Friday, 18 December 2009
Thursday, 17 December 2009
Gateshead Car Park - all Tesco's fault!
SUPERMARKET giant Tesco has been told the controversial Get Carter car park will not be knocked down until firm assurances are given that a new town centre will be built.
Gateshead Council bosses have revealed they have been forced to delay demolition work on the eyesore as they await a promise from Tesco that all the new developments they asked for in exchange for the go-ahead will be delivered.
The retailer has been told it must meet several conditions before the local authority will allow bulldozers to finally tear it down.
Gateshead Council’s chief executive Roger Kelly has told colleagues he was carrying out their orders to make sure the best possible deal is secured before allowing the car park, which is on land leased to the supermarket, to be knocked down.
The eyesore has had to be left to blight the town centre because the council did not want to risk giving Tesco bosses permission to develop the site as it wishes with no assurances the local authority will get what it wants.
Mr Kelly said he expects to reach a final agreement with the supermarket chain this week.
The council boss was responding to a question from Liberal Democrat councillor Jonathan Wallace, who said there were serious concerns over how long the development was taking.
“Having seen the proposals in 2007, we are now heading into 2010 and it still has not come down,” Mr Wallace said.
“A lot of people would really like to know what the problem is behind this.
“My concern is that next year we will still have this car park blocking development and as a result we could miss out on the economic recovery.”
Tesco is still to submit a planning application for the redevelopment of the Trinity Square shopping centre in Gateshead, which should include the flattening of the multi-storey car park.
The upgrade could include leisure and community facilities, student accommodation, a new Tesco store, shops, cafes and restaurants, a hotel and car parking.
Speaking at a meeting of the full council, Mr Kelly said: “The recession has affected some of their (Tesco) thinking and slowed this down.
“We are in the final stages of negotiations – we think we are in the last week of this and once the agreement is signed we would be in a position to speed it up.
“There are three outstanding issues I would hope that before Christmas will be resolved and we will be in a different position.”
The chief executive said he was authorised by councillors to seek the best possible deal and was acting within his remit.
It is believed Mr Kelly has had to use the car park as a bargaining tool because Tesco has presented “unacceptable” draft proposals.
The existing town centre development was approved by Gateshead Council in 1961.
The £200,000 car park was designed by architect Owen Luder, but by the time it was finished the stark concrete architecture was out of fashion.
In 1971 the structure featured in the film Get Carter, which starred Michael Caine.
Jennifer Duncan, Tesco corporate affairs manager, said: “We are making good progress on the Trinity Square development, and hope to announce further details in the New Year.”
http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/north-east-news/todays-evening-chronicle/2009/12/14/council-blocks-get-carter-car-park-demolition-72703-25386958/
Gateshead Council bosses have revealed they have been forced to delay demolition work on the eyesore as they await a promise from Tesco that all the new developments they asked for in exchange for the go-ahead will be delivered.
The retailer has been told it must meet several conditions before the local authority will allow bulldozers to finally tear it down.
Gateshead Council’s chief executive Roger Kelly has told colleagues he was carrying out their orders to make sure the best possible deal is secured before allowing the car park, which is on land leased to the supermarket, to be knocked down.
The eyesore has had to be left to blight the town centre because the council did not want to risk giving Tesco bosses permission to develop the site as it wishes with no assurances the local authority will get what it wants.
Mr Kelly said he expects to reach a final agreement with the supermarket chain this week.
The council boss was responding to a question from Liberal Democrat councillor Jonathan Wallace, who said there were serious concerns over how long the development was taking.
“Having seen the proposals in 2007, we are now heading into 2010 and it still has not come down,” Mr Wallace said.
“A lot of people would really like to know what the problem is behind this.
“My concern is that next year we will still have this car park blocking development and as a result we could miss out on the economic recovery.”
Tesco is still to submit a planning application for the redevelopment of the Trinity Square shopping centre in Gateshead, which should include the flattening of the multi-storey car park.
The upgrade could include leisure and community facilities, student accommodation, a new Tesco store, shops, cafes and restaurants, a hotel and car parking.
Speaking at a meeting of the full council, Mr Kelly said: “The recession has affected some of their (Tesco) thinking and slowed this down.
“We are in the final stages of negotiations – we think we are in the last week of this and once the agreement is signed we would be in a position to speed it up.
“There are three outstanding issues I would hope that before Christmas will be resolved and we will be in a different position.”
The chief executive said he was authorised by councillors to seek the best possible deal and was acting within his remit.
It is believed Mr Kelly has had to use the car park as a bargaining tool because Tesco has presented “unacceptable” draft proposals.
The existing town centre development was approved by Gateshead Council in 1961.
The £200,000 car park was designed by architect Owen Luder, but by the time it was finished the stark concrete architecture was out of fashion.
In 1971 the structure featured in the film Get Carter, which starred Michael Caine.
Jennifer Duncan, Tesco corporate affairs manager, said: “We are making good progress on the Trinity Square development, and hope to announce further details in the New Year.”
http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/north-east-news/todays-evening-chronicle/2009/12/14/council-blocks-get-carter-car-park-demolition-72703-25386958/
So the fact that the council and Tesco's have been 'partners' for years means nothing nor, clearly, does the fact it's been an eyesore for years nor that there's been talk of getting rid of it for years... Is it Tesco's fault the rest of the place is such a mess? Is it Tesco's fault that tourists visiting the Sage or the Baltic or those staying at the Hilton rarely venture into central Gateshead to spend their money at Wilkinsons or stop for gastropub fayre at The Metropole or get a ringside seat for the impromptu bare knuckle boxing at the Trafalgar?
An alternative and more aesthetically attractive proposal would be to cover it with plants and turn it into a kind of Hanging Gardens of Gateshead...
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Tuesday, 15 December 2009
Monday, 14 December 2009
T.A.M.I. Show - finally on DVD
Celebrate!! The TAMI Show finally comes to DVD!
December 14, 4:09 PM Vintage Rock 'n' Roll Examiner Steve Marinucci
One of the rarest rock events ever captured on film, the 1964 concert known as "The T.A.M.I. Show," is finally being released on DVD March 23.
The concert, filmed at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on Oct. 29, 1964. features performances by the Rolling Stones, James Brown, Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, the Supremes, and many others. The release will feature new commentary by director Steve Binder, original T.A.M.I Show radio spots, and a 20-page booklet with liner notes and rare photos and memorabilia.
The film has long been in demand by collectors and was released on VHS in edited form as "Let It Rock" that combined a second show, "The TNT Show." This release, the full show, includes the Beach Boys segment, which was edited from VHS versions. Special features include an interview with director Steve Binder, original T.A.M.I Show radio spots and a 20-page booklet featuring detailed essay and rare photos and memorabilia.
Here's the lineup on the DVD:
Jan And Dean: (Here They Come) From All Over The World
Chuck Berry: Johnny B. Goode, Maybellene
Gerry And The Pacemakers: Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying, It’s Gonna Be Alright
Chuck Berry: Sweet Little Sixteen
Gerry And The Pacemakers: How Do You Do It?
