A 'special' (it says here) edition of Sunday Night Is Music Night presented by giggly Jo Whiley on Radio 2 will celebrate sixty years of Doctor Who. Because .... just because, all right? The BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the BBC Singers, conducted by Alastair King, will perform 'musical sounds' (or, 'tunes' as they're also know) from the TV series in Doctor Who @60: A Musical Celebration. The programme will feature world exclusive first live performances of The Doctor's new companion, Ruby's theme The Life Of Sunday, the theme tune of the Fifteenth Doctor called, not entirely surprisingly, Fifteenth and the new version of the Doctor Who theme. There are contributions from Big Russell Davies (OBE), The Lord Thy God Steven Moffat (OBE) and Chris Chibnall (no OBE as yet) and a look back to the allegedly 'classic' years of Doctor Who from the 1960s, 70s and 80s featuring the vintage synthesisers of Radiophonic Workshop veterans Mark Ayres and Peter Howell. There is also a look ahead to the upcoming trio of sixtieth anniversary specials. Jo Whiley says: 'As listeners to my Radio 2 show know I'm a huge Doctor Who fan, so presenting this concert is a dream come true. How better to mark the incredible sixtieth anniversary of the show than with this wonderful celebration of the music that has featured across the decades.' This blogger is presuming she paused for breath at some stage during that. Helen Thomas, the Head of Radio 2, says: 'Radio 2 just had to mark this momentous anniversary of one of our most-loved BBC TV series. We're thrilled to bring the amazing BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the BBC Singers to the station to play the memorable music of Doctor Who which we know our listeners will love.' Lisa Tregale, the Director of BBC NOW added: 'Everyone at BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales is looking forward to welcoming Doctor Who fans to our home, BBC Hoddinott Hall, in Cardiff for this special sixtieth anniversary concert with BBC Radio 2. The stage is set, The Daleks have descended, The TARDIS has landed and all Whovians are in for a special treat! Tune into Radio 2 to hear classic and brand-new Doctor Who soundtracks performed by BBC NOW as part of this celebration.' Okay, Lisa - just something to drop into your toaster to see if it pops up brown. There is not a single, solitary Doctor Who fan with so much as an ounce of self-respect or dignity (admittedly, not two words that one normally associates with we in fandom) who would use the hateful 'W' word in anything other than an ironic sense. Trust Keith Telly Topping on this one. And, therefore, cut it out. Thanks muchly, it's appreciated. Doctor Who @60: A Musical Celebration will be broadcast on Radio 2 from 8pm to 10pm on Sunday 15 October and available to hear on BBC Sounds. It will also be filmed for BBC iPlayer, to be broadcast at a later date.
The most recent From The North bloggerisationisms update included details of the latest Doctor Who sixtieth anniversary trailer. This blogger mentioned in his piece that many organs of the media had also written, at length about the trailer and what it contained, one of those mentioned being the frequently inaccurate and hyperbolic Screenrant website. This blogger is forced to note that the website's headline, if taken literally, suggested The Celestial Toymaker is a mere fifty seven years old. The blogger always imagined that he would be somewhat older, dear blog reader. Like, immortal, perhaps?
A mere twelve years after behind-the-scenes Doctor Who companion show Doctor Who: Confidential was extremely cancelled due to BBC budget restraints and Auntie not having a pot to piss in, it's coming back. Or, somewhat more accurately, now that Big Rusty is back in charge of the show and has Disney+ money to burn in his pocket, we're finally getting a new behind-the-scenes documentary series to replaced the old one. Doctor Who: Unleashed is a thirty-minute series which will be broadcast on on BBC Three immediately after each and every new Doctor Who episode from November 2023, as well as being available to stream on BBC iPlayer. Instead of the Confidential-style voiceover from a Doctor Who-adjacent narrator (Simon Pegg, Anthony Head, Russell Tovey et cetera), the new show will have an on-screen host in the form of BBC Gaming Correspondent and former Radio 1 Newsbeat presenter Steffan Powell. Who looks well-excited to be the the presence of national heartthrob David Tennant.
