Richard O'Sullivan's This is Your Life from 1974

The actor Richard O'Sullivan has died at the age of 82. He was never out of the studio as child star in the Fifties and early Sixties, and became a sitcom heartthrob of the Seventies.

Talking Pictures TV is currently running the children's show Dick Turpin that he made at the start of the Eighties. O'Sullivan retired from acting after suffering a stroke in 2003.

This edition of This is Your Life was filmed just as O'Sullivan's adult career had taken off because of his starring role in ITV's Man About the House.

Look out for an appearance by a barking mad Trevor Howard.

Steve Winwood and Viv Stanshall: Boy in Darkness

"I suppose I sort of went underground a little," Steve Winwood once told Classic Rock, looking back on the mid Seventies:

One of his 'underground' activities involved a musical liaison with the eccentric Bonzo Dog man Viv Stanshall. The pair had already co-written Dream Gerrard for Traffic's swansong album and collaborated on Stanshall's solo record Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead. They then concocted a soundtrack for a film version of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, hoping for financial backing. It never arrived.

They did, however, manage to funnel some of its ideas into Sir Henry At Rawlinson End, Stanshall's surreal satire of upper-English mores that was eventually made into a film starring Trevor Howard in the title role.

"Viv was hilarious," Winwood says, laughing. "He always sort of needed a straight man to do the musical things that he was wanting to do. And for a while I became that. We'd go into pubs and people's houses and start off some kind of act. I'd play some music, he'd play a bit on his euphonium, then try to do conjuring tricks."

A track said to be from their Gormenghast project, Boy in Darkness, was included on Dog Howl in Tune, an album put together from the confused archive Viv Stanshall left at his death by his son Rupert.

And then the other day I found this track. It too is called Boy in Darkness and it has much the same time as the Viv Stanshall one, though different words. But here Winwood, who presumably wrote that tune, is playing keyboards and Stanshall the euphonium. The band, the YouTube blurb speculates, may be filled out by Traffic members Rebop Kwaku Baah and Rosko Gee on percussion and bass guitar respectively.

This video was posted there by Berkin Altınok, whose account is filled with Winwood rarities and covers of his songs.

The Joy of Six 1224

Bill Browder, in a video interview by Kyiv Post, argues that: "Putin is a little man, who has stolen too much money, who is terrified of losing power. If he loses power he will go to jail, lose his money and die."

"The learning process of having your opinions tested, being exposed to new information, or accepting there are multiple, nuanced but rational positions on many contentious issues, should be an ongoing lifelong pursuit, but if children and young people are not exposed to this approach within schools, how do we expect them to achieve this?" Claire McGuiggan and Peter D'Lima make the developmental case for free speech in schools.

A right-wing political and media ecosystem pushing a US-style anti-abortion agenda is gaining traction in the UK, says Sian Norris.

Michael Bacon found going to a child psychoanalyst four times a week for three years bad enough: reading what she wrote about him was worse. His article a powerful indictment of the harm that 'therapy' with no scientific basis can do.

"Being a gardener means learning how to care for and appreciate the little things in nature. This involves a sense of pride in your work as well as respect for the space around you – an approach you can carry into other areas of life, the environment and interpersonal relationships. Our species is more fragile than we often like to think but we have a greater chance of survival if we learn to work with nature and not try to be its master." Susie Porter on the mental health benefits of gardening.

A London Inheritance visits the Waterman's Arms on the Isle of Dogs: "The audience at the Waterman’s Arms attracted not just the locals, but also those from the West End, and a global set of celebrities from the early 1960s. Names such as Lord Delfont, George Melly, Groucho Marx, Lionel Bart, Trevor Howard, Tony Bennett, Mary Quant, Norman Hartnell, Judy Garland and Clint Eastwood (who wrote the word ‘rowdy’ in the guest book)."

Brief Encounter, Kind Hearts and Coronets: Two outstanding podcasts on two outstanding films

Search for a list of the 10 best British films and there's a good chance that both Brief Encounter and Kind Hearts and Coronets will feature in it. In the Empire Online list from a couple of months ago, for instance, they figure at 5 and 7 respectively.

So it's good that in recent days I have come across outstanding podcasts about both.

