Annie Ross is best known for her time as one-third of one of the most successful vocal groups in the history of Jazz, - Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, whose specialty was ‘vocalese’ - putting lyrics to previously recorded Jazz instrumentals. As a solo artist she recorded several well-received albums, and acted on stage, screen and television.

Annie Ross was born Annabelle Short on July 25th, 1930, in Mitcham, Surrey. Her Scottish parents, Jack Short and May (née Allan), had a song and dance act, and performed on the music hall circuit as ‘Short & Dalziel’. When their daughter was born, they were appearing at the Metropolitan Music Hall on Edgware Road in London. Annie had three brothers Buddy, Bert and Jimmy - who became famous as a comedian under the name Jimmy Logan. A sister, Heather, was born in 1933 and also became a singer.

When she was 3 years old she was sent to Los Angeles to live with an aunt, the singer and actress Ella Logan. Her parents wanted their redheaded daughter to become a child star and described her as “Scotland’s Shirley Temple”. Annabelle Short made her film debut in the comedy short “Our Gang Follies of 1938” at the age of 7. Four years later, and now re-named ‘Annie Ross’, she progressed to feature films under contract to MGM, playing Judy Garland’s younger sister in “Presenting Lily Mars.” (1943), but this did not prove to be the start of a glittering screen career, and subsequent roles were few and far between.

She later said that she loathed Hollywood, and living with her Aunt with whom she regularly clashed. When the MGM contract ended as she turned 17, Annie came back to Britain to live with her parents, by then based back home in Glasgow, but her years away had meant she did not feel a close bond with them. The contrast between Los Angeles and postwar Scotland were stark, and she did not stay long.

Annie Ross made her London stage debut in 1948, appearing in the musical ‘Burlesque’, before accepting a cabaret job in Paris where she spent the next four years. The Parisian Jazz scene was thriving at the time, and it was home to many American jazz musicians. A relationship with the African-American drummer Kenny Clarke produced her only child, Kenny Clarke Jr, who grew up with his Father’s relatives in Pittsburgh. He died in 2018.

In 1952, at the age of 22, she recorded “Twisted” for the Prestige label during a brief return to New York, a song that started out as an instrumental track recorded by the saxophonist Wardell Gray three years earlier. The owner of Prestige, Bob Weinstock, had given her some records and asked her to find something to which she could set words. She chose ‘Twisted’ and wrote lyrics, telling the story of a neurotic patient who is convinced that she is wiser than her psychiatrist. She recorded the words at staccato speed: “My analyst told me that I was right out of my head/The way he described it, he said I’d be better dead than alive/I didn’t listen to his jive . . . ” It became a minor hit, but Annie wasn’t around to capitalise on its success, as she was touring in Europe with Lionel Hampton’s band before again settling in London.

She went back to New York in 1957 to appear on Broadway in the British revue “Cranks,” and later that year she joined forces with Jon Hendricks and Dave Lambert to record the album “Sing a Song of Basie,” on which they sang Hendricks’ lyrics to some of the Count Basie big band’s most celebrated recordings, using multiple overdubs to make their three voices sound like a dozen. The album was a hit, and the three vocalists decided to make their partnership permanent.

While Jon Hendricks provided most of the lyrics for “Sing a Song of Basie,” Annie contributed some memorable vocalese numbers of her own, most notably a new version of “Twisted” which became one of the most popular numbers in the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross repertoire, and probably the most frequently covered.

Lambert, Hendricks and Ross were a worldwide sensation, and over the next four years they recorded seven albums. Despite the group’s success, she left in 1962. At the time, her departure was attributed to poor health, but in later years she said that it had resulted partly by friction with Jon Hendricks, but mainly by her increasing dependence on heroin.

Dave Lambert died in a car accident in 1966. Jon Hendricks died in 2017.

Annie Ross lived in London for almost two decades after a near-fatal heroin fix in 1962, when her then partner, the comedian Lenny Bruce, was also struggling with drug addiction. She credited her brother, Jimmy Logan, to whom she was very close, with helping her to kick her habit and straighten out her life. In 1963 she married the English actor Sean Lynch and together they ran a popular nightclub in Covent Garden called Annie’s Room. But by 1975 her life was again in turmoil, the work had dried up, her marriage had ended, she had been declared bankrupt and lost her home. Shortly after their divorce Sean Lynch was killed in a car crash.

Professionally, with no singing opportunities on the horizon Annie shifted her focus to acting. From the mid-’70s until she returned to the United States in 1985, she appeared frequently on the London stage, both in straight in plays like “A View From the Bridge” and musical productions such as “The Threepenny Opera” and “The Pirates of Penzance.” She also became a familiar face on British television, including a recurring role in “Charles Endell Esq.” - the follow-up to “Budgie” (ITV, 1979). She also co-starred with Dick Emery in his Christmas Special “For Whom The Jingle Bells Toll” (BBC One, 1980). On the big screen, she provided the speaking voice for Britt Ekland in “The Wicker Man” (1973), and a role in “Yanks”(1979) led to other films, including as an over-the-top villainess in “Superman III” (1983), a confused writing student in “Throw Momma From the Train” (1987) and an aging and temperamental jazz singer in Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” (1993) - a part especially written for her.

“Short Cuts” and its soundtrack album offered Annie Ross wider exposure as a singer than she had enjoyed since her days with Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. Even though her singing voice was now somewhat ravaged, it was deep and powerful, and for the next decade she returned to cabaret performances which were positively reviewed - including a regular gig in New York and frequent returns to Glasgow. She took American citizenship in 2001.

In 2012 “No One But Me”, a documentary about her life, received its premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival, and she gave her last performances in the city to great acclaim.

Annie Ross died of complications from emphysema and heart disease on July 21st, 2020. She was 89.

ANNIE ROSS

Born: 25th July 1930 – Mitcham, Surrey, England

Died: 21st July 2020 - New York City, U.S.A.

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In Britain, its likely only diehard Jazz fans will be familiar with Billy Taylor, although many will know his most famous composition, the civil rights anthem, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”, which was used as the long-running theme tune for BBC One’s flagship film review show hosted by Barry Norman. His influence on the careers of many well known Jazz performers, though, was immense, and in the United States he is revered as one of the great popularisers of the genre on TV and radio. A formidable pianist even in his youth, Billy Taylor became a fixture of New York’s Jazz Clubs in the 1940s and backed some of the music’s most iconic performers, including Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Ben Webster. In the 1960s and ‘70s he was a nightly presence on American TV as band-leader on ‘The David Frost Show’ accompanying some of the biggest stars of the era; in the 80s and 90s he produced and hosted more than 250 stories profiling members of the Jazz community for ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ - all while maintaining a prolific recording and performing career.

William Edward Taylor Jr. was born on July 24th 1921, in North Carolina, and grew up in Washington, where his father was a dentist, and his mother taught in a school. It was a household that prized both music and education. He began piano lessons as a child and attended Dunbar High School, a famous institution for Black students in segregated Washington, before enrolling at what is now Virginia State University, where he studied music and sociology.

He arrived in New York in 1944 with the intention of staying only briefly before returning to his education. However on his first night in the Big Apple he was asked to sit in with the saxophonist Ben Webster at a club on 52nd Street called The Three Deuces and he was immediately hired as pianist. 52nd Street - then home to a cluster of Jazz clubs - became his university. He quickly formed his own trio, and by the early 1950s Billy Taylor was a respected figure on the New York scene, known for a style that fused bebop with a blues-inflected touch.

In 1969 he composed what would become his best-known work, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” written with the lyricist Dick Dallas. It was recorded by Nina Simone, and became an anthem of the civil rights era Billy Taylor considered it among his proudest achievements, not for its commercial success but for the way it had become woven into the fabric of the movement it described. In Britain, the instrumental original version became familiar to viewers of Barry Norman’s long running ‘Film’ series on BBC One.

Even as his performing career flourished, Billy Taylor pushed to bring Jazz music to news audiences. In 1965 he helped found Jazzmobile, a charity that put on free concerts to poorer areas of New York. He became the first Jazz musician to earn a doctorate in music education, completing his degree at the University of Massachusetts in 1975, and he went on to teach at Manhattan School of Music and elsewhere. He was later appointed ‘Artistic Adviser for Jazz’ at the Kennedy Center in Washington, where he developed educational programmes and a performance series that ran for several years.

Television brought him his widest audience. He was the pianist and eventually music director for “The David Frost Show” a 90-minute programme which aired five days a week from 1969–1972 and was syndicated to TV stations across America. Billy and his band backed a ‘who’s who’ of music icons, from Anita O’Day…

…to Nancy Wilson,

… to Lou Rawls

From 1977-83 he served as the host of ‘Jazz Alive!’, a Peabody Award-winning weekly series on National Public Radio (NPR), which featured live concert recordings and performance masters from major jazz artists across the United States. From 1981-2002, he appeared regularly on the popular magazine show “CBS Sunday Morning,” where his warmly presented segments introduced millions of viewers to Jazz figures who might otherwise have remained obscure to a mainstream audience, such as this feature on Wallace Roney from 1992:

Billy Taylor returned to NPR in 1995 to host ‘Jazz at the Kennedy Center’ which ran for six years, a live-audience performance and interview series as part of his role as the artistic director for jazz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Each episode featured a guest jazz artist playing alongside Billy ’s own trio paired with interviews with the artists.

His honours were numerous, including a Peabody Award, a National Medal of Arts, and more than a dozen honorary degrees.

Billy Taylor died after a heart attack on December 28th, 2010, in New York City at the age of 89.

He often described Jazz in three words: American classical music. It was a description America had been slow to accept, and one he spent his career trying to make impossible to ignore.

Dr. Billy Taylor

Born: July 24th, 1921 - Greenville, North Carolina, U.S.A.

Died: December 28th, 2010 - New York City, U.S.A.

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Billy Taylor Discography

1945: Billy Taylor Piano (Savoy)

1951: Piano Panorama (Atlantic)

1952: Jazz At Storyville (Roost 1952)

1953: Billy Taylor Trio (Prestige)

1953–54: Cross Section (Prestige) – released 1956

1954: The Billy Taylor Trio with Candido (Prestige)

1954: Billy Taylor Trio at Town Hall (Prestige) (Status 1965)

1955: A Touch of Taylor (Prestige)

1956: Evergreens (ABC-Paramount)

1956: Billy Taylor at the London House (ABC-Paramount)[20]

1957: Introduces Ira Sullivan (ABC-Paramount)

1957: My Fair Lady Loves Jazz (ABC-Paramount; Impulse! 1965, ABC Impulse! 1968)

1957: The Billy Taylor Touch (Atlantic) - featuring tracks recorded in 1951 and 1957

1957: The New Billy Taylor Trio (ABC-Paramount)

1959: One for Fun (Atlantic)

1959: Billy Taylor with Four Flutes (Riverside; with Frank Wess, Herbie Mann and Jerome Richardson)

1959: Taylor Made Jazz (Argo)

1960: Uptown (Riverside)

1960: Warming Up! (Riverside) - also released as Custom Taylored (SeSac) and Easy Like (Surrey)

1961: Interlude (Prestige Moodsville)

1961: Kwamina (Mercury)

1962: Impromptu (Mercury)

1963: Right Here, Right Now! (Capitol)

1965: Midnight Piano (Capitol)

1968: I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free (Tower)

1969: Sleeping Bee (MPS) - also released as Billy Taylor Today (Prestige)

1970: Ok Billy (Bell)

1977: Jazz Live (Monmouth Evergreen)

1977: Live at Storyville (1977 recording for West 54 Records)

1981: With Joe Kennedy Where’ve You Been (Concord Jazz)

1985: You Tempt Me (Taylor-Made, 1989)

1988: White Nights And Jazz in Leningrad (Taylor-Made)

1988: Solo (Taylor-Made)

1989: Billy Taylor and the Jazzmobile All Stars (Taylor-Made)

1991: White Nights and Jazz in Leningrad (Taylor-Made)

1992: Dr. T with Gerry Mulligan (GRP Records)

1993: Live at MCG with Gerry Mulligan, Carl Allen, Chip Jackson

1993: It’s a Matter of Pride (GRP)

1995: Homage (GRP)

1997: The Music Keeps Us Young (Arkadia Jazz)

1999: Ten Fingers – One Voice (Arkadia Jazz)

1999: Taylor Made at the Kennedy Center with Dee Dee Bridgewater (Kennedy Center Jazz)

2001: Urban Griot (Soundspot)

2002: Live at AJE New York (Soundspot)

Over a career spanning five decades, Coral Browne went from provincial Australian theatres to the West End and Broadway, and eventually to Hollywood, where she became known to cinema-goers as much for her devastating comic timing as for the gravitas she brought to grande dames, aristocrats and villainesses alike.

