Lord Bonkers' Diary: Dame Agatha Mousetrap

And so another week at Bonkers Hall draws to a close. It looks like Keir Starmer is in the clear for a while, but I still wouldn't accept any invitations to stay on mysterious islands off the Devon coast if I were in his shoes.

Sunday

These days every television celebrity thinks he’s Dame Agatha Mousetrap, but there’s more to the whodunnit-writing game than meets the eye. I once had a shot at it myself; all went well until I sat down to pen the final chapter, only to find I had not included a butler among the cast of characters and thus had no murderer to reveal. 

My reason for mentioning this is that if the prime minister has been knifed by this own party by the time you read this, it will be like Murder on the Orient Express. They’ll all have had a go at him.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week

• One of Violent Bonham Carter’s boys
• A phone number for the Overton-Window twins
• "I’ll fetch you one up the bracket"
• A young Marines officer called Ashdown
• A strange episode
• He should ask an eagle to do it

Susan Stranks on appearing in the 1949 film of The Blue Lagoon

Talking Pictures screened the 1980 film The Blue Lagoon the other evening. It was an adaptation of the 1908 novel of the same name by Henry De Vere Stacpoole, which tells the story of a boy and girl marooned on a desert island. Nature takes its course, as nature will, and they grow up to have a baby.

The Talking Pictures screening reminded me that The Blue Lagoon was previously adapted for the screen in 1949. This was a British production, and the girl (played as a young adult by Jean Simmons) was played by Susan Stranks, who grew up to be a presenter of Magpie, ITV's would-be rival to Blue Peter.

And Susan Stranks can been seen talking about her experience of making the film in this British Film Institute video from 2021.

I was going to make a joke about the British children never taking their school uniforms off, but in fact our films were noticeably more relaxed about That Sort of Thing than was Hollywood in the Forties. In the Fifties, not so much.

Oh no! Here comes a minor celeb from a Channel 4 clips show of 20 years ago.

Minor celeb from a Channel 4 clips show of 20 years ago: We watched Magpie. Blue Peter was for posh kids.

Liberal England replies: Clear off.

Llyn Dulyn: The Ghosts of the Black Lake (Nationwide, 1973)

Another Fortean report from Nationwide, the BBC early-evening magazine programme that offered an unrivalled portrait of Britain in the Seventies:

Llyn Dulyn ("Black Lake" in Welsh) lies nestled in the Carneddau range of mountains in Snowdonia. 

A quiet, eerie place, it’s steeped not only in an ancient folklore of evil spirits and witches, but also a more modern variety of ghost story. It was the site of multiple airplane crashes during WWII, and became infamous across North Wales. 

In this clip, the locals speak in hushed tones to reporter John Swinfield of collecting debris from the plane wrecks, catching strange-looking fish and hearing disembodied voices calling out to them.

This report was broadcast on 17 October 1973.

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"His central idea, as he has written before, is that people should own their data. Personal data is any data that can be linked to us, such as our purchasing habits, health information and political opinions." Alex Zarifis on Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the future of the internet.

Sarah Lyons on the ubiquity of violence towards women: "The one man present was in total shock, he had never heard women talk so candidly like this before, the way we talk amongst ourselves, and he genuinely could not comprehend how much violence we had all collectively endured He left that night visibly shaken, changed."

Niamh Gallagher reviews a history of the Great Famine: "There is no doubt that food was available in Ireland throughout the crisis – just not to those who needed it most. The year 1845 was a vintage one for oats; in 1846, 3.3 million acres were planted with grain, and Irish farms raised more than 2.5 million cattle, 2.2 million sheep and 600,000 pigs, most of which were exported to Britain." 

"For a man who said he hated politics, it is exactly his uncompromising sense of right and his engagement with the world that will make his legacy everlasting." Kenny Monrose pays tribute to Jimmy Cliff.

Jude Rogers says the Eighties television series Edge of Darkness speaks to the Britain of 2025: "As well as trusting its viewers with the complexity of its plot, much of the making of Edge Of Darkness was also audacious. It pioneered the use of Steadicam in its first episode, following Peck from his hotel room in the lift, through the foyer, down the stairs to a basement garage to meet shadowy government attaché Pendleton."

"Early 1645 Parliamentary forces seized Shrewsbury. In June 800 Parliamentarian men pushed south towards Ludlow, attacking Stokesay en route. The garrison were heavily outnumbered and defending what was now essentially an ornamental castle. A bit of back and forth parlay and the garrison surrendered." Keep Your Powder Dry has a survey of Civil War sites in Shropshire that confirms Stokesay Castle was built chiefly for show.

