overall, stroppy and discombobulated tone of the last couple of bloggerisationism updates. Sorry 'bout that, dear blog reader. A stupid, at the time seemingly innocuous, back injury occasioned by this blogger tripping over his own feet on the Stately Telly Topping Manor stairs whilst taking some rubbish out to the bins was diagnosed - remotely - by this blogger's medical staff as a simple torn muscle around the third vertebrae which, with rest and some industrial strength pain-killers would, eventually, put itself right. Except that, as of the time of writing, it hasn't. Not in the eleven weeks since The Incident occurred and, seemingly, not for the foreseeable future. Keith Telly Topping remains, sad to report, in more-or-less constant pain and, for the most part, immobilised and house-bound - this blogger is able to limp to the local supermarket and post office and back about once a week but, that's the limit of Keith Telly Topping's athletic activities at present. Some days are, admittedly, better than others and there are even odd moments - usually when he's just taken some codeine and is in bed, asleep - this blogger is even able to convince himself there is some light at the end of the tunnel (and that it isn't, as Half Man Half Biscuit once suggested, the light of an oncoming train). Work have been, this blogger is keen to note, broadly speaking patient and sympathetic about this lengthy absence. But, earlier this week, this blogger surrounded to the inevitable and offered his resignation in the knowledge that there is currently no end in sight to his enforced lay off. It's an age-old truism, dear blog reader, but it really is an ill wind that blows no one any good.
Anyway, the odd bout of tetchiness concerning the manifest unfairness life aside, this blogger remains determined to get his shit together, learn to walk properly again and, generally, shake himself from his pain-induced lethargy and depression which has made him like a bear with a sore arse to be around these last three months. It is, perhaps, somewhat fortunate the enforced social isolationism of this coronavirus malarkey has meant that apart from the Stately Telly Topping Manor postman and the check-out ladies at Aldi, this blogger has barely had any contact with any persons alive or dead during the entire period. Not a view you'll see voiced by many people in these strange and troubled times, dear blog reader, but this blogger likes being different.
In other Stately Telly Topping Manor-related news, this blogger is delighted to report that Freddie the Stately Telly Topping Manor freezer whose arrival three weeks ago was noted in the last From The North bloggerisationism update has been working well. And, over the course of two or three limps to local supermarkets, that fact has enabled this blogger to, if not fill Freddie up then, at least, make a start on giving him something to actually freeze. Which is nice.
Plus, of course dear blog reader, this blogger has really deserved all of these ...
Lordy mama, yes indeedy. If there is but one thing that this blogger is still able to do well, dear blog reader, it's pick up the phone to one or other of the takeaways local to Stately Telly Topping Manor and do the 'it's for delivery' thing. What can this blogger say in his own defence, dear blog reader? He would leave this place and limp along to the chip-oil for his daily exercise if he could. He would, but he's got this really bad back, see ... Catch-twenty two, if you will. Fine boo, that. Pretty poor movie adaptation, though.
Which, as if by design - which it actually was - brings us too ...
(Hey, this blogger doesn't just throw these things together, you know. Even when he is in pain ...)

The Bridge (this blogger had quite forgotten just how remarkable the series of the Swedish/Danish crime drama was. Until good old BBC4 dug it out for a highly timely repeat).
Line of Duty. Ditto. Bless the cotton socks of the person that invented iPlayer.
Prodigal Son. This was the first occasion in some considerable time that this blogger has watched all twenty episodes of a series, got to the end and then gone back and watched it all over again. This blogger still stands by the flaws which he alluded to in the last From The North update but, there's something properly intriguing about Prodigal Son. Speculating on how much coffee Michael Sheen had been drinking on an average morning on set, mainly.
Derren Brown: Twenty Years Of Mind Control. A combination of documentary, greatest hits clip-show and live prestidigitation, this celebration of the (self-deprecating) 'national treasure' demonstrated all of the techniques which From The North favourite Dazzling Dezza has used since he first appeared on our screens in 2000; misdirection, cold-reading, auto-suggestion, showmanship, illusionism, 'a health and safety nightmare' and effortless charm. It also featured this blogger's favourite line on TV this year so far - 'You are live on Channel Four so please swear as much as you like!' And, also, his second favourite: 'I have never met them, it's live and there's a plague, what could possibly go wrong?' Plus some smear of no importance at the Gruniad Morning Star felt compelled to have a whinge about it. So, on general principle, that's merely one more reason to love Twenty Years Of Mind Control the mostest, baby.
Mortimer & Whitehouse Gone Fishing. Because relaxation is good for bad backs. Apparently. And so is laughter.
Dave Gorman's Modern Life Is Goodish. And, whilst we're blessing the cotton sock of whomsoever invented iPlayer, the chap - or lady-chap - behind UKTVPlay also deserves a jolly good pat on the back.