Born Coral Edith Brown in Melbourne on July 23th, 1913 (adding an ’e’ to her name later for the sake of sophistication), and grew up in the suburb of Footscray. She initially trained as a painter before turning to the stage, making her professional debut in 1931 in a production of “Loyalties” at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre. By the time she left Australia for England three years later, she had appeared in some two dozen productions.

In London, opportunity arrived in circumstances that might have been scripted: cast as an understudy in “Lover’s Leap,” she stepped into the leading role when the show’s star, Nora Swinburne, fell ill the night after opening, launching a West End career that would encompass Shakespeare, Shaw, Wilde and contemporary drama over the following decades.

She went on to appear on Broadway in “Macbeth” in 1956, “The Rehearsal” in 1963 and “The Right Honourable Gentleman” in 1965, developing a reputation as a formidable interpreter of classical roles as well as a peerless comedienne. American audiences came to know her best as Vera Charles, the boozy, catty stage actress and best friend of the title character in “Auntie Mame” (1958). Her other film credits included “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone” (1961), “The Killing of Sister George” (1968) and “The Ruling Class” (1972).

In 1972 she won critical acclaim for her performance as Mrs. Kitty Warren in the BBC Two’s adaption of George Bernard Shaw’s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” co-starring Penelope Wilton. That same year she played Mrs. Erlynne in Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan” produced for BBC One’s ‘Play Of The Month’ strand.

It was on the set of the 1973 horror comedy “Theatre of Blood” that Coral Browne met the actor Vincent Price, her co-star in the film. The two married in 1974, following the death in 1964 of her first husband, the talent agent Philip Westrope Pearman, to whom she had been married since 1950. She had no children.

Coral Browne largely withdrew from stage work by the early 1970s but continued to act on screen, including a classic performance as Lady Bracknell in the BBC’s adaption of “The Importance Of Being Earnest” (1974); she co-starred with her husband, Vincent Price, in the the sci-fi fantasy series “Time Express” (CBS, 1979); and she appeared as Lady Reading in “Eleanor, First Lady of the World” (CBS, 1982). Coral won the British Academy Television Award for best actress in 1984 for her performance in Alan Bennett’s “An Englishman Abroad,” (BBC One) - playing herself in a dramatization of an encounter with the defected Soviet spy Guy Burgess, a role that also won her the London Evening Standard Award.

In 1984 she co-starred with Tom Conti in the film comedy “American Dreamer” and, the following year, in “Dreamchild,” she played the elderly Alice Liddell Hargreaves — the woman who as a child had inspired Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” for which she won her second London Evening Standard Award.

Coral Browne died of breast cancer on May 29, 1991, at her home in Los Angeles. She was 77.

Coral Browne

Born: 23th July 1913 - Melbourne, Australia

Died: 29 May 1991 - Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.

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Chuck Jackson became known to his fans as “Mr. Everything” because of the range of styles he recorded in — gospel, blues, pop ballads, driving rhythm and blues. The downside of this diversity in his output was that he wasn’t associated with a specific genre, and that, perhaps, is the reason he is not as well remembered as some of his peers.

Charles Benjamin Jackson was born on July 22nd, 1937, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina., but his family moved to Pittsburgh soon after and he grew up there. Like many of his contemporaries, ‘Chuck’ came to music through the Church, singing in gospel choirs before drifting toward secular performances as a teenager. After a brief return to college in South Carolina, he joined the a Gospel vocal group (The Raymond Raspberry Gospel Singers), which gave him his first real experience of life as a touring musician.

In 1957 he became a member of the racially integrated vocal group called the Del-Vikings, best known for the doo-wop hit “Come Go With Me.” Chuck did not sing on the group’s biggest singles, but the association put him on prestige stages across the America and, indirectly, in front of music industry figures who would shape his solo career.

The turning point in Chuck Jackson’s career came through Jackie Wilson. When he was touring as part of Wilson’s revue in 1959, they were doing a show at The Apollo in Harlem and Chuck was spotted by Florence Greenberg, the owner of Scepter Records, and her business partner Luther Dixon, who signed him to the label’s Wand imprint.

Chuck co-wrote his debut single, “I Don’t Want to Cry,” with Luther Dixon. Recorded in late 1960, and arranged by a young Carole King, it became his first chart hit. Two years later came “Any Day Now (My Wild Beautiful Bird),” written by Burt Bacharach and Bob Hilliard. The song reached No. 2 on the R&B chart and No. 23 on the US pop chart in 1962, the peak of Chuck Jackson’s crossover success, it went on to be recorded by Elvis Presley, Scott Walker, Alan Price, and, Ronnie Milsap who took it into the Country charts in 1982.

Other hits followed through the decade, among them “I Wake Up Crying,” “Tell Him I’m Not Home,” “Beg Me” and “Something You Got.”

In the late sixties, Chuck bought out the time left on his contract from Scepter Records and moved to Motown. He made three albums there: “Chuck Jackson Arrives!” (1968), - which produced the hit single “(You Can’t Let the Boy Overpower) The Man in You”; “Goin’ Back to Chuck Jackson” (1969) - from which two singles reached the lower reaches of the R&B Charts: “Are You Lonely For Me” and "Honey Come Back", and “Teardrops Keep Fallin’ on My Heart” (1970), from which two singles were released but neither charted.

Chuck wasn’t happy at Motown as he felt that they weren’t promoting his records with much enthusiasm. He later said that his decision to sign with them was “one of the worst mistakes I ever made in my life”

Although he never returned to the pop Top 40 after the mid-1960s, he remained a steady presence on the R&B charts, after leaving Motown he recorded for ABC Records, Platinum, EMI and Kent (among others), and was a fixture of the touring soul and gospel circuits for decades afterward.

In 1997 he reunited with his old Scepter labelmate Dionne Warwick for the duet “If I Let Myself Go,” which earned the pair a Grammy nomination.

Chuck was closely associated with the Apollo Harlem for most of his life, headlining more shows there than any other performer in the venue’s history, according to the theatre, which honoured him with its Hall of Fame Award. He also helped organise and produce Apollo events featuring Dionne Warwick, Smokey Robinson, Tom Jones, Paul Shaffer and Ashford & Simpson.

Here’s footage of Chuck performing live in Detroit (2011):

Chuck Jackson died on February 16th, 2023, at the age of 85

Over more than six decades in music, he had 22 hit singles on the American R&B charts, 18 of which crossed into Billboard’s ‘Hot 100’, and released two dozen albums, including collaborations with Maxine Brown, Tammi Terrell and Cissy Houston.

His contributions were formally recognized late in his life: the ‘Rhythm and Blues Foundation’ gave him its Pioneer Award in 1992, and in 2015 he was inducted into the ‘R&B Hall of Fame’.

CHUCK JACKSON

Born: July 22, 1937 - Winston-Salem, North Carolina, U.S.

Died: February 16th, 2023 - Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.

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For more than two decades, Queenie Watts moved between two worlds that, in her case, were really one: the East End pubs she ran with her husband, and the film and television productions that came looking for exactly the kind of woman she already was. She never trained as an actress in any formal sense. She was, instead, discovered behind the bar.

Born Mary Spenton in London on 21st July 1923, she grew up in the docklands of the East End and took the name by which the world would come to know her, Queenie Watts, after her marriage to William James “Slim” Watts. Together the couple ran a string of East End pubs, including the Iron Bridge Tavern on East India Dock Road and the Rose and Crown in Pennyfields, Poplar. It was there, singing jazz and music-hall standards with an eight-piece band to keep the punters drinking, that Queenie first built her reputation as a performer — long before any camera found her.

That reputation eventually reached Joan Littlewood, the influential theatre director whose socially conscious, working-class dramas were reshaping British stage and screen in the early 1960s. Queenie Watts appeared in Littlewood’s 1963 film “Sparrows Can’t Sing,” playing a version of the East End she knew intimately.

A year later she was the subject of “Portrait of Queenie,” a 1964 documentary directed by Michael Orrom that filmed her singing jazz standards and original songs, backed by the pianist Stan Tracey’s quintet, amid the streets of Poplar and the Isle of Dogs. The film led to her only record, “Queen High,” released on the Columbia label in 1966.

Her most widely seen moment on screen came in 1966, a raucous turn as a singer belting out “Goodbye, Dolly Gray” in the middle of a pub brawl in “Alfie,” the Michael Caine film that became one of the defining British movies of the sixties. She went on to sing in “Half a Sixpence” with Tommy Steele the following year, and to appear in Ken Loach’s “Poor Cow” and in the film version of “Up the Junction” (1968), two works that, like much of her screen career, drew on the same unvarnished, working-class London she had lived in all her life.

Undecided (1964) from ‘Portrait of Queenie’

I Remember April (1964) from ‘Portrait of Queenie’

The Best Is Yet To Come (1964) from ‘Portrait of Queenie’

Television proved just as fertile ground. Queenie Watts became a familiar presence across British sitcoms and dramas of the 1970s, playing Lily Briggs opposite Arthur Mullard in the sitcom “Romany Jones” (ITV, 1972-75) and its sequel, “Yus, My Dear,” (ITV, 1976) and reprising the role, alongside Mullard, in the film “Holiday on the Buses” in 1973. She appeared as Mrs. Edna Peters in “Dad’s Army” (BBC One), in multiple roles across the long-running “Dixon of Dock Green” (BBC One), and in the comedy-drama “Beryl’s Lot” (ITV) among many other credits. Her later film work included a run of British sex comedies in the 1970s, along with a turn as a doomed housekeeper in the horror film “Schizo” (1976).

Whatever the role, audiences and critics alike came to associate Queenie Watts with a particular kind of authenticity: an actress who did not so much play working-class London as embody it, drawing on a life spent pulling pints and leading singalongs in the pubs she and her husband ran. That grounding gave her performances, however brief or broadly comic, a texture that outlasted the often modest films and programmes she appeared in.

She gave what was probably her finest performance near the end of her life, with a leading role in Barrie Keefe’s “Waterloo Sunset” (BBC One, 1979) directed by Richard Eyre. Part of the ‘Play For Today’ strand - in which she had appeared twice before - it presented contemporary original dramas with a societal context. In “Wateroo Sunset” Queenie plays Grace Dwyer, a 70-year-old woman, who leaves an old people's home to return to her birthplace in Lambeth and discovers a world that initially looks different, but is in fact all too familiar.

Queenie Watts died of cancer on 25th January 1980. She was 56. Queenie was cremated at the East London Cemetery, not far from the docklands streets that had shaped her voice, her manner and, in the end, her long career in front of the camera.

In 2023, renowned street artists Jimmy C (James Cochran) and Zabou were commissioned to create a mural in Poplar, East London. It features the portraits of Queenie Watts and the artist Francis Bacon, with a colourful background inspired by one of Bacon’s works. Queenie’s two pubs, The Ironbridge Tavern and the Rose And Crown, were nearby, and in the 1960s and ‘70s attracted a bohemian crowd that regularly included Francis Bacon and his biographer, Daniel Farson. The mural was organised by Fitzrovia Noir and is part of the Greater London Authority ‘s ‘Untold Stories’ programme.

Queenie Watts

Born: 21st July 1923 - London, England

Died: 25th January 1980 -London, England

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She was born Natalia Zacharenko on July 20th, 1938, in San Francisco, to Russian immigrant parents, and was raised in Santa Rosa, California. Her mother was determined that her strikingly expressive daughter should perform, and pushed her into acting almost from infancy. By the age of four she had appeared in her first film, and she took the screen name Natalie Wood while still a small child.

