Prunella Scales in Hobson's Choice (1952)

Prunella Scales died yesterday at the age of 93. We all remember her as Sybil Fawlty, and in his DVD commentaries on the series, John Cleese (who was 86 today) recalls that she brought much to the role that he and Connie Booth had not imagined. Fawlty Towers was the better for it.

But there was more to Prunella Scales than Fawlty Towers. She was Elizabeth II in Alan Bennett's A Question of Attribution and played Queen Victoria in a one-woman show for many years. There were other successful television sitcoms and a surprising number of films.

The second of these was Hobson's Choice in 1954. You can see a clip from it above – Scales plays the youngest of Charles Laughton's three daughters. Don't worry: the film is all about Laughton getting his comeuppance.

Two weeks ago I posted a clip of Patricia Routledge, who died earlier this month, playing the eldest of the sisters in 1962.

Marion Mould jumps The Sound of Music on Monty Python

The other day I used Bluesky to pass on some of Lord Bonkers' table talk:

Lord Bonkers writes: What all this nonsense about Katy Perry and "the first all-female space crew"? I well recall that a British rocket took off from Woomera 56 years ago almost to the day. Its crew? Marguerite Patten Helen Shapiro Pat Coombs Marion Mould on Stroller

[image or embed]

— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers.bsky.social) 14 April 2025 at 17:13

Think of this as a sort of free extra from the old boy - a Patreon you don't have to pay for. (That is unless I'm short of inspiration for his next diary, when it will appear there too.)

But who, I hear you ask, were Marion Mould and Stroller?

Marion Mould won the silver medal in the individual show jumping at the Mexico Oympics of 1968. I remember her as Marion Mould, though she must have been Marion Coakes at the time, as she did not marry until the following year.

And Stroller was her horse, or rather her pony. It was rare for ponies to compete in top-level show jumping, but he and Marion won 61 international competitions together.

Oddly, I don't remember hearing much of Marion Mould in the early Seventies, when show jumping (it seems so unlikely now) was a huge television sport. My memory may be at fault, or perhaps she did fade from the scene.

But you can see her above in the third episode of the fourth and final season of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

My memory of that fourth series (the one made without John Cleese) is of watching it each week, willing it to be funny, but being disappointed every time.

Watching this episode today it doesn't seem so bad to me - if you like Python then you will like this. Perhaps the individual sketches are allowed to run on too long, but it's not as weak as I remember it.

And this little selection featuring Marion Mould is certainly funny. Show jumping obstacles did get overblown like this when the sport was at the height of its popularity.

What is it that make some names of places or people funny?

 

"He didn't get those in Berlin" just wouldn't be as funny. Partly it's the extra syllable in Heidelberg and partly it's the sound of "Heidel" to English ears.

And Accrington? It's wonderfully specific while being wholly irrelevant. So "My brother lives in Lancashire" wouldn't be as funny either.

Yes. I've been thinking about names and humour. 

In the last Lord Bonkers I had him and the Duke of Rutland falling out over "the ownership of certain Stilton mines outside Cropwell Bishop". Why Cropwell Bishop? Because it was the funniest name available.

You see, there are six commercial Stilton creameries: Long Clawson, Tuxford & Tebbut, Hartington Dairy, Websters, Colston Bassett and Cropwell Bishop. And there's not much comic potential in the first four names.

To me, Colston Bassett is a serious name that's trying to sound funny, and Cropwell Bishop is a funny name that's trying to sound serious. So Cropwell Bishop it was.

Just as a place name can be funny in the right context, so can a surname.

My first job after university was with a chess retailer and magazine publisher. The head of the packing department there was a working class man, without much education but with great intelligence. And he loved Fawlty Towers, and in particular Basil's despair at being unable to make Manuel understand him:

"It's not a proposition from Wittgenstein."

My colleague had no idea who Wittgenstein was, but that didn't matter because the name sounds so much like that of a gnomic Austrian philosopher. If Wittgenstein didn't exist we should have to invent him. 

And to finish, you can change the name of a thing or person to comic or subversive effect.

The owner of the company had written a book he called Easy Guide to Chess, but the packing department had another name for it. If one of them wanted a copy of the book to make up an order, he would call out to his oppo:

"Hardback Mein Kampf."

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"There is a strand of conservatism that is protectionist and isolationist but for any admirer of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher to go along with these policies is extraordinary. Trump represents a repudiation of their values on free trade and internationalism." David Gauke explains why Conservatives should have no truck with Trump.

