Serious question, dear blog reader. Has anyone other than yer actual Keith Telly Topping been genuinely unsure at various stages over the last fortnight exactly which day it was/is? Hopefully this is not a first sign of early-onset dementia in this blogger but, rather, a natural reaction to having Christmas Day and New Years Day on Sundays. And thus, as a consequence, at least two Bank Holidays occurring on days that they would not in what might be considered 'ordinary' circumstances.
So, the first discombobulated From The North bloggerisationisms update of 2023 is, it seems, upon us. Little has changed since last we spoke, dear blog reader. The wind it doth still howl in the night, the winter chill remains biting and nasty, nobody knows which day to put the bins out and, just when you think this right shite state of affairs can't, possibly, get any worse you recall that James Corden is alive and getting paid as well.
New details have been revealed about how Ncuti Gatwa was cast in Doctor Who, with the show's 'bosses' (that's 'producers' only with less syllables for the hard of thinking) explaining that they considered a non-binary actor for the role. Returning showrunner Russell Davies and executive producer Phil Collinson 'opened up' (that's according to the Radio Times which used to be run by adults) or 'spoke about' (according to, you know, everyone normal) what, exactly, they were looking for in the casting the new Doctor. Big Rusty explained: 'As ever, we turned to Andy Pryor [casting director] and said, "Bring us the best in the land." We saw all backgrounds, all genders.' Collinson told Doctor Who Magazine: 'We saw men, we saw women, we saw one non-binary actor.' Rusty added: 'I think, as a rule, we were looking for younger - most of the people we saw were under thirty - but not as a definite rule. And, kind of, new talent.' Whilst Davies hasn't confirmed the names of any other actors who were in the running for the role, he has suggested that another actor was almost cast before Gatwa's audition changed their minds.
It appears that Peaky Blinders actor Aneurin Barnard will be playing a politician in the next series of Doctor Who. Barnard - who was last seen in the recently cancelled Netflix series 1899 - has been spotted by eagle-eyed fans in posters displayed on the set of the new series in Cardiff. The posters suggest that he is playing a character seemingly called Roger Ap Gwilliam who represents a political party called Albion which has the slogan: 'For a bigger, better and bolder Britain.' So, no obvious similarity to any actual political party, then. This isn't the first time that Barnard's name has been mentioned in connection with Doctor Who; in 2012, when he made the David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton biopic We'll Take Manhattan with Karen Gillan, the Digital Spy website claimed that he had highfalutin' vainglorious designs on being Matt Smith's replacement in the BBC's popular long-running family SF drama. But, he wasn't.
A Doctor Who film unit set up a shoot involving two actors and a huge new monster at Swansea University Bay Campus on 4 January according to an article on the Cultbox website. Be aware, the link includes pictures which could, potentially, be spoilers - so if you're bothered about such malarkey, you might want to give it a miss.
Prior to Christmas, Wales Online reported that on Friday 16 and Saturday 17 December filming for the new series with Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson had taken place at Cardiff Bay Barrage. It was stated that the crew worked on 16 December, during one of the coldest nights in living memory, as temperatures fell to -13°C in some parts of Welsh Wales in the kind of weather in which a man could lose his bearings. The new Doctor and his companion filmed a - rather sweet - video of themselves at a car park at Alexandra Head, by the Barrage. The BBC also released their first official images of the pair in costume on that Saturday.
Russell Davies has 'teased the unexpected return of a key Dalek ally last seen in 1966,' according to an overtly speculative piece on the Screen Rant website - which has something of a history of putting two and two together and getting nineteen. Doctor Who Magazine's latest issue contains an interview with Big Rusty, in which he discusses the co-production deal with Disney+ and 'drops several hints' about his future plans for the franchise. Or, possibly, he's just doing what Big Rusty always used to do in such interviews, laying a trail of false breadcrumbs for websites' with a record of jumping to conclusions to jump to like a big jumping thing. 'One of his most intriguing comments hints at the return of an enemy from the story The Daleks' Master Plan,' Screen Rant gush. Actually it doesn't do that or anything even remotely like it. What Russell said was: 'Let me just tell you that we're about to transmit the words "Mavic Chen" on television for the first time since 1966. It is absolutely the same show.' Which rather suggests a passing reference being made to the character (originally played by the late Kevin Stoney in the twelve-part story broadcast in late 1965 and early 1966) than an actual return appearance. Still, why let an annoying little thing like 'facts' get in the way of a good story?