The Cine-Files, like all the best podcasts, has two presenters. And what is so good about their edition on Brief Encounter is that one of them, Steve Morris, is already convinced of its greatness, while the other, John Rocha, very much remains to be convinced.

By the end of it, I think Morris will have convinced every listener that David Lean's direction, Noel Coward's dialogue and Celia Johnson's acting add up to something quite extraordinary. And I, at least, came away wondering if the hero of the film isn't Johnson's husband Fred.

If you want a little more on Brief Encounter, then try the episode of the BBC's Free Thinking on Why we Need Weepies. Like Cine-Files, it entertains the terrible possibility that Johnson may not be the first woman Trevor Howard has picked up at Milford Junction.

The Comfort Blanket podcast bills itself as:

"talking about the films, TV shows, books or music which people go to again and again to feel safe, happy and welcome."

But there's nothing comfortable about the latest edition, where Naomi Alderman brings along Kind Hearts and Coronets for discussion.

This, after all, is a film in which we are invited to take the part of a mass murderer and do so enthusiastically. And we are left wondering whether, after the film closes, Joan Greenwood's Sibella won't prove to be the deadliest character of all.

My only complaint is that no one on the podcast is aware that the journalist who turns up at the end to ask about Louis's memoirs is played by a young Arthur Lowe.

If you want a little more, then try the Soho Bites Podcast episode on the film Monsieur Ripois, which interviews Joan Greenwood's son Jason Morell.

Richard O'Sullivan: This is Your Life

Richard O'Sullivan is in poor health these days and living in retirement at Brinsworth House, but he had quite a career.

He was never out of the studio as a child star in the 1950s and was the situation comedy heartthrob of the 1970s.

Highlights of his This is Your Life include appearances by Melvyn Hayes, the claimant to the throne of Yugoslavia and a barking-mad Trevor Howard.

Brief Encounter still moves us 70 years on

View image | gettyimages.com

There was a tremendous episode of The Film Programme about Brief Encounter on Radio 4 yesterday. Listen to it on the BBC iPlayer:

To mark the 70th anniversary of Brief Encounter, Francine Stock asks why it still makes grown men and women weep despite the restrained passions, clipped accents and various parodies. 

She enlists the help of fans Moira Buffini, Matthew Sweet, Thomas Dixon, Neil Brand and Antonia Quirke.

The discussion raised the question of whether we can be sure that Trevor Howard has not picked up women at Milford Junction before, I am afraid we cannot.

The Clouded Yellow

Made in 1950, The Clouded Yellow is two films in one. Partly it is a Freudian drama involving music, with echoes of The Dream of Olwen or The Seventh Veil. Jean Simmons plays Sophie, the troubled daughter of a musical family whose mental problems are clearly being deliberately worsened by her relations. Sonia Dresdel (Mrs Baines in The Fallen Idol) is a welcome presence in these scenes.

And, more prominently, it is a spy thriller after the style of John Buchan. Trevor Howard plays a disgraced spy who joins the household and goes on the run with Sophie when she is wrongly suspected of murder.

It is an uneasy combination and Noir of the Week is a little kind to count it as a film noir at all. Fellow Lib Dem Mark Pack is another blogger to have written about Clouded Yellow.

One of the pleasures of Buchan's Richard Hannay adventures is the very British locations in which they take place. I remember one car chase where the villains are shaken off in the upper Tyne Valley.

But in Clouded Yellow the landscapes in which the action is played out are urban: notably Newcastle and Liverpool. Which is why the film is a gem for transport enthusiasts. There are trolley buses waiting outside Newcastle Central station and in Liverpool there is wonderful footage of the Liverpool Overhead Railway and of the docks line that ran beneath it at ground level.

Towards the end of the film Howard intends to sail from Liverpool with Simmons (by then his love interest) disguised as a boy. Perhaps he was inspired by Dr Crippen? The film ends with Simmons being menaced and then rescued amid a striking industrial cityscape.

I have issues with Kenneth More, but in this early role his bumptiousness is well used. He plays a secret service enforcer who disguises himself as an amiable upper-class wastrel.

There is also an interesting cinematic parallel. These Liverpool locations saw a real boy being menaced at much the same time - it is a wonder that the two film crews did not collide.