Wera Hobhouse says it's time we had an open and honest conversation about legalising euthanasia.

Despite the fact that governments have spent the last 40 years giving capitalism's loudest voices mostly what they want, such as lower top tax rates and weaker trades unions, in the last 10 years GDP per hour worked has grown by less than one per cent a year. Read Chris Dillow on Labour and the Conservatives' shared belief in "the Scooby-Doo theory of capitalism".

At least 2000 babies were born to Black GIs stationed in Britain during the second world war and a home was created for some of them: Holnicote House in Somerset. Those who grew up there are now telling their stories, reports Steve Rose.

"As a statistician with 20 years of experience in the field of ecology, I recently faced a challenging moment. In August, some colleagues in Canada published a response to a paper that I co-wrote a decade ago, showing that the method my co-authors and I proposed back then is fundamentally flawed." Oliver Gimenez reflects on having a paper of his shown to be wrong.

"Tom Baker was in his fifth full year as the Doctor and was the well-recognised face of the series across the UK. Cleese was also a household name, but for comedy. He had started to build his comedy reputation in the late 1960s and solidified this with his work on the first three series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus between 1969 and 1973 before ascending to comedy royalty with Fawlty Towers, which he created with his then-wife Connie Booth." Oliver J. Wake on the coming together of two giants of Seventies television.

Spying: Another column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

I've just sent off another column to the JCPCP, so it's time to post another of my earlier ones.

The idea that Noel Coward had a role in wartime intelligence has been taken seriously by recent biographers - something else to read up on. And whatever the truth of that, he had upset the Nazis enough to appear on the list of people to be executed after the invasion.

When this list was revealed after the German surrender, Rebecca West, who also appeared on it, sent Coward a telegram: "My dear, the people we should have been seen dead with."

Spychology

The only spy I have known is the one I wrote jokes for. 

Back in the 1990s, I had friends at Liberal Democrat court and could send in lines and ideas for Paddy Ashdown’s speeches. The 1997 general election campaign was, I think, the last at which BBC Radio 4 broadcast a daily late-evening round up of speeches from the hustings, and I sometimes heard my work used. At the following election, a programme satirising the election was broadcast in that slot. It was Peter Cook who said, back in the 1960s, that “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea.”

When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.

There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.

Ashdown’s memoirs told us inevitably little about his MI6 years, though his friend the former Labour minister Denis MacShane suggested after his death that he had been involved with Operation Gladio, which set up arms and supplies caches all over Western Europe for the Resistance to use if Soviet tanks ever rolled in.

Admirers of John le Carré were not surprised by what Ashdown did say about the organisation:

When I first joined, our headquarters was in an anonymous multi-storey tower block south of the Thames whose existence was never supposed to be made public. Indeed, we were all instructed to approach it with discretion, taking appropriate precautions.

But even George Smiley must have winced at this:

The game was, however, rather given away by the conductors of the London buses that passed our door at regular intervals: they delighted in announcing the local bus stop with a cheery (and usually very loud) shout of, "Lambeth Tube Station. All spies alight 'ere."

******

Ian Fleming’s first choice to play James Bond was Noel Coward, but The Master sent a telegram in reply to the offer: ‘DR NO? NO. NO. NO.’ Coward, it is true, had played a spy in Our Man in Havana, but that was a deskbound one with no licence to kill.

What doesn’t work on the screen, however, can work in real life. The Carry On actor Peter Butterworth, for instance, was one of the vaulters who helped in the Wooden Horse escape from a World War II German prisoner of war camp in, but when he auditioned for a part in the film he was told he ‘didn't look convincingly heroic or athletic enough’.

And so it was with Coward, though quite what he did in the war is not clear. Some sources say he was a member of a network of rich travellers who gathered information from across Europe just before hostilities broke out: others that he worked in black propaganda in the same unit as Guy Burgess and Kim Philby.

What seems more certain is that he ran the British propaganda office in Paris, telling his superiors: "If the policy of His Majesty's Government is to bore the Germans to death, I don't think we have time." He later used his showbiz fame to help persuade the American public and government that they should enter the war.