Asquith: The Movie

This television play, screened in 1983 as part of the ITV series Number 10, deals with Asquith's battle with the House of Lords to secure the passage of the budget in 1910.

That measure has gone down in history as Lloyd George's budget, but Asquith himself had done much of the work on it while he was still chancellor.

One thing that must have confused viewers at the time is that Asquith is played by David Langton, who had become well known a few years before for playing a Tory MP, Richard Bellamy in the wildly popular series Upstairs, Downstairs. Think of it as a superior version of Downton Abbey.

As to young Puffin Asquith, I have a book signed by him.

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"The real scandal here is the behaviour of the board. As Patrick Barwise and Peter York detailed in their 2020 book The War on the BBC, the British right has been trying to cow and weaken the BBC for decades, for both political and commercial reasons. But this time is different because the chief saboteurs were board members, chiefly Sir Robbie Gibb. On the Today programme, former Sun editor David Yelland justifiably described this week’s events as 'nothing short of a coup'. The call is coming from inside the house." Dorian Lynskey says the BBC is the biggest prize in the information war and the right may be about to destroy it.

Stacy Patton shows that Donald Trump is not the first US president to be accused of paedophilia.

"In 2024, Pershore and Thrapston became the first towns in the UK to twin their rivers, the Avon and the Nene, creating the Sister Rivers partnership. The idea is simple and scalable. Each town takes guardianship of its stretch of river, monitors it, and shares results, data, and strategies with its twin. Two councils, two communities, one purpose: to restore what regulation has failed to defend." Michael Chapman Pincher on a new initiative to protect our rivers.

Gordon McKelvie finds that historians must be alert to the dangers of AI and its potential to simplify, and ultimately impoverish, the study of the past.

"At one point the White Lady apparently benevolently watches over the father’s daughters as they sleep but she is revealed to be a form of predatory grim reaper when suddenly the silhouetted arc of a scythe she holds appears over their heads." Stephen Prince revisits White Lady, a lesser-known television play by David Rudkin that was broadcast in 1987

The Crow Inn has a guide to some of the best pubs in Derby.

Trivia dump: Woman wakes to find she's bought an emu egg

A BBC News story was shortlisted for Headline of the Day – Woman fulfils childhood dream of rearing an emu – but lost out to a demonic jumper.

The story beneath it does deserve some sort of award though:

A late night shopping spree turned into a dream come true for one animal lover after she successfully hatched an emu egg. 

Rhi Evans, from Cirencester, Gloucestershire, has no memory of buying the egg but woke one morning in 2022 to an email confirmation from eBay saying it was on its way.

We've all been there.

This item gives me an excuse to repost my favourite clip of Rod Hull and Emu. As someone said, "I've watched it dozens of times, but still all I can see is an emu throwing a man into a chest freezer."

Rod Hull began his career on a children's television show in Australia. As it the way with such shows, the presenters sat in front of some shelves with interesting things on them. And among them was an emu's egg.

Someone wrote in to ask if it was ever going to hatch, and shortly after that Hull saw an emu puppet in a shop. The rest is history.

Like the Bee Gees, Rod Hull was given his break into television by an executive called Desmond Tester. Tester had begun his career as a child actor in Britain before the war – he is the boy with the bomb on the bus in Hitchock's Sabotage.

I'm also reminded of a story about someone at Liberal Democrat News finding they needed an illustration for an article on European Monetary Union. Without much hope, they turned to the paper's artwork files, only to find an envelope labelled 'EMU'.

They opened it and found a photograph of an emu. And that complete's today's trivia dump.

The way we talk about and portray children in care really matters

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

In the report of his inquiry into the death of Dennis O'Neill in 1945, Sir Walter Monckton wrote:

It is first necessary to explain the basis of the policy of committing children to a local authority which may board them out. The "fit person," local authority or individual, must care for the children as his own: the relation is a personal one. The duty must neither be evaded nor scamped.

That does not appear to be the view taken by the Reform UK member of Cambridgeshire County Council Andy Osborn. He told a meeting of its children and young people committee that some children in care can be "downright evil".

In an article on East Anglia Bylines, Kerrie Portman explains how damaging such language can be:

Words, especially when spoken by those in positions of power, normalise assumptions and prejudices. They embolden others to think, speak and act in this way, which translates directly to the harms inflicted on Care Experienced people, leading to many of our ongoing vulnerabilities and even shortened life expectancies.

