"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
One of my favourite podcasts is the Chelsea Fancast, which has kept me informed and entertained through my club's recent travails. Its two regular presenters are Stamford Chidge and JK.
Stamford Chidge, I worked out eventually after putting the clues together, is David Chidgey. He's a former television producer, a psychotherapist and the son of the late David Chidgey, who was Liberal Democrat MP for Eastleigh from 1994 to 2005, and the pilot of the Liberal Democrat spacecraft Bird of Liberty in the early years of Lord Bonkers' Diary.
JK is not such a mystery. He is Jonathan Kydd, son of the once-ubiquitous British film actor Sam Kydd and an actor, writer and voiceover artist in his own right.
In this short film, which has won many festival awards, he plays both the actor and the director in a voiceover session from hell.
And to prove that all rabbit holes join up eventually, he writes on his website that, when he was a boy, Alexander Mackendrick saw him several times for the title role in Sammy Going South.
Bobby Charlton played his last game for Manchester United at Stamford Bridge on 2 April 1973. Thanks to a rather flukey goal from Peter Osgood, Chelsea won 1-0.
You can see brief highlights and Charlton's exit in the video below, but first take a look at the photo above. Who is the United player looking on as Charlton plays the ball?
It's Arnie Sidebottom, who was to play one cricket test for England 12 years later. His son Ryan played many more.
Arnie Sidebottom, a centre back, played 16 games for United before joining Huddersfield Town and then Halifax Town.
"Orbán built a glittering façade of think tanks, conferences and podcasts on a brittle framework of prefab ideas and exorbitant contractors’ fees, only for it all to collapse in the blink of an eye. Not in anything its personalities actually wrote or said, but in the history of its decline and fall, does the Budapest scene express that sentiment most Christian: omnia vanitas, memento mori." Franz Pokorny looks at the impact of the death of Orbánism on the European right.
Dan Reed, who directed the explosive documentary Leaving Neverland seven years ago, has come to a sad conclusion: "People don’t care that he was a child molester. Literally, people just don’t care."
"It makes sense to try out Kantian ideas here, because the issue touches on questions of a good future, humanity and a decent life. The question of hope arises in this crisis because, on the one hand, we know that we must remain capable of acting in order to improve the situation. On the other hand, in view of the size of the problem, resignation or even despair can quickly set in." Claudia Blöser says the philosopher Immanuel Kant can help us face global crises today.
Rowan Thompson introduces his new book on the Air League, the Navy League and organised militarism in Britain between the wars: "To foster sea- and airmindedness among the nation’s youth, the leagues were active in schools and universities, while they also formed their own uniformed youth branches – the Sea Cadet Corps and Air Defence Cadet Corps."
Ian Mansfield visits the new V&A East Museum at the Olympic Park in East London.
"Popular supposition is often that the Chelsea and Leeds rivalry emanates from the 1970 FA Cup Final and, particularly, the replay. Not quite true. A few games in preceding years appear to sow the roots of the mutual antipathy." Tim Rolls on the long history of enmity between the two clubs.
"A project that ought to be broad, open and compassionate has come to be dominated by a narrow set of ideological demands which leave little room for genuine diversity of political perspective." Vlad Vexler and Rupert Read argue that if the climate movement does not embrace pluralism it risks handing the future to the far right.
Laura López-Aybar reminds us of the way society can turn a blind eye to the human rights violations involved in psychiatry.
Melinda Wenner Moyer on studies that suggest young people are in many ways doing better than previous generations: "In addition to their interest in helping people, youths today also appear to be more accepting of others and their differences. Some research suggests that youths are becoming more open-minded and inclusive across various realms."
"While the directors express confidence in future revenue growth exceeding £700 million, the margin for error is non-existent. Any sustained failure on the pitch, or a further tightening of regulatory loopholes by the Premier League or UEFA, would jeopardise the entire capital structure of the Group." Paul Quinn digs deep into Chelsea's troubled and byzantine finances.
"Forteanism is not the same as 'skepticism', it is not front-loaded with an agenda of debunking, but it might end up doing some if the evidence (or lack of it) points that way. Skepticism is generally quite boring because the Skeptic is not the fearsome character who has haunted western philosophy for at least 500 years (and also philosophy in other times and places), but a person who thinks religion is A Bad Thing and science is A Good Thing." Yesterday Discontinued Notes went to an event at Conway Hall organised by the London Fortean Society.