Chuck Berry: Nadine
Gerry And The Pacemakers: I Like It
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles: That’s What Love Is Made Of, You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me, Mickey’s Monkey
Marvin Gaye: Stubborn Kind Of Fellow, Pride And Joy, Can I Get A Witness, Hitch Hike
Lesley Gore: Maybe I Know, You Don’t Own Me, You Didn’t Look Around, Hey Now, It’s My Party, Judy’s Turn To Cry
Jan & Dean: The Little Old Lady (From Pasadena), Sidewalk Surfin
The Beach Boys: Surfin’ U.S.A., I Get Around, Surfer Girl, Dance, Dance, Dance
Billy J. Kramer And The Dakotas: Little Children, Bad To Me, I’ll Keep You Satisfied, From A Window
The Supremes: When The Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes, Run, Run, Run, Baby Love, Where Did Our Love Go
The Barbarians: Hey Little Bird
James Brown and The Flames: Out Of Sight, Prisoner Of Love, Please, Please, Please, Night Train
The Rolling Stones: Around And Around, Off The Hook, Time Is On My Side, It’s All Over Now, I’m Alright
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-19248-Vintage-Rock-n-Roll-Examiner~y2009m12d14-Celebrate-The-TAMI-Show-finally-comes-to-DVD
Sunday, 13 December 2009
Meteor Shower
Shooting Stars Set To Light Up UK Night Sky
More than 100 shooting stars per hour could streak across the sky tonight in one of the year's most dramatic meteor showers.
The Geminid shower is one of the most anticipated sights on astronomers' calendars and is expected to peak at midnight tonight.
Forecasts show that people in the South and North West should get a cloudless view of the stars and the new Moon, coming two days later, should not interfere with visibility.
Dr Claire Bretherton, from Royal Observatory Greenwich, said: "The Geminid shower moves quite slowly so it will give people a chance to see anywhere between 120 and 160 meteors an hour.
"It's often easier to spot the stars in the early hours of the morning."
The paths of Geminid meteors appear to point back to a spot near the bright stars Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini, giving the shower its name.
Meteors, also called shooting stars, are the result of small particles entering the Earth's atmosphere.
As they speed towards earth they release a trail of light that quickly fades as the meteor disintegrates.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20091213/tuk-shooting-stars-set-to-light-up-uk-ni-45dbed5.html
Starfish Graveyard
'Starfish Graveyard' In Norfolk After Storm
More than 10,000 starfish have died after being washed on to a beach along the Norfolk coast during a storm.
The creatures are thought to have gathered in the shallows to feed on mussels, before being swept ashore during high tide.
Nigel Croasdale, from Hunstanton Sea Life Sanctuary, told The Times the starfish would have only survived for a few hours without water.
"This type of thing may happen once a year, depending on the weather," he said.
"When the tide returns, the bodies are usually washed back into the sea."
A local resident described the scene on the beach as "a starfish graveyard".
Starfish feed by pushing their mouths out of their stomachs and digesting other sea creatures using enzymes.
If they lose one of their five arms they have the ability to grow it back.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20091209/tuk-starfish-graveyard-in-norfolk-after-45dbed5.html
Friday, 11 December 2009
Gene Barry RIP
Gene Barry, Actor of TV, Film and Stage, Dies at 90
By MICHAEL POLLAK
Published: December 11, 2009
Gene Barry, who portrayed debonair lawmen on television but whose career of more than 60 years ranged from song and dance on Broadway to science fiction, died Wednesday in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 90 and lived in Beverly Hills until about a year ago.
His death, at an assisted-living facility, was confirmed by his daughter, Elizabeth.
As the dapper star of “Bat Masterson” from 1958 to 1961, Mr. Barry sported a derby hat, gilt-tipped cane and spangled vest in the days, as the theme song said, “when the West was very young.” (The real Bat, whose full name was William Barclay Masterson, was a gambler, gunslinger and marshal who spent his later years as a New York newspaperman and died in 1921.)
In “Burke’s Law” (1963-66), Mr. Barry played the equally insouciant Los Angeles police captain, Amos Burke, an independently wealthy crime fighter with a mansion, a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and a stream of beautiful women. In its third and final season, Burke changed professions and the show was renamed “Amos Burke, Secret Agent.” A generation later, in the 1994-95 season, Mr. Barry reprised the role, this time as chief of detectives.
Mr. Barry starred as a magazine tycoon in “The Name of the Game” (1968-71), in which he rotated starring roles with Anthony Franciosa and Robert Stack. He also starred as a wealthy movie celebrity and secret government agent in “The Adventurer” in 1972-73.
He won a Tony nomination in 1984 for his performance as Georges, the less flamboyant half of a gay couple, in “La Cage Aux Folles,” the first Broadway musical in which the principal lovers were gay men. Mr. Barry “proves a most sensitive foil — far more sensitive than you’d ever guess from his starring roles on such television series as ‘Bat Masterson’ and ‘The Name of the Game,’ ” Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, adding that Mr. Barry sang his love songs “with tender directness.”
Mr. Barry said at the time, “I’m not playing a homosexual — I’m playing a person who cares deeply about another person.”
In 1999, the 78-year-old Mr. Barry combined musical comedy with show business reminiscences in the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan, in a show that included among other things a Maurice Chevalier impersonation. He had made his nightclub debut in the Latin Quarter in 1962.
Gene Barry was born Eugene Klass on June 14, 1919, in New York to Martin Klass, a jeweler, and Eva Klass. He was attending New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn when he won a singing contest and a scholarship to the Chatham Square School of Music. While studying there, he began singing on the New York radio station WHN.
He soon went from the Catskills to Manhattan bistros to Broadway productions, making his debut in the labor musical “Pins and Needles.” He also performed in a series of operettas at Carnegie Hall and in Broadway productions of “Rosalinda,” “The Merry Widow” and “The Would-Be Gentleman.”
The impresario Mike Todd hired him to play opposite Mae West in “Catherine Was Great” (1944). Mr. Barry met his wife, Betty, who acted under the name Julie Carson, during rehearsals.
He left “Catherine” for the musical “Glad to See You” and then moved on to straight acting roles, winning a Critic’s Circle Award for his leading role in an Equity Library production of “Idiot’s Delight.”
Mr. Barry signed a Hollywood contract in 1951. Two years later he starred in perhaps his most famous movie role, the scientist Dr. Clayton Forrester, in the George Pal production of “War of the Worlds,” based on the H. G. Wells novel. He also had a role in 2005 as Tom Cruise’s ex-father-in-law in the Steven Spielberg remake. His more than 20 movies also included “Soldier of Fortune” (1955), with Clark Gable and Susan Hayward, and “Thunder Road” (1958), with Robert Mitchum.
From the 1950s through the 1980s, Mr. Barry appeared in scores of television specials and series, including “Playhouse 90,” “General Electric Theater,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Love Boat,” “Charlie’s Angels” and “Murder, She Wrote.”