Her breakthrough came at the age of eight, when she played the sceptical young Susan Walker opposite Edmund Gwenn’s Kris Kringle in the Christmas classic “Miracle on 34th Street” (1947), a performance that established her as one of the era’s most gifted child actors and set a standard against which later young performers would be measured.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Natalie Wood made the perilous transition from child star to adult leading lady. As a teenager she starred alongside James Dean and Sal Mineo in “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955), playing a disaffected suburban teenager in a film that captured the anxieties of post-war American youth and has become a cultural touchstone. Her performance brought her the first of three Academy Award nominations for best actress.

Natalie Wood’s career reached its height in the early 1960s. She played Maria in “West Side Story” (1961), the film adaptation of the Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim musical, a role that showcased her as a dramatic star even though her singing voice was dubbed. That same period brought her second Oscar nomination, for “Splendor in the Grass” (1961), Elia Kazan’s drama of thwarted young love opposite Warren Beatty, and a third nomination for “Love With the Proper Stranger” (1963) in which she starred with Steve McQueen.

She went on to star in “Gypsy” (1962), playing the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, and in “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” (1969), a comedy about shifting sexual attitudes that captured the changing views of the times. Her body of work across the 1950s and ‘60s placed her among a small handful of performers who successfully carried a career from childhood stardom into serious adult acclaim.

In later years she worked increasingly in television, including an Emmy-nominated performance in the 1979 mini-series “From Here to Eternity,” even as her film output slowed.

Her personal life was, for much of her adult years, entwined with that of Robert Wagner. The two married in 1957, divorced in 1962, and remarried in 1972 after her marriage to the British producer Richard Gregson, with whom she had a daughter, ended in divorce. She and Wagner had a second daughter together.

Natalie Wood’s death in 1981 stunned Hollywood and drew international attention. She had been aboard her yacht, ‘Splendour’, anchored near Catalina Island, California. She was on a weekend boat trip with her husband, Robert Wagner, and the actor Christopher Walken, her co-star in the film she was then making, “Brainstorm.” She was reported missing that night and her body was recovered from the water the next morning. The Los Angeles County coroner ruled the death an accidental drowning, though the circumstances surrounding her final hours were never fully resolved and have remained the subject of public speculation and periodic renewed police enquiry in the following decades. Investigators at the time concluded that she was likely to have fallen from her yacht’s swim step while trying to secure a dinghy that had been banging against the boat in rough water, but the exact sequence of events was never definitively established.

The case drew renewed scrutiny from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in later years, and Robert Wagner was publicly identified as a person of interest in a reopened investigation, although he has never been charged in connection with her death.

Despite the unresolved questions surrounding her final night, Natalie Wood’s professional legacy remains secure. She was one of the rare performers to move successfully from the studio-controlled child-star system of the 1940s into the more naturalistic, character-driven filmmaking of the 1960s, leaving behind a body of work that continued to be studied and revived long after her death.

Natalie Wood died on November 29th, 1981, after drowning. She was 43.

Natalie Wood

Born: July 20, 1938 - San Francisco, California

Died: November 29th, 1981 - Pacific Ocean near Catalina Island

WATCH: Natalie Wood interview with Hugh Scully on ‘Nationwide’ (BBC One) in 1980

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Some very talented and acclaimed stage and screen actors have found their careers overshadowed by successfully appearing in a TV sitcom, and thereafter being firmly established in the collective memory for one role. Harry H. Corbett is forever ‘Arold! in ‘Steptoe and Son’, Stephen Lewis was never able to escape Blakey in ‘On The Buses’, Michael Crawford - despite his success on the West End stage - is mainly remembered as Frank Spencer in ‘Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em’. The same can be said for Simon Cadell - a revered, Oliver-award winning dramatic actor who today is permanently associated with Jeffrey Fairbrother, the character he played in the classic holiday camp sit-com Hi-Di-Hi!, in which he tried to fend off the amorous advances of Ruth Madoc’s Gladys Pugh for five seasons from 1980-84 (and their perennial repeats). There was more to Simon than Jeffrey, and despite his very premature death preventing the full maturing of his career it’s one that deserves to be remembered.

Simon John Cadell was born on July 19, 1950 in Marylebone, London. He came from a theatrical dynasty stretching back generations. His Father was the agent John Cadell and his grandmother was the Scottish character actress Jean Cadell. His sister, Selina Cadell, also became a well-known actress, and his cousin was the actor Guy Siner (of ‘Allo ‘Allo fame). He was educated at The Hall School in Hampstead and at Bedales School, where he formed a lifelong friendship with the broadcaster and writer Gyles Brandreth. As a teenager he joined the National Youth Theatre, appearing in its 1967 production of “Zigger Zagger,” before training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

He spent the 1970s building a reputation in repertory theatre, and his early screen credits included lending his voice to the rabbit Blackberry in the animated film “Watership Down” (1978), and playing a chilling German officer in the wartime drama series about the German occupation of Guernsey “Enemy at the Door” (ITV, 1978-80).

It was his casting in 1980 as Jeffrey Fairbrother that made him a household name. He played a former Professor of Archaeology at King’s College, Cambridge who had left academia to run the entertainment staff at the fictional seaside holiday camp ‘Maplins’ in “Hi-de-Hi!” (BBC One).

Simon played the role for the show’s first five series, with a fussy, faintly bewildered charm that became the show’s comic anchor before he left the cast in 1984.

He went on to other television roles, including the scheming civil servant Dundridge in the TV adaptation of Tom Sharpe’s “Blott on the Landscape,” (BBC Two, 1985), and he starred with Carol Royle in the sitcom “Life Without George” (BBC One, 1987-1989). He later joined the cast of the comedy series “Singles” (ITV, 1990) replacing Roger Rees. On radio, he voiced the elven lord Celeborn in the BBC’s adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings” (BBC Radio 4), and he was a prolific voice-over performer, narrating the children’s series “Bump” and lending his distinctive tones to numerous commercials. His stage work, which he regarded as his first calling, culminated in an Olivier Award in 1993 for his performance in the theatrical adaptation of Graham Greene’s “Travels With My Aunt.”

He married the actress Rebecca Croft in 1986. She was the daughter of David Croft, who had co-created “Hi-de-Hi!” as well as “Dad’s Army,” making his father-in-law also one of his professional collaborators. The couple had two sons.

By his own account and those of friends, Simon Cadell was a heavy smoker for much of his adult life, and his health declined sharply in the early 1990s. After a heart attack in January 1993, he returned to work within months, only to receive a lymphoma diagnosis later that year while being treated for pneumonia. He continued to work intermittently through his illness.

Simon Cadell was a performer of unusual range who is often unfairly defined in the public imagination by a single comic role, even as his body of work spanned Shakespeare, wartime drama, farce, and radio.

He died on March 6th 1996 from complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at his home in London. He was 45. He is buried in the churchyard of All Saints in Honington, Suffolk, near the Croft family home.

SIMON CADELL

Born: 19 July 1950 - Marylebone, London

Died: 6 March 1996 - Marylebone, London

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For further reading I recommend Brian Slade’s excellent ‘Simon Cadell: The Authorised Biography’ (2018, Fonthill Media)

During my years hosting ‘Soul of The Blues’ on the radio I must have played Screamin’ Jay Hawkins records dozens of times – his manic howl and deathly cackle make him perfect for Halloween shows especially - a macabre caricature he perfected long before Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, or Marilyn Manson brought dark, theatrical horror to rock-and-roll.

Screamin’ Jay achieved fame by terrifying and delighting teenagers in the 1950s, he would start his performances by emerging from a silk-lined coffin, wearing a cape, and carrying a smoking skull on a stick named ‘Henry’. Yet beneath the leopard-skin suits, rubber snakes, and the bone he wore through his nose was a musician of extraordinary depth—a classically trained pianist and a singer with a booming, bass-baritone voice that could pivot instantly from an operatic swell to a throat-shredding rasp. This is his story.

Jalacy Hawkins was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 18th, 1929, he was placed in an orphanage as an infant and later raised in a boarding house. A gifted, self-taught musician, he learned to read and write music and play classical piano as a child. In his youth, he also pursued boxing, winning the middleweight amateur championship of Alaska in 1949, and served in the U.S. Army during World War II and the Korean War.

His true calling, however, was music. He emerged from Cleveland’s thriving jazz clubs in the early 1950s, serving an apprenticeship with guitarist Tiny Grimes and his eccentric ensemble, the Rocking Highlanders. The group, famous for performing in kilts and tam o’shanters, blended jump blues with theatrical flair, recording spirited numbers such as “Juicy Fruit”, “Coronation Jump” and an unlikely adaptation of “Loch Lomond”. Jay Hawkins played piano and absorbed lessons that would remain with him throughout his career: musical versatility could co-exist with eccentric showmanship.

His appetite for spectacle quickly became evident. While briefly working as an opening act for Fats Domino, wearing an elaborate leopard-skin costume adorned with gold and crowned by a turban, drawing so much attention that he was sacked. Whether the split resulted from flamboyant costumes or, as his biographer Steve Bergsman suggested, the inevitable clash of two ambitious young stars, Jay Hawkins was clearly destined to command centre stage.

His earliest recordings, made from 1953 onward for the Timely, Mercury and Wing labels, already revealed a performer unlike any of his contemporaries. He adopted a vocal style similar to Blues shouter Wynonie Harris, who helped him secure his first engagement in New York, while echoes of Amos Milburn’s earthy storytelling and Stick McGhee’s rhythmic swagger can also be heard. Yet Jay Hawkins quickly surpassed those influences. Songs such as “Not Any More” were suffused with anguished cries and eerie phrasing that transformed otherwise conventional Blues into something unsettling and unforgettable. Supported by Red Prysock’s booming saxophone and drenched in cavernous studio acoustics, the recordings possessed an almost supernatural intensity.

Other early records, including “Baptize Me in Wine”, “This Is All” and “(She Put the) Wamee (On Me)”, demonstrated Jay Hawkins’ uninhibited showmanship. Backed by first-rate musicians such as guitarist Mickey Baker, drummer Panama Francis, saxophonists Sam “The Man” Taylor, Big Al Sears and Red Prysock, he delivered lyrics filled with curses, threats and supernatural imagery with manic conviction. British music historian Bill Millar later described these recordings as “dark, sere, seemingly inebriant performances with few equals in blues or rock.”

His defining moment arrived in 1956 after signing with OKeh Records, Columbia’s rhythm-and-blues imprint. Jay Hawkins had previously recorded “I Put a Spell on You” as a melancholy love ballad inspired by heartbreak, but producer Arnold Maxin believed the song required something far stranger.

The recording session soon became legendary. According to Jay, Maxin ordered barbecue, fried chicken and copious amounts of alcohol in an effort to loosen the atmosphere. Jay later claimed he sang much of the performance lying flat on his back, while guitarist Mickey Baker and several members of the band were heavily intoxicated. Whether embellished or not, the stories became inseparable from the recording itself.

What emerged was unlike anything heard on American radio. Beneath its deceptively gentle waltz rhythm and banjo accompaniment lurked Jay Hawkins’ menacing incantations, punctuated by growls, shrieks and unearthly laughter. Blues music historians have likened the song’s ominous recurring motif to themes from Fromental Halévy’s nineteenth-century opera “La Juive”.

The single shocked audiences. At a time when Elvis Presley and Little Richard were already provoking anxiety among conservative listeners, “I Put a Spell on You” was widely condemned as obscene, deranged and dangerously erotic. Radio stations banned it. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.) protested about his act, fearing it played into negative tribal stereotypes, and criticised Jay Hawkins for presenting what they regarded as an undignified image of Black performers.

Although the record reportedly sold strongly, it mysteriously failed to appear on national charts in the U.S. Yet its influence spread rapidly through word of mouth, establishing him as an underground sensation and forever linking him to the song.

The success came at a price. He often remarked that he became trapped inside the monstrous persona audiences expected. “I was forced to live the life of a monster,” he later said. Concert venues were met by protesters carrying signs objecting to his performances, but influential disc jockey Alan Freed recognized the commercial possibilities.

Freed persuaded Jay Hawkins to embrace the macabre stage presentation that would define his public image. Emerging from a coffin carried onto the stage, Jay would slowly lift the lid, extend a gloved hand and rise before rolling his eyes dramatically at screaming teenage audiences. Wearing a turban, armed with a ceremonial staff, a skull he called Henry — replacing an earlier mascot named Mr. Gooch — and an arsenal of demonic gestures, he created one of rock music’s earliest theatrical spectacles. The performances proved so convincing that the National Casket Company reportedly urged funeral directors not to rent coffins to him.