Do you think, dear blog reader, that someone in the Doctor Who production team is - ever so subtly - trying to tell us something?
Two long-lost Doctor Who stories from the 1960s will be brought back to life as new animations, according to a report from that bastion of always truthful and accurate reportage, the Daily Mirra. Except, instead of describing them as animations, the Mirra went down the 'that's got too many syllables in it for our readers to understand, let's use "cartoons" instead' route. To mark the sixtieth anniversary, two Doctor Who stories from the 1960s are to be animated (or, according to the Mirra 'drawn') and released on Blu-ray and DVD. They are William Hartnell's penultimate story The Smugglers from 1966 and Patrick Troughton's third serial, The Underwater Menace from 1967. Episodes two and three of The Underwater Menace are held in the BBC's archive, but only brief clips from The Smugglers exist. An alleged (though suspiciously anonymous and, therefore, almost certainly fictitious) 'insider' allegedly said: 'Fans have been delighted as the show's fourth season has been slowly restored through animated episodes. Only ten of the forty three broadcast episodes still exist, so we're getting to see the missing classics.' And that is, dear blog reader, almost certainly the first time in recorded history that the words 'The Underwater Menace' and 'classic' have ever been used in such close proximity.
Earlier in 2022, it was widely reported that a loss in funding meant no further animated Doctor Who projects would be commissioned though it was claimed that future productions could go ahead if BBC Studios secured another funding partner. Speaking at a BFI Southbank screening last year for what was at the time understood to be the final release of Doctor Who animations, a version of the 1967 six-parter The Abominable Snowmen, the project's co-director Gary Russell said it was 'a shame' that no further reconstructions were planned. The animation deal, the Mirra suggests, 'is not connected to the show's tie-up with Disney+.' The Mirra also alleges that some surviving black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who will be 'restored and colourised', for broadcast in 2023. 'BBC bosses' (again, that's 'executives', only with less syllables) 'plan to colourise certain stories from the Hartnell and Troughton eras (1963 to 1969), for broadcast next year. This is likely to include the very first story, An Unearthly Child,' they conclude.
Do you fancy a bit of, ahem, 'Dalek relaxation', dear blog reader? Of course you do. Like this blogger you're only human, after all. Here you go, then.
Which, needless to say, brings us to Memorably Daft Double-Entendres In Episodes Of Doctor Whom (1963-2022). Number Fifty Three: The Invasion.
Memorably Daft Double-Entendres In Episodes Of Doctor Whom (1963-2022). Number Fifty Four: Listen.
Memorably Daft Double-Entendres In Episodes Of Doctor Whom (1963-2022). Number Fifty Five: The Haunting Of The Villa Diodati.
Memorably Daft Double-Entendres In Episodes Of Doctor Whom (1963-2022). Number Fifty Six: Lynda Bellingham speaks for all of us with regard to The Trial Of A Timelord.
Memorably Daft Double-Entendres In Episodes Of Doctor Whom (1963-2022). Number Fifty Seven: Yer actual Keith Telly Topping agrees that The Daemons is, perhaps, somewhat over-rated by fandom but, still, he feels this is a criticism too far.
One is not too sure about the whole 'Horn'd Beast, We Salute You' thing The Late Roge is rockin' there, mind you. Too many contemporary Atomic Rooster gigs, one suspects.
Memorably Daft Double-Entendres In Episodes Of Doctor Whom (1963-2022). Number Fifty Eight: This blogger is aware that the late and much-loved David Warner was good-lookin' lad but, you know, decorum dictates and all that ... Cold War.
Memorably Daft Double-Entendres In Episodes Of Doctor Whom (1963-2022). Number Fifty Nine: The Unicorn & The Wasp.
