Happy birthday, old acid tongue!

"I don't exercise. If God had wanted me to bend over, he would have put diamonds on the floor."

Celebrating her birthday today is the acid-tongued grande dame of the chat show, Joan Rivers!

She has often been compared (unfavourably) to that other wild, brash comedienne Phyllis Diller, but our Joan carved herself a bit of a cult following all her own when her one-woman show came to British screens in the 1980s, and she's been up there at the top ever since - now in her 70s, she even made a spectacular appearance the other week on stage at G.A.Y with Erasure!



Despite with that god-awful plastic surgery, Joan is, and will always be, a classy funny lady and gay idol - I love her!

Joan Rivers on Wikipedia

Ministers proposing 'Britain Day'

A national day to promote a stronger sense of British identity and prevent communities from becoming more divided has been suggested by two ministers.



Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly and Immigration Minister Liam Byrne say it could be a new bank holiday.

Spot the "Britishness" in the following...

"A Britain Day would recognise the "local focus" of people's contribution to society in particular. It might be, for instance, that local areas come together, they decide for themselves about the contribution that they might make." Ruth Kelly MP, Communities Minister
BBC Online News

Ruth Kelly's grandfather Philip Murphy was an Irish Republican Army (IRA) officer interned in 1922 by the Government of Northern Ireland. Kelly is a practising Roman Catholic, a member of Opus Dei and regular attendee at their meetings and events. Her brother, Ronan Kelly, is a supernumerary in the Opus Dei organisation. Wikipedia

"We want people with skills and talents we can use to come in a managed way and contribute to our economy. We want people to be able to visit this country and feel welcome and secure."
Liam Byrne MP, Minister for Immigration
Employing Immigrant Workers

In December 2006, twenty year old gay Nigerian asylum seeker Emmanuel Obahiaghbon was deported back to Nigeria on Monday 4 December 2006, on the orders of the Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne MP. Peter Tatchell Website

There never was a golden age of English decency, civility and manners

Just watched the most fantastic programme called England's Seven Sins tonight on - of all places - More4.

The programme featured real-life hoodies, binge-drinkers and chavs delivering the authentic words of 11th century binge-drinkers, Edwardian yobs, Elizabethan xenophobes and 17th-century hooligans to illustrate the fact, contrary to contemporary political and tabloid views on our 21st century society, that the English have been violent, binge-drinking hooligans for more than a thousand years.



Director Joe Bullman reveals the English in all their beer-soaked glory and argues that our lack of respect, lust for violence and love of drink have fuelled our democratic spirit and made us what we are today.

"As I delved into the archives I identified what I came to think of as England's oldest tradition of all – the tendency for people of a certain age to complain that the young people are out of control and that the country has gone to the dogs. Whenever I came across a sentiment like this, I would try to go back the 40 or 50 years or so, to the time when the chronicler of our national malaise had been young. But when I got back there, I found that people were saying exactly the same thing: English manners had disintegrated. The country had gone to the dogs... It's a complaint as old as England itself.

"In 1860 the English press was in the grip of one of its periodic moral panics, brought on by a wave of juvenile delinquency. Gangs of youths, dressed in intimidating street-uniforms, were waging territorial street-battles and threatening respectable people. People were living in fear, and the streets weren't safe to walk on.

"The word "hooligan" was believed to have first emerged on the streets a couple of decades later and to have found its way into the newspapers in the late 1890s...

"But in an obscure manuscript, I found a much earlier appearance – as a resident of 1650's Turnmill Street (which is still there, on the edge of the City) complained of "gangs of hooligans who demand money with menaces from the poor washerwomen who wassh their clothes and do other thynges for theyre owne needs." (London: The Synfulle City – E.J. Burford, Robert Hale, 1990).