Gyles Brandreth remembers how Hayley Mills snatched the child role in Tiger Bay from his grasp. "This is another film with Mills, but set in South Wales. It’s about a young boy who witnesses a murder. Quite dark. Lovely script. You’ll be the boy. John Mills is the detective. They’ve seen your photograph, Gyles. They like the look of you."
I searched for a video of Eddie McCreadie scoring a goal, only to find that his foul on Billy Bremner in the 1970 FA Cup Final replay is everywhere. So here it is instead.
It's here because McCreadie has died at the age of 85. I think that leaves Ron Harris, David Webb and Charlie Cooke as the only members of that victorious Cup Final team who are still with us. How old the world has grown.
Former Scotland and Chelsea player Eddie McCreadie, who was once hailed by Tommy Docherty as the best left-back in Europe and went on to manage the London club, has died at the age of 85.
Born in Glasgow, McCreadie scored Chelsea's winning goal in the 1965 League Cup final against Leicester City and helped the Blues lift the FA Cup five years later with an extra-time, replay victory over Leeds United.
One of his 23 Scotland caps came in a famous 3-2 victory over England at Wembley a year after the hosts had lifted the World Cup there.
And his brief but glorious spell as Chelsea manager:
After retiring from playing, McCreadie joined Chelsea's coaching staff in 1974, with Ron Suart's side sliding towards life back in the second tier.
The Scot took over from the departing Suart in April 1975 and, although he could not prevent relegation, he rebuilt the side around 18-year-old midfielder Ray Wilkins and took Chelsea back up to the First Division in 1977.
However, he left before the start of the new season after a row with chairman Brian Mears, expressing surprise that his offer to resign after being refused a company car was accepted.
The Sun reported McCreadie's happy return visit to the club in 2017 after more than 40 years. I can recall him saying something along the lines of "If I'd known I was this popular I'd have come back sooner."
To end with that foul, the way the referee waves play on after McCreadie had kicked Billy Bremner in the head in the Chelsea box tells you what football was like in this era.
And the fact that, despite the, er, robust play of McCreadie and Ron Harris, most neutrals wanted Chelsea to win, tells you a lot about what Don Revie's Leeds were like.
I liked John Rogers' video on Fulham so much that I've gone back there with Jago Hazzard.
He sets out the history of Fulham Broadway station on the London Underground. And, in passing, he gives us our Trivial Fact of the Day: the terraces at Stamford Bridge were built using spoil from the excavation of the Piccadilly Line.
You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page. And why not follow his YouTube channel? I know I do.
This is such an appealing video that it makes me want to visit Fulham myself.
Its billing on YouTube explains:
Our walk starts Fulham Broadway and the old Walham Green Station. We then cross Eel Brook Common to New Kings Road and Parson's Green.
After a quick browse in the brilliant Hurlingham Books we look inside All Saints Church Fulham before entering Bishop's Park. The park was noted for its fabulous plants and trees as far back as the 16th century and today is still one of London's finest parks.
The mile-long moat was said to have been built by Danes in the 9th century to protect their camp from flooding. The land has been in the possession of the Bishops of London since 691 and was their country home from 704 to 1972 - an incredible 1300 years. The current Fulham Palace boasts a magnificent Tudor courtyard and a beautiful walled garden.
From the palace we stroll and the Thames riverside walk to Craven Cottage home to Fulham FC.
Talking of the football club, it's worth noting the asymmetry of the relationship between Chelsea and Fulham. Chelsea fans have a soft spot for Fulham and may go to watch them if their club doesn't have a game. Fulham fans hate Chelsea.
I've had to inform this blog's trivia desk of a discovery I've made while listening to my favourite Chelsea podcast.
Chelsea Fancast is presented by Stamford Chidge, whose real name is David Chidgey. And the discovery I made from the new edition of the podcast is that he's the son of the late David Chidgey who was Liberal Democrat MP for Eastleigh between 1994 and 2005, and then a member of the House of Lords.
The elder David Chidgey was also, at least according to Lord Bonkers, the intrepid pilot of the Bird of Liberty, a spacecraft the Lib Dems owned in the 1990s.
Chelsea Fancast has previously come to the attention of our trivia desk: see my post on the Kenneth More television series An Englishman's Castle.
An Englishman's Castle was a three-part BBC drama that starred Kenneth More and was screened in 1978. It was set in an alternate 1978 where Britain had been conquered by Nazi Germany.
I don't remember it from the time and have long wanted to watch it. The other day I found all three parts on YouTube, namely:
If you want a blow-by-blow account, then Archive TV Musings is the site for you. Here I offer some more random thoughts.