Horrible Graham Linehan - whom this blogger used to have quite a bit of time for before he, you know, went mad - has claimed that he was dropped by his agent after criticising national heartthrob David Tennant for supporting transgender rights. Which only leaves one question unanswered; why the Hell did it take Linehan's now former agent this long to realise that his (now former) client is not worth the hassle he causes and kick his sorry ass into the gutter along with all of the other worthless turds? On Sunday, Linehan appeared on an - extremely - fringe panel event at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, where he declared himself 'the most cancelled person in this room.' 'Cancelled', in the sense of 'still making crass and ignorant comments on a virtual daily basis all of which get widely reported by newspapers and so, therefore, not really cancelled at all.' The Father Ted and Black Books creator (both of which this blogger still manages to love despite the fruitcake ramblings that come out of Linehan's gob in the same way that this blogger can still, just about, listen to a Smiths record without crying over Morrissey taking a similar last train to Loonsville), who was represented by Independent Talent, has faced a 'significant backlash' in recent years over comments he has made in opposition to trans rights, according to the Independent. For which read 'most people, who don't have a stone where their heart should be would, really, rather not listen to the completely mental crap Linehan frequently comes out with, so tend to steer clear on him and his nonsense.' Which is what the concept of 'cancellation' frequently seems to amount to. Example: Hateful, wretched old scrote Jim Davidson, for instance, often claims to have been 'cancelled' yet he can still find plenty of louse journalists at the Daily Scum Mail and the Daily Scum Express and the Sun who are happy to quote his pathetic blatherings to the rapidly dwindling collective that actually give a crap. Linehan was permanently banned from Twitter in 2020 over his increasingly shrill and alarmingly nasty views, but reintroduced late last year following Elon Musk's takeover. That, in and of itself, should really have been a warning to you, Graham. If 'the enemy of my enemy is my fiend' then, it appears you can look forward to an invite to one of now extremely former President Rump's whine parties at Mar-a-Lago. Bring your own bottle (cos he's got legal fees to worry about). Speaking during the discussion, which was titled 'Is The UK A Safe Space For Free Speech?' (which, as this blog proves, it is. So long you stay within the boundaries of the law as it currently stands and everyone has the right not to be forced to listen to you if they don't wish to), Linehan claimed that he found it 'very hard to find places to speak these days.' And, yet he found one easily enough with the Tories. There you go, that's your future sorted, Graham. Reminds one rather of a line of dialogue in an episode of Drop The Dead Donkey - a sitcom not co-written by a complete tool - in which Gus Hedges remarks to a Russian visitor that Mrs Thatcher is now, seemingly, very popular in the former Soviet Union. 'Oh yes,' replies the visitor. 'All the Old Stalinists think she's great!' 'The other interesting thing that happened to me is I just lost my TV agent because I criticised David Tennant,' Linehan then claimed. In July, Linehan called Tennant 'disgusting, ignorant [and] reckless' after From The North favourite David wore a t-shirt with the slogan: 'Leave trans kids alone you absolute freaks.' Tennant did not respond to Linehan's comments at the time (or, indeed, since), but has previously spoken about the importance of 'fighting the fight' for LGBT+ rights. Expanding on the claims that he was dropped by Independent Talent, Linehan told the audience: 'I only found this out later because I looked at the list of people Independent Talent represented. David Tennant was at the top and he's making slightly more money than me at the moment, so I had to go.'
This blogger has been very much enjoying Talking Pictures TV's repeat run of LWT's award-nominated but rarely-seen 1969 series The Gold Robbers. This was a thirteen-part crime drama focusing on the participants in a multi-million pound bullion robbery and the CID officer who doggedly tracks them down. World-weary but determined Detective Chief-Superintendant Cradock (played by the late - and always superb - Peter Vaughan) is the linking character in each episode; comparisons between Craddock and the Flying Squad's chief thief-taker, Tommy Butler and he and his colleagues pursuit of the Great Train Robbers just a few years earlier are compounded by the fact that the series' technical adviser was ex-detective Arthur Butler (no releation), another former Scotland Yard officer. Major guest stars play the robbers, suspects, witnesses and family members throughout the series, including George Cole, Joss Ackland, John Bindon, Roy Dotrice, Alfred Lynch, Ann Lynn, Katharine Blake, Johnny Shannon, Jennifer Hilary, Wanda Ventham, Peter Bowles, Jeremy Child, George Innes, Terence Rigby, Bernard Hepton, Ian Hendry, Nicholas Ball and Sally Thomsett. The series, which kept Friday-night viewers gripped throughout the summer of 69, was devised and produced by John Hawkesworth and won him a BAFTA nomination for Best Drama Series. Among a celebrated team of writers were Glyn Jones, Z Cars regular Allan Prior and Doctor Who's first script editor David Whitaker. The story opens with an aircraft carrying over five million knicker in gold, landing at a small airfield in Southern England. Mechanics and armed guards bustle around the plane unloading the cargo. Suddenly, above the noise of whining jets, comes the crack of a high-powered rifle. A police car bursts into flames and, as officials and mechanics scatter in confusion, a tooled-up gang of serious blaggers move in from all directions. In a meticulously-timed operation they hand out some well-tasty violence and escape with the gold in a van which, in turn, is loaded onto another cargo plane and the robbers make good their escape by a vairety of routes. It's The Italian Job with ammonia and shooters instead of baseball bats, essentially. From his temporary headquarters on Westmarsh Airfield, Cradock and his trusty oppo, Sergeant Tommy Thomas (Artro Morris), begin the huge task of working out how the great gold robbery was executed, tracking their quarry and feeling the collars of the naughty chap responsible.
Each episode focuses on a different aspect of the robbery and the criminals involved; from the air traffic controller who was supposedly a victim of the robbers but was, actually, in on the whole thing (Ackland), to the marksman who fired the shots that destroyed the police car (Dotrice). Cole is terrific in episode four, as Barry Porter, a second-rate con-man with big dreams, a character not a million miles away from a younger Arthur Daley. Richard Bolt (played by Richard Leech) is a, seemingly rather shady, millionaire businessman whose diverse interests include ownership of a travel agency, a London newspaper and an import-export group. It was Bolt's airline that flew the gold into Westmarsh and he offers Cradock and his men every assistance. But, it is clear from the outset, he knows a lot more than he is letting on. Shortly after the robbery it also becomes clear to Cradock that this is anything but a simple heist (with political dimensions as well as criminal ones). There are several interested parties regarding the progress, investigation and outcome of the case, not least the government who could face international repercussions were it to become public knowledge what the intended use of the stolen gold was - to purchase and supply arms to a foreign power. Speaking to TV Times in 1969, Vaughan said that he saw Cradock as a kind of extension of himself. 'In the sense that I personally don't believe in heroes and villains - by which I mean that I don't believe anybody is all good or all bad. Cradock is a real human being - a man with human weaknesses, intent on pursuing good. And, of course, Cradock is obsessed with his job, which is why I say he's like me.' Although it was a huge hit in its day, The Gold Robbers was one of the last major series made for British TV in black and white and, as such, it was one of the first to be quietly forgotten about once colour broadcasts became the norm in late 1969. It was repeated across the ITV network just once (during the summer and autumn of 1970) and then it simply disappeared into the LWT archives before a complete DVD was released by the much-missed Network company. All episodes of this tool-stiffeningly violent drama stand up remarkably well considering it's fifty years old. This blogger had only very hazy memories of watching probably just part of one episode of it as a young'un but he'd read quite a bit about the series over the years so it's terrific to finally get to see it, in full. Once again, top marks go to the excellent TPTV for unearthly another half-forgotten gem.
