I, Claudius: Brian Blessed, Siân Phillips and Derek Jacobi reunited

This reunion was filmed three years ago for Mary Beard's Inside Culture programme.

The Joy of Six 1169

Matthew Pennell explains where HS2 went wrong: "his is the hallmark of populism - a complete failure to deliver, a lot of posturing and constant drama about things under your nose, with no capability to do anything strategic."

Nick Winch pays tribute to his mother Phoebe Winch, who died last week at the age of 92: "She was a member of the Standing committee of ALC then ALDC – and was the organisation’s first President. She would travel around the country with the likes of Roger Hayes and Andrew Stunell running training days for councillors and campaigners, wrote ALC booklets including an informal - and funny - history of the first ten years at the Birchcliffe Centre."

"Northern England has contributed so much to modern Britain and the world. Its economy, though diminished in relative terms from its industrial peak, remains bigger than that of countries such as Argentina, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Norway and Sweden. Northerners have a fascinating story that deserves to be heard." Brian Groom explains why the North matters.

Jonny Thomson examines Dietrich Bonhoeffer's argument that stupidity is more of a threat than evil: "Evil is a puppet master, and it loves nothing so much as the mindless puppets who enable it - be they in the general public or inside the corridors of power."

Simon Perks on work and life and balance.

I miss the days when there was a rich ecology of blogs. Matthew Cooper had one devoted to critique of the works of the historian Dominic Sandbrook that flourished for five years from 2012.

The Bell at East Langton will reopen on Friday

At last some good news. The Leicester Mercury reports:

A pub in an idyllic village near Market Harborough which shut during the pandemic is preparing to reopen under new management. The Bell, in Main Street, East Langton, will be welcoming customers again from this Friday, October 13.

The pub, which dates back to the 17th Century, has been taken over by Neil and Steph Price who also run The George at Ashley.

While scholars agree that the model for Bonkers Hall is Nevill Holt Hall near Medbourne, East Langton is most often cited as the inspiration for the village to which Lord Bonkers often refers.

My hero J.W. Logan MP lived at East Langton Grange and established a cottage home in the village for the children of men who were killed on his railway works. I had already invented Lord Bonkers' Home for Well-Behaved Orphans when I discovered this.

So The Bell must surely be the model for the Bonkers' Arms. It has a lovely beer garden in front and Mr Logan's cricket ground is across the road.

I wish the new management all the best in reviving what was until recently a thriving pub.

Whitechapel: Where the Overground is under the Underground

Jago Hazzard untangles the history of the railways of this corner of London.

And there's a great first comment below the video on YouTube:

The most amazing thing that only track people would know is when you are in the Brunel Tunnel at night when it is really quiet (lines under Engineering possession of course), you can hear the props of boats on the Thames as they pass above you.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page.

New role for Brian Paddick - and a note on his family history

[Later. In fact Brian has been appointed as a non-executive director of the Met. The official press release is online.]

Lib Dem Voice reports that the Liberal Democrat peer Brian Paddick is to become a non-executive adviser to the Metropolitan Police and will sit as a crossbencher in the House of Lords for the duration of this appointment.

Congratulations to him - I'm sure he will give good advice.

This story gives me an excuse to revisit a favourite piece of trivia: Brian Paddick is a relation of the actor Hugh Paddick, who is best remembered today as a member of the cast of the radio comedy Round the Horne.

As the graphic below, which I salvaged from a defunct family history site via the Wayback Machine, shows, Brian and Hugh Paddick are second cousins once removed.

You can hear Hugh playing Julian to Kenneth Williams' Sandy above.

Welly Telly: When Wellingborough had its own television station

Curious British Telly had a post a couple of days ago on The Curious Tale of Bristol Channel, and that has led me to the blog Prodge's Views and the even more curious tale of Wellingborough Cablevision.

In 1972, Christopher Chataway, the minister of posts and telecommunications, announced plans for five local cable channels. They were to be in Bristol, Greenwich, Sheffield, Swindon and Wellingborough.

As Prodge's Views says, with admirable honesty:

What strikes me about Wellingborough's foray into this early broadcasting experiment is that the town certainly doesn't strike you as a media-savvy environment. It's an average-sized market town, dwarfed by at least two or three other places in the county. 

It would be understandable if its bigger brother, Northampton, had gone in for this venture, or at least Corby or Kettering.

Nevertheless, Wellingborough Cablevision - soon to be affectionately known as 'Welly Telly' - began to be piped into homes across the town on 24 March 1974. The people to see if you wanted to sign up for the service were Mobile Radio in Midland Road.

Prodge has been able to find little information on the station, though he does have a friend who remembers appearing on it live as part of a children's choir.

