The Rio Olympics should be postponed or moved

Yesterday the papers were full of the news that the World Health Organization had been sent an open letter signed by 150 health experts calling for this summer's Olympics to be moved from Rio de Janeiro or postponed.

The experts fear the virus could spread more rapidly around the world because of the influx of Olympic visitors to the Brazilian city, which has a high incidence of the disease Zika.

Today, as I expected, the great and good are telling us not to worry our little heads.

BBC News reports:

Senior WHO official Bruce Aylward told the BBC that risk assessment plans were in place, and reiterated that there was no need to delay the Games. 

The mayor of Rio said disease-carrying mosquitoes were being eradicated.

I expected it because I have seen Jaws (and Peter Benchley had obviously seen An Enemy of the People).

It all sounds very dangerous to me. Just take a look at the opening titles of the original Survivors series above.

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Leicester Oral History Trail 2: Theatre Royal

The Theatre Royal used to have entrances on both Horsefair and the Market Place.

It closed in 1957 and was demolished the following year.

Read more about it on The Music Hall and Theatre History Site.

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This Land: A Pentabus Theatre play on fracking

You may remember (how could you forget?) my day trip to Sheringham to see the Lone Pine Club.

That play was staged by Pentabus Theatre. Their latest production, This Land, looks at fracking and is currently touring the country.

It has already played Bishop's Castle and Snailbeach, and will soon be over in Northern Ireland before returning to the mainland.

You can find a full list of performances on the Pentabus website, where you will also find this video.

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An evening with the legendary Arthur Brown

I have just got back from seeing Arthur Brown at the Harborough Theatre. The evening was a mixture of stories and performance theatre about his music career, all interspersed with songs.

He is best known for his 1968 number one hit Fire, which was an early melding of pop and theatre. But there is more to him than that. Finding himself treated as a guru by some because of the themes of his songs, he felt a fraud and has dedicated his life since to seeking enlightenment.

And tonight the way brought him to Market Harborough.

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This remake of The Sound of Music looks rubbish

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Round the Horne: 50th Anniversary Tour

You'll have to hurry to catch it, because it closes on 12 March, but I can thoroughly recommend the Albany Theatre Company's Round The Horne: 50th Anniversary Tour at the London Comedy Museum.

In the 1960s the radio comedy Round the Horne was extraordinarily popular and this production puts you in the place of the audience at the recording of a couple of episodes of the show.

Much of the script was filth (if only in the listener's mind) but the writers Barry Took and Marty Feldman got away with it because the show was centred on the urbane, establishment presence of Kenneth Horne.

Here are a couple of examples of the humour. Kenneth Williams as Rambing Syd Rumpo singing The Ballad of the Woggler's Moulie above and the opening of the sketch Bona Law below...

HORNE: Can you help me? I've erred. 

SANDY: Well, we've all erred, ducky. I mean, it's common knowledge, ennit, Jule? 

HORNE: Will you take my case? 

JULIAN: Well, it depends on what it is. We've got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time.

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The Stains: Bored

I came across a tweet the other day that suggested the actor David Hemmings had lived briefly in Shrewsbury High Street. That is hard to reconcile with what I know of his life, but it did lead me to this record.

The Stains were a Shrewsbury punk band whose original vocalist was Dom Estos. And Dom Estos was Dominic Hemmings, the adopted son of David Hemmings.

His mother was Genista Ouvry, who acted under the name Jenny Lewes. Dominic had already been born when Hemmings met her during  a two-week repertory engagement in Leicester in 1960 and they fell in love. They married shortly afterwards and Hemmings adopted Dominic, but the marriage did not last.

A few more snippets...

The band turn up in a letter to the Guardian by Mark Webb in 2010:

I was amazed to read of Kevin ­Rowland's antipathy towards ironed creases in jeans ... In the 70s, playing drums in Dom Estos And The Stains, we got a gig supporting Dexys ­Midnight Runners at Shrewsbury Music Hall. Dexys got the bigger dressing room, but we had the electric socket. A knock on the door and Mr Rowland appears: "Hello, lads. Can I plug in my iron to do my trousers?"