And, speaking of proper-great British TV shows of 1969, this blogger wishes to draw dear blog readers' attention to Mark Owen's splendid think-piece for the We Are Cult website, The Beginning Of The Champions. It's a couple of years old, dear blog reader, but this blogger hadn't previously spotted it; so, now is as good a time as any to catch up on one of the great ITC series of the era.
Which brings us to Memorably Daft Lines From British Horror & SF Movies Of The 1950s and 1960s. Number Sixty Eight: The Damned. Viveca Lindfors: 'How could you be so cruel?' Oliver Reed: 'Because I enjoy it, my dear lady!'
Memorably Daft Lines From British Horror & SF Movies Of The 1950s and 1960s. Number Sixty Nine: The Black Torment. Heather Sears: 'Richard, you are not the man I married. And, there is evil at work in this house!'
Memorably Daft Lines From British Horror & SF Movies Of The 1950s and 1960s. Number Seventy: Maniac. Kerwin Matthews: 'Can I buy you a drink, Salon?' Norman Bird: 'Oh, no thank you, Monsieur. I am on duty and when on duty, I allow myself *three* drinks only!'
Memorably Daft Lines From British Horror & SF Movies Of The 1950s and 1960s. Number Seventy One: The Phantom Of The Opera. Herbert Lom: 'You little fool. Do you think you can become a great singer without suffering?!'
Memorably Daft Lines From British Horror & SF Movies Of The 1950s and 1960s. Number Seventy Two: Nightmare. Jennie Linden: 'You found me out there, didn't you? That part of it wasn't a dream! Where does the dream finish and reality begin?'
Memorably Daft Lines From British Horror & SF Movies Of The 1950s and 1960s. Number Seventy Three: Berserk! Joan Crawford: 'Quite a party.' Ty Hardin: 'Don't get the wrong idea.' Joan Crawford: 'What? That you've been entertaining a woman in your caravan dressed like that?' Ty Hardin: 'She came in and I threw her out.' Joan Crawford: 'After two hours!'
Memorably Daft Lines From British Horror & SF Movies Of The 1950s and 1960s. Number Seventy Four: The Blood Beast Terror. Peter Cushing: 'The only time we have a witness to one of these murders and he's out of his mind.' Robert Flemyng: 'Tell me, Inspector, why do you pay so much attention to the ravings of a lunatic?'
Memorably Daft Lines From British Horror & SF Movies Of The 1950s and 1960s. Number Seventy Five: The Brides Of Fu Manchu. Christopher Lee: 'As you were the leader of the rebellion, you shall be the first to go to the snakes!'
This, dear blog readers, is the only photo that Keith Telly Topping ever took of Sycamore Gap. And now, thanks to the actions of some numbskull plank with access to a chainsaw, it is the only one that this blogger ever will. Which is both sad and, indeed, sad. As this blogger told his dear Facebook fiends, the term 'vandalism' is wholly inadequate to describe this particular outrage; there has got to be a stronger words for it than that. Vandalism is smashing a few windows in a temper because you're feeling anti-social, we've all done that or something similar to it in our time. This is on another level. Involving an effing chainsaw.
Of course, the Middle Class hippy Communists at the Gruniad Morning Star were as appalled as most 'normal' people by this utterly senseless occurrence. Hateful GB News obscenity Stephen Dixon, meanwhile, sneeringly rubbished the hurt feelings of many in the North East (and beyond) by claiming it was 'just a tree'. Is it, dear blog reader, any wonder, that many of us take such broad delight in the continuing troubles of this most odious of news outlets? But, the lack of sensitivity wasn't restricted to the right the political spectrum. Oh no, indeed. Bitter old Red, the 'performance poet' Attila The Stockbroker (not his real name, just in case you were wondering) used his Facebook page to suggest that their are greater crimes than chopping down a tree. And that one of them is being a Tory, seemingly.
Oh, bravo and three cheers, Attila me auld sausage - that'll really shake 'em up down at Tory Central Office. Seriously, dear blog reader, given that Attila's been trotting (s'cuse the pun) out pretty much the same sort of material since the early 1980s (when this blogger used to read and rather enjoy a lot of it - before he grew up) and that Attila is now in his mid-Sixties, you'd've though that, by now, the message would have sunk in. That radical poetry of the kind The Young Ones used to parody so effortlessly isn't, really, going to shake The Bloody System to its very foundations. You do that by voting them out at general erections and getting in someone else to be, hopefully, marginally less of a twat. Simple premise - it's called democracy. The Greeks thought it up. And then, look what happened to their economy.