When researching my recent Central Bylines article on Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, I came across an article by Josie Pearce. In it she notes that writers of television drama treat the fact that someone was orphaned or adopted as enough in itself to explain why they have grown up to commit murder.

As she says:

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries orphans were most often heroes. ... But since the twentieth century and TV, our most common plotline is that because our parents were dead, dysfunctional, unable... we must be serial killers. I started counting eventually and by my reckoning 90 per cent of TV serial killers were orphans. 

Sir Walter Monckton's report followed the death of 12-year-old Dennis O'Neill on a farm in Shropshire, where he had been fostered with his younger brother Terry. The case caused a national outcry – more against the council that had sent them there than against the farmer Reginald Gough and his wife, who had actually killed the boy – and gave Christie the inspiration for The Mousetrap. 

In my article on the play for Central Bylines, I quoted Phil O'Neill, who is the son of an older brother of Dennis and Terry: 

"My gentle Uncle Terry always said he wouldn’t seek revenge because that would make him no better than the Goughs. It was a shock seeing him portrayed on stage as a psychotic killer."

The way we talk about and portray children in care really matters. We should give it more thought.

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GB News's new show broadcast live from the US features non-stop praise for Donald Trump and the channel’s co-owner Paul Marshall begging MAGA politicians to "save the UK", reports Josiah Mortimer.

Mills Dyer, who spent several years working in the Liberal Democrats' membership department, gives three reasons why they membership surges like the one the Greens are currently experiencing matter – and three why they're completely irrelevant.

Tayo Bero is worried by the explosion in online content promoting the use of antidepressants: "Antidepressant use can be messy, stressful, confusing and seemingly interminable (don’t even get me started on my experience with withdrawal symptoms). It is not the kind of experience that vulnerable young people should be socially coerced into, especially via the machinations of capitalist vultures. Young people need way more than a two-minute TikTok to figure out what they should do to get better."

"Before socialism even had a name, the poet and painter William Blake saw how the Industrial Revolution’s 'dark Satanic mills' harmed humanity. His visionary work condemned the forces of commodification and cold calculation in emergent capitalism." Jonathan Agin argues that William Blake was a prescient critic of capitalist alienation.

"When Pebble Mill opened in 1971 ... it was the most sophisticated in the country, the largest outside London, and the first to combine TV and radio operations under one roof. It was conceived as the regional counterpart to the Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush." Jon Neale remembers Pebble Mill Studios and the golden age of Birmingham television.

Andy Murray explores the Manx folklore that inspired Nigel Kneale, including his Halloween III script that never saw the light of day.

Not so cosy: A podcast on Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap

I came across a new podcast today – Garlic & Pearls – via a really good episode on Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap.

It's thoroughly researched and emphasises how far from cosy Christie's works can be. The Mousetrap is set in a dislocated postwar world in which the class structure has been shaken and there is an air of paranoid watchfulness.

The BBC's adaptations of the Miss Marple books, which starred the incomparable Joan Hickson, were set firmly in this world. And it's noticeable that when Bertram's Hotel appears to have survived the changes unscathed, it turns out to be too good to be true.

Meanwhile, after the Colonel died, Dolly Bantry sold the big house and moved very happily into a modernised lodge house with all the latest conveniences. The future need not always be resisted, as the worldly Marple grasps.

I recently wrote an article for Central Bylines about the 12-year-old foster child called Dennis O'Neill whose death on a farm in Shropshire Christie to write the play.

The last days of the King's Lynn to East Dereham line

This Terence Carroll documentary on the last days of the line from King's Lynn to East Dereham was first broadcast on BBC2 on 2 June 1969, though Wikipedia tells us the line had been closed for the best part of a year by then:

The line was not listed for closure in the original 1963 Beeching Report. But it was nonetheless closed to passenger and freight services by the Eastern Region of British Railways on Saturday 7 September 1968, save for a three-mile section for sand freight from King's Lynn to Middleton. 

Wendling station continued for a short while as a filming location, with the station and its road bridge featuring in several episodes of the British situation comedy Dad's Army.

A 1959 Monitor feature on Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop

I've struck gold with this 1959 report on Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop at Stratford East from the BBC arts programme Monitor.

The first comment on YouTube reckons you can spot Pat Phoenix. James Booth, Dudley Sutton, Yootha Joyce, Richard Harris and Glyn Edwards among the company.

I've long been interested in Stratford East's links with ITV sitcoms: half the cast of On the Buses (Stephen Lewis, Bob Grant, Michael Robbins) came from the Theatre Workshop. I didn't know before seeing this that, through Pat Phoenix, it was also linked with Coronation Street.