His wife of 58 years died in 2003. Besides his daughter, Elizabeth, of Los Angeles, he is survived by two sons, Michael L. and Frederick J., both of Topanga, Calif., three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
In an interview with Nan Jarrett for an Internet fan site in 2000, Mr. Barry recalled that he was appearing in the final season of the television comedy “Our Miss Brooks” when a producer asked him to play Bat Masterson.
“The idea of playing a saddle-type cowboy was repulsive to me,” he said. “Then he told me about the derby hat and cane, and I went by the costume department and saw the outfit that Masterson would wear, and I couldn’t resist.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/ar...ref=obituaries
By MICHAEL POLLAK
Published: December 11, 2009
Gene Barry, who portrayed debonair lawmen on television but whose career of more than 60 years ranged from song and dance on Broadway to science fiction, died Wednesday in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 90 and lived in Beverly Hills until about a year ago.
His death, at an assisted-living facility, was confirmed by his daughter, Elizabeth.
As the dapper star of “Bat Masterson” from 1958 to 1961, Mr. Barry sported a derby hat, gilt-tipped cane and spangled vest in the days, as the theme song said, “when the West was very young.” (The real Bat, whose full name was William Barclay Masterson, was a gambler, gunslinger and marshal who spent his later years as a New York newspaperman and died in 1921.)
In “Burke’s Law” (1963-66), Mr. Barry played the equally insouciant Los Angeles police captain, Amos Burke, an independently wealthy crime fighter with a mansion, a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and a stream of beautiful women. In its third and final season, Burke changed professions and the show was renamed “Amos Burke, Secret Agent.” A generation later, in the 1994-95 season, Mr. Barry reprised the role, this time as chief of detectives.
Mr. Barry starred as a magazine tycoon in “The Name of the Game” (1968-71), in which he rotated starring roles with Anthony Franciosa and Robert Stack. He also starred as a wealthy movie celebrity and secret government agent in “The Adventurer” in 1972-73.
He won a Tony nomination in 1984 for his performance as Georges, the less flamboyant half of a gay couple, in “La Cage Aux Folles,” the first Broadway musical in which the principal lovers were gay men. Mr. Barry “proves a most sensitive foil — far more sensitive than you’d ever guess from his starring roles on such television series as ‘Bat Masterson’ and ‘The Name of the Game,’ ” Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, adding that Mr. Barry sang his love songs “with tender directness.”
Mr. Barry said at the time, “I’m not playing a homosexual — I’m playing a person who cares deeply about another person.”
In 1999, the 78-year-old Mr. Barry combined musical comedy with show business reminiscences in the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan, in a show that included among other things a Maurice Chevalier impersonation. He had made his nightclub debut in the Latin Quarter in 1962.
Gene Barry was born Eugene Klass on June 14, 1919, in New York to Martin Klass, a jeweler, and Eva Klass. He was attending New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn when he won a singing contest and a scholarship to the Chatham Square School of Music. While studying there, he began singing on the New York radio station WHN.
He soon went from the Catskills to Manhattan bistros to Broadway productions, making his debut in the labor musical “Pins and Needles.” He also performed in a series of operettas at Carnegie Hall and in Broadway productions of “Rosalinda,” “The Merry Widow” and “The Would-Be Gentleman.”
The impresario Mike Todd hired him to play opposite Mae West in “Catherine Was Great” (1944). Mr. Barry met his wife, Betty, who acted under the name Julie Carson, during rehearsals.
He left “Catherine” for the musical “Glad to See You” and then moved on to straight acting roles, winning a Critic’s Circle Award for his leading role in an Equity Library production of “Idiot’s Delight.”
Mr. Barry signed a Hollywood contract in 1951. Two years later he starred in perhaps his most famous movie role, the scientist Dr. Clayton Forrester, in the George Pal production of “War of the Worlds,” based on the H. G. Wells novel. He also had a role in 2005 as Tom Cruise’s ex-father-in-law in the Steven Spielberg remake. His more than 20 movies also included “Soldier of Fortune” (1955), with Clark Gable and Susan Hayward, and “Thunder Road” (1958), with Robert Mitchum.
From the 1950s through the 1980s, Mr. Barry appeared in scores of television specials and series, including “Playhouse 90,” “General Electric Theater,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Love Boat,” “Charlie’s Angels” and “Murder, She Wrote.”
His wife of 58 years died in 2003. Besides his daughter, Elizabeth, of Los Angeles, he is survived by two sons, Michael L. and Frederick J., both of Topanga, Calif., three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
In an interview with Nan Jarrett for an Internet fan site in 2000, Mr. Barry recalled that he was appearing in the final season of the television comedy “Our Miss Brooks” when a producer asked him to play Bat Masterson.
“The idea of playing a saddle-type cowboy was repulsive to me,” he said. “Then he told me about the derby hat and cane, and I went by the costume department and saw the outfit that Masterson would wear, and I couldn’t resist.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/ar...ref=obituaries
Thursday, 10 December 2009
New Paul Muldoon interview
"I’m sure there are poems that have all sorts of roles in the world, and it’s conceivable that a poem might have a moral force and be very successful. In general though I shy away from poems that have designs on one. In some sense all poems have designs [on the reader], but I mean poems that have designs as pamphlets or items of propaganda. I’m always very wary of poems that most immediately aspire to some kind of political position. Which is not to say I haven’t written any myself."
Part 1: http://www.literateur.com/2009/11/paul-muldoon-interview-part-1/
Part 2: http://www.literateur.com/2009/11/paul-muldoon-interview-part-2/
Photo by Matt Valentine http://www.mattvalentine.com/
Wednesday, 9 December 2009
Tuesday, 8 December 2009
Monday, 7 December 2009
Larkin25
Larkin25
Celebrating the life and work of Philip Larkin.
Check out the official website of Larkin25, the campaign to celebrate the life and work of Philip Larkin, and commemorate the 25th anniversary of his death.
Recently chosen as ‘the nation's best-loved poet’ in a survey by the Poetry Book Society, and named by The Times as the greatest British post-war writer, Larkin is a cultural icon for his home city of Hull, and for the world.
Larkin25 has been initiated by The Philip Larkin Society, in partnership with the University ofHull, Hull City Council and Visit Hull and East Yorkshire.
Take a look around to find out more about Philip Larkin and the Larkin25 events happening near you during 2010.
http://www.larkin25.com/
Setlist at the Earl Grey, Gosforth
Things We Said Today
I Shall Be Released
Mind Your Own Business
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Falling
A hostile crowd greeted the casual visitor to the Earl Grey last night. Paul attended but lasted no more than 20mins before legging it in a state of panic. Shortly afterwards the landlady cleared out the drunks and things settled down nicely. Got the punters to sing along with ISBR and MYOB (which was well received).
I Shall Be Released
Mind Your Own Business
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Falling
A hostile crowd greeted the casual visitor to the Earl Grey last night. Paul attended but lasted no more than 20mins before legging it in a state of panic. Shortly afterwards the landlady cleared out the drunks and things settled down nicely. Got the punters to sing along with ISBR and MYOB (which was well received).