So let me do my bit for Welly Telly scholarship by quoting an article from The Stage (6 February 1975):

Wellingborough goes live 

At a time when the cable television experiment is going through a sticky patch the companies in both Greenwich and Bristol have expressed doubts as to whether they will be able to continue for much longer, even at reduced pressure, Cablevision (Wellingborough) Ltd at Wellingborough has increased its facilities to enable live programmes to be transmitted from its studio. 

The station, which began operating in March of last year, has 4,500 subscribing homes. Until recently it has been transmitting recorded programmes between 5.30 and 6.30 daily and repeating them at noon on the following day. From January 27, there has been a live transmission between 8 and 10 pm every Monday evening. 

A spokesman for Cablevision said this week, "We are now able to include live interviews and discussions in our Monday programming and this has added a lot of excitement to our work. All our programmes are planned and put on by groups in the community and the extra time and facilities will enable us to increase the scope of our productions. 

"We have a bye election coming up soon and we shall be able to make our first real contribution to the political scene on the previous Monday."

That by-election must have been for the local council, as there was no parliamentary contest in Wellingborough that year. And the station was to close on 24 March 1975 after exactly a year of broadcasting.

But keep your eyes open in the town. Prodge quotes one resident:

"If you know what you are looking for around Wellingborough, you can still see cables running along the walls of houses, just below the gutters, and a few booster amplifiers for the old 'piped TV' system.

Drunk man arrested with axe down trousers 'had no idea where it came from'

Honestly, it could happen to anyone, as the judges remarked.

The Leicester Mercury wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The Joy of Six 1168

Andrew Page thinks the media be overestimating the importance of Labour's victory in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election.

"When a child arrives in need of a placement it is a rush to the phones to find somewhere that can provide for the needs of that child and the net is cast far and wide across the country. As smaller providers are closing or being bought by larger concerns this very bespoke pool reduces and the sector can become a bidding war for any remaining places available." Chris Carubia, deputy leader of the Lib Dem group on Wirral Council, makes the case for government regulation of childcare placement costs.

Euan McColm on the Tory nonsense over 15-minute cities: "Andrew Bowie entered the House of Commons as a politician of the moderate centre ground, a man regarded even by opponents as an honest broker. I wonder if he ever imagined he'd one day be reduced to peddling conspiracy theories in order to win the support of reactionary right-wingers."

Why are true stories about active police investigations going untold in the media? Charlotte Tobitt explains.

"This inability to make pro-active decisions for the good of the game, because they may upset or disturb the privileges of an elite minority, is typical of the game’s administration over the last century. Moreover, this behaviour explains why the recommendations of previous reports ... have never been enacted." Duncan Stone doubts that the England and Wales Cricket Board's ambition to make cricket Britain's 'most inclusive sport' will be fulfilled.

Philip Concannon takes us inside the restoration of Michael Powell's 1960 film Peeping Tom.

Genesis: Your Own Special Way

To a poor boy from the backstreets of Market Harborough who relied on Radio Luxemburg and Radio One for his music, Genesis's I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) was like a song from another planet.

It was a track from their 1973 album Selling England by the Pound and reached number 21 in the UK singles chart the following year.

Your Own Special Way comes from 1976's Wind & Wuthering. It failed to trouble the top 40 in the UK, but it was a similarly minor hit in the US too.

This is Genesis at a transitional stage. Peter Gabriel has left the band, but its full philcollinsisation is yet to take place.

For some reason I thought of Your Own Special Way the other day, after quite possibly not having heard it since it was released in 1977.

Malcolm Saville on Children's Hour: More about Elaine Macnamara, the second Dickie Morton

A thousand thanks to the reader who left a comment directing me to a Radio Who's Who for 1947 and the entry for Elaine Macnamara, the actress who played Dickie Morton in two 1946 dramatisations of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine books.

The most I could establish was that she had specialised in playing children's roles in BBC Radio plays, but the Who's Who entry tells us about her earlier career:

Started in ballet on the Continent, and was for three years with Andre Chariot at the Vaudeville Theatre, London. Appeared in many important parts in Repertory at the Festival Theatre, Cambridge. Before the war did much work in television, and later, as a war job,  became a programme engineer on the staff of the BBC.

It then gives us chapter and verse on her later speciality:

Left the BBC in April, 1945, to become free-lance actress, since when has broadcast as Florence Dombey in “ Dombey and Son,” Francesca in “ The Seventh Veil,” and in many other important roles. Can simulate the child voices of either sex from babyhood upward, and, apart from being well-known as a straight actress, has built up a separate reputation as a portrayer of child characters. So realistic are these that a Theatrical Producer recently tried to book a little boy he heard in a schools’ programme - the “little boy” was Elaine Macnamara!