The general outputs of BBC4, Sky Arts, Yesterday, Sky Nature, Crime+Investigation, Eden, PBS America and Sky Documentaries. Because TV in which you might - dangerously - learn something is never a bad thing; whatever the average scum tabloid may opine to the contrary.
Casablanca.
The X Files.
Little Birds.
Jekyll.
Qi. The - shortened - R series has now concluded but it was really good to see From The North favourite The Extremely Righteous Benjamin Zephaniah appearing in the final episode.
Doctor Phibes Rises Again. 'Every time we build a better mousetrap, Phibes has built a better mouse!'
The Be-Atles' (A Popular Beat Combo Of The 1960s, You Might've Heard Of Them) Anthology.
The Godfather, Part II.
The Sopranos.
And, of course, Would I Lie To You? Because, you know, some things never change.
And, because the trailers for all three have been cropping up about every five minutes on the various Sky channels, this blogger is rather looking forward to Lovecraft Country, I Hate Suzy and Two Weeks To Live.
On a somewhat related theme, this whole lockdown malarkey enforced due to the plague (not to mention back injuries and all that) have, reportedly, brought about a surge - that's a surge - in TV watching and online streaming. This is according to the media watchdog - and politically-appointed quango, elected by no one - Ofcom. Or, in the case of this blogger, just watching roughly the same amount of telly as he did before all this crap started. Swings and roundabouts, innit? Ofcom's annual study into UK media habits (to which this blogger did contribute) suggested adults - many stuck indoors - spent forty per cent of their waking hours in front of a screen, on average. What they do for the other sixty per cent of the time, they don't say. Probably contemplating the inherently ludicrous nature of existence, or something. Time spent on subscription streaming services also doubled during April. Though, not in Stately Telly Topping Manor, they didn't. At the height of lockdown, adults spent an average of six hours and twenty five minutes each day viewing ... stuff. Pfft. Lightweights. Screen time overall was up almost a third (thirty one per cent) on last year. People watched streaming services, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+, for one hour eleven minutes per day and twelve million punters joined a service that they hadn't used previously. Three million of these viewers had never subscribed to any service before. The majority signed up to Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, although Disney+ overtook Now TV as the third most popular paid-for streaming platform in the UK. Older viewers - yes, dear blog reader, just like yer actual Keith Telly Topping - who typically watch more traditional broadcast TV, increased their use of streaming platforms, too. One third of fifty five to sixty four year-olds and fifteen per cent of people aged over sixty five used subscription services in the early weeks of lockdown. The study, entitled Media Nations 2020, suggested that as lockdown measures eased towards the end of June, the uplift in streaming services held firm - seventy one per cent up on the same time last year. This figure also included people viewing more non-broadcast content on platforms like YouTube and gaming sites. And, more than half of UK adults (fifty five per cent) with new streaming subscriptions said that they will keep them and spend the same amount of time watching streamed content in future. However in July, Netflix warned investors that subscriber growth will inevitably slow, after it it added more than ten million subscribers in the previous three months, bringing the total of new subscribers to twenty six million in 2020. In contrast, Netflix saw twenty eight million new subscribers for the whole of 2019. 'Growth is slowing as consumers get through the initial shock of coronavirus and social restrictions,' the company said. As for the public service broadcasters - BBC, ITV, Channel Four and Channel Five - they achieved their highest combined monthly share of broadcast TV viewing (fifty nine per cent) in more than six years in March, as people turned to trusted news services for daily updates on the virus. The BBC was, by a distance, the most popular source of news and information about Covid-Nineteen - used by eighty two per cent of adults during the first weeks of lockdown. Of course, in the age of information overload, our attention is the most precious resource for all broadcasters. These days we tend to devote ever more of it to screens. And that was before lockdown. The surge in screen viewing through the pandemic is - genuinely - extraordinary, if somewhat understandable. Cos, you know, what else are you gonna do if you're stuck in your drum all day, every day? Contemplating the inherently ludicrous nature of existence is only entertaining for so long. It is important to remember, also, that many of the companies or services that have turned us into screen addicts didn't exist a decade ago. Sadly for Britain's commercial broadcasters, all these eyeballs haven't turned into revenue, as advertising is in sharp retreat, for now at least. Before lockdown, the creative industries were growing several times faster than the rest of the economy, albeit powered by US companies. Never mind 'Eat Out To Help Out'; might 'Tune In To Help Out' be a slogan to boost Britain's path out of a deep and dark recession? Broadcasters' video-on demand services also received a boost in lockdown. Dramas Normal People and Killing Eve - both of which will feature strongly in From The North's end-of-year 'Best Of' list - helped BBC iPlayer attract a record five hundred and seventy million programme requests in May 2020 - seventy two per cent higher than in the equivalent month in 2019. Channel Four's on-demand service, All Four, generated thirty per cent more views among sixteen to thirty four year olds - suffering from severe Hollyoaks-withdrawal, probably - in the first two weeks of lockdown compared with the same period in 2019. And viewers spent eighty two per cent more time year-on-year watching ITV Hub. However, the boost to PSBs' linear audiences was short-lived as coronavirus interrupted production on soaps including EastEnders, Coronation Street and Emmerdale, as well as major sporting events like the Olympics and the Premier League and entertainment broadcasts such as the Glastonbury Festival. By the end of June and with lockdown easing, the amount of time viewers spent watching traditional broadcast content fell forty four minutes to three hours and two minutes per day. Except in Stately Telly Topping Manor where it remained considerably higher than that. Broadcast TV viewing is now comparably lower than it was in 2014 to 2017, although it remains eleven per cent higher than this time last year.