Coward and Fleming were near neighbours in Jamaica, where much of Dr No was filmed, and both members of the slightly disreputable international elite that had flocked to the newly independent island – there was nothing slightly about another of its members, Errol Flynn. A young Chris Blackwell, who came from a family in that set, helped find locations for the film and was offered a job by Harry Salzman, who produced it alongside Cubby Broccoli.

Blackwell was tempted, but decided to remain in the music business. He moved to London and imported Jamaican records to sell to the expatriate community there, then founded his own production company. He discovered first Millie Small (‘My Boy Lollipop’) and then Steve Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group, and with them on board, Island Records took off. 

In 1976 Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate on Jamaica came on the market, twelve years after his death. Blackwell bought it, but only after he had failed to persuade another Island artist to do so. Bob Marley could be stubborn.

******

When the BBC showed Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective at Christmas I found it had curdled since I saw it in 1986, but their adaption of John Le Carré’s spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from 1979 never disappoints. I know its seven episodes so well that I had to steel myself before seeing the 2011 film of the book and then steel myself not to walk out of the cinema. It was all wrong. Really, it was just different, though two hours was not enough time to do justice to the book’s intricate plot.

If the TV series, like Fawlty Towers, gets a bit more Seventies every time you see it, that’s only to its advantage. Much of the publicity about the film concerned its efforts to recreate the look of that decade, but the television series didn’t have to try at all.

Someone working on it for the BBC asked a contact if he could be smuggled into the MI6 building - the spooks had moved since Paddy Ashdown’s day - to see what it was like. "There’s no need," he was told. "It’s exactly like Broadcasting House."

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"Along with a shortage of GP appointments and an excess of potholes in the roads, the issue exercising Henley’s well-heeled voters above all else is the state of the famous waterway sparkling just beyond the high street." Esther Webber looks at evidence that something is changing in the heart and soul of Tory England.

Chris Grey considers what the party manifestos say about Brexit and post-Brexit relations with the EU.

Julian Barnes says Britain must legalise assisted dying: "Most of us want to die with our personality intact, rather than have it swamped by blank misunderstanding; many fear a long process of dying, in which the body outlasts the mind, and indignity, humiliation and panic may ensue."

"When it comes to the England men's football team, the backing of fans, the press, pundits, and the country as a whole cannot be taken as a given. When the team does well, the whole country goes mad with excitement, but when it does badly the nation comes down on the players like a ton of bricks." Jan Dehn asks why the England men's football team plays so badly.

Katja Hoyer offers a German view of British humour: "I have never understood why so many Brits seem embarrassed about the German scenes when talking to me about them. Yes, of course Fawlty’s behaviour is ludicrous, but that’s the point. It’s the German family who are depicted as sensible and rightly offended by his antics. Exasperated they wonder at the end, 'How ever did they win?'"

No, the Black Death was not the result of a medieval pogrom against cats. Eleanor Janega explains.

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Jan Dehn outlines the many questions being considered by the government inquiry into what happened on Alderney under Nazi occupation: "It is known that the camp held Russian and Ukrainian prisoners as well as Spanish Republicans, captured French resistance fighters, and jews, but precisely how many people were there, who they were, and where exactly they came from remains clouded in mystery. There are also suggestions in some quarters that there are mass graves on Alderney, but where they are located and who is buried in the pits is unknown."

Carlos Moreno, the father of the '15-minute city' has a new book out, reports Feargus O'Sullivan.

"'It’s become increasingly mundane to see intrusive and inappropriate surveillance technologies, once reserved for the police and prison estate, deployed in our schools,' says Caitlin Bishop, senior campaigns officer at Privacy International." Adele Walton on the dangerous rise of surveillance in UK classrooms.

Paul Powlesland tells the tragic story of Hoad’s Wood, used as a landfill and ignored by authorities, and suggests it shows we need Rights of Nature and guardianship.

"A parade in Rogation Week around the old borders of one parish ended in 1751 with an incursion into Richmond Park, which had been built a century before by king Charles I by buying, acquiring and enclosing land from several parishes - an act that had caused decades of anger and friction, as people not only lost access to common land for subsistence, collecting firewood, grazing livestock etc, but were also denied access along traditional footpaths." London Radical Histories unpacks the many meanings of the ceremony of Beating the Bounds.

Huw Turbervill ranks the 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers.

Twitter: A dead cat and a dead parrot

This morning Twitter is working normally on my PC, but when I try to use the app on my phone it's a disaster area.