The photograph of Macnamara above comes from the Who's Who.

One of the many things I learnt from years of writing press releases from psychology papers is that little boys speak with a deeper voice than little girls, even though there is no physiological reason why they should do so.

The Comic Strip Presents: A 41st anniversary celebration

A 41st anniversary is a milestone for any comedy troupe. Here actors from The Comic Strip Presents - Peter Richardson, Nigel Wallace, Alexei Sayle, Gary Beadle and Julia T. Wallace - remember the good old days.

I don't remember much about Gary Beadle, while Julia T. Wallace was to find fame in 1986 with The Life and Loves of a She Devil.

One question remains: why wasn't Peter Richardson in The Young Ones rather than that other bloke no one can remember?

Mirror publishes list of 14 seats where Labour supporters can help defeat the Tories by voting Lib Dem

From today's Mirror:

The Compass campaign group has published details of 14 constituencies where the Lib Dems are best placed to topple the Conservatives - and urged Labour supporters to switch allegiance

Tactical voting campaigners have revealed how Labour supporters switching their loyalty in 14 'unwinnable' seats could help oust the Tories.

So the Mirror isn't yet backing such tactical voting, just putting the idea out there, you understand.

The Mirror is remembered as having influenced Labour supporters to vote tactically in the 1997 general election, but its readership was higher then and there were fewer sources of information and 'alternative facts'. 

Still it's good to see the paper is making moves in that direction again, though I can't find anything about this on the Compass website.

But you want to know the list of 14 seats, don't you?

• Carshalton and Wallington
• Cheadle
• Cheltenham
• Esher and Walton
• Guildford
• Hazel Grove
• Lewes
• St Ives
• South Cambridgeshire
• Sutton and Cheam
• Wimbledon
• Winchester
• Woking
• Wokingham

Researchers baffled as tuna spotted doing 70mph on the M5

This fishy story wins Plymouth Live our Headline of the Day Award. Well done, everybody.

Another traveller has found a portal to the Bonkers Hall Estate

Embed from Getty Images

An issue of Fortean Times generally provides something of interest for this blog. And the November one has hit the jackpot in the shape of another person who may have found the Bonkers Hall Estate.

That is not an easy thing to do. I once wrote that:

Growing up in Market Harborough, it was hard to ignore Lord Bonkers. If you climbed any of the hills that ringed the town then the slender spire of St Asquith’s, the gaunt pinnacles of the Home for Well-Behaved Orphans and, most impressive of all, the towers, domes and follies of Bonkers Hall and its grounds, would dominate the view to the North. ... 

As a teenager, armed with a water bottle and Ordnance Survey map, I cycled out to find Bonkers Hall many times, only to return defeated on every occasion. Those towers and domes seemed clear enough from a distance, but when you neared them strange things began to happen.

Rounding the final bend that would surely bring you face to face with the Hall, you found that it was not there after all but somewhere over your shoulder instead. Turn your bike round to complete the pursuit and the same thing would happen. The harder you pedalled towards the place, the more quickly it seemed to retreat.

Now a correspondent to Fortean Times remembers another eerie experience in this part of the world.

Clifton Stewart says that he has been a part-time lecture at De Montfort University for many years, and commutes along the A47, mostly through Rutland. A landmark on this route is the Old Rutland Inn. Now a private house, it stands beside the road near the village of Belton-in-Rutland.

Stewart recalls making the journey home on a really foggy evening in autumn or winter:

On reaching the Old Rutland Inn, I knew I was making good progress. Passing this location, the road veers left and then right, and suddenly ... the roads were no longer bounded by country hedges and fences. 

Instead on either side of the road it was as if there was a row of houses, living room windows bleeding light and street lights illuminating from above where I knew there were none. They were indistinct, almost but not quite present given the dense fog conditions, set back from the road a little. 

As I drove through, my brain was screaming that this wasn't right, the shouldn't be there. Part of me wanted to stop but soon it was over and the fog and the darkness closed around the car once more and I kept going,

The conclusion is obvious: the Old Rutland Inn is a portal to the Bonkers Hall Estate and he was driving through the village. The Bonkers' Arms and St Asquith's, like the Home for Well-Behaved Orphans, would have been obscured by the fog.

The Joy of Six 1167

"When you look at the facts in the cold light of day; Labour’s plan will raise much needed money at a time when state schools are quite literally crumbling. It will not lead to a mass exodus or overwhelm the state sector, and when even Michael Gove thought taxing private schools was a good idea, it’s hard to argue against it." Emma Monk backs moves to curb the tax breaks received by private schools.