Media regulator Ofcom (a politically-appointed quango, elected by no one) has launched an investigation into the Dan Wootton Tonight show on odious GB News after a sexism row sparked over seven thousand complaints. And, for once, three cheers for Ofcom. Twenty four carat wack-nutjob Laurence Fox drew condemnation after insulting the journalist Ava Evans, asking what 'self-respecting man' would 'climb into bed' with her, during Tuesday's live show. A better question, surely, may be what self-respecting man would boast about whom he would and would not climb into bed with on a forum such as that (even if it was only being watched by a tiny fraction of the general population). So much for your own self-respect, Larry. Being 'quite good' in thirty odd episodes of Lewis and a member of a noted theatrical family does not entitle you to act like a guffawing sex-obsessed fifteen year old in public. Shame on you. Ofcom said that it will 'probe' the episode under the rules on offence. Personally, this blogger thinks that the 'rules of offence' are far too narrow, otherwise Wootton, with an offensive face as well as an offensive mouth and a brain that is both narrow and full of shit, would be under permenant investigation. The Daily Scum Mail earlier said it had ended Wootton's contract as a columnist. Which, let's face it, is funny. Listen, mate, when even the Daily Scum Mail think you're too toxic to handle, you know you're in some serious diarrhoea. It came a day after Wootton and Fox, two of GB News' most high-profile presenters, were both suspended by the channel. Fox claimed on Thursday he was 'sorry for demeaning' Evans (one or two people even believed him), while Wootton apologised and said he should have intervened (not a single person believed him). Ofcom's chief executive, Dame Melanie Dawes, told the Radio 4 PM programme that there were 'good reasons to think there may have been a breach' on its rules on offence. Not pre-judging anything obviously. But, yes, there is. She said: 'Clearly there's been a lot of concern about this and that's why we've actually acted very quickly this week.' She added, more widely, there was a 'real issue with misogyny' in discourse, particularly on social media. And, amongst those who are hard of thinking. You put that condition and social media together and, boy have you got a cesspool to deal with? Ofcom launched the investigation under rule 2.3 of the Broadcasting Code, in which broadcasters must ensure material which may cause offence is justified by the context. Earlier, the publisher for the Daily Scum Mail announced it had extremely sacked Wootton, who had written a column for the newspaper since 2021, 'following events this week.' A DMG Media spokesperson said: 'DMG Media can confirm that Dan Wootton's freelance column with MailOnline, which had already been paused, has now been terminated, along with his contract.' The paper had paused the column last month as it announced it was 'looking into' allegations that Wootton used a fake online identity to offer money to individuals for sexually explicit images. Wootton admitted making 'errors of judgment' but strongly denies any criminality. Meanwhile, Fox, who initially said he 'stood by' his outrageously horrid remarks, snivellingly apologised to Evans, PoliticsJOE's political correspondent, on Thursday evening in a fifteen-minute video - despite saying he was still angry at her. A tip, Lazza, mate; when you're in a hole, it's usually a good idea to stop digging. 'It's demeaning to her, to Ava, so I'm sorry for demeaning you in that way,' he said, adding 'I know I'm going to get sacked tomorrow.'
On Sky Sports News one day last week, the presenters were discussing Australia's somewhat disastrous Rugby World Cup performance against Wales with some bloke from the Sydney Morning Herald called Tom Decent. Presumably, afterwards, they then sought the views of his colleagues Shane Average, Philip Inadequate and Frank Rubbish?
Shortly after posting the last From The North bloggerisationisms update, this blogger was watching his beloved (and now, thankfully, sold) Magpies giving Sheffield United a damned, good, hard, trousers-down eight-nil spanking. Simultaneously, he was having quite a bit of fun clicking 'like' on lots of stuff on Facebook. Because, this blogger was in a happy mood and enjoying reading stuff posted by his fiends (and, others with like-minded interests). But, apparently, Facebook has a real problem with people liking lots of stuff in a short space of time. They don't want people to like lots of stuff in a short space of time. They would appear to prefer it if we did not like lots of stuff in a short space of time. Which is effing annoying on all sorts of levels.
This blogger has, he is sure, mentioned previously the delightful Mrs Bagina who lives in a house directly opposite The Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House with her husband (that would be Mister Bagina). Recently, this blogger learned that the Baginas are shortly to be moving to North Shields, which is a darn shame since good neighbours are hard to come by. But, mainly, because nothing can quite describe the overwhelming joy when a letter addressed to them accidentally gets delivered to The Stately Telly Topping Manor Plague House (which happens more often than you'd think, dear blog reader). That will be missed.
Moving on swiftly to the first in a new, semi-regular, From The North series: 'Things That They (You Know, Them That Are In Charge Of Things) Should Bring Back Instantly (If Not Sooner)'. Number one: Dark chocolate club biscuits. Which remain unsighted in the wild, as previously bemoaned on this very blog, since circa 1982. And yet the utter abominations that are fruit and mint flavoured varieties both still exist. No justice.
Admission time, dear blog reader, yer actual Keith Telly Topping always rather fancied joining top pop duo Orbital.
This blogger could do that, dear blog reader. He could play 'Doctor?' in a bangin' techno-style(e) at Glastonbury with Smudger. Wibbly-wobbly, timey-winey.
Oh no, dear blog readers. Too late.
And now, dear blog readers, we come to the saddest part of the latest bloggerisationisms update. In the 1960s, there was one actor who could justifiably claim that ladies really did prefer blonds. As the super-secret agent Illya Kuryakin in The Man From UNCLE, David McCallum, who has died this week aged ninety, reportedly received more fan-mail from young women than any other actor in MGM's history. With his haircut in the style of The Be-Atles (a popular beat combo of the era, you might've heard of them), his liking for black turtleneck sweaters (which created a fashion fad) and an aloof and enigmatic wryness, through which he sneaked a fair amount of charm and self-amusement, McCallum made Kuryakin into a sex symbol of the period. He provided a trendy contrast to the late Robert Vaughn's Napoleon Solo, his fellow spy, who went in for expensive suits and ties. Although Solo and Kuryakin worked perfectly in tandem, their personalities were at variance, the former being urbane, easygoing and sociable, the latter more reserved, intellectual and intense. The James Bond craze had already taken off when The Man From UNCLE launched in 1964, so US audiences were used to laidback heroes and their villainous nemeses. However, it was surprising to find a hip Russian alongside the good guys of United Network Command for Law and Enforcement fighting against the evil THRUSH, during the cold war. McCallum, who played Illya with the slightest Russian accent and an occasional Scottish lilt, was also known recently for his long-running role from 2003 in the popular CBS crime series NCIS.