My conclusion is that Twitter has major technical problems and Elon Musk's announcement about rate limits was a calculated move to distract us from them. It seems to have distracted the media too, as journalists continue to report Musk's remarks at face value and neglect to ask what is really happening with Twitter.

Here is an honourable exception.

I don't want to be one of those people who believes that everything in the news is there only to distract you from something else, and that if something isn't in the news it's because someone has taken out a super-injunction) but I find the phrase 'dead cat' springing unbidden to mind.

Leslie Sarony: Ain't it Grand to be Blooming Well Dead

There's a programme about Les Dawson that used to be shown regularly on high-numbered TV channels. One of the people who pays tribute to Dawson is John Cleese, who was a regular in two series of Sez Les.

Cleese describes Dawson as "an autodidact, a very smart guy who was fascinated by words " and mentions in passing that something the Monty Python team had in common was an interest in and affection for music hall.

And that interest in music hall may explain why Leslie Sarony is in the cast of The Crimson Permanent Assurance, the short that begins Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

As I blogged last month, Sarony was the composer of Jollity Farm, a song from 1929 that the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band recorded in the 1960s, and also played Uncle Staveley in the final series of Peter Tinniswood's I Didn't Know You Cared in 1979. The Crimson Permanent Assurance was made in 1983.

So here's another of Sarony's songs. One of my pet theories is that the Victorians were less Victorian than we imagine and that much of that awful English mania for respectability actually dates from the early decades of the 20th century.

But Ain't It Grand to Be Bloomin' Well Dead! reminds us that there was a great appetite in popular culture for laughing at respectability then too.

I remember it 1971, when it served as the theme song for That's Your Funeral, a BBC sitcom starring Bill Fraser that was cancelled after one series but was still turned into a feature film, as many sitcoms were in those days, by Hammer.

One final discovery: it turns out that Jollity Farm was a riposte to a song from the previous year called Misery Farm.

John Cleese on At Last the 1948 Show

At Last the 1948 Show is part of the prehistory of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Written and performed by Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graham Chapman, John Cleese and Marty Feldman, this sketch show was broadcast nationally by ITV in 1967.

Here talkingto Dick Fiddy about it in front of a British Film Institute audience, John Cleese is agreeably surprised at how good it was. 

Though it's worth pointing out that, well before Python, Round the Horne and The Goon Show were into subverting broadcasting conventions. Both dragged the BBC announcer into the show, for instance.

And a point that's got me into more than one Twitter argument: the Four Yorkshiremen sketch comes from At Last the 1948 Show and not Monty Python.

But you try an' tell the young people of today that, and they won't believe you.

Happy birthday Charles Dickens

The great man was born on 7 February 1812.

This clip is from David Lean's 1948 film of Oliver Twist and the boy himself is played by John Howard Davies, who grew up to produce Monty Python, Fawlty Towers and The Good Life.

I once blogged about a Radio 4 documentary on his experience of making the film:

Years before I had a blog, I wrote an article on Oliver Twist. In it I said that, while the workhouse boys in Oliver! are obviously stage school brats, those in Lean's film look as though they would eat you given half a chance.

Davies confirmed this was pretty much the case. Describing the scene in which the boys peer through the window at the workhouse board enjoying a banquet, he said that in 1948 none of the child actors had ever seen a meal like that in real life.

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"Becoming conservative requires the means, and it's the Conservatives who are frustrating the acquisition of means. And so the constituency is in decline." A Very Public Sociologist foretells the demise of Conservatism.

Tim Bateman highlights the case for and resistance against raising the age in England and Wales. "In law, young people are not, for instance, considered sufficiently mature to make decisions in relation to the purchase of alcohol and tobacco, apply for a credit card, or get married without parental permission, until eighteen years of age. Full culpability for behaviour that transgresses the criminal law is attributed eight years earlier."

When Victoria was born she was fifth in the line of accession to the throne. Charles Littleton on the series of events that led to her accession.

"Moviedrome whiffled through this world of serious film study like the freshest of breezes. Those who feared that understanding cinema required a degree and/or a French-English dictionary, here was a programme that provided a way of seeing and appreciating movies that was the furthest thing from dry and poncy." Richard Luck celebrates the film criticism of Alex Cox.

A London Inheritance identifies a mystery location photographed by his father at the end of the second world war.

Dedicated scholarship by Dirty Feed finds there are differences between the published script of the Gourmet Night episode of Fawlty Towers and the broadcast version we all know and love.