To begin, I have a Kenneth More problem: I don't like him when he plays the hero. I'm reminded of Matthew Sweet and his comment on A Night to Remember:
You almost get the feeling watching A Night To Remember that the ship goes down simply to wipe the smug grin off of Kenneth More's face.
and also of his comment on More's onscreen character in general:
He was heroic in a cocky, big-brotherly way - like a public-school prefect who might have saved a new boy from a beating, but expected three terms of shoe-polishing and crumpet-toasting in return.
But the older, compromised More we see here is more to my taste. He plays the scriptwriter of a popular television drama called An Englishman's Castle, which is set in the recent past and is reaching the time of the German invasion of Britain.
This, and the complications of his personal life, suddenly make it harder for him to please the viewing public without upsetting the authorities. Up till now, he has made the compromises that allowed him to walk this tightrope.
Then there is the brilliance with which an authoritarian state is conjured up without showing us anything. The violence all takes place offscreen and everyone running things is British. The only German we see is an amiable young soldier who appears in the drama within the drama.
And then there's the cast. More's wife is played by Kathleen Byron, the mad nun from Black Narcissus. The controller of the television channel is Anthony Bate, soon to play Sir Oliver Lacon in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. One of More's sons, though he's not at his best here, is Nigel Havers.
In the minor roles are two figures with pleasing trivial connections. Jonathan Kydd, the son of the actor Sam Kydd, appears on one of my regular podcast listens - Chelsea Fancast - every week.
While the young German soldier is played by Louis Sheldon. As Louis Sheldon Williams he was one of the children in Our Mother's House and, better still, his mother wrote a weekly column for Liberal News in the 1960s.
If you click play on the video at the top, you'll soon see a scene between Kenneth More and Anthony Bate. If you like it, I think you'll like the whole thing.
The first things I can remember, as a child, reading with pleasure in an adult newspaper are Brian Glanville's football reports for the Sunday Times.
He was still teaching me new words when I was 16. I can recall his writing about England's 3-2 victory over Italy in the USA's Bicentennial tournament. England fielded two young debutants: Gordon Hill, a left wing from Tommy Docherty's exciting Manchester United side, and Ray Wilkins (often called Butch Wilkins in those days), the 19-year-old Chelsea captain.
He described Hill as an "urchin" figure and Wilkins - in a new word for me - as a "gamin". Wilkins had looked thoroughly at home in midfield, passing the ball like an experienced international. You can see England's starting XI in the image above.
This morning I heard that Glanville has died at the age of 93. Richard Williams is quoted among the tributes on the Football Writers' Association site:
Some of us are old enough to remember a time when colleagues often sniggered at Brian Glanville’s ability to pronounce the names of foreign footballers – particularly those of Italian players – correctly.
They stopped laughing when English teams were suddenly filled with foreign players, and the ability to avoid mangling their names became a necessary part of a football reporter’s skillset.
Brian’s interest in the game as it was played in other countries sprang from his cosmopolitan nature; it turned out to be prophetic, and I often felt that the rest of us should have been paying him some sort of pathfinder’s royalty.
A sophisticate as much at home at the Chelsea Arts Club as at Stamford Bridge, he came from a time before football became gentrified but played and wrote about it with wholehearted commitment and without condescension towards those who’d come to it via routes very different from his own.
Andrew Page draws some lessons from Mark Carney's victory: "What we saw in Canada is that, when political leaders focus on the issues voters care about, minds (and voting intentions) can be changed. It also became apparent that the populist tactics previously employed by the Conservatives ceased to work once the incumbent party found a way of reconnecting with the electorate."
"The Conservatives are defending a high watermark, a freakishly good result for them in 2021 created by the short-lived vaccine bounce that put wind in their sails for a few months." Matthew Pennell previews tomorrow's local elections.
Commenting on the suicide of Virginia Giuffre, Emily Maitlis says "We have to believe women while they’re alive."
City Monitor asks why Britain has let trams fall by the wayside: "People won’t leave their cars at home until there is an efficient, reliable and comfortable alternative. Trams provide that alternative. No other form of public transport allows you to travel about town smoothly and quietly, doesn’t emit noxious exhaust fumes, doesn't need a parking space, runs so frequently that you don’t even need a timetable – and actually enhances the urban environment."
Johnny Meynell explodes a popular myth about the 1970 FA Cup final: "No show-jumping took place at Wembley Stadium in the days, weeks, or even nine months before Chelsea took on Leeds United for the right to lift the FA Cup on April 11."