David Keith mcCallum was born in Glasgow. His parents were classical musicians; his mother, Dorothy Dorman, a cellist, his father, David, a violinist and leader of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. McCallum Junior won a scholarship to University College school, Hampstead, before being accepted at RADA, where he studied from 1949 to 1951, having given up his ambition and his parents' wish, to play the oboe professionally. In 1951, McCallum managed to satisfy his love for both music and the theatre by landing the position of assistant stage manager at Glyndebourne opera. There, he developed a fascination for acting. There were appearances as a child in BBC radio drama and involvement in amateur dramatics. A well-received performance as the doomed prince in Shakespeare's King John helped him make the decision. 'I pleaded, unsuccessfully, with the assassin not to kill me,' he recalled. 'It is a real tear-jerker and the audience applauded wildly at the end. It was in that moment I realised that my home in this world was on a stage.' However, he was soon called up to do his national service in West Africa. Demobbed as a lieutenant, the nineteen-year-old McCallum headed for the theatre, which mainly meant stage-management jobs in rep. In 1956, he half-heartedly posted off some photographs of himself to the Rank Organisation, which was scouting for young talent. The photos were seen by Clive Donner, who was casting his first feature, The Secret Place (1957) and he invited McCallum to do a reading. 'Although he was nervous, his voice was firm and he was very good,' Donner recalled. 'I sat and looked at him for a long time. He was very skinny, with a marvellous head and huge eyes. I think he was living in a bedsit in Archway at that time and had little money. We put him under contract straight away.' Obviously under the influence of James Dean, the leather-jacketed McCallum, playing a young punk involved in a heist, did his best to convey teenage angst. In Cy Endfield's gritty thriller Hell Drivers (1957 and previously reviewed on this blog), McCallum plays Stanley Baker's younger brother, on crutches as a result of a crime gone wrong. In the cast, as a waitress, was twenty-year-old Jill Ireland. McCallum and Ireland were to marry a few months before the film's release. Soon after, they played young lovers in Robbery Under Arms (1957), an adventure shot mostly in Australia. It was back to British realism with Basil Dearden's Violent Playground (1958), in which McCallum plays a juvenile delinquent gang-leader in Liverpool (again, opposite Baker with whom he got on well). Despite a mite too posh an accent, he makes a vivid impression with his drawn features and mop of fair hair dancing to the wild, pagan rhythms of rock and/or roll music.
There followed several more conventional supporting roles, such as radio operators, first on the Titanic in A Night To Remember (1958) and a jumpy one in an Elstree-studio Burmese jungle in the war drama The Long & The Short & The Tall (1961). He was even more nervy in John Huston's Freud (1962) as one of the first of the psychoanalyst's patients, a young man who assaulted his father because of an incestuous love for his mother. After appearing as a sympathetic officer in Peter Ustinov's Billy Budd (1962), McCallum went to Germany to make John Sturges's The Great Escape (1963), the most expensive PoW picture of them all. Among a star-studded cast, headed by Steve McQueen, James Garner and Charles Bronson, McCallum held his own among the Brits as Eric Ashley-Pitt who devises a way of getting rid of dirt from the digging of the escape tunnel. But more significant for him was the fact that Ireland, who was with him during the shoot, fell for Bronson. Ireland and McCallum divorced; he later married Katherine Carpenter, while Ireland married Bronson. David's death now leaves William Russell (also aged ninety) as the final surviving member of one of the most memorable casts in movie history. McCallum, who was already making his principal career on television, was given the role of Kuryakin in The Man From UNCLE, but was soon granted equal billing with Vaughn after it rapidly became clear that he had developed a huge fanbase. Alma Cogan recorded a song called 'Love Ya, Illya', which became a pirate-radio hit in Britain in 1966 and as late as 1991, an Argentinian funk duo named themselves Illya Kuryaki & The Valderramas, after McCallum's character and the large-haired Colombian footballer. The first feature-film spin-off from the TV series, To Trap A Spy (1965), in which McCallum had a small role, did little business (like all of the UNCLE 'movies' these were, essentially, two-part TV episodes with some additional filmed material given a theatrical release in many territories). But the second one, The Spy With My Face, co-starring McCallum, was successful, followed by the box-office hits One Of Our Spies Is Missing, One Spy Too Many and The Spy In The Green Hat (all 1966) and How To Steal The World (1968). After The Man From UNCLE finished in 1968, McCallum continued to make guest appearances on TV until his second long-running series, the BBC's Colditz (1972-74), in which he played Flight Lieutenant Simon Carter, a hot-headed RAF officer who is impatient to escape. Subsequently, McCallum appeared and disappeared as a scientist in The Invisible Man (1975-76 which this blogger was a big fan of but which was quickly cancelled due to a lack of interest by many other viewers) and co-starred with Joanna Lumley in ATV's spooky Sapphire & Steel (1979-82) as the eponymous extra-dimensional detectives sent to Earth to monitor threats to the time-stream. Despite PJ Hammond's often cryptic storylines, the series regularly pulled in audiences of more than eleven million punters. This blogger thought it was great. However, a reorganisation of the ITV regional companies, coupled with rising production costs, saw the series dropped, to audience disappointment, in 1982 and ended with the duo trapped, seemingly for eternity, in an abandoned cafe.