Yet the elaborate gimmick often overshadowed his remarkable musicianship. By the late 1950s, fellow performers increasingly regarded him as a novelty act. During Alan Freed’s 1957 ‘Big Beat’ tour, Jerry Lee Lewis said he admired Jay Hawkins personally but viewed him more as a vaudeville entertainer than a musical rival.

Lewis’ assessment overlooked Jay’s artistic range. The 1958 album “At Home with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins” demonstrated that behind the theatrics stood a sophisticated interpreter of popular song. Alongside the obligatory “I Put a Spell on You”, the record featured comic originals such as “Hong Kong”, elegant ballads including “If You Are But a Dream”, and wildly inventive reinterpretations of standards like Gene Autry’s “Give Me My Boots and Saddle”. Perhaps most revealing was “I Love Paris”, in which he shifted effortlessly from polished crooner to comic impressionist before concluding with a stirring, heartfelt finale worthy of the great vocal stylists of his era.

That emotional depth resurfaced repeatedly throughout his career. His interpretation of Jesse Belvin’s “Goodnight My Love” on the 1970 Philips album “Because Is in Your Mind” remains one of the finest examples of his ability to strip away theatrics and reveal vulnerability.

His commercial fortunes declined in the early 1960s, but Jay Hawkins continued producing compelling recordings. The 1962 single “I Hear Voices”, and my own personal favourite “Ashes”, are among his overlooked masterpieces, combining ghostly whispers, paranoid screams and irresistible rhythm-and-blues grooves into one of his most inventive performances.

His revival began unexpectedly in Britain during the mid-1960s. While working in relative obscurity as singer, pianist and master of ceremonies at a Honolulu nightclub, Jay attracted the admiration of British rhythm-and-blues enthusiasts, and a jazz-loving American couple who had witnessed his performances while holidaying in Hawaii. Their efforts, together with the success of Nina Simone’s iconic cover version of “I Put a Spell on You” resulted in Screamin’ Jay’s’ first British tour in 1965, introducing him to audiences who appreciated not only his stage antics but also the richness of his musical achievements.

Several of those British admirers would become instrumental in preserving his reputation. Writers Cliff White and Bill Millar documented his career with scholarly precision, while Millar’s extensive notes for Bear Family Records’ definitive collections, “Spellbound! 1955–1974” and “Screamin’ Jay Rocks”, remain among the best anthologies of his recorded legacy. Photographer Brian Smith likewise created what many consider the definitive visual chronicle of Jay Hawkins on and off stage.

Renewed visibility through cover versions by prominent artists brought further recognition. “I Put a Spell on You” was a hit for Alan Price in 1966, and Creedance Clearwater Revival in 1968 cementing his reputation, while collaborations with artists including Keith Richards reflected the esteem in which fellow musicians held him. In 1980 Screamin’ Jay opened for The Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden, and he enjoyed an unexpected British chart success in 1992 when his recording of Tom Waits’ “Heart Attack and Vine” reached No. 42.

Despite the enduring success of “Spell,” Jay Hawkins had sold his publishing rights early on, forcing him to tour relentlessly to support himself. In his later years, he found a second wave of fame as a cult movie actor. The independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch used “I Put a Spell on You” as a central motif in his 1984 film ‘Stranger Than Paradise’, and later cast him as a dapper, velvet-suited night clerk in the 1989 film ‘Mystery Train’.

Jay Hawkins spent his final years living in France, where his theatrical, uninhibited style had long been revered. He was married six times, and in addition to the three children he had with his first wife, he claimed to have fathered dozens of others around the world—a claim that his estate and biographers have since sought to document. While he never achieved his lifelong dream of singing grand opera, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins left behind a singular legacy - he took the Blues, dipped it in theatre, and paved the way for the theatricality of heavy rock.

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, on February 12th, 2000. He had been admitted to hospital for an emergency surgery to treat an aneurysm and intestinal obstruction. He was 70.

“I came into this world black, naked and ugly,” Jay Hawkins once told an interviewer. “And no matter how much I accumulate here, it’s a short journey. I will go out of this world black, naked and ugly. So I enjoy life”

SCREAMIN’ JAY HAWKINS

Born: July 18th, 1929 - Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.

Died: February 12th, 2000 - Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

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For further reading I can highly recommend the biography ‘Put a Spell On You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ by Steve Bergsman, published by Feral House in 2019. It is available from Amazon.

For me, ‘The Goodies’ were a comedy equivalent of a gateway drug, it took me to ‘Monty Python’, ‘The Goons’, ‘Marty Feldman’, ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’, and on and on… For whatever reason, repeats of The Goodies are as rare as hen’s teeth, but when the trio reunited in 2019 for a comeback audio series on Audible (subtitled “The Big Ben Theory”), I was among the first subscribers. It was good, and like many I’d hoped would be the beginning of a new chapter for them, but it was not to be. The pandemic came along and took away the national treasure that was Tim Brooke-Taylor.

He found his greatest fame as one-third of that dynamic comedy trio, alongside Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie. Running from 1970 to 1982 on the BBC and later ITV, the series featured the three men as an agency-for-hire operating under the motto “We Do Anything, Anytime, Anywhere.” In an era defined by counter-cultural cynicism, The Goodies leaned into visual absurdity. They rode a three-seater bicycle (a trandem), battled a giant white cat that toppled the London Post Office Tower (”Kitten Kong”), and engineered elaborate, live-action cartoon sequences. Within this trio, Tim Brooke-Taylor played the quintessential, Union Jack-waistcoat-wearing Tory—pompous, easily terrified, fiercely royalist, and deeply hypocritical. It was a pitch-perfect skewering of the British Establishment, delivered with a brilliant, nervous energy.

Timothy Julian Brooke-Taylor was born on July 17, 1940, in Buxton, Derbyshire. His father, Edward, was a solicitor and a decorated World War I veteran; his mother, Rachel, was a former international lacrosse player. His grandfather, Francis Brooke-Taylor, was a local coroner, giving young Tim an early, intimate view of the eccentricities of English civic life. After his father died when Tim was 12, he attended Winchester College before enrolling at Pembroke College, Cambridge, to study law. It was there that his legal aspirations were permanently derailed by the Cambridge Footlights, the university’s legendary theatrical club. As the club’s president in 1963, TB-T spearheaded ‘A Clump of Plinths’, a critically acclaimed revue that transferred to London’s West End and eventually to Broadway under the title ‘Cambridge Circus’. The show served as a major transatlantic showcase for a new wave of British comedy.

Returning to England, Tim became ubiquitous on BBC radio, most notably on the fast-paced sketch show “I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again”.

In 1967, he pivoted to television as a writer and performer on ITV’s “At Last the 1948 Show”, sharing the screen with John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Aimi MacDonald and Marty Feldman. It was in this series that TB-T co-wrote (with Feldman) and originally performed the “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch—a classic bit about competitive poverty that was later adopted and made famous by Monty Python.

Here are Tim and Aimi at the BFI in 2019 talking with Dick Fiddy about “At Last The 1948 Show”:-

While Python pursued a more fragmented, stream-of-consciousness style of television, Tim and his Goodies cohorts favoured a more traditional, narrative-driven absurdity rooted in the physical comedy of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. The formula worked; the show won the Silver Rose of Montreux in 1972 and even spawned a brief, unexpected pop career, with their novelty record “The Funky Gibbon” reaching the top ten on the U.K. singles chart in 1975. At around the same time he became part of another trio - with Barry Cryer and John Junkin - for the BBC Radio 2 sketch show ‘Hello Cheeky’ which then transferred to ITV for three series from 1976-79.

Tim Brooke-Taylor remained a foundational pillar of British broadcasting. For nearly 50 years, he served as a regular panelist on the long-running BBC Radio 4 game show “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue”. Billed as “the antidote to panel games,” the show relied heavily on double entendres and deliberate nonsense. Tim’s sharp, self-deprecating wit made him a fan favorite until his final recordings.

Listen: ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’s tribute to Tim (BBC Radio 4, 2020):

He was married to the former Christine Wheadon for 52 years, they had two sons. Though he spent decades playing variations of the stuffy, frightened conservative, his colleagues remember him as the warm, generous heart of their comedy cohort. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2011 for his services to light entertainment.

Tim Brooke-Taylor died on April 12, 2020, after contracting COVID-19. He was 79.

TIM BROOKE-TAYLOR

Born: 17 July 1940, Buxton, Derbyshire, England

Died: 12 April 2020, Cookham, Berkshire, England

WATCH: ‘An Audience with The Goodies’ hosted by Stewart Lee (2018)

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Back in 1989, Hitachi made a television commercial to advertise their Maxell cassette tapes. It used ‘Israelites’ by Desmond Dekker and the Aces as its soundtrack. In the advert a reggae fan holds up a number of boards as the music plays, on which the lyrics are written, only he has misheard them. So instead of “The Israelites” the handwritten board reads “Me ears are alight”. The next board says “At least I think that’s what he said – but I need to hear it on a Maxell”.

It was a funny and effective advert. I was familiar with the song before that - it had been a huge hit in Britain - but I had never really thought about what Desmond was singing about. I only knew I loved the rhythm, it made me want to dance. But like many things about Desmond Dekker there were hidden depths. This is his story.

He was born Desmond Adolphus Dacres on July 16th, 1941 in Saint Andrew Parish, Kingston, Jamaica. Orphaned young, he spent part of his childhood in the parishes of St. Mary and St. Thomas, where he was raised in part by a grandmother and aunt whose devotion to Church hymns left a lasting impression on his sense of melody. He apprenticed briefly as a tailor before returning to Kingston, where he found work as a welder — a job he shared for a time with another young man who sang on the factory floor to pass the hours, Bob Marley. It was Desmond who later urged the record producer Leslie Kong to give him an audition, leading to Marley’s first recordings.

His own path to a record deal was slower. After being turned away by the storied producers Coxsone Dodd and Duke Reid, he auditioned in 1961 for Kong’s Beverley’s label. Kong signed him but withheld him from the studio for two years, waiting, he said, for the right song. That song, “Honour Your Mother and Father,” topped the Jamaican charts in 1963 and launched a career that would make Desmond Dekker, backed by a vocal group that came to be known as the Aces, one of the island’s most reliable hitmakers throughout the decade.

His 1967 single “007 (Shanty Town),” inspired by street unrest he had witnessed in Kingston, became an anthem of the “rude boy” youth culture and found an unlikely second audience among mods in Britain. But it was “Israelites,” released in Jamaica in 1968 and reaching Britain and the United States the following year, that made him an international figure. Sung partly in Jamaican patois and built around the everyday hardship of the island’s poor, using the biblical metaphor of the “Israelites” to symbolise hardship, poverty, and the fight for spiritual and physical survival. The song reached No. 1 in Britain — the first Jamaican record to do so — and climbed into the American Top 10, a feat no Jamaican artist had managed before him. Desmond later said the song had come to him nearly whole after he overheard a couple arguing about money in a Kingston park.

He moved permanently to England in 1969, and further hits followed, including “It Mek” and “You Can Get It If You Really Want,” a Jimmy Cliff composition he had been reluctant to record. His fame was such that Paul McCartney name-checked him — (“Desmond has a barrow in the marketplace”) — in the Beatles song “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”

His commercial fortunes ebbed in the 1970s, but the arrival of the 2 Tone ska revival in Britain brought him back into the spotlight. Signed to the punk label Stiff Records, he recorded the 1980 album “Black & Dekker” with the backing of Graham Parker’s band, The Rumour, introducing his music to a new generation of punk and skinhead audiences who, by several accounts, had first encountered ska through bands like The Specials and Madness. He was declared bankrupt in 1984 after a period of poor management, but he continued to tour for the rest of his life, and remained a draw well into his sixties; associates recalled a sold-out Los Angeles show in 2005 filled largely with fans under 30 who knew the words to even his most obscure songs.

To later generations of musicians, particularly in Britain’s punk scene, Desmond Dekker was often cited as an entry point into Jamaican music, indeed ska records by artists like him were on the turntables at early punk gatherings before any punk records existed. He succeeded in bridging Kingston’s dance halls with the concert stages of London, Desmond Dekker did as much as any single performer to carry ska and rocksteady out of Jamaica and into the world’s ear.