Joan Littlewood's remarkable career proved there is an audience for challenging theatre beyond the affluent West End. If you enjoyed this film, see my post on The Living Theatre in early 1960s Leicester too.

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David Howarth knows how to make the BBC less afraid of Nigel Farage: "Proportional representation would free the BBC from fear, but more than that, since under PR many parties would enjoy a reasonable prospect of entering government and so of supplying the secretary of state for culture, the BBC would have better incentives to maintain impartiality among democratic parties."

"Calling Andrew entitled is beside the point. He was raised with no economic purpose and now he finds himself as a connector to whom no one wants to be connected. 'I have no idea who he will socialize with,' one Norfolk grandee told me. 'All his friends are Chinese spies.'" Tina Brown claims to have the inside story on how King Charles pulled the plug on Andrew.

AI is supercharging abuse against women journalists, but Megha Mohan argues that it doesn’t have to be that way.

"For a period beginning in the 1960s and ending around the turn of this century, the preferred form of the homicidally inclined was the drawn-out danse macabre of serial murder. This was especially true in America’s Pacific Northwest, where an astonishingly large number of serial killers, from Ted Bundy to Israel Keyes, from the Green River Killer to the Shoe Fetish Slayer, from the Werewolf Butcher of Spokane to the Beast of British Columbia, grew up or operated." James Lasdun on the serial killers of Seattle.

Stephen Prince introduces us to the 1970 book Filming the Owl Service (1970), which is "long out of print and rare as hens' teeth to find second hand, which is a shame as it is a fine companion piece to the series, full of rather lovely photographs, artefacts, anecdotes, background story, prop sheets and designs from the filming and the series itself".

Robert Hartley explores the Leicestershire connections of George Stephenson, the father of railways.

Kirsty Williams: Online trolling forced me out of politics

Embed from Getty Images

Kirsty Williams, once leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats and education minster in the Welsh government, has spoken about the pressure that her political career put on her and her family.

She described the online abuse she and other politicians received as "unforgivable" and said it was this level of trolling that forced her to leave politics.

When she told her daughters about her new role as chairwoman of the Cardiff and Vale health board, they said "don't do it, we can't go through this again".

Kiraty was appearing on the Fifth Floor podcast. I can't find a link to that episode, but there are some quotes in the a BBC News story:

"I didn't realise how badly it affected my family," she said, adding that once news of her new role was made public the "pack" were back online "telling everybody what a terrible person I am".

Williams said that being a politician was "no worse or better than many other jobs that people do".

"Most sane people would run a mile from putting themselves into that environment," she said, referring to the level of criticism received.

"I'm worried that it's baked in now. People who go for that job accept that this is how they're going to have to live their lives.

"It's not pleasant."

The belief that "politicians are all as bad as each other and are all in if for themselves" is endemic on the left as well as the right.

I sometimes wonder if the sea of snark and satire we now move in is good for us. After all, the one solid achievement from 94 years of Have I Got New for You has been to help Boris Johnson on his way to Downing Street.

Prunella Scales in Hobson's Choice (1952)

Prunella Scales died yesterday at the age of 93. We all remember her as Sybil Fawlty, and in his DVD commentaries on the series, John Cleese (who was 86 today) recalls that she brought much to the role that he and Connie Booth had not imagined. Fawlty Towers was the better for it.

But there was more to Prunella Scales than Fawlty Towers. She was Elizabeth II in Alan Bennett's A Question of Attribution and played Queen Victoria in a one-woman show for many years. There were other successful television sitcoms and a surprising number of films.

The second of these was Hobson's Choice in 1954. You can see a clip from it above – Scales plays the youngest of Charles Laughton's three daughters. Don't worry: the film is all about Laughton getting his comeuppance.

Two weeks ago I posted a clip of Patricia Routledge, who died earlier this month, playing the eldest of the sisters in 1962.

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"The Cabinet Office, Lord Gove and Ciga Healthcare were approached for comment but did not respond by time of publication." Byline Times has news of another alleged scandal in government procurement during the Covid pandemic.

Max Sullivan on his experiences of introducing on-street bicycle hangars in the London Borough of Westminster: "Make decisions on merit. Objections that don't have merit can be listened to, but not indulged, if you want to move faster. Officers need to have the confidence in the need for the scheme (lack of space to park a bike is a major barrier to cycling) to give their politicians good advice. Politicians must be prepared to respectfully disagree with their residents, to deliver for their other residents. Who are many in number, waiting for somewhere safe to keep a bike."

"A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television." Derek Thompson explains his theory.