McCallum was seldom off television screens over the next three decades (1989's Mother Love, 1991's Trainer, 2001's The Education of Max Bickford), making the occasional sortie into films. He also did some theatre in New York, where he and his wife had settled, notably Julius Caesar in a Central Park production (2000), playing the title role as 'a senile old man, suffering from ideas of grandeur' according to the actor and portraying the Emperor Joseph II on Broadway in Peter Hall's revival of Amadeus (1999-2000). He liked living and working in America, he said, because they had a far greater work-ethic than we have in Britain. In 2003, his looks belying his age, McCallum began playing Ducky Mallard, chief medical examiner, in the TV series NCIS, following the cases of the fictional agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. His research for the part included studying pathology and sitting in on real autopsies. He stayed with the show for the rest of his life, appearing in all twenty series up to and including this year. In one episode, one character asks another what Ducky would have looked like when he was younger. 'Illya Kuryakin' comes the reply. McCallum is survived by Katherine, their son, Peter and daughter, Sophie and by his sons Val and Paul from his first marriage; Jason, his third son with Ireland, died in 1989.
The acting career of Gayle Hunnicutt, who died in September aged eighty, could be defined a a play in two acts. As an up-and-coming starlet in Hollywood she was often cast for her stunning beauty. Then, after marrying David Hemmings, she moved to the UK, where she played big parts in two major television series like The Golden Bowl and Fall Of Eagles. After a divorce she married the journalist and editor Simon Jenkins and, alongside her acting career, became a fixture of the British social scene. She may, though, be best remembered for the final three series of Dallas, from 1989 to 1991, in which she played Vanessa Beaumont, an English aristocrat whose long-ago affair with JR Ewing produced a son he never knew.
Gayle Hunnicutt was born in Fort Worth. Her father, Sam, was a colonel in the army; her mother, Mary, gave birth to Gayle while her husband was serving in New Caledonia during World War II. Her parents did not support her desire to go to college, but she won a scholarship to the University of California and paid for her time there with part-time work while studying English and theatre. Spotted in a college production by a talent scout from Warner Brothers, she made her debut on the television naval comedy Mister Roberts at the age of twenty three in 1966 and then in Roger Corman's Peter Fonda/Nancy Sinatra film Wild Angels, about a San Pedro motorcycle gang. Who get loaded and have a good time. Once asked whom she would most want to look like, Hunnicutt replied Audrey Hepburn, whose beauty, like hers, was often described as 'porcelain' or even 'cold'. But Hepburn also projected a certain vulnerability, whereas Hunnicutt seemed to carry her beauty naturally. Rather than Hollywood's typecasting of her as a beauty queen, she needed parts that played on a contrast between fragile beauty and steely character. She got noticed in 1967 for her role as a woman trying to con Jed Clampett out of his fortune in a two-part episode of The Beverly Hillbillies and then playing opposite James Garner in the film Marlowe (1969) as the older sister, Mavis Wald, protecting secrets in a film based on Raymond Chandler's novel The Little Sister. By then she had met Hemmings, at a party at Peter Lawford's beach house. She described it as love at first sight and they married in 1968. Hemmings, already a major star after Blow Up, characterised them as the 'poor man's Liz Taylor and Richard Burton' and although Hunnicutt 'always thought that was silly', her new husband seemed intent on replicating the conflict of the Taylor/Burton relationship. Within three months of the wedding he began a very public affair with Samantha Eggar, yet despite his serial infidelity they remained married and moved to Britain, where their son, Nolan, was born.
Gayle co-starred with Hemmings in Fragment Of Fear (1970) which is mostly terrific in spite a woefully ambiguous ending and then was directed by him in Running Scared (1972) with Robert Powell. In 1973 she played in Scorpio, in which Michael Winner wasted the talents of Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon, then again alongside Hemmings in Voices, which was less interesting than her next horror film, The Legend Of Hell House (opposite Roddy McDowell, Pamela Franklin and Clive Revill; another fine movie let down by a rather dodgy denouement). Being in Britain brought her theatre opportunities and, in 1973, she was in her fellow American Michael Rudman's Hampstead Theatre production of Peter Handke's Ride Across Lake Constance, alongside Alan Howard, Jenny Agutter, Nigel Hawthorne and Nicola Pagett. In 1972 she also starred on the small screen in the BBC's adaptation of Henry James's The Golden Bowl as Charlotte Stant, playing, for the first time, a transatlantic character. She followed up with another success as the Tsarina Alexandra in Fall Of Eagles (1974) and that year also played in Nuits Rouges (aka Shadowman in its English dubbed version), George Franju's homage to the fictional criminal genius Fantômas, in which she was memorable in an Irma Vep-style bodysuit being chased by police across the Paris rooftops. She revisited Fantômas in three episodes of the eponymous 1980 French mini-series, directed by Claude Chabrol and Luis Buñuel's son, Juan Luis. In the BBC's 1978 TV film Dylan she played Liz Reitel, a woman having an affair with Ronald Lacey's Dylan Thomas, drinking his way through his ill-fated final American tour.
Hunnicutt had divorced Hemmings in 1974 and married Jenkins in 1978, by which time she was a notable presence on stage and in quality television roles. In London in 1979 she ranged from playing the title role in the Watermill Theatre's production of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler to being Peter Pan at the Shaftesbury Theatre. That year she also starred in a double episode of The Return Of The Saint with Ian Ogilvy, which was later repackaged as a TV movie. She would play in another Saint TV movie, The Brazilian Connection (1989) with Simon Dutton. She also returned to Raymond Chandler as a femme fatale opposite Powers Boothe in an episode of Marlowe, Private Eye in 1983. In the first episode of The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes (1984) opposite Jeremy Brett, she played Holmes' great female rival, Irene Adler. In 1985 she starred as Donna Lloyd with Gene Hackman and Matt Dillon in Arthur Penn's thriller, Target. Her most personal project was a two-hander, The Life & Loves Of Edith Wharton, which debuted in 1995 at the Hampstead Theatre and toured for many years afterwards; according to Jenkins, she identified with the troubled Anglo-American writer. Later she played Mary Wollstonecraft in another two-hander, The Two Marys. Her last screen role came in a 1999 episode of CI5: The New Professionals. But, we can't really blame her for that. Having written a book called Health & Beauty In Motherhood in 1984, two decades later she published Dearest Virginia, a moving collection of her father’s love letters written while he was serving in the South Pacific. She and Jenkins divorced in 2009; her sale of the Primrose Hill house they had lived in for three decades became an episode of a 2012 reality show, Selling London. She is survived by Nolan, another son, Edward, from her marriage to Jenkins and five grandchildren, Poppy, Theo, Oscar, Dash and Nia.