And, so to the - by now traditional - From The North'death corner'. The singer and actor Trini Lopez has died aged eighty three, after contracting Covid-Nineteen, at hospital in Rancho Mirage, California. As well as starring in the 1967 second world war action movie The Dirty Dozen, Lopez scored a transatlantic hit with 'If I Had A Hammer' and designed a pair of sought-after guitar models for Gibson. Trinidad Lopez III was born in Dallas, to Mexican parents. His father was also an actor and singer. Trini's life changed after his father bought him a twelve dollar black Gibson acoustic from a pawn shop when he was fourteen. His father taught him to play the instrument, which led the teenage Lopez to perform in Dallas nightclubs with his first band - including The Vegas Club, owned by Jack Ruby - that usually didn't allow Mexican-American patrons. Buddy Holly saw Lopez at a nightclub in Wichita Falls and introduced him to Norman Petty, his producer in Clovis, New Mexico. Holly died in a plane crash six months later and Lopez briefly replaced him as singer of The Crickets. Trini shuttled between various record contracts for several of years but he earned a nightclub residency at PJ's in Los Angeles, where he was heard by Frank Sinatra, who signed him to his new label, Reprise. Trini's debut LP was recorded live at PJ's in 1963, featuring a range of songs that drew from US folk, rock'n'roll and traditional Mexican songcraft, including covers of Ray Charles's' What'd I Say?', Woody Guthrie's 'This Land Is Your Land' and a raucous 'La Bamba'. His version of Pete Seeger's 'If I Had a Hammer' outstripped the success of an earlier hit version by Peter, Paul and Mary, reaching the top three in the US, number four in the UK and number one in thirty six other countries; the LP sold over a million copies. Lopez had further US hits with 'Kansas City', 'Michael', 'Get Along Without Ya Now', 'Sally Was A Good Old Girl' and 'Lemon Tree', while 'I'm Comin' Home Cindy' was a minor UK hit in 1966. He had success in the Spanish-language market with The Latin Album. A rare Latino in the rock and folk world of the time, he would speak often of resisting pressure from record company executives to change his name and presumably appeal more to white audiences. Lopez received a Grammy nomination for best new artist of 1963 and by early 1964 he was so in demand that he and The Be-Atles (a popular beat combo of the 1960s, you might've heard of them) were co-headliners with Sylvie Vartan during an eighteen-day engagement at the Olympia Theatre in Paris. It was just before The Be-Atles were due to travel to the US, appear on The Ed Sullivan Show and, consequently, upend the careers of Lopez and countless others. 'The French newspapers would say "Bravo Trini Lopez! Who are The Beatles?"' Lopez later said in an interview. 'The last night we were there, reporters came to my dressing room. And they said "Mister Lopez, The Beatles are leaving tomorrow for New York. Do you think they’ll be a hit?" I said "I don’t think so."' So, good singer, decent actor, crap fortune teller. At the peak of his popularity Trini was asked by guitar manufacturer Gibson to design two models, The Trini Lopez Standard and The Lopez Deluxe, owners of which include Dave Grohl and Noel Gallagher. In the mid-1960s he was releasing as many as five LPs a year, though that slowed in the 1970s. While he continued performing, he released very little music until 2000, when he began recording again. He also starred in a self-titled TV variety show in 1969, which was part of a short, but interesting, acting career. His most famous role was as Pedro Jimenez in 1967's The Dirty Dozen, starring alongside Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Telly Savales, Donald Sutherland and many others. Lopez crossed over into acting, appearing in the comedy The Phynx and credits on television's Adam-Twelve. His nephew, Trini Martinez, was the drummer for the Dallas indie-rock band Bedhead.