"As far back as the early 1600s, the streets of London were terrorised by a succession of organised gangs – with names like The Dead Boys, the Roaring Boys, The Bravadoes and the Mohocks. They amused themselves by breaking windows, demolishing taverns, assaulting Night Watchmen, rolling old ladies in barrels and slitting the noses of their victims with swords...

"And so it goes. Back through time. An endless succession of English ignorance and thuggery. The idea behind this film is not to imply that anti-social behaviour is not a problem – it is. It's turned our towns and cities into the vilest, ugliest, most barbaric places in the developed world.

"No, the real point is to put the current debate about anti-social behaviour into its historical context. Once we and Tony Blair realise that there never was a golden age of English decency, civility and manners, we can begin to have an intelligent debate about what to do".

England's Seven Sins on IMDB

The most sensational woman anyone ever saw

An often unheralded champion of human rights during the 20th century, and one of the most exotic, glamorous, powerful and beautiful women in entertainment history, Josephine Baker would have been 101 years old today!



In her heyday as the predominant star of the Folies Bergere in Paris, she rivalled Gloria Swanson and Mary Pickford as the most photographed woman in the world, and by 1927 she earned more than any entertainer in Europe. Ernest Hemingway described her as "the most sensational woman anyone ever saw."

On her early attempts to return to the stage in her homeland of the USA, Josephine was initially rejected by the bigots in the audience and the media. But she vigorously campaigned throughout the 50s and 60s to fight racism. When New York's popular Stork Club refused her service, she engaged a head-on media battle with pro-segregation columnist Walter Winchell. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) named May 20 Josephine Baker Day in honour of her efforts.

In her own words: "You've got to fight every single day. When I see a roach, I step on it."

When she died in 1975, more than 20,000 people crowded the streets of Paris to watch the funeral procession on its way to the Church of the Madeleine. The French government honored her with a 21-gun salute, making Josephine Baker the first American woman buried in France with military honors.

A true star!

Josephine Baker biography on Wikipedia

The Government says you should be...

Yet more tiresome blather from the Nanny State. this time from some over-fed creature called a "respect czar"...

Apparently, we're all too rude and disrespectful, and should mind our manners.


Read the article

Why don't these twerps in Government just do something, instead of proselytising about such rubbish as "public service responsibility to try to uphold certain standards of decency"?

We live in such a hypocritical society - I can sit in a bar where in a few weeks' time I will be a criminal for lighting a fag, and through the window a group of street scum cluster in a doorway to light a crack pipe and nobody does anything!

There are too few police on the streets, yobs who beat someone senseless get away with community service orders, the government sends troops to the Middle East and ignores human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Russia and Poland, and all this overpaid "church-going and neighbourly" political adviser can focus on is dropping litter?

I wanna be loved by you...

What is there to say about Marilyn Monroe that has not been said a million times before? The former Norma Jean Baker, sultry screen idol and surprisingly great actress, would have been 81 today, and I am certain that the column inches dedicated to her life and sad lonely death will far outweigh anything I could blog here...

So I'll just post a picture and wallow in the many many happy memories Marilyn Monroe gave to me, and to the world.



Marilyn on IMDB

Another chapter closes

Peculiar irony, this...

I have been avidly watching the fantastic BBC4 "Children's TV on Trial" season all week, from its roots in the Fifties and Sixties, through Oliver Postgate, Magic Roundabout, Crackerjack, Blue Peter and Grange Hill, to the decline of children's broadcasting into the Nineties, when I heard the sad news that earlier this week one of its old stalwarts died.

Tony Bastable, one of the original presenters of Magpie - ITV's answer to Blue Peter in the 70s - was a major TV presence when I was a child. In a similar way to presenters like Michael Aspel, Michael Rodd and Brian Cant, Tony Bastable provided that safe, chummy, well-groomed "older brother" air in anything he presented, and although it seems his career never really made it further than those dim and distant halcyon days he still remains an important part of the very history the BBC has been trying to explore this week.

>

Such a shame that so few people will remember him. RIP.

Read his obituary in The Guardian