Memorably Daft Double-Entendres In Episodes Of Doctor Whom (1963-2022). Number Sixty: The Android Invasion.
Memorably Daft Double-Entendres In Episodes Of Doctor Whom (1963-2022). Number Sixty One: A rather harsh assessment, one feels. This blogger, in fact, thought The Curse Of Fenric was great.
Memorably Daft Billy-Fluffs In Episodes Of El Doctor Misterio (1963-2022). Numbero Sesenta Y Dos: La Persecución, señors y señoritas.
Memorably Daft Double-Entendres In Episodes Of Doctor Whom (1963-2022). Number Sixty Three: Asylum Of The Daleks.
This blogger's gratitude goes to his fine Facebook fiend John Hamilton for cracking the following joke on this blogger's Facebook page. Which Keith Telly Topping instantly decided he was totally nicking for this blog.
Shortly before New Year, dear blog reader, as a result of catching a few episodes for the first time in a few years on the Drama Channel, this blogger posted the following thought for the day to his Facebook fiends: 'The Caroline Quentin, Julia Sawalha and Sheridan Smith episodes of From The North favourite Jonathan Creek were all, pretty much uniformly, brilliant. The Sarah Alexander ones really weren't.'
Whomsoever was responsible for Channel 4's most recent advertising campaign, in this blogger's opinion, deserves a significant pay rise. Seemingly, the government was in agreement.
ITV have confirmed when From The North favourite Vera will be back on screens, with the last two episodes of series eleven lined-up to be broadcast from 15 January according to the Evening Crocodile. It was confirmed that the first episodes to be shown will be the final two from series eleven, which will be followed by four brand new ones from series twelve.
And now, dear blog reader, this ...
The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2015). The movie otherwise known as Watney's Red Planet. A fine film, especially as it has a plot which bears an uncanny similarity to Home Alone!
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019). This blogger's favourite Tarantino movie since Jackie Brown.
No Time To Die (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2021).
Dune (Denis Villeneuve, 2022).
The H8ful Eight (Quentin Tarantino, 2015).
Picnic At Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975). 'Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.' A thing of quite awesome and haunting beauty in this blogger's not even remotely humble opinion.
Moonage Daydream (Brett Morgan, 2022). Asked, by one of his dear Facebook fiends, if he was watching this on a streaming service, this blogger confirmed that he was. On Amazon Prime, in fact (Keith Telly Topping having got a 'twenty eight days free offer'. This blogger remains, quite literally anybody's for a freebie).
Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, 2022).
Almost Famous (Untitled) (Cmaeron Crowe, 2000). 'I'm just going to say this and I'm going to stand by it: you should be really proud of him. Cos I know men and I'll bet you do too. And he respects women and he likes women and let's just pause and appreciate a man like that. I mean, you created him out of thin air and you raised him right, he's having a great time, he's doing a good job and don't worry - he's still a virgin. And we're all looking out for him. And that's more than I've ever even said to my own parents, so there you go. This is the maid speaking, by the way!'
Or, to put it another way. 'Dick, I got him. He's okay. He is on acid, though ... How do you know when it's kicked in? ... Yeah, it's kicked-in!'
The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948).
Someone - this blogger forgets whom for the moment - once described watching a Powell and Pressburger movie as 'like being slapped in the face with a rainbow.' Which just about covers it, this blogger feels.
Which bring us, with the tragic inevitability of the tragically inevitable, to that part of From The North dedicated to this blogger's on-going medical malarkey. Or, strictly speaking, malarkeys. For those dear blog readers who haven't been following this on-going fiasco which appears to have been on-going since roughly this time last year, it goes something like this: Keith Telly Topping spent some weeks around New Year feeling rotten; experienced five days in hospital; was discharged; received B12 injections; then more injections; somewhat recovered his missing appetite; got an initial diagnosis; had a consultant's meeting; continued to suffer fatigue and insomnia; endured a second endoscopy; had another consultation; got (unrelated) toothache; had an extraction; which took ages to heal; had another consultation; spent a week where nothing remotely health-related occurred; was given further B-12 injections; had an echocardiogram; received more blood extractions; made another hospital visit; saw the insomnia and torpor continue; received yet more blood tests; had a rearranged appointment for his sick note; suffered his worst period yet with the fatigue. Until the following week. And, then the week after that. Oh, the fatigue, dear blog reader. The depressing, ceaseless fatigue. He had a go on the Blood-Letting Machine; got another sickie; had an assessment; was given his fourth COVID jab; got some surprising news related to his assessment; had the results of his annual diabetes check-up; had another really bad week with the fatigue; followed by one with the sciatica; then one with the chronic insomnia; and, one with a plethora of general cold-related grottiness.