Since the last bloggerisationism update, England snatched a riveting three-wicket victory from the jaws of defeat against Pakistan in the first test at Emirates Old Trafford thanks to a daring partnership between Chris Woakes and Jos Buttler. Chasing two hundred and seventy seven on a snakepit of a pitch, England looked all but beaten at one hundred and seventeen for five, only for Woakes and Buttler to counter-attack in a partnership of one hundred and thirty nine runs. Buttler was LBW reverse-sweeping Yasir Shah for seventy five with twenty one still required and the second new ball due. The promoted Stuart Broad took England to within four runs of victory, which Woakes got from an outside edge to end the match eighty four not out. It was Woakes who said on Friday night that England would draw on their experience of recent unlikely victories and this latest success followed the drama of the World Cup final and the Headingley Ashes test of 2019. Not only were they second favourites for most of the test, but conceded a one hundred and seven-run first-innings lead after errors in the field, poor tactics and a top-order collapse. They gradually battled back over the final two days, yet it was only when Buttler and Woakes were together that Pakistan's energy was replaced by trepidation.
     This was a classic finish to a gripping test, one that in another time would have had an empty Emirates Old Trafford bouncing. England were rightly criticised for their performance over the first two days - wicketkeeper Buttler's reprieves which allowed Shan Masood to make one hundred and fifty six, captain Joe Root's odd tactics and some really poor batting. But the way they battled in the second half of their first innings was brave, their bowling in Pakistan's second innings was tenacious and the match-winning Buttler and Woakes partnership was truly nerveless. They made light of a surface that was turning, spitting and rearing to help England to the second highest run-chase completed to win a test in Manchester. It was fitting that Woakes, so often an unsung hero, hit the winning runs, celebrating with a roar that echoed around the empty stadium. Buttler famously has an irreverent slogan written on the handle of his bat. It is an approach that served him well in a situation where he may have been playing for his place after the earlier keeping errors and a lean run with the bat. What made the sixth-wicket stand all the more remarkable was what had gone before. England had lost three for twenty after Naseem Shah got one to lift at Root, Yasir's fizzing googly took the glove of Ben Stokes and Ollie Pope had absolutely no chance in the face of an unplayable lifter from Shaheen Afridi. Buttler and Woakes decided that attack was the best form of defence. Buttler went after leg-spinner Yasir with drives, sweeps and reverse-sweeps. Woakes slapped the pace bowlers through the covers. The fifty partnership came in forty nine balls. Pakistan retreated and the pitch went to sleep. The previously metronomic Mohammad Abbas was ineffective. The strokeplay gave way to steady accumulation, tension rising as the scoring slowed. Buttler freed the shackles by heaving Shadab Khan for six, but was out in the following over. Broad swiped seven useful runs before his was out, then Woakes' edge to third man sealed an unlikely victory in the glorious Saturday evening sunshine. Pakistan had been in control for so long thanks to their determined first-innings batting, relentless bowling and enthusiasm in the field. The tourists showed togetherness throughout, their reserve players making noise from the balcony of the hotel which overlooks the ground. They took the initiative at the start of the day, extending their lead by thirty two runs in sixteen chaotic deliveries that concluded with the fall of the final two wickets. But Pakistan immediately seemed intimidated by Buttler. The field spread, pressure was released and runs were much easier to come by. Captain Azhar Ali burned his reviews in desperation before Yasir struck late to remove Buttler and Broad. Pakistan buzzed and chatted to the end, but ultimately lost a match that they should have won.
What a difference a week makes, however. The issue of bad light in test cricket 'needs to be addressed' according to Joe Root after bad light and rain utterly ruined the drawn second test at the Ageas Bowl, with only a day and a half's play possible across the entire match. Root said authorities should consider using a brighter red ball, bringing forward the start time, not being so rigid with when lunch and tea are taken and improving floodlights at test grounds. 'It is something that needs looking at higher up the chain,' he said. 'It is way above my pay grade but there are different things that may be able to be trialled to see if there are other ways we could do things in this country to avoid similar scenarios. It has been a huge talking point but it needs to be addressed somewhere somehow.' England reached one hundred and ten for four in reply to Pakistan's two hundred and thirty six before Root and Azhar Ali agreed on a draw which preserved the hosts' one-nil lead in the three-match series. Zak Crawley made fifty three and Dom Sibley thirty two but fell in consecutive Mohammad Abbas overs. Ollie Pope was out fifteen minutes before the close. The test was the ninth shortest in England in terms of balls bowled, although it was only the third draw in the past forty three tests in the UK. Only 134.3 overs - less than a day and a half's play - were possible in the match, the shortest test in England since 1987. Root said 'we've got protect the game as much as possible,' adding: 'You don't want to drastically change the game too much for potentially only an hour's bad light in a five-day game.' Under ICC regulations, umpires can take the players off for bad light when they deem it to be 'dangerous or unreasonable' to continue. The officials were criticised in Southampton, particularly on the first two days when play was stopped despite the light not seeming either dangerous or unreasonable or anything even remotely like it. Root, who said he did not blame the umpires, added: 'We are all for playing but don't want anyone getting injured or hurt because of light or wet ground.' Azhar said: 'It's tough. A spectator, outside the ground, will obviously want to see the game being played, but umpires and the other authorities will want to put player safety first because they are the ones under pressure and the ones who have to do it in the middle. I think they are doing a great job.' Frustrations have been voiced that there has not been more play - when the entire third day was lost there was a two-hour period when it felt like there could have been some action. For what it's worth, this blogger thought the umpires were a sodding disgrace throughout.