Dom Estos appears still to be making music, under the name Dominic Ouvry, as part of Liquid Vision.

And a little googling suggests Genista Ouvry used the name Jenny Lewes because Lewes was her mother's maiden name.

Not only that: it suggests she was a direct descendant of George Henry Lewes, Victorian man of letters and partner of George Eliot (or Mary Ann Evans).

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Kenneth Branagh and Rupert Everett in Another Country

In the autumn of 1982 I was unemployed and living in Market Harborough. To cheer myself up I went down to London to stay for a few days with an old friend from university.

One of the things we did was go to see a play called Another Country at the Queen's Theatre. Which means that I saw the West End debut of Kenneth Branagh.

It was a tribute to him that, though Rupert Everett was a more flamboyant actor playing a more flamboyant role, it was Branagh we talked about afterwards.

You can see the two of them in this Newsnight report.

Incidentally, though the film of Another Country was good, the play was much better. In it, all the sex and the beating took place off stage, which made them all the more powerful.

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The Boxmoor Playhouse and letters about custard

I once wrote of Boxmoor County Primary School:

I was very happy at Boxmoor, though in one way adversity there helped make me a Liberal. The dinners were cooked elsewhere and brought to the school, and they were indescribably awful. (My mother let me come home for dinner after a while.) And if you didn't want custard with your pudding, you had to have a letter from home.

I now regard this as an early introduction to the absurdities of socialism.

That was the old Boxmoor County Primary in St John's Road, which was demolished long ago.

We had our dinners in the church hall next door. That building still stands, though it is now called The Boxmoor Playhouse. (There appears to be a new hall built recently next to the church.)

We also held fetes in the hall and I once gave a well-received Innkeeper in the school nativity play.

It's not quite the Saville Theatre, but I am glad to see that somewhere I trod the boards is still thriving.

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Six of the Best 570

Ed Miliband has an article on inequality in the London Review of Books.

"If you criticise the party of government, you become a pariah - all of a sudden, you're faced with a deluge of SNP warriors to defend yourself against. What is becoming of democracy in Scotland if this is the situation that we have been left in?" Jordan Daly on life in post-referendum Scotland.

David Brindle talks to Brian Rix, who was 92 this week, about his two careers: farceur and activist for people with learning disabilities.

Labour peer Lord Berkeley warns against a pause in Network Rail's work to protect and improve the route to the South West.

Roger Mills introduces us Lilian Bowes Lyon, the Queen Mother's rebel cousin.

The Liverbirds were Britain's first all-female rock band. Paul Fitzgerald describes how they found fame in Hamburg.

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NY rat dies in freak accident just as her Broadway career was flourishing

Thanks to a nomination from a reader, the Independent wins Headline of the Day.

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Sheila Sim 1922-2016

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The actress Sheila Sim died yesterday at the age of 93.

As long as there are awkwardly romantic Englishmen she will be remembered as the star of A Canterbury Tale.

The photograph above shows her wedding to Richard Attenborough in 1945.

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Alan Rickman's brother is a member of Harborough District Council

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Alan Rickman's sad death last week revealed that his brother Michael is a member of Harborough District Council.

The Leicester Mercury has published a short article, quoting his tweets, where he thanks fans for their kind messages and says simply and movingly "I am broken."

Michael Rickman is the Conservative member for the Nevill ward, which includes the villages around Hallaton and Medbourne.

It is named after Nevill Holt, which most literary theorists now believe to be the inspiration for Bonkers Hall.

Back in the 1980s the SDP's only county councillor in Leicestershire was the brother of the film director Stephen Frears.