He was protective about his private life. He lived for many years in Thornton Heath, in the London Borough of Croydon. He was divorced and had two children, a son and a daughter.

He died on May 25th 2006 of a heart attack at his home. He had continued to perform into his final weeks, playing what would be his last concert at Leeds University less than two weeks before his death.

DESMOND DEKKER

Born - 16 July 1941, Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica

Died - 25 May 2006, Thornton Heath, Surrey, England

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Decades after his death, Ian Curtis remains one of rock music’s most closely studied figures — a singer whose brief career left behind a body of work that continues to be examined for what it revealed, and perhaps concealed, about the man who wrote it.

His death, by suicide, came on the eve of what was to be Joy Division’s first American tour, and just weeks before the release of the band’s second album, “Closer,” a record that would come to be read, inescapably, as a chronicle of his final months.

Ian Kevin Curtis was born on July 15, 1956, in Stretford, a suburb of Manchester, and grew up in Macclesfield. As a teenager he was drawn to the glam rock of David Bowie and the confrontational theatrics of ‘The Doors’, and he wrote poetry long before he sang publicly. He married his teenage girlfriend, Deborah Woodruff, in 1975, and the couple had a daughter, Natalie, born in 1979.

The band that became ‘Joy Division’ formed in Manchester in 1976, not long after several of its members attended a ‘Sex Pistols’ gig that is often cited as a catalytic moment for the city’s music scene. Originally called ‘Warsaw’, the group changed its name in 1977 to avoid confusion with another band, adopting Joy Division — a name drawn from a 1955 novel that referenced forced prostitution in Nazi concentration camps, a choice that later drew scrutiny given the band’s often-misunderstood aesthetic.

In 1978, Joy Division appeared on Granada TV’s regional magazine show ‘Granada Reports’. Presenter (and owner of the iconic ‘Hacienda’ nightclub in Manchester) Tony Wilson introduces them in the clip below, after a link by Bob Greaves who obviously was unaware of the derivation of the band’s name.

Ian Curtis’s lyrics, often composed as much like private notebook entries as song verses, dealt with isolation, control and psychological collapse, delivered in a voice that critics frequently likened to Jim Morrison’s for its dark register and theatrical weight.

With the guitarist Bernard Sumner, the bassist Peter Hook and the drummer Stephen Morris, Ian Curtis helped forge a sound that was spare and emotionally raw, aided by the unconventional production techniques of Martin Hannett on the band’s 1979 debut album, “Unknown Pleasures.”

Onstage, Ian Curtis became known for a jerking, trance-like dance that fans and critics alike would later connect to the epilepsy he had been diagnosed with in 1978. The condition worsened through the following two years, complicated by the demands of touring, flashing stage lights and a grueling medication regimen that caused severe mood swings. He suffered seizures during performances and, on at least one occasion, in transit to a show.

His final months were marked by turmoil in both his professional and personal life. He was navigating the breakdown of his marriage alongside a relationship with a Belgian journalist, Annik Honoré, even as Joy Division’s profile rose sharply in the British music press. Friends and bandmates later described him as increasingly withdrawn and exhausted in the weeks before his death, though the extent of his distress was not fully understood by those around him at the time. He died on May 18th, 1980, at his home in Macclesfield. He was 23.

Joy Division disbanded following his death. The surviving members went on to form ‘New Order’, which became one of the defining bands of 1980s electronic and dance music. “Closer” and the single “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” released after his death, became touchstones of the era and cemented Joy Division’s legacy as a foundational influence on the sound that would come to be called post-punk and, later, goth and alternative rock more broadly.

His life and death were later dramatized in the 2007 film “Control,” directed by Anton Corbijn and based in part on a memoir written by Deborah Woodruff.

Ian Curtis

Born: 15 July 1956 - Stretford, Manchester

Died: 18 May 1980 - Macclesfield, Cheshire

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Robert Steven’s career traced an unusually dramatic arc, even by the standards of a profession built on reinvention. He rose to fame in the 1950s and ‘60s as a founding member of the National Theatre under Laurence Olivier’s direction, delivering performances — Horatio in “Hamlet,” Atahuallpa in “The Royal Hunt of the Sun,” Benedick opposite his wife, Maggie Smith, in “Much Ado About Nothing” — that made him one of the most closely watched actors of his generation. He left the National Theatre in 1970, and as his marriage to Maggie Smith unraveled in the early 1970s, his career and personal life went into a tailspin marked by heavy drinking and a nervous breakdown that kept him largely out of view through much of the 1970s and ‘80s.

Then, in 1993, the Royal Shakespeare Company took a chance on him, casting him as Falstaff in “Henry IV, Parts I and II,” a performance of such boisterous, wounded vitality that it won him the Olivier Award for best actor. A year later he played the title role in “King Lear,” directed by Adrian Noble which was described as a raw and devastating performance that critics said evoked Olivier’s own legendary portrayals and confirmed that Sir Robert had, against long odds, come all the way back. According to his fourth wife, Patricia Quinn, the sheer physical toll of that performance likely hastened his final decline.

Robert Graham Stephens was born on July 14, 1931, in Shirehampton, a working-class district of Bristol, the eldest of three children of Reuben Stephens, a shipyard labourer who later worked as a costing surveyor, and Gladys Millicent Stephens, who worked in a chocolate factory.

At 18 he won a scholarship to Esme Church’s Bradford Civic Theatre School in Yorkshire, where he met his first wife, a fellow student named Nora Ann Simmons.

His first professional work came with the Caryl Jenner Mobile Theatre, followed by seasons of repertory work in Morecambe and Preston. A performance there caught the eye of the director Tony Richardson, who brought him into the first season of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1956 — a launching pad, in retrospect, for one of the defining movements in postwar British drama.

His early screen work included “A Taste of Honey” (1961), in which he played a charming, feckless boyfriend; a supporting role as a Roman officer in the epic “Cleopatra” (1963); and Prince Escalus in Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” (1968). He appeared with his third wife Maggie Smith in the film version of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), and the following year starred as Sherlock Holmes in Billy Wilder’s “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.”

On Broadway, his performance in “Epitaph for George Dillon” during the 1958-59 season earned him a Tony Award nomination.

He was married four times, each one was an actress: Nora Ann Simmons in 1951 (with whom he had one son, Michael); Tarn Bassett in 1956 (with whom he had a daughter, the dance artist Lucy Dillon); Maggie Smith in 1967, (with whom he had two sons, the actors Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, before the marriage ended in divorce in 1974; and finally, in 1995, to Patricia Quinn, best known as Magenta in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

Colleagues who worked with him in his final years often remarked that his King Lear seemed to draw on the full sweep of his own turbulent life — its early glories, its long fall, and its improbable, hard-won return. He gave the performance the nickname of his own memoir, published the year of his death: “Knight Errant.”

Sir Robert Stephens died on November 12th 1995 in London from complications following surgery, after years of declining health. He was 64. His death came less than a year after he was knighted for his services to the theatre.

The commanding stage actor who was hailed in the 1960s as the natural successor to Laurence Olivier, fell into a long professional and personal slump in the years that followed, and then, astonishingly, reclaimed his place at the summit of British theatre in a late-career run at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Sir Robert Stephens

Born: 14 July 1931, Shirehampton, Bristol

Died: 12 November 1995, London

LISTEN to Robert Stephens on Desert Island Discs (1979):

DID with Roy Plomley (BBC Radio 4)

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When I was a boy Sundays seemed to drag on forever. I grew up in the South Wales valleys where it always seemed to rain on the seventh day, and I would be counting the minutes to its one highlight - the Film Matinee on BBC1. At 1.55pm, I could get lost in a classic British film from the 1940s or 50s, there were tales of World War Two; spy stories; Ealing comedies, or if I was unlucky a period drama with Margaret Lockwood and Stewart Granger, but even they were preferable to the politics and farming programmes on ITV. The ‘names above the title’ of the era were all there in all their monochrome glory - post-war celluloid stars like John Mills; Jack Hawkins; Trevor Howard; Celia Johnson; Dirk Bogarde; Michael Redgrave, and Eric Portman. Names that will probably mean little or nothing to anyone born after 1970 but still remembered fondly by boomers like me. Some more than others, though. Eric Portman seems to have faded from collective memory more than his contemporaries. He starred in some fine films and in at least three out and out classics by Micheal Powell and Emerick Pressburger - “49th Parallel” (1941), “One of Our Aircraft Is Missing” (1942) and “A Canterbury Tale” (1944). This is his story.

Eric Harold Portman was born on July 13, 1901, in Halifax, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, one of four children of Matthew Portman, a wool merchant, and his wife, Alice. As a young man he worked as a salesman in the menswear department of a Leeds department store while performing in his spare time with the Halifax Light Opera company, where his interest in acting first took hold.

His break came in the early 1920s, when he joined Robert Courtneidge’s touring Shakespearean company, appearing in a production of “Richard II” that led to a formal contract. He made his West End debut at the Savoy Theatre in September 1924, playing Antipholus of Syracuse in “The Comedy of Errors.”

“I learnt the acting thing by joining a touring company, playing parts and learning by my mistakes. Thank goodness I didn’t have to go to a drama school – tiresome things,”

His successes with the Courtneidge company led to the producer Lilian Baylis inviting him to join the Old Vic Company at the Lyric, Hammersmith, where he built a reputation as a serious classical actor, playing Romeo at the rebuilt Old Vic in 1928 and appearing alongside Gerald du Maurier and Basil Rathbone in “Diplomacy” in 1933.

Over the next 20 years he acquired the nickname ‘Long-Run Eric’ due to his many lengthy periods on the boards: “The Browning Version” (244 performances), “A Touch of the Poet” (284), “The Living Room” (307), “His Excellency” (412) and “Separate Tables” (726) - a record-breaker took him to Broadway where he gave another 322 performances.

His film career, which began with small and uncredited roles in the early 1930s, gathered momentum through the decade. He was offered a five-year Hollywood contract by Warner Bros after he was spotted by an American talent scout. He moved to California in October 1936 to play a minor role opposite Errol Flynn in “The Prince and the Pauper”. It proved to be a false start, his performance did not win acclaim and, disillusioned, he left his contract - and Hollywood - by mutual agreement.

Back in Britain, his big break came in 1941 when he was cast in the lead role of a ruthless and calculating Nazi U-boat commander in Powell and Pressburger’s “49th Parallel”. The part made Eric Portman a star overnight. In 1942, he starred in Powell and Pressburger’s “One of Our Aircraft Is Missing” about Allied pilots in occupied Holland; and played a Belgian resistance leader in “Uncensored”. In 1943 he had four major roles - a German pilot in “Squadron Leader X”; a sailor in Anthony Asquith’s “We Dive at Dawn”; a factory supervisor in “Millions Like Us”, and as a British schoolteacher trapped in occupied Denmark in “Escape to Danger.”

Eric Portman was back with Powell and Pressburger in 1944 for the classic ‘A Canterbury Tale’ and later that same year had the lead in “Great Day” with Flora Robson. Film exhibitors voted him the 10th most popular star at the British box office in 1944, He maintained that ranking the following year.

His work ranged widely across genre and tone. He made some thrillers – “Wanted for Murder” (1947), “Dear Murderer” (1947) and “The Mark of Cain” (1947). Other memorable films include “Daybreak” (1948), “Corridor of Mirrors” (1948), “The Blind Goddess” (1948), “The Spider and the Fly” (1949), “Cairo Road” (1950), “The Magic Box” (1951), and an Ealing comedy, “His Excellency” (1952), playing a trade unionist who becomes Governor of a British colony.

As the fifties progressed Eric Portman evolved from support to leading man to reliable character star. He made “South of Algiers” (1953) then had a big hit on stage in Terence Rattigan’s “Separate Tables”. He had a major success on screen with supporting roles, as a Prisoner of War in “The Colditz Story” (1955), the discredited doctor in Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea” (1955) and as an uncaring uncle looking after a child in “Child in the House” (1956). In 1957, he was again playing a lead role as Jess Oakroyd in JB Priestley’s “The Good Companions” (1957).

In later years he continued to work steadily in film roles including in “The Naked Edge” (1961), “Freud: The Secret Passion” (1962), “West 11” (1963), “The Man Who Finally Died” (1963), “The Bedford Incident” (1965), and “The Spy with a Cold Nose” (1966).

