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

Cousin Avi
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/jul/23/dennis-farina

"Should I call you Bullet? Tooth?"
"You can call me Susan if it makes you happy."

he was really interesting.
During WW2 he won the Iron Cross so he was already a bit special. Then he was parachuted into the Soviet Union, where he was eventually captured and sent to a POW camp. From which he escaped and went back to aid the German war effort.

He was parachuted into France where he was eventually captured by the Americans and sent to a POW camp. He escaped and was wandering around france when he happened upon a couple of British soldiers who greeted him with the words "hello Fritz, do you want a cup of tea?"

After that he was sent to a POW camp in northern England and the rest is history

It's surprising sometimes that there are still people from that era of football still alive - the Tom Finney, Stanley Matthews, Nat Lofthouse, Ted Ditchburn era. After he retired from playing and managing, Ted Ditchburn had a sports shop in Romford which I never actually went into, being the kind of person that prefers to watch sports rather than play them

(To be honest, I was quite surprised to learn that Dennis Farina fought in WWII but astonished and confused to learn that he won the Iron Cross.)

Pretty much everyone in Hollywood has a secret life of one kind or another

Sant Kaur Bajwa
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-23421826

I wonder how many people there are left in the world who were born in the 19th century? It can't be too many now.

Mike Winters
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23851503

There's one for the teenagers. "Mike who?"

Cliff Morgan
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/rugby-union/23876605

I only knew him as a broadcaster. "...the 11 years behind the microphone on Sport on 4. For many Radio 4 listeners, the weekend had not properly begun until they had tuned in to Morgan's perceptive take on the sporting world, delivered in what fellow presenter Des Lynam described as "one of the best broadcasting voices of all time"."

Yep. I can't remember which came on first - Sport on 4 or Breakaway, but that hour between 9am and 10am was required listening, in bed if possible.

I might be remembering this through rose-tinted memories, but apart from Cliff's voice, one of the things I liked most about Sport on 4 was the way that, even during the football season, football wasn't given the all-encompassing importance it gets on other sports shows and in general. For instance, our local PBR station broadcasts the World Service four nights a week, from 11pm until about 5am I think, and there's usually a sports report around 5.45am British time which lasts about two to three minutes. Even in the middle of the summer it's all about football, with maybe a cursory mention of tennis or cricket, and very often not, even if there's a Test match going on.

I'm going to have a huge earworm now, for at least a few days, and the next few times I see this post as I come here to record the dropping off the twig of someone else http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn5tXXU5WLk#t=0m58s

Now I think about it a little more... not while in bed, while having a Saturday morning fryup with a big pot of

David Frost.

Well that is very very spooky. Apart from my current tag having been 'Hello, good evening and Gosho' for four or five days, last night I watched an old Parkinson show and his guests were Michael Palin, Diana Rigg, Annie Lennox and David Frost. They spent most of the interview talking about Nixon, and from what I could make out it was around the time the film with Michael Sheen was being made.

A lot of people probably think they know how influential he was because of That Was the Week That Was and all his 'Frost on Friday/Saturday/Sunday', 'Frost Over...' and Frost Report programmes (and probably some that I can't remember), and they recall things like the 'Class' sketch with Cleese, Barker and Corbett, he was unintentionally responsible for starting the writing careers of people we know very well now, as well as using the skills of established writers. Here, for instance, is the list of writers for The Frost Report (1966 - 67), according to the IMDb.

John Cleese (Monty Python and so much more)
Tim Brooke-Taylor (The Goodies, At Last the 1948 Show etc, was in the original 'Four Yorkshiremen' sketch)
Willis Hall (worked with Keith Waterhouse, wrote episodes for multiple shows as well as co-writing the screenplay for Billy Liar)
Antony Jay (co-wrote Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, amongst other things)
John Law (reportedly wrote the 'Class' sketch, also co-wrote the Casino Royale screenplay - the one with David Niven and Woody Allen, of course)
Frank Muir (together with Denis Norden one of the most prolific writing partnerships in British radio and TV, needs no introduction from me, also remembered for the 'Everyone's a Fruit and Nutcase' ad for Cadburys)
David Nobbs (created Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, amongst others)
Denis Norden (see Frank Muir)
Peter Tinniswood (created Uncle Mort and all his incarnations, including I Didn't Know You Cared, amongst others)
Dick Vosburgh (half of the 'Sid and Dick' writing team for Morecambe and Wise before they moved to the BBC and teamed up with Eddie Braben)
Keith Waterhouse (see Willis Hall, writing credits as long as your arm, the pair also created Budgie)
Graham Chapman (Monty Python and so much more)
Marty Feldman (co wrote Round the Horne, Bootsie and Snudge, At Last the 1948 Show The Army Game as well his own shows and Comedy Playhouse, was in the original 'Four Yorkshiremen' sketch and turned up in Young Frankenstein)
Eric Idle (Monty Python and so much more)
Terry Jones (Monty Python and so much more)
Michael Palin (Monty Python and so much more)

And let's not forget that Ronnies Barker and Corbett came together on the various David Frost shows and formed one Britain's favourite double acts.