Sunday, 6 December 2009
Richard Todd RIP
Richard Todd, the actor, who died on December 3 aged 90, was one of the first British officers to land in Normandy in advance of the main D-Day landings and went on to become Britain's highest-earning matinee idol of the post-war years; his most memorable role was that of Wing Commander Guy Gibson, VC, in The Dam Busters (1955), a film he carried with the help of Michael Redgrave as Barnes Wallis.
Handsome, blue-eyed and with an erect military bearing, Todd enjoyed the unusual distinction of appearing in films about D-Day in which the role of his wartime self was played by other actors.
As an officer in the 7th (Light Infantry) Parachute Battalion, he had not only been one of the first to land in Normandy, he had also been among the first to meet the glider force, under the command of Major John Howard, defending Pegasus Bridge, a scene memorably recreated in two epic films in which Todd later starred. In D-Day, the Sixth of June (1956), he played the commanding officer of his unit who vies for the affections of Dana Wynter with his Yank rival Robert Taylor.
In The Longest Day (1962), which was based on the book of the same name by the Telegraph special war correspondent Cornelius Ryan, Todd took the role of Howard, performing one scene opposite the actor playing himself (a role he turned down because "I did not do anything special that would make a good sequence").
"I was, in effect, standing beside myself talking to myself," he noted. At a cost of $8 million, The Longest Day was the most expensive black and white film made until Schindler's List.
Immediately after the war Todd gained fame on the London stage for his portrayal of "Lachie" MacLachlan, the wounded soldier protagonist of John Patrick's The Hasty Heart, and won praise when he replaced Richard Basehart in the role on Broadway.
He returned to England to appear in the Warner Brothers film adaptation of the play (co-starring Ronald Reagan, who became a personal friend); was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in 1949; and won a Golden Globe the following year. In America, he also won critical acclaim for his touching portrayal of US Senate chaplain Peter Marshall in Henry Koster's A Man Called Peter (1955).
Richard Andrew Palethorpe-Todd was born in Dublin on June 11 1919 into an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family. His father was a British Army physician who had gained three caps for Ireland at rugby before the First World War; his mother was a noted beauty and horsewoman. The family moved to Devon when Richard was very young, although due to his father's Army commitments a few of his childhood years were spent in India.
Richard's mother wanted him to make a career in the Diplomatic Service, but he set his sights on becoming a playwright. After Shrewsbury School he enrolled at the Italia Conti Academy to "learn something about the theatre".
There, instead of becoming a writer, he caught the acting bug. His chosen career path, he recalled in later life, led to a rift with his mother so deep that when he learned, aged 19, that she had committed suicide, he did not waste time grieving, having lost all affection for her.
In his autobiography, Caught in the Act (1986), Todd recalled that, while training as an actor, he appeared in the crowd scenes for two Will Hay movies and as an extra in A Yank at Oxford (1938). But the main focus of his ambition was the stage. After leaving drama school he performed in regional rep and in 1939 joined the newly-founded Dundee Repertory Theatre.
The Second World War temporarily prevented Todd from advancing his career. He volunteered the day after war was declared and was commissioned in the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry in 1941. In 1943 he applied to become a parachutist, and in May of that year was posted to the 7th Parachute Battalion – part of the 6th Airborne Division. For the Normandy landings, he was appointed assistant adjutant.
In a later article about his D-Day experiences Todd compared the pre-briefing for the landings to "the readthrough and cast list for a new production at the Dundee Rep", and likened himself to an actor who had just been "told the minor role I was to play" after having been "subjected to a four-year rehearsal for the big first night". Yet throughout those years he had kept his profession secret, terrified that he might be put in charge of the Entertainments National Service Association: "Not even my closest friends knew I was an actor."
After the war Todd rejoined Dundee Rep before making his West End debut in The Hasty Heart. In 1948 he was invited to London for a screen test and won a film contract with Associated British Pictures.
After making his screen debut in For Them That Trespass (1948) and triumphing in The Hasty Heart, Todd travelled to Hollywood to appear as a bridegroom with a murky past in King Vidor's Lightning Strikes Twice (1950), then starred as Marlene Dietrich's former lover – and a murder suspect – in Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950).
There followed an orgy of swashbuckling heroics in Disney's The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men (1952), The Sword and the Rose (1953) and Rob Roy, The Highland Rogue (1954), all of which served only to prove that Todd was no Errol Flynn.
His role as Peter Marshall in A Man Called Peter persuaded Henry Koster to cast Todd in his Virgin Queen (1955) as a roguish Sir Walter Raleigh, whose dalliance with lady-in-waiting Joan Collins angers Elizabeth I (Bette Davis). Koster then cast him in D-Day, the Sixth of June the following year.
The Dam Busters (1954) marked the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with the director Michael Anderson. Todd went on to appear in Anderson's Yangtse Incident (1956) as the commander of a crippled frigate breaking a Chinese blockade, and in the Hitchcock-style Chase a Crooked Shadow (1958) he played the mysterious stranger claiming to be the late brother of the heiress Kimberley Prescott (Anne Baxter). He returned as a wing commander (this time named Kendall) for their last film together, Operation Crossbow (1965).
Todd worked with a variety of other directors. He was the leader of the escape committee in Don Chaffey's PoW camp movie The Danger Within (1959), and in Leslie Norman's The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961) he played the leader of an Army patrol sent out into the Malaysian jungle. The same year he produced as well as starred in the bedroom farce Why Bother to Knock?
Todd was Ian Fleming's first choice to play James Bond in Dr No (1962), but a scheduling clash gave the role to Sean Connery. Instead he played Inspector Harry Sanders in Lawrence Huntington's Death Drums Along The River (1963), a role he reprised in Coast of Skeletons the following year. In a rather more unlikely casting, he played a counter-culture hippie guru professor in The Love-Ins (1967).
By the late 1960s Todd's star had waned, and his later film parts were mostly forgettable, with the possible exception of Michael Winner's remake of The Big Sleep (1978), in which he played the police commissioner opposite Robert Mitchum's Philip Marlowe.
From the mid-1960s Todd resumed his stage career, appearing in the West End as Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband (Strand, 1965) and as Nicholas Randolph in Dodie Smith's Dear Octopus (Haymarket, 1967).
In 1970 he founded Triumph Theatre Productions, with which he toured extensively abroad in many plays. In 1974 he toured America in two RSC "entertainments", The Hollow Crown and Pleasure and Repentance. In the 1980s he played the lead for eight unbroken years in Richard Harris's Business of Murder at the Mayfair Theatre.
Todd had made his television debut in 1953, as Heathcliff in a BBC adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Nigel Kneale, who scripted the adaptation, recalled that the production came about because the actor had turned up at the BBC and announced that he would like to play the role. Such was Todd's celebrity at the time that Kneale was told to get the script prepared in a week as the broadcast was rushed into production.