Near the end of his life he played character roles including ‘Number Two’ in an episode of the cult ITV series “The Prisoner” in 1967, and two films for Director Bryan Forbes: “The Whisperers” (1967) and “Deadfall” (1968) - in which he played an ageing homosexual safecracker, opposite cat burglar Michael Caine. Forbes later said Eric Portman was “grossly overlooked when it came to handing out honours” but pointed to his fondness for the bottle as a reason. Saying that he was, “always pursued by his own demons”.

His 44th and final film was “Assignment to Kill” (1968), after which he retired to live in a converted labourer’s cottage in the fishing village of St Veep, Cornwall. He died there, of a heart attack in his sleep, on 7th December 1969. He was 68.

Eric Portman was gay, and lived during a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence. Over his career he originated several of the lead roles in Terence Rattigan’s plays - notably the repressed schoolmaster in ‘The Browning Version’ and the disgraced major in ‘Separate Tables’ (whose ‘crime’ was originally conceived as a homosexual one). Late in his life he finally played an explicitly gay character in Bryan Forbes’ complex and underrated thriller ‘Deadfall’ (1968).

He lived for many years with Knox Laing (1913-1974), who was publicly referred to as his ‘manager’ or ‘housekeeper’.

Eric Portman, the stage and film actor who was one of the most respected performers of the English theatre and cinema for more than four decades is long overdue a re-appraisal.

Eric Portman

Born: 13th July 1901 - Halifax, West Riding of Yorkshire

Died: 7 December 1969 - St Veep, Cornwall

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READ: Eric Portman’s career has been charted by author Andy Owens in the biography ‘Our Eric – A Portrait of Eric Portman’ published by Sigma Press in 2013 and available from Amazon.

Brian Cant was born on July 12, 1933, in Ipswich, and attended Northgate Grammar School for Boys. As a young man he trained with the youth team of Ipswich Town Football Club before working as a printer, only turning to acting in the late 1950s. His path to children’s television was, by his own account, something of an accident. He was appearing in a BBC schools programme about ancient Rome when he learned that auditions were underway for presenters for a new series for under 5’s on the corporation’s fledgling second channel, BBC2. At his audition, the show’s creator, Joy Whitby, asked him to climb into a cardboard box and mime rowing out to sea, so he pretended to be fishing and caught a Wellington boot full of custard. He got the job. The programme was “Play School,” which would become a cornerstone of British children’s broadcasting, and Brian Cant made his first appearance on its third week in May 1964, and he would remain associated with it, in one form or another, for decades.

It was his work on “Play School” that led him to the role for which he is perhaps most fondly remembered: narrator of a trio of much repeated stop-motion puppet series created by Gordon Murray. He voiced “Camberwick Green” in 1966, “Trumpton” in 1967 and “Chigley” in 1969 — gentle, unhurried portraits of English village life that became, for many, synonymous with a certain idea of a vanished, orderly Britain. The rollcall of Trumpton’s fire brigade — Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb — delivered in Brian’s measured tones, endured in British popular memory long after the show itself had left the air.

He went on to create a spin off aimed at older children “Play Away” which ran on BBC Two on Saturday afternoons from 1971 to 1984 and introduced viewers to Jeremy Irons, Anita Dobson and Tony Robinson among others.

Brian also presented “Bric-a-Brac” on BBC One in the early 1980s. In the nineties he was seen on ITV in the role of ‘Brian The Farmer’ in “Dappledown Farm” originally made by the breakfast television company TV-AM, it later moved to Channel 5 where it stayed until 1999.

Brian Cant’s range extended beyond children’s programming, if less memorably. He made two appearances on “Doctor Who” in the 1960s, playing Kert Gantry in “The Daleks’ Master Plan” in 1965 and Tensa in “The Dominators” in 1968. He later presented the BBC science programme “The Great Egg Race” in 1979 and briefly co-hosted the game show “It’s a Knockout” in 1982.

His standing with the public he had entertained for so long was affirmed in 2007, when he was voted the best-loved voice in British children’s television history in a poll of more than 1,200 people. Three years later, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) honoured him with a special award for his contribution to children’s television. In his acceptance remarks, delivered with the dry, self-deprecating humour that colleagues often described, he reflected wryly on having spent a career speaking, thinking and understanding as a child — and, he noted with evident amusement, being paid for the privilege.

Brian Cant lived for many years in Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire. He was married twice, first to Mary Gibson, with whom he had two sons, including the actor Richard Cant. In 1984 he married the writer and director Cherry Britton, they had three children together.

He disclosed his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in an interview on BBC Breakfast in 2010, speaking candidly about a condition that would shape his final years.

Brian Cant died on June 19th, 2017, at Denville Hall a retirement home for entertainment professionals in Northwood, London. He was 83.

Brian Cant

Born: 12 July 1933 - Ipswich, Suffolk

Died: 19 June 2017 - Northwood, London

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For more than five decades, Jamaican singer John Holt was one of the most recognisable voices to emerge from Kingston’s fertile postwar music scene, a singer whose unhurried, lovelorn delivery set him apart from the ska and rocksteady singers of his generation and helped lay the groundwork for what would later be called ‘Lovers Rock’.

It was with his group ‘The Paragons’ that John wrote and sang “The Tide Is High” in 1967, a wistful, string-laced ballad that became a local hit but attracted little notice outside Jamaica. Thirteen years later, Blondie recorded a cover that topped the charts in both the United States and Britain, turning the composition into one of the most widely known reggae songs ever written, even as many listeners remained unaware of its origins. In 2002, British girl group ‘Atomic Kitten’ covered it again and released it as the second single from their second studio album ‘Feels So Good’ - it became the group’s third and final UK number one single.

I saw him perform on three occasions; at Leeds Polytechnic in 1985, where I remember him as edgy, vital and at times overtly political; at his iconic “John Holt in Symphony” orchestra concert at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2000 - all lush strings and tuxedos, and finally in 2012 when the radio station I worked for helped promote his concert at Cardiff University - by then his energy, and performance had dimmed - but that didn’t bother his audience too much - they all knew the songs anyway, and sang along - most had just come to revere the artist who had contributed so much to the soundtrack of their lives.

John Kenneth Holt was born on July 11, 1947, in the Greenwich Farm section of Kingston, the son of a nurse. As a boy he became a fixture of the talent contests staged around the city by the promoter Vere Johns, reportedly winning nearly thirty of them, some broadcast live on the radio.

He recorded his first single, “Forever I’ll Stay,” in 1963 (as Johnny Holt) for the producer Leslie Kong, but it was as a member of the vocal trio The Paragons — alongside Bob Andy, Tyrone Evans and, later, Howard Barrett — John Holt first found wide fame. The group recorded for the producers Coxsone Dodd and Duke Reid, becoming one of the defining acts of the mid-1960s rocksteady sound, a slower, more soulful cousin of ska.

After The Paragons disbanded around 1970, John Holt launched a solo career that would prove even more successful than his work with the group. His 1972 single “Stick By Me” was reportedly the best-selling Jamaican record of that year, and his 1973 album, “Time Is the Master,” produced by Harry Mudie with orchestral arrangements recorded in London, established a lush, string-driven sound that Trojan Records would soon replicate on a larger scale.

That same year brought “1,000 Volts of Holt,” a collection of reggae versions of pop standards that introduced John Holt to international audiences and spawned a British Top 10 hit with his rendition of the Kris Kristofferson song “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Two sequel albums followed later in the decade.

The massive success of “1,000 Volts of Holt” in Britain - and especially London - wasn’t an accident. It was the result of a highly calculated, ground-breaking production and marketing strategy by London-based Trojan Records. The album eventually became their best-selling single-artist LP of all time. It captured both the capital’s mainstream and underground music scenes.

Trojan Records wanted to break reggae out of its underground niche and get it onto mainstream British daytime radio. To do this, producer Tony Ashfield took raw, heavy rhythms recorded in Jamaica by John Holt and brought the tapes to London. At Chalk Farm Studios in Camden, Ashfield overdubbed sophisticated, smooth orchestral string and horn arrangements (arranged by Brian Rogers) on top of the heavy roots basslines. This unique fusion—often called “Uptown Reggae”—smoothed out the rough edges for casual British listeners while keeping the deep groove that Caribbean diaspora communities in London loved.

Because the album consisted mostly of silky reggae covers of famous pop, country, and soul tracks (including “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” Lobo’s “I’d Love You to Want Me,” and Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly”), it was instantly familiar. This accessibility made it a favorite for daytime programmers at the newly launched Capital Radio in London which propelled the single “Help Me Make It Through the Night” into the UK Top 10 in 1974.

While commercial radio handled the mainstream, London’s thriving Caribbean communities popularised the album from the ground up. In neighbourhoods like Brixton, Notting Hill, and Harlesden, sound systems played the tracks at community dances. The popularity of the album soon spread to other British cities where there was a significant Caribbean population, such as Birmingham, Bristol and Cardiff.

Crucially, the album became a foundational staple of the “Lovers Rock” subgenre, which was exploding in London at the time. It was an absolute must-have in independent reggae record shops, purchased heavily by both the West Indian diaspora and white working-class youths (such as the traditional skinhead and mod subcultures) who frequented Trojan’s distribution network.

Trojan Records treated “1,000 Volts of Holt” like a major pop release rather than a niche import. They pressed it in massive quantities, gave it an eye-catching sleeve, and targeted high-street record shops across London (like HMV and Woolworths), ensuring it wasn’t just hidden away in specialist stores.

By bridging the gap between London’s underground sound system culture and mainstream commercial pop appeal, the album became a ubiquitous soundtrack in households across London throughout the mid-to-late 1970s.

John Holt’s sound shifted with the times. In Jamaica in 1977 he scored a hit with “Up Park Camp,” and by the early 1980s, working with the producer Henry “Junjo” Lawes, he had embraced a harder-edged dancehall style on songs like “Police in Helicopter” (1983) which addressed the Jamaican government’s crackdown on marijuana farming. He remained a fixture of the ‘Reggae Sunsplash’ festival throughout the decade and was among the first Jamaican artists, alongside Freddie McGregor, to perform with a symphony orchestra.

His slow, aching style on songs like “Man Next Door” — later covered by Dennis Brown, UB40 and Horace Andy — anticipated the lovers rock genre that would flourish in Britain in the years that followed.

John Holt died of colon cancer on October 19th, 2014, at a hospital in London where he had been receiving treatment since collapsing on stage at the ‘One Love Festival’ in Bedfordshire on 16th August, leaving his wife, Valerie, twelve children and twenty-five grandchildren. He was 67.

In 2004, the Jamaican government awarded John Holt the Order of Distinction for his contributions to the nation’s music. His 1973 album “1,000 Volts of Holt” was certified gold in Britain in 2022, evidence of an audience that had only grown since its release.

’Sir’ John Holt

Born: Greenwich Farm, Kingston, Jamaica - 11 July 1947

Died: Wellington Hospital, St Johns Wood, London - 19 October 2014

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Terry-Thomas, the gap-toothed comic actor with the exquisitely caddish drawl, was among the most instantly recognizable stars of postwar British - and American - cinema. He did not start life with a silver spoon in his mouth, and its bleak end was a stark counterpoint to the joy and laughter his performances still bring. This is his story.

He was born Thomas Terry Hoar Stevens in Finchley, North London, on 10th July 1911, the fourth of five children for Ernest and Ellen Stevens. His father was the managing director of a butcher’s business in London’s Smithfield Meat Market. ‘T-T’ - known as ‘Tom’ as a boy - was sent to boarding school in Sussex, and while there his parents’ marriage disintegrated as both descended into alcoholism, and eventually separated. In order to fit in with his upper class schoolmates he adopted a plummy accent far removed from his own, which would stand him in good stead during his later career.

After leaving school he drifted through a series of unglamorous jobs — as a transport clerk, a meat salesman at Smithfield Market, an insurance agent — before deciding that ordinary employment was not for him. He tried his hand at ballroom dancing and bandleading, and as a cabaret performer under a string of stage names before settling, in his late twenties, on ‘Terry-Thomas’.