Anyway, dear blog reader, that concludes another - necessary - From The North bloggerisationism update, featuring all of the usual bollocks but, as ever, if not free then, at the very least, cheap. Stay safe and, if at all possible, do try to avoid tripping over your own feet and wrecking yourself. Take it from this blogger, life is much easier if don't do that.

These present, unique and singular times remain strange and often bloody disturbing for many, dear blog reader. But, it is necessary for us all to remember that some truths are, as always, self-evident.
Truly, madly, deeply self-evident.
Mind you, dear blog reader, let it be noted that From The North's daily traffic has seldom been anywhere near as busy as we have witnessed under the strain and bleak naughty oppression of near-universal lockdown. Which, of course, leads to the asking of one very obvious question; haven't you people got anything more worthwhile to be looking at on the Interweb to fill the long and boring hours of self-isolation than come here to read all this flaming nonsense? And, the answer appears to be, no, seemingly, you have not. Well, that's certainly reassuring.
There has been much discussion surrounding the phrase 'the new normal' - as opposed to the 'old normal', one supposes. This, basically, seems to be a new catchphrase which gives lots of Middle Class hippy Communists at the Gruniad Morning Star and the Independent something else to whinge about. And, similarly, some jack-booted bully-boy louse-thugs at Torygraph and the Daily Scum Mail, obviously.
There does seem to be a 'new honesty' about some aspects of this 'new normal' which can be quite refreshing - particularly in the wide and often crowded boulevard that is 'naming shit accurately.'
Though, inevitably, some assumed identities remain. Cos, that's never his real name, surely? If it is, then the 'old normal' was every single bit as weird as the 'new normal' appears to be.
Signs of 'the old normal' - as opposed to the 'new normal' - are around, however. If one knows where to look for them. For instance, there is a new Bond movie trailerout. And, it looks sodding brilliant.
Meanwhile, Greggs' are selling yer actual stotties again for the first time since March! This blogger had almost forgotten how gorgeous they taste. Belgian buns and jammy heart biscuits are also back on sale, as are the Southern fried chicken baguette and the ham and cheese baguette. Par-tee!
England can stillbeat Australia at cricket from seemingly impossible and unwinnable positions. Even without Ben Stokes in the side.
England's football team also continue to demonstrate their - not infrequently seen in the past - ability to play really poorly and still, somehow, get a result. As witnessed in their 'limp over the line' against Iceland.
And, of course, this blogger's back is still cattle-trucked - albeit, let it be noted, since he left work two weeks ago, there has been signs of a - very marginal - improvement in this blogger's pain management. Which is jolly curious but, nevertheless, extremely welcome.
At the arse end of August, dear blog reader, yer actual Keith Telly Topping ventured into town for the first time in a while to run some errands. Or, to be strictly accurate, limp - extremely slowly - some errands. This ended, however, with yer actual Keith Telly Topping visiting a proper, sit down therein restaurant for the first time since ... well, again, March. Did he really deserve this, dear blog reader? What do you think? Go on, guess ...
It was, just in case you're wondering, marvellously splendid! An eighteen quid five-courser at the New Canton in Gallowgate for half-price (fifty per cent off due to that whole Eat Out To Help Out malarkey). Soup, wantons and ribs, crispy aromatic duck, chilli prawns and fried rice. No wine on this occasion as this blogger is still, very much, 'on pills for me nerves.' Or something equally dramatic. He was in the company of the very excellent Malcolm Hunter. And, yes, just in case there was ever any slight doubt about the matter, both of them really did deserve that.
Though, in the interests of full disclosure, this blogger should note that he subsequently only got about four hours of sleep that night - which isn't unusual of late but, mostly, it's been due to back pain rather than a rumbly tummy caused by vicious heartburn. Still, it could've been worse. This blogger was considering having a coffee at the end of the meal before catching the bus back to the Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House. If he had, he would probably have been up all night.
God, it was a proper nice spread, though. As, indeed, was this Salt and Chilli King Prawn obtained from the Royal Sky.
Or, this Prawn and Beef Curry with Egg Fried Rice which he picked up from the Happy Chef in Waalsend.
Or, this Chilli, Garlic and Spring Onion Shredded Crispy Beef that he got delivered from Tam's.
Or, this King Prawns with Chinese Mushrooms in Oyster Sauce which he also got from the Royal Sky.