If, like this blogger, you happen to be loaded full of seasonal snot at the moment, dear blog reader, take Keith Telly Topping's acquired wisdom to heart. Do not, under any circumstances, buy yourself any of those Lemsip Lemon Cold Cure sachets which you take dissolved in hot water. That stuff is more addictive than heroin.
From The North favourite Hanif Kureishi has said he believed he was dying after an accident in Rome on Boxing Day. The Oscar-nominated scriptwriter and novelist said his injuries have left him unable to move his arms or legs. 'I cannot scratch my nose, make a phone call or feed myself,' he said. 'As you can imagine, this is both humiliating, degrading and a burden for others.' A spine operation has led to 'minor improvements' in recent days, he added. The sixty eight-year-old described the accident as 'a fall' after feeling dizzy following a walk. 'I woke up a few minutes later in a pool of blood, my neck in a grotesquely twisted position, my wife on her knees beside me,' he explained in a series of messages posted on Twitter. He added: 'I believed I was dying. I believed I had three breaths left. It seemed like a miserable and ignoble way to die.' His wife 'saved my life and kept me calm,' he explained. 'For a few days I was profoundly traumatised, altered and unrecognisable to myself. I am in the hospital. I cannot move move my arms and legs.' He continued: 'I have sensation and some movement in all my limbs and I will begin physio and rehabilitation as soon as possible. I want to thank the doctors and nurses at the Gemelli hospital, Rome, for all their extraordinary kindness, competence and care. At the moment, it is unclear whether I will ever be able to walk again, or whether I'll ever be able to hold a pen, if there is any assistance that I would be grateful for, it would be with regard to voice-assisted hardware and software, which will allow me to watch, write and begin work again and continue some kind of half-life.' He asked followers to send ideas that might help him. 'I want to thank all my readers for their love and support over the years,' he concluded. Kureishi's screenplay for the 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette was nominated for an Academy Award and launched Daniel Day-Lewis's acting career. The movie was directed by Stephen Frears and described a relationship between a gay skinhead and a Pakistani-British boy. Kureishi's first novel, The Buddha Of Suburbia, was an international bestseller in 1990 and won the Whitbread book of the year award for a first novel. The book was turned into a four-part television series by the BBC in 1993, with a David Bowie soundtrack. His second novel, The Black Album was also a critical sensation. Kureishi also wrote the screenplays for Sammy & Rosie Get Laid and London Kills Me, which he also directed. Other works include his drama The Mother, which told of a cross-generation relationship between a grandmother and a handyman half her age. That also became a film, starring Anne Reid and Daniel Craig. His 2006 screenplay Venus earned best actor nominations at the Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe awards for veteran actor Peter O'Toole and launched the career of Jodie Whittaker.