The word 'great' is somewhat promiscuously applied to actors. But it was undoubtedly deserved by Sir Michael Gambon, who has died aged eighty two after suffering from pneumonia. He had weight, presence, authority, vocal power and a chameleon-like ability to reinvent himself from one part to another. He was a natural for heavyweight classic roles such as King Lear and – in the days when white actors played the role – Othello. But what was truly remarkable was Gambon's interpretative skill in the work of the best contemporary dramatists, including Harold Pinter, Alan Ayckbourn, Dennis Potter, David Hare, Caryl Churchill and Simon Gray. Although he was a fine TV and film actor – and, sadly, will forever be identified in the popular imagination of young people with Professor Albus Dumbledore in the Potter franchise – the stage was his natural territory. It is also no accident that, in his private life, Gambon was an expert on and assiduous collector of, machine tools and firearms for, as Peter Hall once said: 'Fate gave him genius but he uses it as a craftsman.' Off-stage, he was also a larger-than-life figure and a superb raconteur. However, Gambon's bravura was also mixed with a certain modesty; he said that he found it difficult to learn lines at his age. 'Sometimes,' he said, 'I sleep with a script under my pillow, or just carry it around in my raincoat pocket, in the hope the lines will rub off on me.'
Michale John Gambon was born into a working-class Dublin family that had no artistic background; his mother, Mary, was a seamstress and his father, Edward, an engineer. When the family settled in Britain after the World War II, the young Gambon went to St Aloysius school, in Somers Town. On leaving at fifteen he took a five-year apprenticeship with Vickers-Armstrongs, leading to a job as a tool-and-die maker. With his mechanical aptitude, he loved the work. But he also discovered a passion for amateur theatre and, having started by building sets, eventually moved into performing. 'I went varoom! I thought, Jesus, this is for me.' With typical chutzpah, he wrote to the Gate Theatre in Dublin, creating a fantasy list of roles that he had supposedly played in London, including Marchbanks in Shaw's Candida; in the end, he made his professional debut there in 1962 as the Second Gentleman in Othello. His best decision, however, on returning to London, was to sign up for an improvisational class run by William Gaskill at the Royal Court. Gaskill was about to join the newly formed National Theatre company at the Old Vic and recommended Gambon for an audition: hence the celebrated story of Gambon's first encounter with Laurence Olivier, which ended with the young actor, in his excess of zeal, banging his hand on a nail in an upstage column and bleeding profusely. Far from being the nail in Gambon's coffin, this led to a productive four years with the National in which he progressed from walk-ons to substantial roles such as that of Swiss Cheese in Gaskill's revival of Mother Courage. On Olivier's advice, however, Gambon left the National in 1967 to hone and pursue his craft at Birmingham rep – a shrewd move which saw him, at the astonishingly early age of twenty seven, playing his first Othello. He moved on later to the Royal Shakespeare Company and in 1968 made his first foray into television with the leading role in a BBC adventure series called The Borderers. It was while buckling his swash on The Borderers, set in Sixteenth Century Scotland, that he was spotted by Cubby Broccoli and asked to audition for the new Bond film, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. While it may be amusing to reflect on how Gambon's Bond could have turned out - more George Smiley than 007 - he was not enthusiastic about taking it on. 'I haven't got nice hair and I'm a bit fat,' he told Broccoli and the part went, instead, to George Lazenby. However, it was through working on another TV series, The Challengers, that he made a contact that was to transform his career. His fellow actor Eric Thompson was moving into directing and in 1974 was set to do an Ayckbourn trilogy, The Norman Conquests, at the Greenwich Theatre. He cast Gambon, against type, as a dithering vet. He revealed, for the first time, his shape-shifting gifts.
This led to a highly productive working relationship with Ayckbourn including key roles in Just Between Ourselves (Queen's Theatre, 1977) and Sisterly Feelings (National, 1980). At the same time, Gambon began an association with Gray by taking over, from Alan Bates, the role of the emotionally detached hero in Otherwise Engaged (Queen's, 1976). That was directed by Pinter, for whom in 1978 Gambon created the part of Jerry in Betrayal at the National. It was a production beset by problems, including a strike that threatened to cancel the first night, but Gambon's mixture of physical power and emotional delicacy marked him out as a natural Pinter actor. That power, however, manifested itself in the 1980s in a series of performances that staked out Gambon's claim to greatness. First, in 1980, came Brecht's Galileo at the National: a triumphant performance which brought out the toughness, obduracy and ravening intellectual curiosity of Brecht's hero. It was a measure of his breakthrough that, as Gambon returned to his dressing room after the first night, he found the other actors in the National's internal courtyard were shouting and roaring their approval. Two years later, Gambon returned to the RSC to play both a monumental King Lear and a ravaged Antony opposite Helen Mirren's Cleopatra. But arguably the finest of all of Gambon's 1980s performances was his Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller's A View From The Bridge, directed by Ayckbourn at the National (1987). It helped that Gambon actually looked like Miller's longshoreman-hero: big and barrel-chested with muscular forearms, he was plausibly a man who could work the Brooklyn docks. Gambon also charted Eddie's complex inner-life through precise physical actions. He stabbed a table angrily with a fork on learning that his niece had got a job, let his eyes roam restlessly over a paper as the niece and the immigrant Rodolpho quietly spooned and buckled visibly at the knees on realising that a fatal phone-call to the authorities had ensnared two other immigrants. In its power and melancholy, this towering performance justified the sobriquet once applied by Ralph Richardson of 'the great Gambon.'