Alistair Carmichael talks to Holyrood Magazine about, among other things, Dolly Parton and the Dalai Lama.

Angelina Osborne on why Black British history matters.

"In just one year, bans have increased by a third, with a total of 3,362 bans in the 2022-23 school year. The sharp rise in book bans is largely targeted at books with LGBTQ+ content, characters or authors; books about race or racism; and books about physical abuse or with themes of grief or death." Katie Dancey-Downs explains the need for Banned Books Week in the US.

Terence Towles Canote writes about one of his favourite British films: "David Puttnam had good reason for wanting Bill Forsyth to see Whisky Galore! The producer had been researching the Scottish oil industry, in particular the oil boom in Shetland in the early Seventies. What struck David Puttnam is that the Shetlanders actually welcomed the oil companies, in hopes that the large amount of money generated by oil would in turn help them. David Puttnam then talked Bill Forsyth into developing the idea for what would become Local Hero."

A short introductory lecture on T.H. White, one of my favourite authors, from Gabriel Schenk.

The New Statesman goes to the Liberal Democrat conference

Fiona was busy, so the New Statesman sent Freddie to see the Liberal Democrats meet in Bournemouth. This is what he found.

It's not deep analysis, but the participants in this podcast do say some nice things about us.

John Rogers, Coldrum Long Barrow and the lost village of Dode

From the blurb on YouTube - note the hint of A Canterbury Tale:

Our walk starts at Halling Station and proceeds through Upper Halling, over the Pilgrims Way and onto a chalk ridge and pick up the North Downs Way. 

We make our way to the lost village of Dode that was wiped out by the Black Death in 1349. All that remains now is the chapel that has stood on the site for over 900 years. 

From here we return to the North Downs Way and onwards to Coldrum Long Barrow that was built over 1000 years before Stonehenge and is the best surviving example of the Medway Megaliths. 

We then follow the footpaths to the villages of Ryarsh and Birling before catching the train back to London from Snodland. 

John has a Patreon account to support his videos, and he blogs at The Lost Byway.

Brexit ultras waged campaign against the science journal Nature over covid vaccines

Computer Weekly has published a long and extraordinary story by Duncan Campbell, Bill Goodwin and Guy Taylor:

One of the world’s most prestigious general science journals, Nature, was the target of a two-year-long sustained and virulent secret attack by a conspiratorial group of extreme Brexit lobbyists with high-level political, commercial and intelligence connections, according to documents and correspondence examined by Computer Weekly and Byline Times.

The group attempted to have Nature and its staff put under surveillance and investigated by MI5, MI6, the CIA, Mossad, and Japanese and Australian intelligence agencies. They met Cabinet minister Michael Gove and later asked him to arrange phone taps and electronic surveillance. One member of the group led intrusive investigations into the intimate personal life and background circumstances of senior Nature staff the group suspected of “extreme Sinophile views”.

When their campaign flopped and a Covid vaccine promoted by the group failed to reach any form of clinical testing, the group arranged for unfounded accusations against Nature magazines and staff to be published by the Daily Telegraph and on other right wing news sites. They called themselves the “Covid Hunters”. Their allegations against science reporting helped fuel an explosion in “lab leak” claims on right-wing conspiracy sites.

Pushing their “extraordinary, true story” to a top Hollywood producer in 2020, the group wrote self-adulatory biographies and explained how fate had brought them together (see box: Covid Hunter heroes who became victims). The movie proposal portrayed them as victims of imagined Chinese-led information operations, aided and abetted by an imagined network of communist fellow travellers in the west. The movie idea “has all the ingredients of a major hit”, they blagged.

The producer did not write back. No movie was made. The truth was that their campaign helped flame divisive and damaging rows, potentially hindering international Covid research.

Now read on.

The three Dickies: More about Malcolm Saville on Children's Hour

We've seen that the third actor to play Malcolm Saville's child character (and my first literary hero) Dickie Morton was tried for murder at the Old Bailey as a young man.

That was Cavan Malone, who was acquitted within minutes by the jury on the grounds of self-defence. He continued acting for some years and played the first bridegroom in Coronation Street - he married Annie Walker's daughter - but was to die in 1982 aged only 45.

But who were the first two actors to play Dickie? 

The second Dickie was a woman. Elaine Macnamara took the part in adaptations of The Gay Dolphin Adventure and Seven White Gates, which were both first broadcast in 1946.

She had started acting in BBC Radio productions the previous year and did so regularly until 1961. As far as I can tell from the cast lists, she always played children - both boys and girls.

Besides a couple of stage appearances in Scotland before the war, that is all I can discover about her.