Success did not come quickly. He had a few minor roles in operetta with Edgware Operatic Society, and started to pick up work as a film extra. Terry-Thomas made his uncredited screen debut in “The Private Life of Henry VIII” (1933) starring Charles Laughton, and over the next eight years he was used as a supporting artist in sixteen films. His first speaking role was in the comedy “Once In A Million” (1935) - shouting “A thousand!” during an auction.

In between films he refined his cabaret routine and carried on working as a dance teacher. In 1937 T-T met a South African dancer, Ida Florence Patlansky, who used the stage-name Pat Patlanski, and they established a cabaret double-act billed as “Terri and Patlanski”, which proved successful. The couple became romantically involved and married on 3rd February 1938. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the newly-wed pair signed up for ENSA (The Entertainments National Service Association) which had been created to provide entertainment to the British Armed Forces. In 1942 T-T was called up for active military service. He joined the Royal Corps of Signals - after basic training he was promoted to the rank of corporal and applied for a commission, but a duodenal ulcer, and hearing impairment sustained on a film set some years earlier led him to be turned down. Paradoxically, it was this misfortune that gave his career its decisive push: he toured with the forces entertainment troupe Stars in Battledress, sharpening the mannered, affected persona of the fatuous English toff that would define the rest of his working life. He finished the war as a Sergeant and was finally demobbed in April 1946.

Back on Civvy Street, a hit revue in the West End, “Piccadilly Hayride” and regular appearances on the popular BBC radio show “Variety Bandbox” in the late 1940s brought him wider public attention, followed by an early BBC television series “How Do You View?” (1949–1953) that made him a familiar face in those British homes that could afford a set.

Terry-Thomas’s breakthrough on film came with “Private’s Progress” in 1956, in which his performance as the blustering Major Hitchcock gave him a catchphrase — a scornful appraisal of subordinates as “an absolute shower” — that followed him for the rest of his career. It was the start of a run of collaborations with the directing brothers John and Roy Boulting that cemented his standing as one of British comedy’s most reliable draws: “Brothers in Law” (1957) - notable because he was cast against type as a cockney criminal: “Lucky Jim” (1957): “Carlton-Browne of the F.O.” (1959): “I’m All Right Jack” (1959) - in which he reprised his role as Major Hitchcock, this time as a tetchily incompetent personnel manager in a classic satire of British industrial life, and “School for Scoundrels” (1960) - in which he was perfectly cast as the first-class bounder and antagonist.

Across the following decade he built a gallery of memorably disreputable Englishmen: cads, cheats, faithless suitors and minor aristocrats undone by their own vanity. By the late 1950s he was also starting to get noticed in America. Writing in the New York Times of his performance in the 1959 film “Too Many Crooks,” the critic Bosley Crowther marveled at an actor “whose eyes flashed and lips curled as he built to a magnificently unhinged comic outburst”.

He made over 50 films including the international hits “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,”(1963) “How to Murder Your Wife”(1965) and “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines,”(1965).

Colleagues and biographers alike observed that the character he played rarely varied from film to film — some version of the pretentious, self-regarding rogue with an eye for easy money — but that audiences never tired of it.

In 1971, at the height of his fame, Terry-Thomas was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He continued to work through the decade, taking smaller roles and making television appearances, including candid interviews about his condition that helped raise public awareness of the disease. But his health steadily worsened, his medical costs mounted, and by the early 1980s he and his wife had sold their properties in London and Spain to cover expenses.

By 1987 the couple had returned to London to live in a modest, charity-assisted flat, a decline in circumstances that alarmed friends from his years of stardom. In 1989, the actor Jack Douglas and the broadcaster Richard Hope-Hawkins organized a benefit gala at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, with Michael Caine as host and Phil Collins topping the bill, raising more than £75,000 for Terry-Thomas and for Parkinson’s disease research.

Terry-Thomas was married twice: to Ida Patlanski from 1938 until their divorce in 1962, and to Belinda Cunningham, who he wed in 1963 - they had two sons. He was the second cousin of ‘The Good Life’ star Richard Briers with whom he appeared in ‘A Matter Of WHO’ (1961).

Reflecting on the persona that had made him famous, Terry-Thomas once suggested that the affected, cravat-wearing Englishman audiences knew from the screen was, in the end, a performance built carefully over years — proof, he said, that a man could invent himself as thoroughly as any character he played.

For more than thirty years, Terry-Thomas embodied a particular strain of English comic villainy: the bounder, the rotter, the upper-crust wastrel forever scheming his way past better men. With his signature gap between his front teeth — which he said was echoed in the hyphen of his adopted name — and a wardrobe of cravats, waistcoats and loud checked jackets, he turned caddishness into an art form so distinctive that “a Terry-Thomas part” became its own kind of shorthand in casting offices on both sides of the Atlantic.

In his final weeks Terry-Thomas was a patient at a nursing home in Surrey, where he died on 8th January 1990. He was 78. He had lived with Parkinson’s disease for nearly two decades, an illness that transformed one of the screen’s most physically exuberant comic performers into a man who spent his final years largely immobile and, for a period, in genuine financial hardship before friends and admirers in the entertainment world rallied to his aid.

Terry-Thomas

Born; 10 July 1911 – Finchley, North London

Died: 8 January 1990 - Godalming, Surrey

Terry-Thomas Filmography

LISTEN: Terry-Thomas on “Desert Island Discs” (1970):

Desert Island Discs with Roy Plomley (BBC Radio 4)

WATCH: Terry-Thomas interview on “Film Talk” (1976):

Film Talk with Mark Caldwell (Stoic)

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Gwen Guthrie spent nearly twenty five years in the music business. She moved fluidly between roles: as a Baptist-choir girl from Newark, New Jersey who studied classical piano; as a singer of countless jingles (often alongside her friend Valerie Simpson, of ‘Ashford & Simpson’); as a much-sought backing vocalist for the likes of Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Luther Vandross, Steely Dan and Madonna; and, eventually, as a sola artist at the forefront of the dance scene in the UK.

Her biggest hit, “Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On but the Rent,” released in 1986, became a generational statement of female independence, its refrain insisting that any potential suitor would need to have steady employment — “you have to have a J.O.B. if you wanna to be with me,” as she put it — before he could expect her attention. The song reached No.1 on the Billboard R&B chart in the US and turned Gwen, until then known only to music business insiders as a songwriter and session singer, into a star in her own right.

Gwendolyn Guthrie was born on July 9th, 1950, in Newark, where her father began teaching her piano when she was eight years old. She sang in the choir at Mount Zion Baptist Church and, in high school, joined an all-girl vocal quartet called ‘The Ebonettes’, known for matching gowns and elbow-length gloves. She worked for a time as an assistant school teacher while singing in local groups, including one led by Larry Blackmon, who later founded the band ‘Cameo’.

Her professional break came in 1974, when she was called in as a last-minute replacement to sing backup on Aretha Franklin’s single “I’m in Love.” Session work and song-writing followed in quick succession. With her boyfriend at the time, the trombonist and bassist Patrick Grant, she wrote “Supernatural Thing,” which was a big ‘comeback’ success for Ben E. King in 1975, and “This Time I’ll Be Sweeter,” later a hit for Angela Bofill. She also contributed several songs to Sister Sledge’s 1975 album “Circle of Love” and wrote Roberta Flack’s “God Don’t Like Ugly.”

In 1978, Gwen moved to Jamaica, where she became closely associated with Reggae music, singing on albums by Peter Tosh (including the 1981 chart hit "Nothing But Love") and forming a lasting partnership with the duo Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare. That collaboration led to her self-titled debut solo album, released by Island Records in 1982, and to a string of club records — among them “Padlock,” “Seventh Heaven” and “Peanut Butter”.

She continued recording through the decade, releasing “Good to Go Lover” in 1986, the album that contained “Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On but the Rent,” which climbed up the charts in Britain, eventually reaching No 5 in the summer of 1986. By the autumn she was the toast of the UK soul scene, selling out the Hammersmith Odeon in London and the Fairfield Hall in Croydon (with Curiosity Killed the Cat as support) and scoring two further Top 40 hits with a cover of the Carpenters’ song “(They Long To Be) Close To You”. Gwen released two more albums, “Lifeline” in 1988 and “Hot Times,” in 1990, after which she largely stepped back from performing to concentrate on bringing up her two children, especially after the death of her husband, Donald Wakefield, in 1995. By the end of the nineties her own health was in decline.

Gwen Guthrie was diagnosed with uterine cancer in 1998. Despite undergoing treatment, the disease progressed rapidly, leading to her death on February 3rd, 1999, in Orange, New Jersey. She was 48.

Her songs have since taken on a life beyond the era that produced them, sampled and covered by artists including Mary J. Blige and Mariah Carey, and rediscovered by new listeners drawn to the plain-spoken confidence of a woman who wrote her own rules and set them, unmistakably, to a beat.

Albums

Gwen Guthrie (Island Records 1982)

Portrait (Island Records 1983)

Just For You (Fourth & Broadway Records 1985)

Good To Go Lover (Polygram Records 1986)

Just For You (Fourth & Broadway Records 1988)

Lifeline (Warner Brothers Records 1988)

Can’t Love You Tonight (Island Records 1989)

Hot Times (Island Records 1992)

Gwen Guthrie

Born: July 9th, 1950 - Newark, New Jersey

Died: February 3rd, 1999 - Orange City, New Jersey

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Marty Feldman was once told he could never appear as a performer on television because audiences would not accept his appearance, a judgement he not only disproved but went further to become a major comedy star in Hollywood.

He was born Martin Alan Feldman on 8th July 1934 in Canning Town, a then unfashionable and relatively poor area of the East End of London. His parents, Myer Feldman, a garment manufacturer, and Cecilia Feldman, were Ukrainian - both from Jewish families who had emigrated from Kiev.

As a child he contracted Graves’ ophthalmopathy as the result of Thyroid disease and this left him with protruding, misaligned eyes, a condition compounded over the years by later accidents; the effect gave his face an air of perpetual startled mischief that he later turned into his professional signature. “My face is me,” he once told an interviewer, “the sum total of the disasters of my life.”

He left school at 15, working for a time at a seaside funfair in Margate and nursing an ambition to become a jazz trumpeter, an instrument he later admitted he played badly. By his early twenties he had abandoned music for comedy, touring in a modest stage act (Morris, Marty and Mitch) before settling into a career as a scriptwriter for the BBC.

He worked on scripts for the popular radio show “Educating Archie” a series which subsequently transferred to television.

In 1954, Marty met an aspiring comedian called Barry Took, with whom he formed a writing partnership that would last for twenty years. In 1960 they wrote episodes for one of ITV’s most successful sitcoms of the era “The Army Game” and went on to pen most of its spin-off “Bootsie and Snudge” (1960–62), For BBC Radio they wrote “Round the Horne” (1964–67), their best-remembered comedy series, which starred Kenneth Horne and Kenneth Williams.

Marty then became the chief writer and script editor on BBC1’s “The Frost Report” (1966–67) - and co-wrote that series’ most famous sketch “Class” in which John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett portrayed the personification of the British class system - facing the audience in descending order of height.

It was not until 1967 that Marty Feldman stepped in front of the camera himself - at the insistence of John Cleese, joining the ITV sketch series “At Last the 1948 Show,” where he had a hand in writing what became known as the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, later a signature piece for the Monty Python team.

The series also included Marty and John Cleese in the classic ‘Bookshop’ sketch with John Cleese (which Cleese has described as his favourite).

His own programme , “It’s Marty!,” (BBC Two, 1968-69) followed soon after, earning him two British Academy Television Awards (the first series also won the Golden Rose Award at Montreux). Marty’s first feature film role was in “Every Home Should Have One” (1970). A further television vehicle, “The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine,” (ITV 1971-72) cemented his reputation at home even as he remained largely unknown across the Atlantic.

For millions of cinema-goers, Marty Feldman will be remembered first and foremost as Igor, the shuffling, wall-eyed lab assistant who greeted Gene Wilder’s title character in Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” (1974). The role of Igor (pronounced “Eye-gor”) and the sly, conspiratorial glances he threw directly into the camera, made him an unlikely star in the United States at an age when most performers are already established, and it opened the door to a string of further collaborations with Mel Brooks, including “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother”(1975). “Silent Movie” (1976) and “High Anxiety” (1977). He also moved behind the camera as a director, making his debut with “The Last Remake of Beau Geste” in 1977 and later directing and starring in “In God We Trust” (1980).