When you consider that the decade also saw Gambon playing the psoriasis-ravaged hero of Dennis Potter's groundbreaking TV series The Singing Detective (1986), you realise his virtuosity and range. Gambon won a BAFTA for his role as the mystery writer Philip Marlowe ('my mother should have called me Christopher, I'd've been a better writer!') confined to a hospital bed with a crippling skin and joint disease, who dreams of a fantasy world in which he also played his character's alter-ego, the eponymous 1940s sleuth. He played the violent gangster Albert Spica in Peter Greenaway's dark crime comedy The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover in 1989 and throughout the 1990s there were a number of other leading film roles. These included Toys, in which he played alongside Robin Williams, as well as Plunkett & Macleane, a grand turn in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow and Gosford Park. He also appeared as Inspector Maigret in an ITV adaptation of Georges Simenon's books which ran for two series. His virtuosity became even clearer in 1990 when he played the mild-mannered hero of Ayckbourn's Man Of The Moment (Globe Theatre), had another crack at Othello for Ayckbourn in Scarborough and appeared, in 1989, as a romantically fixated espionage agent in Pinter's TV adaptation of Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat Of The Day: that last performance, alternately sinister and shy, was one of Gambon's finest for television and deserved a far wider showing. In later years Gambon successfully balanced his stage career with an amazingly prolific one in film and television. In Hare's Skylight at the National in 1995 he combined the bulk and weight of a prosperous restaurateur with a feathery lightness – a skipping post-coital dance across the stage with the balletic grace often possessed by heavily built men. Gambon was equally brilliant as a disgusting, Dickensian, accent-shifting Davies in a revival of Pinter's The Caretaker (Comedy Theatre, 2000), as a perplexed bull of a father in Churchill's A Number (Royal Court, 2002), as a Lear-like Hamm in Beckett's Endgame (Albery, 2004) and as a brooding, alcoholic Hirst in Pinter's No Man's Land (Duke of York's, 2008). Even if Gambon's Falstaff in a 2005 National Theatre production of Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 did not quite match expectations, his work for the theatre revealed an ability to combine volcanic power with psychological depth and physical delicacy. Ill health and increasing memory problems forced him to retire from stage acting in 2015, but not before he had given memorable performances in two Beckett plays: Krapp's Last Tape (Duchess, 2010) and All That Fall (Jermyn Street Theatre, 2012), where he played, opposite Eileen Atkins.
He also continued to work in television and film for as long as possible. He belied the whole notion of the small screen by giving large-scale performances as the black sheep of a big family in Stephen Poliakoff's Perfect Strangers (2001) and as a reclusive plutocrat in the same writer's Joe's Palace (2007). He was nominated for awards for his performances as Lyndon Johnson in an American TV movie, Path To War (2002) and as Mister Woodhouse in a BBC version of Jane Austen's Emma (2009). He was brilliant as a wounded, Scourge-like victim of a father's bullying in the 2010 Doctor Who festive episode A Christmas Carol. Later TV series included The Casual Vacancy (2015), Fearless (2017) and Little Women (2017). His film work included a heavyweight mafia boss in Mobsters (1991), the aged Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited (2008), a cantankerous old director in Dustin Hoffman's Quartet (2012) and the bearded Hogwarts headteacher in six of the eight Harry Potter films, taking over the role for Harry Potter & The Prisoner Of Azkaban (2004) following the death of Richard Harris. This blogger was amused but, also, somewhat saddened that, in the wake of Sir Michael's death, the media tributes that were paid to him almost exclusively included the phrase 'Harry Potter actor' in their headlines, reducing a career of astonishing depth and variety to but one part. Gambon himself, you felt, would have found that hilarious. He also played Private Godfrey in the (really poor) 2016 film version of Dad's Army, Agent Five in slapstick spy comedy Johnny English Strikes Again, another TV Shakespearean turn as Mortimer in The Hollow Crown and, in his final role, as Moses in the 2019 film Cordelia. He also provided the narration for the Coen brothers' excellent Hail, Caesar! (2016) and voiceovers for the two Paddington films (2014 and 2017, both firm From The North favourites).
Away from acting, he collected and restored antique guns and clocks and was a noted classic car enthusiast, making a memorable appearance on Top Gear in 2002. His drive in the 'reasonably priced car' around the test track saw him take the final corner on two wheels. The producers were so impressed by his recklessness that they subsequently named the corner after him. On a second appearance, three years later, he had Jeremy Clarkson in fits of laughter recalling being interviewed whilst playing Oscar Wilde on-stage and being asked, by a particularly stupid journalist, if he found it difficult to get 'into' the character. 'No, I found that very easy because I used to be homosexual,' he claimed. 'But I was forced to give it up.' When asked why, he replied 'because it made my eyes water!' Gambon brought to everything he did, in life as well as art, enormous gusto, a sense of twinkling mischief and a concern with precision: he was almost as happy restoring old firearms as he was working on a new role. In 1992 he was appointed CBE and, six years later, he was knighted. He married Anne Miller in 1962, and they had a son, Fergus. From a subsequent relationship with Philippa Hart, whom he met on the set of Gosford Park, he had two sons, Michael and William. He is survived by Anne and his three sons.