Fay Weldon, who died this week aged ninety one, was to an extent the creation of her own, somewhat extravagant, imagination. A polemicist whose opinions shaped themselves around the plots of her latest books, a pragmatist who laughed her way through every sentence, she was mischievous and evasive, sharp-tongued but kind-spirited, wilfully and wittily life-affirming. 'I long for a day of judgment when the plot lines of our lives will be neatly tied and all puzzles explained and the meaning of events made clear,' she wrote in her waspish 2002 autobiography, Auto Da Fay. 'We take to fiction, I suppose, because no such thing is going to happen and at least on the printed page we can observe beginnings, middles and ends and can find where morality resides.' With these lines, Weldon appeared to be giving a cheeky wink to future obituarists: catch me if you can, she seemed to be saying - there is nothing you can write about me that I haven't written about myself and it is the storyteller who is in command of the narrative. It is perhaps not too unfair to say that, like Ruth, the (sort-of) heroine of her best-known novel, The Life & Loves Of A She-Devil (1983), Weldon moulded herself into a succession of identities designed to buttress her against the misfortune of having been raised - both literally and metaphorically - in an earthquake zone. In literal terms, that was New Zealand, where her childhood, as the younger of two sisters born during the short marriage of her English mother, Margaret and emigrant father, Frank Birkinshaw, was periodically rocked by Earth tremors. The first struck while Fay was still in her mother's womb, forcing Margaret to flee the city of Napier and take refuge on a country sheep farm, where she remained for three months without knowing whether her husband was alive or dead. 'Doctor Birkinshaw, my father,' wrote Weldon, with that familiar vat of salt in her phrasing, 'was too busy with the injured to take care of his young wife.' Metaphorically speaking, though, the seismic activity echoed back generations before her birth. In Auto Da Fay, she traced it to her maternal grandmother's inability to come to terms with the madness of a daughter (Margaret's sister, Faith), who tipped into violent psychosis at the age of seventeen after being discovered in bed with her own uncle. 'It was the shock waves from this tragedy which echoed through the generations to disastrous effect,' Fay claimed. Rather than censuring the abusive uncle, Weldon laid the blame squarely with her grandmother, Frieda. 'It is only now, as I write this, that I see the pattern. As you're done by, so you do. All the mothers betrayed the daughters, looking after their own skin first.' Frieda came from boisterous bohemian stock. She had modelled as a child for the pre-Raphaelite artist Holman Hunt and studied the piano under Clara Schumann before abandoning her career to marry Edgar Jepson, part of Aleister Crowley's social circle who wrote seventy popular novels with titles such as Lady Noggs Assists and The Reluctant Footman. One of the family's many faithless husbands, Edgar committed his final betrayal when, at the age of sixty nine, he impregnated his mistress and then decided he would marry her. It was against this backdrop of family disintegration that Margaret decided to marry Frank, a medical student from Birmingham and emigrate to New Zealand. Traumatised by the earthquake - and by her husband's abandonment - Margaret returned to the UK, to Frank's family in Barnt Green, Worcestershire and gave birth to her second daughter, whom she named Franklin because she had been expecting a boy, but who was soon known to all as Fay. 'Thus I started out in a state of ambivalence,' wrote Weldon. 'I took out library books as Franklin and read them as Fay.' Weldon described herself as a 'plump, cheerful child,' stating in a blog post which began as an unpublished article for the Daily Scum Mail: 'I was born large, blonde and big-boned into a family of small beautiful women. My mother thought it was unlikely that anyone would marry me and therefore I would have to pass exams, earn my own living and make my own way in the world. Or that's what I thought she thought.' After one last attempt at reviving the marriage in New Zealand, Margaret began to earn her own living, writing romantic novels under the pen-name Pearl Bellairs, borrowed from Aldous Huxley's novel Crome Yellow. She sent her daughters to a nearby convent school in Christchurch, where Fay had brief infatuations with several girls and became fascinated by the mutilation of saints. 