This blogger really, really, really deserved all of them, dear blog reader. Really.
Yer actual Keith Telly Topping had occasion to pop into town again, briefly, a few days later to pay a couple of bills and transfer some of his formerly hard-earned coin from one bank account into another. The trip also included slow and awkward shopping limps to Poundland, Boots, Marks & Spankers, Wilkinsons and Morrisons. Keith Telly Topping was most disappointed to discover, however, that the New Canton, the restaurant he went to - and so enjoyed - a few nights previously doesn't open but one lunch time each week. It's Friday. And this was a Friday. What's that all about? So, on that particular occasion, this blogger was forced to do without. And, he'd've really deserved it if only he'd got the opportunity to have it.
And now, dear blog reader ...
The Bridge series two. Still the best of the four, by a distance.
The long-awaited return of Qi XL.
The general outputs of BBC4, Sky Arts, Yesterday, Sky Nature, Crime+Investigation, Eden, PBS America and Sky Documentaries. Because TV in which you might, actually, learn something is never a bad thing; whatever the average scum tabloid louse may opine to the contrary (slight return).
Theatre of Blood.
I Hate Suzie.
Budgie. ('There are two things I hate in life, Budgie and you're both of them!')
The Manchurian Candidate. (The 1962 version, obviously rather than the flawed-and-not-particularly-interesting remake.)
The Third Man.
Doctor Who.
More Doctor Who.
MoreDoctor Who.
A Matter Of Life & Death. (Still, in this blogger's opinion, the greatest film ever made. Bar none. And, you should probably take this blogger's word of it, dear blog reader, Keith Telly Topping is, after all, a highly respected author, journalist, broadcaster and bloggersationisms-type-person, he clearly knows what he's talking about.)
Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
Even moreDoctor Who.
Two Weeks To Live. (It got some dodgy reviews from professional media whingers but, this blogger thought the opening episode was really rather good.)
Peter Sellers on Parkinson.
Orson Welles on Parkinson.
Line Of Duty series four.
True Detective.
The West Wing.
These, meanwhile, form the current Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House reading list.
And with that necessary round-up of the latest malarkey in this blogger's sick, sore and tired existence, dear blog reader, yer actual Keith Telly Topping is now off for a nice, luxurious lie down. Because, he really deserves one, you feel me?
   From The North will, hopefully, return with something a bit more substantial and thought-provoking when this blogger returns to the 'old normal'.

Dame Diana Rigg - who died this week aged eighty two - enjoyed a long and effortlessly distinguished acting career on stage, in films and on TV. The range of her roles was enormous, from serious drama to comedy and high camp and just about every shade of the rainbow in-between. She was the only Bond girl to get 007 to the altar (albeit, briefly), but for those of a certain generation - this blogger very much included - she will always be the remarkable, desirable, incomparable Emma Peel in The Avengers. She also played the title role in The Mrs Bradley Mysteries, Helena Vesey in Mother Love, Miss Hardbroom in The Worst Witch, Tracy Draco in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Edwina Lionheart in Theatre Of Blood, Mrs Gillyflower in Doctor Who and Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones. That's not a bad first few lines to have on a CV which also included appearances in Victoria & Albert, Running Delilah, Diana, The Assassination Bureau, Evil Under The Sun and Detectorists.
Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg was born in Doncaster in July 1938. Whilst she was still a toddler, she travelled to India, where her father, Louis, worked as a railway engineer for the Maharaja of Bikaner. By the time she returned to the UK as an eight year old, she spoke fluent Hindi as a second language. She was then sent to a Yorkshire boarding school, Fulneck Girls School in a Moravian settlement near Pudsey. 'I felt like a fish out of water,' she noted, although she later credited the intensely unhappy experience with helping to form her character. On leaving school in 1955, she trained as an actress at the RADA - where her contemporaries included Glenda Jackson and Siân Phillips. She made her professional debut in a production of Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle as part of the 1957 York Festival.
She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she received much praise for her portrayal of Cordelia in a touring production of King Lear. Her TV debut came in 1959 with a walk-on part in a Peter Hall production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. During the early 1960s she combined regular - acclaimed - theatre work with occasional forays onto the small screen in productions like Theatre Night, A Sentimental Agent, Festival, Armchair Theatre and Play Of The Week.
In 1965, she screen-tested for the part of John Steed's new partner in The Avengers after the departure of Honor Blackman to play Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. In fact, the role had already been cast for another actress, Elizabeth Shepherd. But Brian Clemens, the programme's producer, was not happy with Shepherd's performance. 'She's not a bad actress,' he later recalled. 'But she just didn't have a sense of humour at all - that was essential in The Avengers. So we scrapped what we'd shot and got rid of her and then out of the tests came Diana Rigg, who was head and shoulders above everybody else.' Diana's performance as the cat-suited, hard-as-nail Emma Peel brought her international fame.