Later, Todd appeared in such series as Virtual Murder; Silent Witness; Holby City; Murder, She Wrote; and in the Doctor Who story Kinda in 1982. He was General Benjamin Cutler in the television miniseries Jenny's War (1985), and played Lord Roberts of Kandahar in the miniseries Sherlock Holmes and the Incident at Victoria Falls (1992, featuring Christopher Lee as Sherlock Holmes and Patrick Macnee as Dr Watson).
After retirement Todd worked as a volunteer for Age Concern, supported the Royal British Legion and was a popular speaker at charity functions and military commemorations, raising huge sums for charity. His interests included the countryside; for many years he lived near Chipping Camden in Gloucestershire. Later moving to Little Ponton in Lincolnshire, he was appointed OBE in 1993.
Todd was twice married, first to the actress Catherine Grant-Bogle, with whom he had a son and a daughter, and secondly to Virginia Mailer, a model with whom he had two sons. Both marriages were dissolved.
In 1997 Todd returned to public attention under tragic circumstances when Seamus, his 20-year-old son by his second marriage, killed himself with a shotgun. In a series of articles written for The Sunday Times the actor ascribed the death to the "predicament that so many young people find themselves in nowadays, forced to live miserably, unhealthily, and in debt in order to achieve a university degree that is no longer even a fairly sure guarantee of employment at any level."
The tragedy of losing one son was compounded in 2005, when Peter, his eldest son by his first marriage, also shot himself dead following the break-up of his marriage.
In a subsequent interview, Todd likened the process of coming to terms with these tragedies to the experience of war: "You don't consciously set out to do something gallant. You just do it because that is what you are there for. It is your country. And you just get on with it." He returned to the battlefield itself on several occasions.
Richard Todd's two remaining children survive him.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/film-obituaries/6743553/Richard-Todd.html
Thursday, 3 December 2009
The Collected Robert Lowell
Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.
As Reviewed By:
Anthony Moore
Elizabeth Bishop's grateful publicity blurb for Life Studies (1959) vividly measures the space Robert Lowell filled at that time. "Somehow or other, by fair means or foul, and in the middle of our worst century so far, we have produced a magnificent poet." Irvin Ehrenpreis compounded the hyperbole in 1965 when "The Age of Lowell" (the title of his widely reprinted essay surveying Lowell’s early and middle work) was adopted as a catchphrase to welcome the developments being made in American poetry in the 1960s, with Lowell leading the advance. Since intelligent and sympathetic readers gave currency to Ehrenpreis’s vague term, it suggests Lowell sensed, or constructed, correctly his own auspiciousness: he was the right man at the time, of his time, and American poetry needed him then as proof of its value and continuing power to reinvent itself. In the 1970s his admirers continued to hold him up as a national justification. The judges awarded his second Pulitzer in 1973 for The Dolphin in no doubt that “by common consent of both reader and critic, [he is] the most considerable poet since T. S. Eliot.” A few months before his death in September 1977, Boston University gave him an honorary PhD with an encomium that began, “Long called first among our poets, you continue to deserve that appellation and to survive it.”
Once a literary giant, Lowell has long seemed smaller than he did over a quarter century ago when he was an influential living presence and a celebrity. But does American poetry still need him? Of course it does. Once we stop fretting over who is the most important American poet since World War II, and put aside the superlatives and the absolutes, we can see that he remains considerable. His lines weigh a lot. He reminds us, as few living writers do, of the serious rewards and challenges of poetry. He is a voice in which the country truly speaks; America, it has been said, is his work’s longest love. He evokes with unflagging invention and energy the contradictory complexity of our times. The nine hundred pages of poetry in his Collected Poems throb with imaginative resource. Open them at random and the pulse quickens. In comparison, nearly all the verse being printed today by our small presses and literary magazines seems in need of life support.
The unrhymed sonnet “For John Berryman I,” an even-handed tribute to his own and Berryman's poetic powers, begins:
I feel I know what you have worked through, you
know what I have worked through—we are words;
John, we used the language as if we made it.
Luck threw up the coin, and the plot swallowed,
monster yawning for its mess of potage.
Lowell worked through four printed versions of these lines. He settled on the affirmative and triumphant “we are words” in History (1973) once he’d removed the implications of only or merely words—just trivial things—in “these are words” that appeared in the three editions of Notebook (1969, 1970). For the space of a third of a line, the poet finds the assurance to lose his self in the satisfaction of words, and then swells up to the proud full-line boast “John, we used the language as if we made it.” But there is a price to pay. The words turn back to the process of writing and rewriting, for the “monster yawning” is insatiable. What the authors have not yet put into poetry is much vaster than what they have. Their language is always lagging behind the contingent, unruly experience they try to plot into orderly artful narrative. “For John Berryman. (After reading his last Dream Song)” in his last volume Day by Day (1977) again addresses his friend and rival as zealous practitioner and fellow sufferer, in a ruefully tender, witty elegy. The serio-comic free verse, in this extract from the first paragraph, also celebrates their mixed blessings: the joys of being a poet and the heavy burdens of dedication to a writing life.
I used to want to live
to avoid your elegy.
Yet really we had the same life,
the generic one
our generation offered
(Les Maudits—the compliment
each American generation
pays itself in passing):
first students, then with our own,
our galaxy of grands maîtres,
our fifties’ fellowships
to Paris, Rome and Florence,
veterans of the Cold War not the War—
all the best of life . . .
Inventive French poets and sophisticated European cultural capitals are played off against philistine American attitudes that victimize homegrown poets. Might the parentheses serve to contain the bitter resentment of these cursed poets? Or stand in for bandages on the wound of artistic neglect? Or suggest indifference as their particular American generation turns away? The two psychically connected artistic veterans may be fated to endure the worst of life, to break down or die unappreciated with ambitions frustrated. But they persist. After five more leisurely lines of reminiscence, the paragraph ends with the ringing assonance and heavy stresses of “We asked to be obsessed with writing, / and we were.” What is said in the tributes to Berryman is clearly self-regarding and the two poems give a sharp sense of Lowell’s attitude to his own practice.
II.
The long-awaited Collected Poems, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, collects much of, but not all, the poetry Lowell saw fit to print, and some poems and drafts that he did not. It is an overdue, capacious, imposing celebration of a writer who was irresistibly passionate about poetry. All but four of the individual volumes are presented chronologically and intact. Those not so treated are Land of Unlikeness (1944), his self-published first collection, provided as an appendix, and Notebook 1967-68 (1969), Notebook 1967-68, revised (1969), Notebook (1970), which are omitted, apart from one short sequence from each of the latter two in another appendix. Although the editors are otherwise admirably tender to the work, their decision to set aside the Notebooks risks a charge of insensitivity to Lowell’s creative principles. The choice is not explained by the exigencies of space, since they find room for extensive apparatus most of which might be thought expendable. Notebook, as Bidart writes, “is less ‘well-written’ perhaps—but, in its free-wheeling catch-as-catch-can improvisations, compelling in an entirely different way from History.” Quite so; the Notebooks and History are not alternatives. Lowell, as Bidart reveals, “in the end didn’t think of either book as replacing the other.” Some of us see History straining too strenuously after flashy grandeur, puffed up and laden with debt to the Pound dogma that “an epic is a poem including history.” “Attila, Hitler,” for example, desperately compels us to be interested in two barbarian mass-murderers. Its loose prose effects seem stuck onto, rather than to arise from, its weighty matter. Here is the first half.
