Color TV in 1953 !!

Found in the fascinating El Mundo photo archive is this shot of a ‘pretty girl tuning in a colorcast on a color video receiver ‘before the assembled American press on 17th December   1953. This was a prototype; commercial broadcasting in color began the following year. I don’t know when TV reached Argentina, let along colour TV, but British viewers were only offered colour in 1967, nearly 14 years after it had been unveiled in the States. Apparently, colour had been in development across the Atlantic from the earliest days of TV but due to technical and other problems, the service was delayed for many years.

My own family were initiated into the TV age in 1951—before the Coronation—when my mother was given a leaving present of a new sixty guinea Bush receiver by a grateful employer. But if someone had told us in 1954 that in America families were gathering around

Melly on Savile 1980

George Melly jazzman, writer and critic wrote about the now disgraced DJ Jimmy Savile in the book The Media Mob (Collins 1980) which was illustrated by Barry Fantoni. Melly was no fool and even something of a cynic but this encomium shows just how deeply Savile duped everybody...

He doesn't really do anything, he just is. The lock of inappropriate dyed hair over the craggy, patently heterosexual face, the eccentric but meaningless clothes, the cigar, the parrot cries of 'Howzabout about that guys'n gals', the flat Yorkshire accent:  none of it should add up and yet somehow it does. The reason, I believe, is that Savile  is that rarest of all human creatures, genuinely good right through, a kind of bizarre saint. He is genuinely odd, too, with big cars and his job as a hospital porter and his passion for physical endurance tests. But his goodness is manifest; people respond to it automatically.

At the same time George has this to say of the astronomer Patrick Moore for whom there was an outpouring of sentiment when he left the planet last year...

  ...tie awry, hair crackling electricity, he sprays out words at the speed of light as though attempting to bridge the vast and silent interstellar spaces which are his province..he reminds me of a werewolf just beginning to feel the effect of the full moon… I have never read a kindly word about [him].

Theatre programme for Simon Gray's Cell Mates

The original  1995 theatre programme for the short-lived Albery Theatre's production of Cell Mates signed by cast member Stephen Fry. The play also starred Rik Mayall. It has 36 pages.

Fry's involvement - or rather, almost immediate non-involvement - in the production was the focus of much media rumpus at the time, although he now recalls the episode with philosophical good humour. The whole episode is covered elsewhere in some detail and the playwright Simon Gray later published an account of events in his diary, Fat Chance.

Withnail & I script

From the catalogue of Charing Cross Road Bookshop (2002) It was priced at £1500 and is no longer for sale.

Bruce Robinson. Withnail and I. Typed manuscript..82 pages typed recto only  in rung bound folder.(1976)  Closely written typed pages written in the first person mainly describing the picaresque London and deep country adventures of 2 out of work actors. The main character is Withnail, although this treatment reads somewhat differently form the script of the 1986 film the essential plot and the outrageous character of Withnail is the same. Many good scenes were not included in the film , possibly for reasons of time. Robinson appears to have written the story out as a novel with a great deal of dialogue, the typescript has his name and Fulham address (c/o Linda Seifort) and phone number with an arrow and the handwritten words ‘Me till Set ‘76.’ The tyescript was apparently touted around the film industry for years until Bruce Robinson managed to make the film himself in 1986. The typescript appears to be mostly ‘top copy’ i.e. straight from the typewriter with occasional tippexed corrections or new typed lines cut out and stuck to the page over the corrected line. 

There are a small amount of short handwritten corrections. Some of the memorable lines in the cult film are here--for example the drug dealer Danny (here called Sammy) advises Withnail who is contemplating having his hair cut --’"A very foolish move man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government...Hairs are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos, and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight." It is hard to think of a cult film with a more dedicated following than ‘Withnail and I’ - the village where the country scenes (Stony Stratford) are shot still has visitors  bothering the tea room with lines from the film such as:-  “We want the finest wines available to humanity, and we want them here and we want them now...” Semi aubiographical based on his experiences sharing a flat with the actor Vivian Mackenderell an elegant wastrel, the typescript ends in the same way as the film with Marwood and Withnail looking at the wolves in a cage in Regents Park.