"It’s a surprise to arrive in Bexhill, prepared to take a look at one of the most famous examples of English modernism, the De La Warr Pavilion, all white walls, glass and steel, and to encounter a group of buildings with a whiff of the Mughal empire about them." Philip Wilkinson visits the Sussex coast.
"Kennedy has already indicated what he expects the 'findings' to be: that vaccines did it, even though all legitimate science shows that is false. To make sure no real science accidentally happens, he has put a non-scientist/non-doctor in charge of this non-study: David Geier, a man who has been fined for practicing medicine without a license. Worse, his 'treatments' of children are better described as pointless torture." Amanda Marcotte says RFK's pledge to discover the cause of autism isn't just a ploy: it's a war on children's health.
Viv Griffiths reports on the widespread support among MPs for rejoining the customs union and single market: "Lib Dem Paul Kohler summed up well the frustration and anger expressed by many others: 'The Tories' botched Brexit deal has been a disaster for our country… The Conservative government wrecked our relationship with the EU and the new Labour government refuse to take the necessary steps to repair it.'"
The Atlantic says dark times call for dark humour.
Over the years, scholars have turned to Monty Python and the Holy Grail to explore how the Middle Ages are portrayed - and parodied - in modern culture. Its lasting influence can be seen in classrooms, academic journals and discussions of medievalism. David D. Day offers a list of 10 open-access articles you can read that examine its legacy from multiple angles.
Chelsea won the Football League title in 1954/5 and should have been the first English club to play in the European Cup. As Tim Rolls explains, the men in blazers stopped them.
Helen Parry reviews Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal, by Sarah LeFanu: "It is a sort of detective story, the piecing together of Macaulay and her life from scraps of paper and faded photographs, and a ghost story, pursuing an insubstantial version of someone who has long gone."
The Liberal Democrats are urging the government to provide replacement funding to an American project that locates Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia, as the party gathers for a spring conference heavily focused on the response to Donald Trump.
British support for the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale University could be part of a more robust approach towards the US president, particularly over Ukraine, according to Calum Miller, the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesperson.
Earlier this month, Yale said US government funding for the lab, which has attempted to track the fate of the estimated 20,000 Ukrainian children taken to Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, had been ended as part of cuts imposed by Elon Musk’s so-called department of government efficiency.
The paper has spoken to the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesperson Calum Miller. As it reminds us, he entered politics just four years ago when he became an Oxfordshire county councillor.
But with his background as a senior civil servant and then heading Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, he was given the foreign affairs brief immediately after becoming an MP in July.
Calum will be moving a motion at the the party's spring conference expressing "profound alarm" at Trump’s presidency and urging closer European collaboration in response.
He is calling for the government to use the £2bn-plus proceeds from Roman Abramovich’s sale of Chelsea FC to help such efforts:
"We’d like to think that some of this Abramovich money could be put to exactly those purposes, so this terrible chapter of children being forcibly removed and almost indoctrinated in Russia, can be brought to an end, but also hopefully when those children return to Ukraine they can be given all the support they need as part of a humanitarian package."
Calum also told the paper that more confiscated Russian assets should be used to aid Ukraine.
He is strongly critical of the Conservative approach to the new international situation:
"I’m genuinely baffled by the approach taken by the Conservatives in this regard, fawning over Donald Trump at his inauguration and declaring a new era in UK-US relations. It looked unwise at the time and events since have proven how ill-advised it was.
"So many people in my area opened their doors to Ukrainian families, like they did across the whole country. Voters can see that the Russians have been emboldened and empowered by the US administration, and they think that’s just the wrong thing."
It's worth reading the whole piece: Calum also talks about the Labour government's approach to US under Trump.
Finally, as a Chelsea fan I cannot help reflecting that, after paying £2bn to buy the club, its new members have invested another £1.4bn in making the team far weaker than the one they inherited.
The black British soul group Sweet Sensation topped the singles chart in 1974 with Sad Sweet Dreamer. One of its member, St Clair Palmer, is the great uncle of Chelsea and England's Cole Palmer.
That's certainly our Trivial Fact of the Day. As far as I can make out, St Clair is second from the right in the front row in the video above.
Later. This story was widely reported this week, but the Daily Mail had it last year and also revealed that St Clair Palmer later became an actor and appeared in one episode each of Coronation Street and Brookside.