'They were beautiful and good and pain was their reward: I was fascinated and horrified: I knew there was something wrong in my response but not quite what.' In 1946, Fay, her mother and her sister, Jane, returned to London and she won a scholarship to South Hampstead School for Girls. They lived in the basement of a house where her mother worked as a housekeeper. Fay went on to study psychology at St Andrews University - which she blamed for her subsequent argumentative streak - and, after stints as a waitress and a hospital orderly, landed a job on the Polish desk of the Foreign Office propaganda unit, the Information Research Department. There she began her writing career, with pamphlets that were designed to be air-dropped on Poland as part of the Cold War effort. The Foreign Office was too buttoned-up to accommodate her for long however and she left after becoming pregnant by a nightclub singer and deciding that she wanted the baby, but not the father. When a stint running a tea shop (which, she later claimed, was haunted) in Saffron Walden with her mother and sister became too much, she launched a letter-writing campaign to potential employers and landed a job as an agony aunt at the Daily Mirra. But readers' problems were not as exciting as the opportunities offered by the new commercial television and before long she was embarking on a career as an advertising copywriter. It was to produce one of the most famous slogans of the 1950s, 'Go to work on an egg' (Weldon has said she did not actually write it, but was running the campaign which produced it). Not all of her ideas were quite as successful. 'Vodka gets you drunker, quicker' was way ahead of its time, while an attempt to get the nation's housewives to add an extra egg to their Christmas puddings backfired, disastrously, when she forgot to add sugar to the recipe. Employment was never going to be straightforward for such a wayward spirit and when she'd had enough of the demands of reconciling single-motherhood with making a living, in 1956 she married a schoolmaster twenty five years her senior. Ronald Bateman didn't want sex himself but was happy for her to see other men, in a two-year union so mind-bogglingly disreputable that, in her autobiography, she resorted to referring to herself in the third person. She only returned to being herself after meeting the jazz musician and antiques dealer Ron Weldon, who in 1962 was to become her second husband. Fay wrote her first TV play while impatiently awaiting the arrival of the first of their three sons. A Catching Complaint was screened in 1966 as an ITV Play Of The Week, with a cast that included Derek Godfrey, Hylda Baker and Tessa Wyatt. The following year, she published her first novel, The Fat Woman's Joke. From then on she wrote at an industrial rate, turning out more than thirty novels at the same time as continuing a screenwriting career which included the pilot for Upstairs, Downstairs and a five-part adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, which appeared faithful to the original whilst slyly rearranging the marital politics of Mister and Mrs Bennet to make him meaner and her more sympathetic. She also wrote the series Kate, episodes of Half Hour Story, The Doctors, The Wednesday Play, Armchair Theatre, Thirty Minute Theatre, The Sex Game, Menace, Rooms and Send In The Girls. Pride & Prejudice was screened in 1980, the same year that Puffball - her novel of pregnancy as a fungal condition - was published and serialised in Company magazine and the year after she was shortlisted for the Booker prize for Praxis (1978), one of a succession of tales of women transforming themselves to take control of their own destinies in a discriminatory world. The Life & Loves Of A She-Devil was successfully adapted for TV with Patricia Hodge, Julie T Wallace and Dennis Waterman in 1986 and then made into a (really not very good) movie starring Roseanne Barr in 1989. This was the peak of second-wave feminism and Weldon's populist novels made her one of its high priestesses, while her ability to write topically and at speed suited the burgeoning market in women's magazines. Her 1987 novel The Hearts & Lives Of Men was first serialised in weekly instalments in Woman's Own. She was also becoming part of the literary establishment, albeit a grandee who judged prizes more often than she won them. She ascribed this fate to the brevity of her sentences, 'which makes the books appear to lack gravitas' - though perhaps equally significant was her acknowledgment that 'even editors don't seem to understand the make-it-up-as-you-go-along school of writing which I inhabit.' On the back of the success of The Life & Loves Of A She Devil, she remained in demand on TV, scripting The Cloning Of Joanna May, Growing Rich and Big Women during the 1990s. Her make-it-up-as-you-go-along philosophy played an increasingly important part in her public persona as well as her work. In 2001 she scandalised the literary world by accepting eighteen thousand smackers from a jeweller for a novel, The Bulgari Connection. Far from being sheepish about the deal, she flamboyantly overdelivered, sprinkling more than thirty namechecks for the firm into the text, when she had been contracted to mention them a mere twelve times. Always ready to turn out newspaper opinion pieces for a suitable fee, she could be relied on to say the unsayable, defending facelifts, rounding on men, on rape victims (infamously telling the Radio Times 'rape isn't the worst thing that can happen to a woman if you're safe, alive and unmarked after the event') and - after Ron left her for his psychotherapist after thirty years of marriage - on the confessional industry. 