In The Magnet, a minor Ealing Comedy, William Fox played a small boy in peril in the city. Today, more than 60 years later, as James Fox - father of Laurence Fox and father-in-law of Billie Piper and Richard Ayoade - he is still acting.

TV Film of the Week: The Charge of the Light Brigade

I was thrilled to be offered the role of Captain Nolan. Everything about the film gave it the air of a British classic - the subject matter, though viewed from a deeply unglorious perspective; the principal cast: John Gielgud, Trevor Howard, Harry Andrews and Jill Bennett - a roll-call of dramatic excellence; and, above all, the script.

My part as the renegade young captain was one that I loved and soon learned backwards. The screenplay was beautifully, sparely written by Charles Wood, and I read it with glee. It contained, in my view, some of the finest lines in cinema, dialogue that captures the period and attitudes to war with subtlety, grace and style.

Wood had shown us a whole new approach to dialogue in The Knack and for Charge he wrote in a mystical way, with short sharp sentences and what I call "fly-away buttons".

"He would do that. Would"

Or, from Trevor Howard, "I saw you, sir. Saw you. Black bottle. Drinking beer, sir. In this mess. Saw you."

Lines like this look odd on the page and are tricky to deliver - they can come out like gunfire or stumbles - but in the hands of Gielgud or Howard they were like droplets of pure colour on a backdrop of Victoriana.

So wrote David Hemmings in his memoirs. And it is Hemmings's presence in a star role as much as director Tony Richardson's left-wing politics that date this wonderful film to the 1960s. Look too for the Terry Gilliam-like animations.

And, most of all, listen for Gielgud's line:

"It will be a sad day for England when her armies are officered by men who know too well what they are doing. It smacks of murder."

The Charge of the Light Brigade is on Channel 4 on Friday 7 December at 2 a.m.

Jeremy Kyle and the fall of Western civilisation

Or "I'm just wild about Hari".

Johann Hari has a particularly silly piece in the Independent today in which he argues that Jeremy Kyle and his television show are a force for tolerance and morality.

Love and Garbage has kindly made a lot of good points in reply, saving me the trouble. But there are two I should like to add.

Hari writes:

Who are the villains of these shows, the people the audience find abhorrent? Men who treat women badly. Homophobes. Misogynists. Neglectful parents.

But bullying people into the values that Hari and I agree with is no more admirable than any other kind of bullying. Hari's argument is his usual one that any criticism against popular culture is a sign of prejudice against the white working class. But surely believing that Kyle's technique is the way to win such people over itself betrays a pretty low view of that class?

And he touches on something sacred to this blog when he writes:

Watch the 1945 film Brief Encounter now and it seems like the record of two deeply mentally-ill people. Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson meet on a train, fall in love and realise they are perfect for each other – but they are so deeply repressed they can't even bring themselves to touch, and return to miserable, wasted lives, wondering what might have been.

So a decision to keep to one's marriage vows is now a sign of mental illness? Clearly the fall of Western civilisation is nearer than I thought.

The Way to the Stars

I have been diagnosed with John Mills poisoning, but I taped The Way to the Stars this afternoon and watched it this evening.

It is an impressive film, dealing with the fortunes of an airfield through World War II. There are few scenes of flying, as the loves and lives of the aircrew and local civilians are placed centre stage.

This is one of those films from late in the war where Anglo-American relations are a key theme. Here, though Bonar Colleano does his usual act, of the two tragic central figures it is the Englishman (Michael Redgrave) who is dashing and a little flash, and the American (Douglass Montgomery) who is quiet and home loving.

Incidental pleasures include early appearances by Jean Simmons, Trevor Howard, David Tomlinson and Bill Owen. The Way to the Stars was made in 1945: I doubt if Owen had completed even 10 years in Last of the Summer Wine by then.

The tone of the film is downbeat, even though heroism is certainly displayed by some. This tone is captured in the John Pudney poem that features in the film and gives it its title:

For Johnny

Do not despair
For Johnny-head-in-air;
He sleeps as sound
As Johnny underground.

Fetch out no shroud
For Johnny-in-the-cloud;
And keep your tears
For him in after years.

Better by far
For Johnny-the-bright-star,
To keep your head,
And see his children fed.