Hitler had fingertips of apprehension,
“Who knows how long I’ll live? Let us have war.
We are the barbarians, the world is near the end.”
Attila mounted on raw meat and greens
galloped to massacre in his single fieldmouse suit,
he never left a house that wasn’t burning,
could only sleep on horseback, sinking deep
in his rural dream.
Is this a joke, or is it serious? Either way it is not even average Lowell. Happily much of History is better. Those of my stripe prefer the Notebooks for just the illusion of relaxed improvisation that Bidart characterizes so well and we regret that one was not included.
Bidart, Lowell said, knew his poems better than he did and loved them more. He was Lowell’s close collaborator through the four years (1969-1973) when in six successive books Lowell published, then revised and reprinted hundreds of sonnets, many rewritten time and again to give them an impromptu character. Alastair Fowler calls these Lowell fourteen-liners open-form epigrams. True, many are so condensed they resist any one meaning and live for their closing oxymorons (poems have been written for less worthy reasons). Nobody knows better than Bidart that parts of this astonishing output have a contested reputation. Many outsiders found little value in what they saw as ill-advised manic activity. By neglecting to find room for at least one Notebook the editors decline to give readers an extended, instructive opportunity to follow the evolution of Lowell’s thinking. He worked the sonnets over and over not as an aberration, but as a deliberate artistic choice. Revision powered his entire imaginative process and was central at all stages of composition. Even at his death, he was revising Day by Day, published only weeks before.
All poets revise—and differ from each other in the degree to which they do. There is a massive material presence of revision in Lowell’s work that becomes conspicuous in poetry he prints for the general reader. This changes his difference in degree into a difference in kind. Stanley Kunitz talks somewhere of Lowell’s nervous vivacity: he does not aspire to the condition of an absolute, static art and is forever rewriting his old poems. We get a glimpse of this from the magazine versions of a few familiar poems (such as “Beyond the Alps” and “Waking Early Sunday Morning”) in Collected Poems, when he uses printed copy as rough copy and changes it extensively. He can radically transform his intent and apply fragments and lines written on one topic to something else.
“Beyond the Alps” is a striking instance of the hard labor he puts in to get a conception right. In this case his tenacity lasted through more than twenty years. The visible twists and turns of the poem’s creative development, and the offspring of its evolution, are complex. But the main features of the story are clear when we concentrate on fourteen lines that were first printed in Kenyon Review 15 (Summer 1953) as one of the seven formally similar, end-stopped rhyming sonnet stanzas of that magazine’s “Beyond the Alps . . .”
I thought of Ovid, for in Caesar's eyes,
That Tomcat had the number of the Beast.
Where the young Turks are facing the red east
And the twice-stormed Crimean spit, he cries:
"Rome asked for poets. At her beck and call,
Came Lucan, Tacitus and Juvenal,
The black republicans who tore the teats
And bowels of the mother wolf to bits.
Beneath a psychopath's divining rod,
Deserts interred the Caesar-salvaged bog.
Imperial Tiber, O my yellow dog,
Black earth by the Roman Sea, I lie
With the boy-crazy daughter of the God,
Il duce Augusto. I shall never die."
Lowell wrote this “Beyond the Alps . . .” (three others were printed) in three different locations (Rome, Paris, Iowa) over more than two years and found that stanza especially difficult, drafting and redrafting it many times. But he was hesitant about its value. By 1957 he was circulating privately the sonnet revised as the separate “Saint Ovid” with a shorter version of “Beyond the Alps” and considering both for Life Studies. “Saint Ovid” did not make the cut when “Beyond the Alps” appeared in 1959 as the book’s opening poem, with three fourteen-line stanzas followed by a twelve-line stanza and a closing couplet. Eight revised lines from the forty-two omitted were rewritten into “For George Santayana.” Lowell left behind the seven stanza variant of “Beyond the Alps,” yet reversed his decision on the Ovid stanza when berated by a mock-heroic onslaught as Berryman thanked him for his presentation copy of Life Studies, “and, holy God, how could you cut the Ovid stanza out of the first poem???????” The 1964 preface to For the Union Dead made amends: “‘Beyond the Alps’ is the poem I published in Life Studies, but with a stanza restored at the suggestion of John Berryman,” who drew public attention two years earlier to the omission as he discussed “Skunk Hour” in New World Writing 21.
Who cares to hand grades to a writer who could first make the Ovid stanza in "Beyond the Alps" [...] and then delete it? The reader may not have come on this, so I put it in evidence. [he then gives the entire 1953 stanza quoted above] Lowell once told the present writer that the stanza took him a hundred hours; it is worth every second of the time, and may be read, despite its author, for as long as things not formular are read.
The “not formular” anticipates Lowell's subsequent revisions. His 1964 professional generosity did not overcome a desire to do more work with the material, and finally he dissented from Berryman. He reverted to the Life Studies version of “Beyond the Alps” in both Selected Poems (Collected Poems has that as its copy text). Lowell, before then, makes something new out of his Ovid lines through the reworked “Ovid and Caesar's Daughter” in History (also in Collected Poems).
"I was a modern, and in Caesar’s eye,
a tomcat with the number of the Beast--
now buried where Turkey faces the red east,
or wherever Tomi my place of exile was.
Rome asked for art in earnest; at her call
came Lucan, Tacitus and Juvenal,
the black republicans who tore the tits
and bowels of the Mother Wolf to bits. . . .
Thieves pick gold
from the fine print and volume of the Colossus.
Because I loved and wrote too profligately,
Imperial Tiber, O my yellow Wolf,
black earth by the Black Roman Sea, I lie
libelled with the boy-crazy daughter of
Caesar Augustus who will never die."
The poem courts disruption in pursuit of free and spontaneous diction. Expectations of a regular rhyme pattern are disabused by awkward line endings, stuttering their lack of containment in a desire to sound like conversation. The brazen vitality of the original set of lines has been beaten down to make a sort of sonnet that boasts it is not poetry-as-such. The broken off, metrically clumsy fifteenth line is conspicuously chasing loosely formal effects “not formular.” We could write this off as Lowell sacrificing his art to his revisionary nature at its meddling extreme. But when we look more intently at his preference for the slacker version we might guess why his attachment to the first conventional Ovid sonnet was cooling even in the mid 1950s. Its hectoring rhetoric and relentless drive to assert end rhymes have little purpose except to serve a textbook poem. It’s bent on overpowering and exemplifies his clamorous, hyper-literate, Euro-centric, verbally aggressive, self-enclosed first three books. As everyone knows, he came off his stilts with Life Studies and did not intend to get back on them.
III.
