(1) The Fancy Dress Party Sam had a problem. His friend Abbie was having a fancy dress birthday party on the last day of the school holidays and he couldn’t decide what he wanted to go as. ‘What about being a wizard with a cloak, a wand and a pointed hat?’ his mum suggested.… Continue reading…
Who killed Elvis Presley? In his new film ‘Elvis’, which goes on release this week, writer-director Baz Luhrmann makes a pretty convincing argument that the singer’s manager, the phony ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, bears much of the responsibility for the star’s early death. Many fans will agree with that, believing that, during those last months of… Continue reading…
You can’t beat a bit of real mystery as the background for dramatic super-reality, can you? Well, that’s what the latest Doctor Who series tapped into when the Tardis touched down in Liverpool on Sunday evening. Not being a time traveller myself, I can’t say that I completely followed the plot. But the bit that… Continue reading…
A second chance – that’s what I was being given when, having skirted death during that first round of Covid, I left hospital just over a year ago. I was, I was told, only half way there. It would take twelve more months before my body got back to near where it had been before… Continue reading…
I learned the real meaning of gold fever when I was 13 – although in my case the fever was silver and came in the shape of 33 Roman coins dug out of the bed of a small stream on a West Lancashire farm. A chance remark by a friend of my sister that a hoard… Continue reading…
We got conned a couple of weeks ago – as, according to Action Fraud, were 504,489 other people during the past 13 months. That’s right. Nearly half a million people in the UK have had money stolen from them in little over a year by gangs of fraudsters – to the tune of £1.26 billion… Continue reading…
The Beatles were hardly a happy band of musical brothers when they assembled before film cameras shortly after ten in Twickenham Film Studios on the morning of January 2, 1969. It was too early in the day for John and George, too cold as well, and it was only ten weeks since they’d finished their… Continue reading…
When the Everly Brothers had their first hits in the late 50s they were both barely more than boys, and the sound of those two late adolescents harmonising about sorrow, pain and the hurts of teenage love, was imprinted on the memories of a generation. So when I finally met them after a London concert I… Continue reading…
What Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, Lord Hailsham, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon, Roger Vadim, Michael Caine, Leonard Cheshire, Paul Raymond, Eric Morecambe, Mick Jagger, Terry Wogan, Elvis Presley, Dennis Hopper, David Attenborough, Tony Benn, Charlie Watts, Enoch Powell, Marc Bolan and Jimmy Savile (and many more) told me… There are many good and honourable reasons for… Continue reading…
DEVOTED Written by Ray Connolly Listen here. Starring Philip Jackson and Alison Steadman Produced by Gary Brown On April 15, 2020 Ray Connolly was admitted to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital suffering from Covid 19. He did not return home until September 25. He was aged 79, with no underlying health issues. Spending over 100… Continue reading…
