h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Kate Spade was a sad loss.

http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article213340189.html

The Village Voice
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/aug/31/the-village-voice-ceases-publication-after-63-years

I got the name for my furniture business by plagiarising and slightly changing the name of someone who advertised in The Voice. They were Lumbersmith, we were Timbersmiths.

I wood never have thought of that.

Liz Fraser
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/sep/10/liz-fraser-obituary

Ah, she was gorgeous

Fenella Fielding
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/sep/12/fenella-fielding-obituary

She too was gorgeous, and that voice

I saw the original "Avengers" series, but don;t remember Ms Fraser in it. I can't remember seeing any of her movies. "I'm all right jack" came out in 59, when I was 11. Chances are I wasn't in any position to see that film then.

Fenella Fielding was fantastic. She's in my 2nd favourite Carry On film "do you mind if I smoke?"

Never fails to crack me up, that scene. I was thinking that she was the voice of the Black Queen in Barbarella, but that was Joan Greenwood, whose voice was every bit as as Fenella's.

What's your favourite Carry On, by the way?

Carry On Cleo - that line (you know the one I mean) is possibly the best line in anything since the dawn of time.

I do know the one you mean But I didn't know who actually wrote it until just now, and that's an astonishing but sad bit of synchronicity, because...

Denis Norden
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-25738224

"The pair were also responsible for some of the most memorable Carry On lines - including "Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me" - which was borrowed with their permission."

Frank and Denis are from a Britain that almost doesn't exist any more now. Oh, Nicholas Parsons keeps it going on Mondays at 6.30pm, but he's in his 90s too. I can remember the first It'll Be Alright on the Night. It was shown on Christmas Day, right after the Queen's Speech, where any sane broadcaster would put a blockbuster film, so kudos to ITV for that, and it worked. We loved it.

Herbert Von Carry On?

29 years? I had no idea.
I hadn't realised, to my shame, that he was still knocking around. 96 is a pretty good innings.

This saddens me for several reasons, not the least of which is the young age at which her husband died and the advanced age at which she did, leaving her a widow for nearly 60 years.

Annetta Hoffnung
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/oct/03/annetta-hoffnung-obituary

I've been a huge fan of Gerard Hoffnung since I first heard a 78 of his 'speech', for want of a better word, at the Oxford Union, the one that includes the Bricklayer's story, that was owned by a schoolfriend's father. Then, through a different schoolfriend, I discovered his music concerts.

Suddenly coming across his widow's obituary (he died 59 years ago) is like going back both to that time when I was a teenager, and to the exciting, optimistic 1950s of Britain, which I have to imagine, having been a toddler for only a part of it.

Ray Galton
http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/oct/07/ray-galton-obituary

I've been working my way through every episode of Steptoe and Son over the last several months and now find myself at the beginning of series 8, the last one. I've heard it said that when the series was resurrected after the hiatus between series 4 (1965) and series 5 (1970), Galton and Simpson thought they'd wrung everything they could out of the characters and decided to play it just for laughs, and yet those later series have some of the best, and often most poignant, episodes of the entire show, such as The Desperate Hours, Oh What a Beautiful Mourning, Porn Yesterday, and especially Two's Company.

They also wrote the script for the BBC's adaptation of Gabriel Chevalier's novel Clochemerle, an underrated and often forgotten series with an outstanding cast - Wendy Hiller, Roy Dotrice, Cyril Cusack, Kenneth Griffith, Hugh Griffith, Dennis Price, and Peter Ustinov as the narrator.

The 1950s in Britain were optimistic? Weren't you still on wartime rations for part of that period? Were you optimistic that the rations would soon end?

"Another one snuffed it in the night"--Basil Fawlty

the 50s were incredibly optimistic. Rationing would eventually stop, everyone knew that. You really can't underestimate how the war in Europe affected everthing

Alas, I was born after the war, so I had no reference point for before the 1950s.

What i remember is some Hungarian refugee children who came to our elementary school in the mid-'50s. I remember periodic air raid drills, which entailed an unpleasant siren, followed by orderly proceeding to the school's auditorium, which was thought to be the safest place in the school in case anyone dropped bombs on us. Some historians think that the period from 1914 to 1990 was one long war with several interludes. This is because much of eastern Europe continued to live as if a war was still going on.

We called it the Cold War. I was a little kid, but I could catch somber echoes on "the twilight Zone," and in nuclear fallout-themed books like "On the beach." My parents showed me a community fallout sghelter in the next town.

So, in my country at least, we couldn't be *too* optimistic. If the bombs didn't fall directly on us, they could spread nuclear fallout far and wide wherever they *did* fall.

I understand that in some other school districts, children were taught to "duck and cover."

Somehting terrible can still happen...

I appear to have some catching up to do.

Richard Baker
http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/nov/18/richard-baker-obituary

For someone who had to be more serious than anyone else on the BBC, he had an enormous sense of fun, not only for taking part in the famous Morecambe and Wise 'Nothing Like a Dame' song and dance, but also for being in at least one of the very early BBC Christmas tapes and miming, in drag, to a Florence Foster Jenkins song.