More recently I've seen him resurrect the 'Frost on...' format with a one-off Frost on Sketch Shows programme, and he interviewed Joan Bakewell earlier this year to mark her 80th birthday. I must say that she (six years older than him) looked and sounded younger than he did.

With a career like his, and having interviewed Nixon after the resignation, surely one of the biggest coups in celebrity intervewing history, it's beyond me why he chose to go so downmarket with 'Through the Keyhole'.

Oh bother, I knew I should have checked up on that first. Dick Vosburgh didn't work with Sid Green, that was Richard Hills. Dick Vosburgh has written for everyone from Tommy Cooper to Reg Varney to Kenny Everett to The Two Ronnies to Rory Bremner.

Barry Cryer on David Frost: "David's got this beautiful convertible Mercedes. He drives round with the roof down and if it starts raining, all he has to do is press this red button... and it stops raining!"

Here's one I missed recently (died August 1st) - John Amis
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10219112/John-Amis.html

And even more spookiness: "For many years he appeared as a panellist in My Music alongside Steve Race, Denis Norden and Frank Muir."

And Ian Wallace! Don't forget Ian Wallace I did think about mentioning My Music in the Frank Muir/Denis Norden sections of the David Frost post but decided to stick mostly to their writing credits.

I remember him mostly from My Music, but also from some work he did with Gerard Hoffnung, namely the 'Punkt Contrapunkt' discussion from Hoffnung's 1958 Interplanetary Music Festival. It takes the form of two highbrow German music scholars, Dr Klaus Domgraf-Fassbaender (Hoffnung, who really was German but spoke with an impeccable English accent) and Professor von der Vogelweide (Amis, who had to put on his German accent) discussing the latest piece by a fictitious avant garde 12-tone composer called Bruno Heinz Jaja.

The piece has some... eccentricities. It has three sections, if I remember rightly. A first section, a silence, and then the first section is repeated upside down and back to front.

The description of the three-bar silence is the only bit of the piece I've been able to find on teh interwebs, apart from a brief preview on an Amazon page for buying the mp3 (other online shops are available). It's the sound file about halfway down this page, Hofnung's voice first then Amis http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/alexross/2010/02/hoffnung-remains.html They've cut the end off that, which is a pity, but it goes on like this:

Hoffnung "...three bars of silence."

Amis "The first is in 7/8, the third is also in 7/8, but the second bar of silence is in 3/4. And zis gives to the whole work a quasi-Viennese flavour. But what makes zis middle bar of silence so important is zat ze silence makes a crescendo! Because it is ze only moment in the whole piece when every instrument in ze orchestra has the mute off. But zere is yet more of a climax. The violas have a bottom B flat in zis spot, marked tremolando ma quasi pensato."

Hoffnung "Zey must not play zis note, only think it!"

Amis "In fact, zey can only think it because zis bottom B flat is not on ze instrument"

I can remember mere snippets of the whole thing - I haven't heard it for probably 35 years.

"Each note is dependent on ze next. Each note is like a little polished diamond, like Igor Stravinsky has once said." "But of course Stravinsky has only said zis after he stopped writing his old tonal muck."

And then there's an actual performance of the piece

Oh man, and now David Jacobs
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23938128

He's one of those people who personified what the BBC used to be - dignified, prestigious and abundant in quality (I refuse to say quality-driven... I can hardly even bear to type such ghastly business-speak ).

I used to listen to his Sunday night show on Radio 2 while I was out driving the van around London, dropping off magazines hear and there. I shall miss his opening "Hello there". I've long been partial to a bit of easy listening

Now I'll have the Juke Box Jury theme playing in my head for a day or two, and that's no bad thing

Ray Dolby
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24075429

He's one of those people whose name you might not know even though it's associated with a product that almost everyone's heard of, because you never really thought that it was someone's name in the first place.

All of a sudden I'm reminded of Flanders and Swann http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7huNxJ3pXUE

Noel Harrison
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24621444

I've always liked The Windmills of Your Mind. I was only 12 when it first came out but I found it very evocative. Of what, I'm not sure, but for me it has an other-worldly quality, and I found it interesting at the the time that he was using a British accent, not the usual mid-Atlantic accent that most songs are sung in. And a few years later when I got to see The Thomas Crown Affair and discovered it was the theme tune to the film, I liked it even more.

Written by Michel Legrand if I remember rightly. A seriously underrated musician and songwriter.

Lou Reed
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/lou-reed-dies-aged-71-a-true-musical-rebel-who-treated-authority--and-journalists--with-genuine-disdain-8907675.html

I didn't care much for the Velvet Underground at all, but his album New York was one of the first two CDs I ever bought (the other was Nick Lowe's Party of One but I can't remember which one I bought first). I don't have it any more.

I don't sing karaoke, but if forced to do so, I will only voluntarily sing Lou Reed songs. This is mainly because of his self professed "three note range."

I've only done karaoke once. I managed to pick only songs that were sung in a British accent, like Parklife

I've only done karaoke once myself. But it wasn't voluntary. It was a bit of hazing when I was a prospective member of our motorcycle club. I didn't know until I got on stage what song I'd be singing...

It was "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me" by Boy George.

I did it as an angry spoken word piece, in the style of Henry Rollins.