This and similar treasure hunts for the mysteries of Lowell’s creative imagination are enabled and enlivened by the robust respect for primary material in Collected Poems. Ten individual volumes appear as Lowell printed them, complete with the line drawings that he invariably commissioned as frontispieces from Frank Parker (a friend since boyhood). Three last poems follow which, had he lived on, he would have included in his next book. As well as Land of Unlikeness, the magazine versions and Notebook sequences I’ve mentioned, there are also appendices for some published variants, renditions of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandalstam brought in from Poets on Street Corners (1968) edited by Olga Carlisle, uncollected poems and poems left in manuscript. The spaciousness and refined typography of these main sections are shining examples of how poetry should forever to be printed by obliging publishers. Jonathan D. Lippincott designed the book inside and out (although he’s only credited with the jacket) and he courteously serves our reading pleasure.
One critical commonplace claims Lowell frequently changes direction. The flow of this development (every inch of it hard won, of course) can be measured in half an hour spent with Collected Poems, dipping into a poem or two from the start of the career then moving onto the end. There is the muscle-bound torsion of Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) that won him his first Pulitzer. “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” is a powerful and impetuous poem spoiling for a fight with his country for pursuing enemies in World War II to unconditional surrender. It goes to the mat in direct reference or allusion to other literatures (the Bible, Milton, Thoreau, Melville), bursting to win with an American form of expression firmly grounded in European civilization. A multi-cultural, old-with-new world sensibility comes through in irregularly rhymed lines thick with hard consonants, wrenching run-ons, startling coinages. A striking opening passage drags up the drowned sailor clutching the dragnet.
Light
Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,
He grappled at the net
With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs:
The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,
Its open, staring eyes
Were lustreless dead-lights
Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk
Heavy with sand.
Sound has preference over statement here in verbal pyrotechnics. The risky semantic units invite the frivolous to enter the serious as they raise, and then suspend, the possibility of double meanings (Light/ Flashed, not flash lighted; the bloodless corpse has coiled, hurdling muscles, but is not blood curdling; staring eyes were dead-lights, not headlights). Such anti-puns are not conventional humorous word play, but they do owe something to punning as, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, they yoke by violence disparate meanings together. Is the poem too remorselessly old-fashioned for comfort today? A poet I know, whose work and critical opinions I prize, relishes it and often includes it in public readings. On the one hand, Randall Jarrell sparkles with accuracy in his waggish conclusion that the poem comes “from a man contracting every muscle, grinding his teeth together till his shut eyes ache.”
Leaf forward through the collection and thirty years’ work to Day by Day. “Our Afterlife I” is a lithe forty-four line poem, limber to the point of sounding double-jointed, with no ambition to tie the language into eccentric knots. There are no ground teeth, although the poem’s movement is tightly controlled. It saves its breath for the natural cadences of speech and concludes:
After fifty,
the clock can't stop,
each saving breath
takes something. This is riches:
the eminence not to be envied,
the account
accumulating layer and angle,
face and profile,
50 years of snapshots,
the ladder of ripening likeness.
We are things thrown in the air
alive in flight . . .
Our rust the color of chameleon.
What does it mean? I’m not entirely sure. I accept it as a charming tribute to the uncertainty, mobility and mutability in two temperaments, and the flux of contrasting and irreconcilable states in their creative natures. The poem, like “The Quaker Graveyard,” absorbs a treasury of the old world’s literature but, unlike the earlier text, takes its high culture quietly. It is there only if we want to find it. I’d hesitate to say that Lowell intends me to hear flyte in flight, but it helps that I do. Flyting is an obsolete term for the battle of verbal skills between two wrangling contestants. The chameleon, formerly supposed to live on air, has long been a pet symbol of imaginative writers and their restless creative spirit. The comparison is used by Hamlet for himself, Pope for a compliment to Swift, the English Romantics for the highly responsive, impressionable, volatile nature and unpredictable changes of mood that they welcomed as healthy signs of genius. Keats asserts “What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er, delights the chameleon Poet” and Shelley makes a similar remark with more emphasis “Poets, the best of them, are a very chameleonic race.”
“The Quaker Graveyard” and “Our Afterlife I” illustrate the two bookends of Lowell’s stylistic development. The differences are clear enough, but both are true to his resourceful creativity as he restlessly explores the strenuous and the quietly subtle limits of versification and metered language—at no time did he commit completely to free verse or abandon rhyme. Of greater interest are the persistent patterns, the significant unity of the central concerns that remain undisturbed by each new turn. The Collected’s sequential run of the original volumes helps sharpen the focus on what has always been the case: deep continuities in subject matter and poetic manner are the rule not the exception in his career.
IV.
There comes a point in praising when enthusiasm can overcook and become indigestible. I shall draw to my close with the one serious reservation I have about Collected Poems. The book refuses to leave us alone to fumble through the thrills and discoveries of our own readings. No limits appear to have been set on the nature and size of the elaborate editorial apparatus. There are two hundred densely packed pages of it and most is bent on interposing between the poetry and its readers. The decision to provide 150 pages of small-print notes is distinctly odd; it raises difficult matters of editorial principle that are neither clarified nor justified. All we’re given is the styptic, “From the beginning [Helen] Vendler insisted that this edition must have notes.” Hang on a second. Insisted? Must? Why? When readers have survived for fifty years without notes in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens? As they have managed without notes in the collections of almost any twentieth-century poet you care to name? Interpretation is the job of critics, not editors.
I don’t want to belittle the prodigious effort that went into compiling the notes, which, I suspect, took up several years. But not only am I puzzled by why they’re needed at all, I’m also unclear about the readers the editors had in mind for them. Who will spend $45 on the book and not know how to use the general dictionaries and encyclopedias the notes raid so freely for verbatim entries? William Empson cautioned against sniffy objections like mine: “It does not require much fortitude to endure seeing what you already know in a note.” But isn’t the case altered decisively when editors favor so much arbitrary annotation after deciding that they cannot make room for poetry their author wanted to keep in print?
Bidart and Gewanter have said, “the Notes do not offer interpretation of the poems,” but some of the briefest and all of the longest are not primarily there to supply information. The notes are awash with interpretation and comment from many critical studies, two full-length critical biographies, Bidart and other Lowell friends and collaborators. I object to any editors who annotate so intrusively and aggressively that they try to take charge of my reading and thereby force on me the author that they have created while I’m trying to find him for myself.
Lowell often took the opportunity to revise a book when moving from hard to paper covers. If the editors could bring themselves to loosen their proprietary control over how the poems are read they might follow his example with a paperback that gives us the poetry, the whole poetry and nothing but the poetry.
The Contemporary Poetry Review, January 2004
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
Sunday, 29 November 2009
Saturday, 28 November 2009
The Empty Seats
Reflective internal tears were shed by PJ last night as he screened 1960's The Children of the Damned to a row of empty seats. But like a trouper he pushed on and ignored the apathy, except for the whispered words: 'Why did they desert me?'
Friday, 27 November 2009
Interviews with...
