RIP The Duke of York's Theatre, soon to be renamed the Tom Stoppard Theatre after the great playwright
It's another snippets post today, dear reader:
- RIP: the Halifax Building Society, as its parent Lloyds Banking Group announced it plans to scrap the 173-year-old brand, and either rename its branches as Lloyds or else merge standalone outlets into one. Shame.
- RIP: The World Tonight, one of my favourite news programmes on BBC Radio 4 at 10pm every weekday - which is being axed (after 56 years!) as part of sweeping cuts by Auntie's new Director General Matt Brittin, to be replaced by Newshour, currently only available on the World Service. Why not the other way around, I say? Let "Johnny Foreigner" listen to the kind of quality journalism that has made TWT the yardstick by which other news outlets should be judged, and is aimed at a British audience! Hint to Mr Brittin: "British" is in the name of your organisation, in case you didn't notice when you arrived in post fresh from fucking Google...
- RIP: Humphrey Smith, patriarch of the Sam Smith brewery and pub chain - who ran the organisation in an eccentric, borderline draconian manner. No music, no TV, no dogs, no kids, no mobile phones, no swearing, coal fires, lots of dark wood, only "own-brand" drinks on sale - all this, and more, made any Sam Smith pub instantly recognisable. However, by all accounts, working for the man must have been a nightmare - he lost several tribunals on the grounds of unfair dismissal; he would often pay a visit to one of his many pubs and if he experienced anything not to his satisfaction, close it down then-and-there, with the result that his estate has many pubs that remain shuttered today. Let's see what happens to all this "Victorian values" stuff now Yorkshire's answer to "Mr Burns" is dead.
- And, finally, RIP: Victor Willis, founder-member, lead singer and songwriter of The Village People, who has strutted off to the glitter-ball strewn eternal discotheques of Fabulon, just ahead of our own Gay Xmas (Gay Pride) in London this weekend. He made his name as part of an iconic camp band, yet he was such a paranoid weirdo that - regardless of the group's obvious references to 1970s gay stereotypes/Tom of Finland erotic fantasies, despite their name being a tribute to the then gay heartland of New York Greenwich Village where the recruitment of the band took place, despite the flamboyant gayness of their performances, despite the innuendo-filled song titles such as Cruisin’, Macho Man and so on - he threatened legal action against any media outlet that dared to call his and the group's biggest hit Y.M.C.A. a "gay anthem"! He even allowed that Tangerine Twat in the White House to shake his wizened senile carcass to the song at his rallies. Mr Willis, you were responsible for some memorable choons, but let's face it - nobody in the world could ever think any of your songs were actually about "straight black male solidarity" at all. I rest my case with this:
And the weather? Proper summer sunshine. I love it.