Those who worked with him often remarked on the disconnect between the frantic figure on screen and the more melancholy man they knew off it — a gentler, more introspective performer who nonetheless never tired of making the very deformity that had once caused him pain into a source of delight for audiences on two continents.

Marty met Lauretta Sullivan, a Bristol-born secretary at a children’s talent agency, in 1958 at one of the London jazz clubs he frequented and sometimes played in. they were married the following year. Lauretta essentially became his manager, and was largely responsible for his success in America.

Marty Feldman died of a heart attack on 2nd December 1982 in a hotel room in Mexico City, where he was completing work on the pirate spoof “Yellowbeard” having spent the day filming what would prove to be a bitterly fitting final scene: the death of his own character. He was 48.

He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills, not far from the graves of Buster Keaton and Stan Laurel, two performers he had idolized since childhood.

Marty Feldman

Born: Canning Town, London on 8th July 1934

Died: Mexico City on 2nd December 1982

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Since the early 1960s, boys of an ilk (and indeed some girls - but mainly boys) in Britain have displayed a tendency to gravitate towards James Bond movies, and “Doctor Who” on television - and will often demonstrate allegiance to the actors who were playing the roles in their formative years. ‘My’ James Bond was Roger Moore, and the ultimate Doctor for me will always be Jon Pertwee.

He was born John Devon Roland Pertwee in Kensington, London, on July 7th 1919, to the actor-playwright Roland Pertwee and the stage actress Avice Scholtz, who separated when Jon was young, and he was raised by his paternal grandmother. The theatrical dynasty he belonged to were seemingly incapable of producing anyone who was not a performer. His brother Michael (1916-91) would later become a prolific film and stage writer and cousin Bill Pertwee was a comic actor, and long-time cast member of the BBC series “Dad’s Army.”

Formal education did not suit him. His rebellious behaviour led to his expulsion from two schools, and from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, reportedly for “lack of seriousness,” — an early sign of the restless comic instinct that would define his career.

Like many of his generation, Jon Pertwee’s acting ambitions were put on hold by the Second World War. He served as an officer in the Royal Navy, working in naval intelligence, and was, for a time, a crew member of HMS Hood, the pride of the British fleet — transferred off the ship shortly before it was sunk in 1941 with the loss of all but three men. He rarely spoke of the episode without acknowledging his good fortune.

After the war, Jon turned to radio comedy, developing the gallery of funny voices and rubber-faced characterizations that would become his trademark. He had regular roles in the wartime comedies “Waterlogged Spa,” alongside Eric Barker, and “Puffney Post Office,” in which he played a hapless old postman.

His breakthrough came with the BBC radio sitcom “The Navy Lark,” in which he played Chief Petty Officer Pertwee. The cast included Leslie Phillips, Dennis Price and Ronnie Barker. It was a hugely popular show and had an 18-year run from 1959 to 1977. It made Jon Pertwee one of British radio’s most familiar voices, even as his screen career blossomed in parallel.

He starred in the crime film “Murder at the Windmill” (1949) and the comedy “Will Any Gentleman...?” (1953), the latter featuring future First Doctor actor William Hartnell - and on the set of which he met his first wife, the actress Jean Marsh.

Jon also appeared in four films in the Carry On series between 1964 and 1992:- “Carry On Cleo”(1964) playing the Soothsayer; “Carry On Cowboy” (1965) playing Sheriff Earp, the unlucky lawman quickly dispatched at the start of the film; and in “Carry On Screaming!”(1966) in which he played the mad scientist Dr. Fettle. In a 1986 interview, he said he turned down offers to appear in more Carry On films because he believed the series had adversely affected the careers of other regular actors such as Kenneth Williams, Sid James and Joan Sims, although he did return for a brief cameo as the Duke of Cornwall in the final film in the series “Carry On Columbus”(1992)

On stage Jon starred in the comedy “There’s a Girl in My Soup” at the Globe Theatre in London’s West End from October 1966, and later appeared in the play’s 1967 New York production. He was offered the role of Captain Mainwaring in the pilot episode of “Dad’s Army”, but turned it down to continue on Broadway.

Jon Pertwee’s defining television role arrived in 1969, when he was cast as the third actor to play the Doctor in the BBC science fiction series “Doctor Who.” Where his predecessor, Patrick Troughton, had played the role for comic whimsy, Jon — drawing on his own enthusiasms for fast cars, diving and derring-do — reinvented the Time Lord as a natty man of action, closer in spirit to the era’s spy thrillers. Determined to move away from the clownish depiction Troughton gave the character, he played the Doctor as an action-based interplanetary crusader exhibiting the characteristics of an Edwardian action hero, capable of drawing on his own considerable skill performing stunts.

He held the role until 1974, and returned to it periodically afterward, including in the 20th-anniversary special “The Five Doctors.” Colin Baker, one of his several successors in the part, called him “a man of such presence and stature,” while Tom Baker, who inherited the role directly from him, praised him as “such a stylish actor.”

After leaving “Doctor Who,” he hosted the murder mystery panel game, “Whodunnit?” on ITV from 1974 to 1978 before taking on the role for which many children of the era remember him best: the title character of “Worzel Gummidge,” a walking, talking scarecrow with interchangeable heads, based on the books by Barbara Euphan Todd. The series was, by his own account, an unlikely triumph — a project the BBC and Thames Television had each turned down before Southern Television agreed to produce it, and which he later described as “becoming something of a cult” within its first four episodes.

In his later years Jon Pertwee never strayed far from the character who made him famous, becoming a fixture on the “Doctor Who” convention circuit and making in-character appearances for fans well into the 1990s.

He married Ingeborg Rhoesa in 1960, and had two children, Sean and Dariel, both of whom followed him into acting. His earlier marriage, to the actress Jean Marsh in 1955, ended in divorce.

Jon Pertwee’s body was cremated at Putney Vale Crematorium, with a toy figure of Worzel Gummidge affixed to the coffin — a final touch specified, fittingly, in his own will. His death came just eight days after the premiere of a new “Doctor Who” television film, whose British broadcast closed with a dedication: “To the memory of Jon Pertwee, 1919–1996, now with the Time Lords.”

The debonair actor who piloted the TARDIS as the dashing, gadget-loving third incarnation of Doctor Who and later charmed a generation of children as the shambling, turnip-headed scarecrow Worzel Gummidge, died on May 20th 1996 while on holiday in Connecticut. He was 76.

Jon Pertwee

Born: 7th July 1919 in Kensington, London, England

Died: 20th May 1996 in Sherman, Connecticut, U.S.

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Alan Freeman would have been 99 today, and I for one find it startling to think he will have been gone 20 years in October. Universally known to listeners and colleagues alike as “Fluff,” he was for many British listeners the voice of the pop chart itself. As host of “Pick of the Pops,” the countdown show he started presenting in 1961 and would return to, in one form or another, for nearly 40 years, he narrated the rise and fall of the nation’s hit singles to a signature fanfare, “At the Sign of the Swingin’ Cymbal,” with an enthusiasm that never seemed to dim, even as the music around him changed almost beyond recognition.

“Fluff was the greatest out-and-out disc jockey of them all,” the broadcaster John Peel once said of him — a tribute Alan prized, colleagues said, precisely because it came from a man whose musical tastes differed so sharply from his own. Where Peel prided himself on introducing the obscure and the difficult, Alan Freeman’s gift was for making the Top 20 itself feel like an event.

Alan Leslie Freeman was born on July 6th, 1927, in Melbourne, Australia, and grew up wanting to be an opera singer before concluding, in his own estimation, that his voice was not strong enough for the stage. He worked instead as an accountant for a timber company before auditioning, almost on a whim, for a radio announcing job in 1952. He got it, and began his career at a station in Tasmania before moving to 3KZ in Melbourne.

In 1957 he set out on what was meant to be a nine-month trip around the world, with a promise to his employer that he would be back in Melbourne by the following January. He never returned. Arriving in London, he found work as a summer relief disc jockey on Radio Luxembourg, then the dominant commercial station for British pop fans, and stayed on air there for over a decade. By 1960 he had joined the BBC’s Light Programme, and the following year he began presenting “Pick of the Pops,” reading out the week’s chart in reverse order in a delivery that listeners came to find as thrilling as the music itself.

His nickname, by most accounts, arose from a woolly submarine-style pullover, a gift from his Mother, that returned from the dry cleaners looking like a shapeless ball of fluff; he wore it to the studio often enough that the name stuck for good.

Alan Freeman was part of the original presenting team on “Top of the Pops” when it began in 1964, and became a regular panelist on “Juke Box Jury.” When BBC Radio 1 launched in 1967, he was there at the start with Pick of The Pops on Sundays - simulcast on Radio 2. On television, as well as hosting ‘Top of The Pops’ once a month he presented a music magazine-style television show for BBC One in 1968, ‘All Systems Freeman’, on Friday evenings, but despite good reviews it did not return for a second series.

He took over from Terry Wogan on Radio 1’s weekday afternoon drive-time slot in 1972, when - in a bizarre move - an actor called Tom Browne was hired to take over his hugely successful chart show slot. Alan also presented a series called Quiz Kid on Sunday evenings, recorded at youth clubs and boys' clubs all over the country. In 1973, he was moved again - this time to Saturday afternoons where he created the multi-award winning Alan Freeman’s Rock Show which featured heavy and progressive rock interspersed with snippets of classical music and opera. Black Sabbath, in gratitude for his championing of the group’s music at a time when few broadcasters would play it, dedicated an instrumental track, “Fluff,” to him on their album “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.”

He presented ‘The Story of Pop’ - a 26-part Radio 1 series in 1973–74. From 1975 to 1977, he hosted the musical game show ‘Free Spin’ on Radio 2. Alan left the BBC for London commercial station Capital Radio in 1979, reviving both “Pick of the Pops” (this time combining the current London singles chart and a classic Top 20 from a bygone year) and “The Rock Show” there, before returning to the BBC and Radio 1 a decade later to revive them once more. In 1993, as part of a broader purge of the network’s veteran presenters under the controller Matthew Bannister, Alan was let go, along with several other long time colleagues. He went on to host shows for Virgin Radio, Classic FM and Capital Gold, then, from 1997 until 2000, he brought “Pick of the Pops” to its final home on BBC Radio 2, alongside a programme called ‘Their Greatest Bits’ devoted to opera and classical highlights.

His staccato delivery, thick with exclamations of “All right!” and “Not ‘arf!”, made him an easy and enduring target for parody, most famously as the inspiration for the character Dave Nice, one half of the fictional has-been DJ duo Smashie and Nicey created by the comedian Harry Enfield. Fluff took the joke in good humour, appearing in a cameo in a 1994 television special built around the characters.

He never married. In March 1994, he revealed on breakfast television that he had become celibate in 1981, but had previously been bisexual. He said that he had been wary of forming lasting attachments. Radio, he once remarked, had been “my friend, my lover, my everything for most of my life.”

In 2000, arthritis in his hands made it increasingly difficult for him to continue working, and he moved into Brinsworth House, the retirement home for entertainers in Twickenham, though he continued for a time to travel to BBC Broadcasting House to record his programmes before finally handing “Pick of the Pops” to Dale Winton. That same year he received a lifetime achievement award at the Sony Radio Academy Awards, presented by Winton, who called him a man held “in the highest affection by, quite literally, every sector of our industry.”

He was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 1997/98 New Year Honours list. He received the award in recognition of his significant services to broadcasting and music.

Alan Freeman died on 27th November 2007 at Brinsworth House, after having been in declining health for several years, hampered by severe arthritis and asthma. He was 79.

LISTEN : The Alan Freeman Story on BBC Radio 1 (1986)

LISTEN: The Complete Fluff - A Tribute to Alan Freeman on BBC Radio 2 (2006)

LISTEN: Capital Radio Tribute to Alan Freeman on Capital Gold (2006)

WATCH: Alan Freeman being surprised by his old Capital Radio colleague Michael Aspel on ‘This Is Your Life’ on ITV (1987)

In 2024, DJ Simon Mayo picked Alan Freeman as his nominee on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Great Lives’

Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman

Born: 6 July 1927 - Melbourne, Australia

Died: 27 November 2006, Brinsworth House, Twickenham, England

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