Andy Ackerman, Berle Adams, Edie Adams, Robert Adler, Alan Alda, Kay Alden, Steve Allen, Charlie Andrews, Army Archerd, James Arness, Beatrice Arthur, Edward Asner, Larry Auerbach, Rick Baker, Bob Banner, Joseph Barbera, Paris Barclay, Bob Barker, Cliff Barrows, William Bell, Ted Bergmann, Milton Berle, Rick Berman, Walter Bernstein, Lewis Bernstein, Barbara Billingsley, Wade Bingham, William Blinn, Lucille Bliss, Steven Bochco, Paul Bogart, Haskell Boggs, Mili Lerner Bonsignori, Ernest Borgnine, Tom Bosley, Peter Boyle, Ed Bradley, Bernie Brillstein, David Brinkley, James L. Brooks, Kirk Browning, Frances Buss Buch, Allan Burns, Ken Burns, James Burrows, LeVar Burton, Robert Butler, Sid Caesar, Dann Cahn, Stephen J. Cannell, George Carlin, Diahann Carroll, Leo Chaloukian, Marge Champion, Cyd Charisse, Glen Charles, Les Charles, Julia Child, Roy Christopher, Dick Clark, Kevin Clash, Tim Conway, Joan Ganz Cooney, Hal Cooper, Barbara Corday, Fred De Cordova, Bob Costas, Alexander Courage, Richard Crenna, Walter Cronkite, Robert Culp, Bill Daily, Bill Dana, Michael Dann, Bob Carroll Jr., Ossie Davis, Ann B. Davis, Madelyn Pugh Davis, Ruby Dee, Sam Denoff, Phyllis Diller, Walter Dishell, Roy E. Disney, Elinor Donahue, Phil Donahue, Sam Donaldson, Richard Donner, David Dortort, Mike Douglas, Hugh Downs, Charles Dubin, Betty Cole Dukert, Dick Van Dyke, Roger Ebert, Barbara Eden, Michael Eisner, Ruth Engelhardt, Nanette Fabray, Jerry Falwell, Elma Farnsworth, Barbara Feldon, Norman Felton, Mike Fenton, Dorothy Fontana, Tom Fontana, June Foray, John Forsythe, Michael J. Fox, Charles Fox, Fred Foy, John Frankenheimer, Dennis Franz, Albert Freedman, Chuck Fries, James Garner, Betty Garrett, Tony Geiss, Larry Gelbart, Marla Gibbs, Sharon Gless, Leonard H. Goldenson, Jerry Goldsmith, Andy Griffith, Robert Guillaume, Earle Hagen, Larry Hagman, Monty Hall, Valerie Harper, Patricia Heaton, Dwight Hemion, Sherman Hemsley, Florence Henderson, Paul Henning, Don Hewitt, Ron Howard, Russell Johnson, Quincy Jones, Shirley Jones, Chuck Jones, Earl Hamner Jr., Hal Kanter, Bob Keeshan, Lynwood King, William Klages, Jack Klugman, Don Knotts, Harvey Korman, Marty Krofft, Mort Lachman, Perry Lafferty, Angela Lansbury, Jack Larson, Norman Lear, Jack Lemmon, Sheldon Leonard, Jerry Lewis, Frank Liberman, William Link, Art Linkletter, Charles Lisanby, Sidney Lumet, Bob Mackie, Gavin MacLeod, Robert MacNeil, Martin Manulis, Sonia Manzano, Rose Marie, Bob Markell, Garry Marshall, E.G. Marshall, Richard Matheson, Rue McClanahan, Bob McGrath, Jim McKay, Ed McMahon, Barney McNulty, Tammy Faye Bakker Messner, Burt Metcalfe, Newton N. Minow, Don Mischer, Vic Mizzy, John Moffitt, Ricardo Montalban, Leslie Moonves, Mary Tyler Moore, Rita Moreno, Harry Morgan, Pat Morita, Sheila Nevins, Bob Newhart, Leonard Nimoy, Agnes Nixon, Carroll O'Connor, Hugh O’Brian, Don Pardo, Fess Parker, Regis Philbin, Suzanne Pleshette, Abraham Polonsky, Mike Post, Tom Poston, David Pressman, Tony Randall, Joyce Randolph, Phylicia Rashad, Frances Reid, Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner, Del Reisman, Gene Reynolds, Rita Riggs, Pat Robertson, Cliff Robertson, Fred Rogers, Phil Roman, Andy Rooney, Meta Rosenberg, Marion Ross, Aaron Ruben, Tim Russert, Thomas Del Ruth, Morley Safer, Soupy Sales, Jay Sandrich, Isabel Sanford, Thomas W. Sarnoff, Bob Schiller, Arthur Schneider, Sherwood Schwartz, Jan Scott, William Self, William Shatner, Sidney Sheldon, James Sheldon, Fred Silverman, Doris Singleton, Erika Slezak, Bob Smith, Dick Smith, The Smothers Brothers, John Soh, Aaron Spelling, Carroll Spinney, Daniel Petrie Sr., Lesley Stahl, Jean Stapleton, Herbert Stempel, Leonard Stern, Bob Stewart, Dick Stiles, Jerry Stiller, Gale Storm, Maxine Stuart, George Takei, Noel Taylor, Studs Terkel, Grant Tinker, Mel Tolkin, Daniel J. Travanti, Ted Turner, Ret Turner, James Wall, Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, Joseph A. Wapner, Ruth Warrick, Dennis Weaver, Bob Weiskopf, Joseph Wershba, Betty White, Joseph M. Wilcots, Andy Williams, Ethel Winant, Henry Winkler, Jonathan Winters, Dick Wolf, Ben Wolf, David Wolper, Jane Wyatt or Alan Young.
http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people
http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people
Thursday, 26 November 2009
Our Lady of Alvinos hooks up with another short guy
Bruni to star in Woody Allen film Film director Woody Allen has asked French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy to star in his next film, she has revealed in an interview.
The wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy told French TV station Canal Plus that she had agreed to appear but did not know what part she would play.
"I cannot in my life miss an opportunity like this," she said.
"I'm not at all an actress. Maybe I'll be absolutely terrible," the former model added.
The 41-year-old, who is also a singer-songwriter, said starring in a movie would be a "great experience".
She added: "I'd like to, you know, when I'm a grandmother, to have done a Woody Allen film."
Last year, she released her third album Comme si de rien n'etait (As If Nothing Had Happened)
The Italian-born singer wrote 11 of the album's 14 songs, but said at the time she had no plans to release a fourth record because her official duties would take priority.
She tied the knot with Mr Sarkozy in February last year after a three-month whirlwind romance.
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8378906.stm?ad=1
Set List at The Habit, York
Falling
Human Highway
Birds
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Several Dylan covers on the night including Tombstone Blues and Knocking On Heaven's Door plus spirited renditions of The Boxer and Sunny Afternoon by two young scalliwags.
Human Highway
Birds
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Several Dylan covers on the night including Tombstone Blues and Knocking On Heaven's Door plus spirited renditions of The Boxer and Sunny Afternoon by two young scalliwags.
Wednesday, 25 November 2009
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