Ronnie Lane and Eric Clapton at the Drum and Monkey
 |
| The Drum and Monkey today |
I have just listened to the BBC Radio Shropshire programme on Ronnie Lane and Eric Clapton that I blogged about on Monday. (It was broadcast today at lunchtime.)
Far from exploding the myth that you could once hear rock and roll aristocracy playing at remote Shropshire pubs it proved the stories were true.
It also includes a rare interview with Ronnie Lane's widow Kate. Well done, Johnty O'Donnell.
You can listen to the programme for the next month on the BBC website. It occupies the second hour of Paul Shuttleworth's show.
There are also some photographs from the most celebrated concert at the Drum and Monkey on the BBC Radio Shropshire Facebook page.
Noosha Fox: Georgina Bailey
A little bit of Continental sophistication from 1977 which reached no. 31 in the British charts.
Some sources claim it was banned by the BBC, but as this video comes from an episode of Top of the Pops that seems unlikely.
Noosha Fox was originally the singer with the band Fox. They had three top 20 hits, but she was less successful as a solo artist.
She is also the mother of the doctor and science journalist Ben Goldacre. Sadly, she was to busy with her music career to teach him to comb his hair.
Karl Popper interviewed on Channel 4 in 1988 - part 5
And so to the third and final programme in this series, where the interviewer is Anthony Quinton.
Like the other programmes, this one is split across two videos.
Watch part 1
Watch part 2
Watch part 3
Watch part 4
Lord Bonkers' Diary: An alternative chameleon
An alternative chameleon
A sombre day: the moving television brings news of the deaths of both Pierre Boulez and Christy O’Connor Jnr. I am confident that they will go down in the annals of the game as one of the great Ryder Cup pairings.
To cheer myself up, I take a party of particularly Well-Behaved Orphans to Oakham Zoo. The consensus on the charabanc is that we want to see the chameleons.
As is the way with such creatures, they rather blend into the background. I am struck, however, by one that spends its time ranting about how much it hates “Thatcher”. I ask the keeper why it does this. “Oh,” comes the reply, “it’s an alternative chameleon”.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary
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.
Lord Bonkers' Diary: Cooking hedgehogs for Nick Clegg
Cooking hedgehogs for Nick Clegg
One does not have memories of last year’s general election campaign so much as flashbacks, but I do recall visiting a hedgehog sanctuary with poor Clegg and Paddy Ashplant. While Clegg was being shown how the inmates are cared for and educated, Ashplant took me to one side and confessed that he used to eat the creatures when he was in the Special Boat Service.
Having invited Clegg to dinner this evening, I hit upon the happy idea of reminding him of those days by serving hedgehog. Cook is not keen – “nasty, flea-ridden things that don’t belong in a Christian kitchen” – and claims not to know how to manage “all they prickles,” so I enlist the help of the Elves of Rockingham Forest, who quite charm her. They tell us that the trick is to bake the beasts in clay so that when they are done to a turn you simply break the clay open and then peel it and the spines clean off. The Elves also agree to catch the hedgehogs for us using high elven magic (or possibly Pedigree Chum).
I have no doubt that the evening will prove a success and that our hedgehog recipe will appear in the next Liberal Democrat Cookbook alongside Pressed Tonge and Norman Lamb Hotpot.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary
Six of the Best 572
Michael Oakeshott is an important 20th-century British Conservative thinker. Aurelian Craiutu reviews his notebooks.
Like Ray Gosling and Alan Moore, Jeremy Seabrook is a product of working-class Northampton. Here he writes of growing up gay in the town in the years after World War II.
"Robert Mitchum considers The Night of the Hunter one of his most impressive roles. Gentle, subtle and seductive, but deranged and psychotic, Mitchum’s character is one of the scariest villains in film history." Cinephilia & Beyond on the only film directed by Charles Laughton.
"It was while working on Time Out’s annual pub guide in 2000 that I heard the tale of the Camden castles. A reviewer claimed that there were once four Camden pubs with castle in their name – the Edinboro, Windsor, Dublin and Pembroke – and these had originally been built for navvies digging Regent’s Canal." Peter Watts gently explodes a myth.
A witness statement by a victim of Greville Janner
Now, judging by the headlines about Lord Bramall and John Inman, the same papers are incensed if the rich and famous are even investigated.
The truth, no doubt, is somewhere in between.
So to remind ourselves that such people can be guilty of such offences, let's look at one of the witness statements alleging abuse by Greville Janner.
It was reproduced in the Daily Mail and on The Needle in April 2015 and begins:
From my earliest childhood I never knew my parents and believe that I was in the care of the Leicestershire Local Authority from when I was about two weeks of age. I recall that I was fostered by a family called Wilkinson ... until I was about seven years of age when I went to live at The Cottage Homes at Countesthorpe, which was a Local Authority owned establishment.
Shrewsbury in colour in 1959
 |
Click on the image above to go to the film on the BFI site.