Sexy, resourceful, self-assured - with a deadly knowledge of self-defence - and a street-and-a-half cleverer than her male companion, Diana's character became - much to her own reported annoyance - an icon for the growing feminist movement. Her action-girl allure, coupled with her husky voice - the result of a twenty-a-day cigarette habit - also brought her legions of male admirers. 'We had no idea it would be defining,' she said later. 'It was nose to the grindstone - working all hours that God gave.' She also showed she was capable of taking on the establishment. During filming of her first series in 1965, she reportedly discovered that she was earning less salary than the cameramen and insisted on more money before she would make another episode. But Diana also found the sudden fame as a TV star difficult to cope with. She recalled having to hide in a lavatory to avoid the attention of the crowds. It was partly her resentment at the invasion of her privacy which persuaded her that she would spend only two series on The Avengers.
Diana appeared in fifty one episodes of the popular telefantasy drama having, she claimed, auditioned for the role on a whim, without ever having seen the series previously. In an interview with the Gruniad Morning Star in 2019, Diana stated that becoming a sex symbol overnight had 'shocked' her. She also did not like the way that she was treated by the production company, Associated British Corporation. For her second series, in 1967, she held out for a pay rise from one hundred and fifty knicker a week to four hundred and fifty; she noted in 2019 - when gender pay inequality was very much in the news - that 'not one woman in the industry supported me ... I was painted as this mercenary creature by the press when all I wanted was equality. It's so depressing that we are still talking about the gender pay gap.' The late Patrick Macnee once noted that Diana had subsequently told him she considered Macnee and her driver to be her only friends on the set.
The popular perception of the mid-Sixties, of course, is of an Avengers episode being completed and then Patrick and Diana having a quick glass of champagne in their trailer before popping into central London in the Bentley, still in-costume, to enjoy an evening at The Ad-Lib discothèque with Michael Caine, Terence Stamp, Sean Connery, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who. In fact, according to Diana, 'It was great fun to do but everyone thinks it was party, party, party. In fact it was work, work, work. You had to get to the studio at Elstree for 6.30 every morning and you'd be working until eight o'clock every night.' She also described her working conditions as 'the life of a mole.' She was, simultaneously, keen to keep her stage career alive. 'Some weeks I'd spend four days on the set of The Avengers and then head up to Stratford to be [in] Olivier's Lear,' she said.
Like her Avengers predecessor, Rigg moved to 007, starring in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) opposite George Lazenby. Diana became the only James Bond girl to get the secret agent to the altar, although the marriage was abruptly cut short when her character was shot extremely dead soon after the wedding. She said that she took the role with the hope she would become better known in the United States. Her relationship with Lazenby was reportedly difficult, although she strongly denied the rumour that she had deliberately ate garlic before their love scenes.
Her other films from this period include The Assassination Bureau (1969), Julius Caesar (1970), The Hospital (1971), In This House Of Brede (1975) and A Little Night Music (1977). She also starred, brilliantly, as Vincent Price's daughter in the horror classic, Theatre Of Blood, with its strong Shakespearean theme and very Avengers-style humour.
But soon she returned to the stage - nominated for a TONY for her performance in Abelard & Heloise. Between 1973 and 1974, she starred in a short-lived US TV sitcom, Diana. And, in something approaching a career highlight, she appeared in the 1975 Morecambe & Wise Show Christmas episode, playing Nell Gwynne in one of the plays wot Ernie wrote and singing a saucy version of 'Baby, It's Cold Outside' with Eric.
She appeared as the title character in The Marquise (1980), a television adaptation of the play by Noël Coward. She also appeared in a Yorkshire TV production of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1981) and as Lady Holiday in The Great Muppet Caper. The following year she received acclaim for her performance as Arlena Marshall in the movie adaptation of Agatha Christie's Evil Under The Sun, sharing barbs with her character's old rival, played by Maggie Smith. She appeared as Regan, the king's treacherous middle daughter, in a Granada production of King Lear (1983), which starred Laurence Olivier. As Lady Dedlock she co-starred with Denholm Elliott in an award-winning BBC production of Dickens'Bleak House (1985) and played the title character's evil stepmother in the 1987 adaptation of Snow White. In 1989 she played Helena Vesey in the BBC drama Mother Love - her portrayal of an obsessive mother who was prepared to do anything, even murder, to keep control of her son won Diana the 1990 BAFTA for Best Television Actress.