James Coverley draws an important lesson from the death of the Roman Emperor Domitian: "Caesar, of course, was betrayed by someone close to him. Mussolini ended up hanging from a streetlamp. You can only bully people into liking you for so long until someone, one day, realises that you’re the problem and that your grip on power is, actually, paper-thin and depends on the illusion of fear."

Koraljka Suton takes us deep into David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001): "Some of these narrative threads appear superfluous at first glance because we seemingly never get back to them. Others take us down rabbit holes that leave us feeling dazed, confused and disoriented. But all of them have their rightful place in Lynch’s surrealist picture that stubbornly defies genre categorization."

"A few clubs have boreholes, able to provide clean water on their wickets which then filters back into the aquifer in a virtuous circle. This was interesting and unexpected, revealing how certain clubs can benefit from their local geology, whereas others rely on ageing infrastructure and water companies." Dan Looney recently walked the Kennet & Avon Canal from Reading to Bath, then onwards via the River Avon to Bristol, visiting 11 cricket grounds along the way to see how they are adapting to climate change.

Daniel Naroditsky and Bodhana Sivanandan: Sad and happy news from the world of chess

The chess world has been shocked by the death of the American grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky at the age of 29.

As well as being a strong player, Naroditsky was famous as a chess trainer and commentator. Chess experience a boom during Covid lockdown, and his videos, which were among the very best of their kind, must have played a part in this.

Many grandmasters don't understand how little the rest of us understand about the game, but Naroditsky was able to make things wonderfully clear.

In the video above, in which he beats a weaker player, he explains his moves as he goes along. And then he goes back over the game and the more general lessons to be learnt from it.

When I was a teenager, I used to borrow audio cassettes on the game – the nearest thing to this that was available between series of The Master Game.

On a happier note, the 10-year-old British prodigy Bodhana Sivanandan has beaten the former women's world champion (now ranked 13 in the world among women players) Mariya Muzychuk. 

You can hear her analysing their game with wonderful maturity in the video below.

Nationwide from 1970: A haunted Sheffield nightclub

If you want a portrait of Britain in the Seventies, you can't beat Nationwide. This was a news magazine programme shown every weekday evening after the six o'clock news. It began with news from your region and then went national to tackle both serious and lighter subjects.

The regional presenters featured in the national segment too, and people of my generation will still recall nanes like Mike Neville in Newcastle, Bruce Parker in Southampton and Ian Masters in Norwich. And I think they were all men – very Seventies.

Nationwide covered the three-day week, the drought, the Silver Jubilee and so on through the decade. It also covered the rise of both consumerism and environmentalism.

And the programme had a fondness for supernatural stories like this one, which also gives you a picture of Sheffield people in 1970.

In 1982 David Dimbleby took over from Michael Barratt as the programme's main host, and his pomposity killed it off. But naybe something as Seventies as Nationwide was always going to struggle in the new decade.

Alleged Jesus Army abusers may receive larger pay outs than were given to victims

Since the broadcast of a BBC documentary, Inside the Cult of the Jesus Army, Kathleen Hallisey, a lawyer from Scott-Moncrieff and Associates, has taken on about 60 new clients who are pursuing claims.

The BBC News report also reminds us of a worrying discovery:

A lawyer representing 150 victims of the Jesus Army said plans to allow people accused of child abuse to receive a share of the cult's fortune were "shameful".

A BBC investigation revealed 172 former loyal members of the disgraced Northamptonshire-based evangelical sect would receive much larger payouts than those awarded to victims under a redress scheme.

It is understood some who have been people accused of perpetrating or covering up abuse could be among the beneficiaries of the group's assets – which is estimated to be more £50m – a prospect survivors have described as "sickening".

Malcolm Johnson, a lawyer from Lime Solicitors, said the only right action to take was redirect the leftover assets for charitable use.

Once again, I'm left wondering why the scandal surrounding the Jesus Army hasn't been a bigger story.

Roger Hollis: The spy who never was?

My memory of the Eighties is that Peter Wright was seen as being obsessive about Soviet infiltration of British intelligence. But didn't Karla arrange things to make Control look like that?

And in this programme from 1984 Wright cuts an impressive figure. No Percy Alleline he.

Let's end with a couple of pieces of trivia. 

Malcolm Turnbull, the future Australian prime minister, who embarrassed the British government in court while fighting to allow Wright to publish his memoirs, is related to both Angela Lansbury and Oliver Postgate.

And Roger Hollis, whether he was a spy or not, was the father of Adrian Hollis, who was a correspondence chess grandmaster.