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Barbara Windsor and Murray Melvin talk about Sparrows Can't Sing

Joan Littlewood was a renowned theatre director but made only one feature film. Sparrows Can’t Sing was released in 1962.

Here two of the film's stars, Barbara Windsor and Murray Melvin, talk about the experience of making it.

Among the subjects they touch on are working with Littlewood, the Kray twins, Stephen Lewis (Blakey from On the Buses, who wrote the play on which the film was based) and Queenie Watts.

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The opening night of Oliver!

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9 July 1968 - Many belong to a species of stage boy, only related to childhood by their small size. All the other attributes of boyhood - youth, gaiety, innocence - have long since gone. Squat creatures, seemingly weaned on Woodbines, they are the boys who have been in Oliver! Lionel Bart has cut a swathe through the nation's youth like the 1914-18 war. They are the new Lost Generation.
Alan Bennett Writing Home (1994)

There is at present a good documentary from 2002 on the BBC iPlayer about the opening night of Lionel Bart's 'Oliver!' It includes interviews with the late Ron Moody and Tony Robinson, who was one of Fagin's gang.

I suspect a young Robinson is second from left in the photograph above. Holding the cake is Keith Hamshere, the original Oliver, who want on to become one of the leading stills photographers in the film industry.

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The Byrds: Chestnut Mare

This has the Byrds' characteristic jingle-jangle sound and there turns out to be an interesting history behind it.

Chestnut Mare was written by Roger McGuinn and Jacques Levy for Gene Tryp, a proposed country rock musical based on Peer Gynt. That show never materialised and the song was included on the Byrds' Untitled album.

A shorter version made no. 19 in the UK singles chart early in 1971, though I am not convinced I remember hearing it from then,

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Six of the Best 558

Labour moderates don't need a new party, they need new ideas and new purpose, argues Jonathan Todd.

Mike Smithson says that if you want the opinion polls to tell you who will win the next election you should look at the ratings of the leaders not the parties.

"Gideon Haigh summed it up in The Australian. 'The West Indies used to be baaaaaaad. Now they’re simply bad'." Peter Miller on the decline of a great test power.

Steve Galloway celebrates the restoration of Walmgate Bar and the east end of York Minster.

Inside the Box has an audio interview with Jonathan Stephens, who played Chubby Joe ("Going home for the holidays, ha ha what?") in the TV adaptation of A Box of Delights.

"Malcolm ... travelled the length and breadth of the country knocking them for six with his comedic performances as 'The Woman Who Knows', Nell Gwyn, Boudica, and the epitome of femininity the fabled 'Gibson Girl'. Flashbak on the unexpected career of the brother of Scott of the Antartic.

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Vanished Leicester: Palace Theatre, Belgrave Gate

Here it is being demolished in 1959.

A website devoted to music hall and theatre history - www.arthurlloyd.co.uk - describes the theatre in happier days:

The Palace Theatre of Varieties as it was named in 1901 was built on the site of the former Floral Hall in Belgrave Gate, Leicester, for Oswald Stoll and was designed by the renowned Theatre architect Frank Matcham in an elaborate Moresque style. 

The Theatre opened on Monday 17th June 1901 being a three tier Theatre consisting of the Fauteils, stalls and pit on the ground floor, above which were the Grand circle, Upper circle and Gallery. There were three stage boxes each side of the proscenium arch, one at stalls level and two in the dress circle, plus 7 rear circle boxes. The opening capacity was 3,500 people, it being, in 1901, the largest Theatre outside London ... 

In the centre of the stage was a large wrought iron animal cage which could be raised and lowered from underneath the stage by hydraulics for wild animal shows. 

A remarkable feature of the Theatre however, was the crush room (waiting area) being a semi circular area with a glass and iron domed roof being a Winter Garden with rockeries, fountains and dripping wells, all overlooked by a rustic smoking balcony. The rockeries representing Derbyshire and Peak district rock formations designed by Clapham and West of Didsbury.

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