In New York, her portrayal of Heloise had been criticised by the acerbic US critic John Simon who described her in a nude scene as 'built like a brick basilica with insufficient flying buttresses.' She later admitted that she never felt comfortable removing her clothes on stage. 'I come from Yorkshire and no-one from Yorkshire takes their clothes off, except on a Friday night,' she said. The episode led her to publish a collection of scathing theatrical reviews entitled No Turn Unstoned (1982). She received her second TONY nomination in 1975, for The Misanthrope. A member of the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic from 1972 to 1975, Diana took leading roles in productions of two Tom Stoppard plays, Dorothy Moore in Jumpers (National Theatre, 1972) and Ruth Carson in Night & Day (Phoenix Theatre, 1978).
In 1994 she won a TONY at last for one of her most acclaimed roles, that of Medea, underlining her credentials as one of theatre's leading tragediennes. In the same year Diana was created a Dame in the New Year's Honours List for her services to theatre. She appeared as Mrs Danvers in an adaptation of Rebecca (1997), winning an EMMY, as well as in a production Moll Flanders and as the titular amateur detective in The Mrs Bradley Mysteries, playing Gladys Mitchell's detective, Dame Beatrice Adela Le Strange Bradley, an eccentric woman who worked for Scotland Yard as a pathologist. From 1989 until 2003, she hosted the PBS television series Mystery!, shown in the United States by broadcaster WGBH. She also appeared in the second series of Ricky Gervais's alleged comedy Extras - but we won't judge her too harshly for that - and in the 2006 movie The Painted Veil.
She appeared in great nostril-flaring form in a 2013 episode of Doctor Who, the Victorian-era based The Crimson Horror alongside her daughter Rachael Stirling, Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman. The episode had been specially written for her and her daughter by Mark Gatiss who was shocked to discover that Rachael had never previously acted with her mother. It was not the first time mother and daughter had appeared in the same production - they were both in the 2000 TV movie In The Beginning - but it was the first time she had worked directly opposite her daughter and, also, the first time in her career that her roots were accessed to find an authentic West Riding accent.
The same year, Rigg secured a recurring role in the  HBO series Game Of Thrones, portraying Lady Olenna Tyrell, a witty and sarcastic political mastermind, the grandmother of regular character Margaery Tyrell. Her performance was well-received by critics and audiences alike and earned her an EMMY nomination. The character was finally killed off in the seventh series of the popular adult fantasy drama.
Her work in the theatre continued, including performances in The Cherry Orchard, Pygmalion and Tennessee Williams'Suddenly Last Summer. Her final screen appearances will be in a forthcoming mini-series adaptation of Black Narcissus and, next year, in Edgar Wright's psychological thriller Last Night In Soho.
Diana was married twice, first to Israeli artist Menachem Gueffen, from 1973 to 1976 and then to Archie Stirling, the father of her daughter, born in 1977. The couple divorced in 1990 after Stirling's affair with Joely Richardson became public. In the 1960s, Rigg lived for eight years with the director Philip Saville, gaining tutting attention from the more up-their-own-arse tabloids when she disclaimed interest in marrying the older, already-married Saville, saying that she had 'no desire to be respectable.' She was a Patron of International Care & Relief and was, for many years, the public face of the charity's child sponsorship scheme. She was also Chancellor of the University of Stirling.
Michael Parkinson, who first interviewed Diana in 1972, described her as the most desirable woman he ever met, who 'radiated a lustrous beauty.' A smoker from the age of eighteen, Diana was still smoking twenty fags a day as late as 2009. By 2017, she quit after serious illness led to heart surgery, a cardiac ablation. A devout Christian, she commented that: 'My heart had stopped ticking during the procedure, so I was up there and the good Lord must have said, "Send the old bag down again, I'm not having her yet!"' Her first grandchild, Jack, was born to Rachael and her partner, the Elbow frontman Guy Garvey, in the same year.
In a 2015 interview with The AV Club, Diana commented on the chemistry she shared with Patrick Macnee on The Avengers: 'I vaguely knew Patrick Macnee and he looked kindly on me and sort of husbanded me through the first couple of episodes. After that we became equals and loved each other and sparked off each other. And, we'd then improvise. They trusted us. Particularly our scenes when we were finding a another dead body. How do you get 'round that one? They allowed us to do it.' Asked if she had stayed in touch with Macnee (the interview was published a mere two days before Macnee's death): 'You'll always be close to somebody that you worked with very intimately for so long and you become really fond of each other.'
Although it was the role of Emma Peel which brought Diana Rigg to public attention, she was successful in casting off the character and carving out a distinguished career as a classical actress. She never felt the need to return to the cat-suit, steadfastly refusing to sign Avengers photographs that continued to be sent to her. She excelled at playing sharp-witted female characters who carried iron fists in velvet gloves - but distanced herself from those feminists who claimed her as one of their own. 'I come from a generation where, when my dad arrived and parked the car, my mother would rush upstairs and put some lipstick on,' she once explained. 'Which I think is so charming. If a man holds a door open for me or pulls back a chair so that this old bag can sit down, I'm delighted.'