'The more we understand each other, the harder it seems to us to cleave to one another for any length of time,' she wrote. In a 2017 interview on Newsnight, she expressed ambivalence about the successes of feminism. Social change had been enormous, 'thanks to feminism,' she conceded but it wasn't all wonderful: 'We saw a world of young, healthy, intelligent, striving women. And we didn't really, honestly, take much notice of those who were not like us.' Ron died in 1994 as their divorce became final. Fay remarried within a year and continued writing and making headlines from the home in Dorset that she shared with her third husband, Nick Fox, a poet and bookseller. He was a quiet presence in the background of many a media profile, serving plates of pasta and stepping in to temper Fay's wilder assertions, while Weldon gleefully decried the 'domestic incompetence' of husbands. They separated in 2020. The provocations continued into her old age. Having been baptised into the Church of England at St Paul's Cathedral in 2000, she was rewarded with two glimpses of the pearly gates while under anaesthetic and reported that they were 'double-glazed and in garish colours,' which she found 'not very encouraging.' In 2006 she published a book of dos and don'ts for the older woman, What Makes Women Happy, which suggested that 'Porn is sex in theory, not in practice. It just helps a man get through the day. And many a woman, too, come to that.' In 2017, she threw herself into the increasingly ill-tempered debate between feminists and trans activists over the rights of transgender women, with Death Of A She-Devil, a sequel to her earlier bestseller, which saw an octogenarian trying to sort out her legacy. In order to inherit the family fortune her estranged grandson must change gender - a transformation for which neither he, nor Weldon herself, appeared to have much enthusiasm. True-to-form, the villain of the piece was not a man at all but the 'fourth-wave' feminist who forced him to make the change - a lesbian so convinced of the superiority of women that she did not associate with men at all. It would, however, be crass to dismiss Weldon as a publicity-seeking controversialist. Though she could be infuriatingly, often wilfully, contrary, she saw the pain of the human condition out of the corner of mischievous eyes. A member of the Royal Society of Literature, who was made a CBE in 2001, she was generous to other writers (she had a particularly long friendship with Dennis Potter). In her knack at identifying and hitching herself to the zeitgeist and her skill at keeping herself in the public eye, she created a template for a writer's life that seems prophetic. Hers was a prototype 'dandelion career' - releasing clouds of creativity and seeing where each spore landed - long before the term was invented by writers two generations younger than her. She appeared to cruise through old age with an unstoppable momentum, travelling by taxi to publicity events within a one hundred-mile radius of her home and throwing herself with gusto into her second professorship of creative writing, at Bath Spa University, in 2012, at the age of eighty one. She concluded Auto Da Fay by asserting that 'nothing interesting' happened to her after she was thirty and that she simply spent the next forty years 'scribbling.' On her website, she took a more pragmatic tack: 'I buried the rest of the autobiography in three more novels, Mantrapped (2004), She May Not Leave (2006) and Kehua! (2010), bringing the story up to this very year. If you are interested, they await deciphering and scholastic enquiry.' Her son Tom died in 2019. She is survived by her sons, Nick, Dan and Sam, her stepdaughter, Karen, twelve grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
Let us, now, look at the latest nominations for the From The North Headline Of The Week Awards, starting with one from Somerset Live, Churchill Parish Council Says Sorry After Wording Error On Minibus Rebrands Group As The 'Anus Society'. Followed, a couple of days later, by Probe Launched Into 'Anus Society' Blunder On Churchill & Langford Minibus And It Will Be Discussed At Community Meeting. One trusts that the (anal) probe in question managed to, if you will, get to the bottom of things.
Next, Metro (so, not a real newspaper) and their Council Erects Unbelievable Number Of Bollards Outside School. Presumably, the conversation went something like: 'Someone has placed numerous short posts used to prevent traffic from entering the area outside.' 'Bollards?' 'It's true!'
Devon Live gives us Woman In Tears Of Laughter After Accidentally Printing Huge Green Asda Logo Onto Her Head. Oh, you don't want to do that. You don't get any money for advertising. Trust this blogger, he's tried.
And finally, dear blog reader, thanks to the Stoke Sentinal for informing us that Man Who Ate One Hundred & Twenty Four Kebabs In A Month Says It Left Him 'Physically & Psychologically' Damaged. It probably didn't do his poor little sphincter much good, either.