[Later. Thanks to a reader, I can tell you more about Elaine Macnamara.]

BBC Radio's common practice now, as it seems to have been when radio drama began, is to have boys' parts played by boys. But after the war it was more usual to give such roles to an adult actress.

Why that was the case may be explained by the first boy to play Dickie. 

That was Peter Mullins, who played him in an adaptation of Mystery at Wichend broadcast in October 1943,

The cast list reveals a couple of familiar names. Harry Fowler, the chirpy cockney evacuee in Went the Day Well? and star of Hue and Cry, sounds just right for Tom Ingles. David Morton, however, was played by Charles Hawtrey.

Charles Hawtrey?

Before you decide this dramatisation must have been a sort of Carry On Up the Lone Pine - and Hattie Jacques would have made a wonderful Miss Ballinger - I had better point out that as a young man Hawtrey often played children on the radio and even on film.

In 1943 Peter Mullins was becoming a regular for the BBC, acting in everything from Children’s Hour serials to Marlowe's Edward II.

You can see Mullins in a clip above playing Bruno, a German Jewish refugee boy, in Mr Emmanuel, a 1944 propaganda film. Perhaps he's not helped by the German accent he was obliged to adopt.

As small boys will, Mullins got older, with the results that he played the older brother David Morton in the two 1945 adaptations where Elaine MacNamara played Dickie, He was also Guy Standing when Children’s Hour dramatised Malcolm Saville’s Redshank’s Warning in 1948.

But it was another of his roles that may have led to the BBC to conclude that it was less trouble to cast women as boys. Charles Hawtrey and Peter Mullins also played brothers in the first series of Norman and Henry Bones - Boy Detectives, which was again broadcast as part of  Children's Hour in 1943.

This proved hugely popular and was to run to more than 120 episodes, with the result that Peter Mullins was soon replaced by Patricia Hayes, presumably because he didn't sound like the younger brother any more.

I remember reading about the casting of Billy Barratt in the BBC television drama Responsible Child a few years ago - I raved about his performance at the time,

One of the challenges was that they had to leave it late to find their young lead, because if you cast the perfect 12-year-old six months before filming starts, he may no longer be perfect when he turns up on the first day. 

Peter Mullins went on acting for BBC Radio into the early 1950s, by then playing adult roles in the classics.

There are two Peter Mullins on the IMDb. Peter Mullins (I) has half a dozen credits for children’s roles in the 1940s, including Caravan (1946), which features the future DJ Pete Murray, and another Malcolm Saville story, Trouble at Townsend, from the same year.

He also has a couple of credits as a stage manager for TV plays from 1952. This, surely, is the Peter Mullins who played Dickie Morton.

Peter Mullins (II) on IMDb is an art director and production designer, with credits including Where Eagles Dare and a couple of Pink Panther films. He worked continuously from 1947 (when he was credited as an apprentice) until 2001.

But if you look at his entry carefully, you will see that this Peter Mullins also has a couple of credits as a child actor in the 1940s - for Hue and Cry (1947) and The Boys in Brown (1949).

As it's not such a common name, I'm happy to conclude that Peter Mullins (I) and Peter Mullins (II) are the same person. Which means that the original radio Dickie Morton is still alive at the age of 92.

The Joy of Six 1166

"If the introduction of proportional representation is a Lib Dem red line, then the party needs to work out now how it would secure the political commitment to change, and the process for achieving it." Jess Sargeant says the Liberal Democrats must learn from their failure to achieve constitutional reform during the Coalition years.

Daniel Dennett is interviewed by Taylor McNeil about his career as a philosopher and his hopes and fears for the future: "AI systems, like all software, are replicable with high fidelity and unbelievably fast mutations. If you have high fidelity replication and mutations, then you have evolution, and evolution can get out of hand, as it has in the past many times."

"It isn’t brave to say you hate classical music so much as bog-standard normal. State publicly that you don’t like classical music, and you’re cool, funny and 'relatable'. State publicly that you don’t like popular music, and you’re a weirdo or a snob." Alexandra Wilson dissects a Twitter row.

Christopher Hilton on Benjamin Britten as a campaigner against railway branch line closures.

PsychoNottingham investigates one of the city's lost cinemas.

"An emerging leitmotif in much of Aiken’s subsequent work for children makes its appearance here — the resourcefulness of its young protagonists against the machinations of adults who wish them ill. It’s not surprising that Wolves has shown itself a popular choice with younger readers: it has the right amount of jeopardy, a bit of safe distance is created by its being set in the 19th century, and expectations are high that, like a fairy tale, all will come right in the end." Calmgrove offers an appreciation of Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.