Here, from 1992, is one of the great lost television commercials. Lost because it had to be withdrawn after children started Tangoing each other in the school playground and ear drums got perforated as a result.
The excitable commentator is Hugh Dennis, who was already famous from The Mary Whitehouse Experience. The laconic analyst is the late great Ray Wilkins, who will always be Butch Wilkins to a Chelsea fan of my vintage. And the deep voice at the end belongs, unexpectedly, to Gil Scott-Heron.
"As even some of his most sympathetic supporters in the media are now coming to realise, Starmer's Labour is neither red, nor blue, nor green, nor indeed any other easily recognisable colour on the political spectrum. Let there be no mistake about it: these are the days of Grey Labour." Alex Niven was disillusioned with this Labour government even before it came to power.
Jane Green and Raluca L. Pahontu present research that contradicts the idea that Brexit was voted through by the economically left-behind: "Our results show that individuals who lacked wealth are less likely to support leaving the EU, explaining why so many Brexit voters were wealthy, in terms of their property wealth."
M.F. Robbins tells the tale of two playgrounds: "One is closing soon while the other - brand new - has stood empty for nearly a year, ringed with steel fencing to stop people from using it. Their stories aren’t the most important thing you’ll read today, but they illustrate something much bigger - the collapse and retreat of local government, and the profound effect it will have on our public spaces."
Mother Jones talks to Daniel Immerwahr about what the history of American expansion can tell us About Trump’s threats.
"Unexpected visitors to the Director’s Box that day were ex-goalkeeper and US Secretary Of State Dr. Henry Kissinger, quite literally one of the most famous men in the world at that point and in the UK for talks on Rhodesia, and UK Foreign Secretary Anthony Crosland. A step down from Raquel Welch’s appearance a few years back, possibly, but enough to get pictures of Kissinger, Chelsea Chairman Brian Mears and his wife June in a number of national newspapers." Tim Rolls takes us back to Stamford Bridge in 1976, when the Chelsea team had only one player who had cost the club a transfer fee.
Ian Visits on Heathrow Junction, the London station that came and went in six months in 1998.
"Any pleasure I may take in the distinction of the honour of an FRS is diminished by the fact it is shared with someone who appears to be modeling himself on a Bond villain, a man who has immeasurable wealth and power which he will use to threaten scientists who disagree with him." Dorothy Bishop explains her decision to resign as a Fellow of the Royal Society - she's talking about Elon Musk, of course.
Jim Sleeper uncovers the Classical roots of the US Constitution: "The founders anticipated someone like Trump partly because they’d been reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was hot off the presses in the 1770s. We should read Gibbon now, too, paying close attention to his account of how the Roman republic slipped into tyranny when powerful men had seduced or intimidated its citizens so that they became a stampeding mob, hungry for bread and circuses."
Amy-Jane Beer is excited by the rewilding project at Castle Howard: "While most authorised beaver reintroductions in the UK have been in small enclosures, here the plan is to give them 450 acres to work with, alongside pigs and large grazers that will churn and prune and trample and further invigorate ecological processes. I cannot wait to see it."
During the Cold War, philosophers worked together to aid dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. Cheryl Misak was part of a movement that included both Jacques Derrida and Roger Scruton.
"Wicked makes its cinematic premiere at an awkward time, so soon after so many American voters acted against virtually every moral idea the production unsubtly espouses," says Luke Buckmaster.
Tim Rolls on the day in 1966 that Bobby Tambling scored five goals at Villa Park: "Looking at the TV footage a couple of things strike home. The quality of Chelsea’s accurate, incisive passing (particularly Osgood and Cooke) and speedy breaks, and the sheer inability of the home players to shut down their breaking opponents."
The Beautiful Game are a British rock band from London whose self-declared influences include The Jam, The Clash and Oasis. I came across them via a recent Chelsea Fancast podcast.
OK so we're talking dad rock here, but I like the song and Alexei Sayle once said something wise about not trying to please the imaginary cool people in your head.
BBC Radio Shropshire is running a series of short programmes on strange stories from the county under the title Secret Shropshire.
So far there are 17. They range from Bloudie Jack to the ghost barge of Ironbridge; from Wild Edric and the seven whistlers to the RAF Cosford UFO; from Mad Jack Mytton to the Child's Ercall mermaid.
Because he was born in Dawley, there's a good programme on Bill "Fatty" Foulke, who played only 34 games for Chelsea but remains part of the club's folklore to this day.
I've not plucked up the courage to listen to The Phantom Arm of Much Wenlock though.
