A chance to see Frankie Howerd's Bottom

Put your titters away, because I'm talking about Shakespeare. In 1957 Frankie Howerd was invited to appear as Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Old Vic.

And very good he was to, at least according to Francis Wyndham in The Queen (7 January 1958):

Some members of the audience may have feared that his gift for gagging might interfere with the sacred text; others, that his comic genius might be constrained within the limitations of a classic. 

On the first night he struck a happy medium, under-acting in the rehearsal and Titania scenes but bursting out with hilarious bravado when performing Pyramus before the Duke. This play scene can have seldom been made so funny.

You can see Howerd's Bottom ("Shut your face.") in the video above.

Far down the cast as First Fairy ("And that's an achievement with this lot, I can tell you.") was a young Judi Dench. You can see and hear her below.

A portrait of Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)

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The playwright Tom Stoppard died today. There will be plenty of obituaries, but there is a good portrait of him in this Guardian interview from two years ago (to the day) by Claire Armitstead:

Tom Stoppard is chatting in the theatre bar when I arrive to interview him about a revival of his play Rock ’n’ Roll. He was comparing ailments with an elderly director friend, he says cheerfully, as he heads up the stairs, having declined an offer of the lift. At 86 he has the nonchalant elegance of a spy in a cold war thriller, lean and mop-haired in a discreetly expensive-looking coat.

Though Stoppard is feted around the world for some of the cleverest plays of the last 60 years, as well as the Oscar-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, he is more gossipy than grand. “I said to him,” he reports of the conversation from which he has just been dragged away, “I’m being interviewed by the Guardian in half an hour and it’s supposed to be about Rock ’n’ Roll, but I’m going to have to have an opinion about Gaza, aren’t I?”

Being canvassed for opinions comes with the territory for a playwright whose identity straddles two of the biggest faultlines of 20th century history. His most recent play, Leopoldstadt, was a monumental reckoning with a Jewish heritage of which he only became aware in middle age. It ended with Leo, one of three survivors of a mighty dynasty, returning after the war to a Vienna of which he had no memory, having adopted his stepfather’s surname and lived in England since infancy.

Stoppard himself settled in England and adopted his stepfather’s name when he was eight, though his early childhood was spent not in Austria but Czechoslovakia. Rock ’n’ Roll, which premiered at the Royal Court in 2006, contains a different reckoning: what if, instead of getting remarried to an Englishman after the death of Stoppard’s doctor father in the war against Japan, his mother had returned to Soviet Czechoslovakia with him and his brother? 

“I thought I could write a play which was about myself as I imagined my life might have been from the age of eight,” he says. “And then I would find out whether I was brave enough to be a dissenter, or just somebody who would keep his head down and his nose clean. And I have a terrible feeling that it would have been the latter.”

In 2020 the same paper published a review by Stefan Collini of Hermione Lee's biography of Stoppard:

Although Stoppard’s plays can seem like the distillation of several course-loads of reading lists, he didn’t go to university. Instead, at 17 he started work as a reporter on a local newspaper in Bristol. 

What he lacked in experience he seems to have made up for in chutzpah: he got himself made the paper’s motoring correspondent without revealing that he couldn’t drive. Increasingly, he wrote theatre reviews, and then followed his dream by giving up his job, moving to London, and writing plays.

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Sienna Rodgers takes us inside the power struggle at the top of Your Party: "There is talk that the leadership race could feature at least one other candidate; a non-MP perhaps with a 'plague on all your houses' campaign aimed at highlighting the chaos that has emerged under those running the show so far."

"The whole estate shares the same creaking water, electric, sewage and gas systems, most of which are interconnected across the buildings – meaning shutdowns for repair affect the whole estate. According to the official Restoration and Renewal unit, there are 'also hundreds of miles of rusting pipework, obsolete electrical cables and gas pipes, and the giant, inefficient Victorian steam heating, all of which need replacing'." The Palace of Westminster is falling down, reports Simon Wilson.

Tom Chidwick pays tribute to Lord Taverne - Dick Taverne - whose victory in Lincoln in 1973 was, along with the Liberal Party by-elections triumphs of that era, one of the things that got me interested in politics.

"The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry. It seems to me as though his pieces are, as it were, enormous sketches, not paintings; as though they were dashed off by someone who could permit himself anything." William Day seeks to explain Ludwig Wittgenstein's dislike of Shakespeare.

Georgia Poplett emphasises the Leicester roots of Adrian Mole and his creator Sue Townsend: "As a teenager and young adult, the aspirant Leicester Tolstoy moved between jobs, working in retail and at a garage where she spent most of her time reading books on the forecourt. She was sacked from a clothes shop for reading Oscar Wilde in the changing rooms."

"Bitterns are elusive and well camouflaged. They hide in the dense reed beds, popping out to catch eels, fish and amphibians, and quickly darting back under cover. This makes them a secretive bird and extremely hard to spot in their environment with their unique plumage. Typically, it’s their call, the Bittern boom, that announces their hidden presence." Leslie Cater remembers his encounters with Britain's loudest bird.

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.

High Flying Around: Memories of the 1960s Leicester Music Scene Volume II by Shaun Knapp

In Leicester this afternoon, I called in at the launch of Shaun Knapp's book High Flying Around: Memories of the 1960s Leicester Music Scene Vol II.

As the publisher's website says: 

High Flying Around Volume II continues the remarkable story of Leicester’s 1960s arts and music scene via the people who were there. Their memories and reminiscences bring back to life the buildings long since demolished, the groups who packed out the venues and the people who filled the halls and clubs.

Find out how some of the biggest names in music performed in some of Leicester’s smallest and long-lost venues, revisit the 1969 free festival, and discover the incredible stories of Leicester band Gypsy and the 1960s creatives. Discover the importance of the college and university circuit, the arts lab, the city’s underground music, folk and poetry scenes and the music that influenced Leicester playwright Joe Orton.

Leicester women tell their stories about life in the city during the 1960s, while singer/songwriter Ryan Dunn explains how the decade influences his songwriting and fashion.

Dipping into it, I find plenty of new bands to research and the odd anecdote I might share here.

And, yes, my home town gets at least one mention:

The first time we played in Market Harborough was at a place called the Embi Club, on St Mary's Road. The building had a great doorway, which was the entrance, then you went to the back building through a small yard. That was where the club was. The club itself was long and it looked like a few rooms had been knocked into one. It was a very busy venue. Jethro Tull had played there as did Edwin Starr. I later learned the site had been an old cinema. the Oriental, which opened in 1921. The interior decor consisted of Egyptian mummies Chinese dragons, palm trees and pyramids.

The main building had, I think, gone by the time I moved here – the length of it ran behind what is now the House of Art tattoo studio and probably a couple of other vanished buildings – but the exotic domed entrance on St Mary's Road lasted through the Seventies.

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.

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.

Child prodigies: A column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

Here's another of the discursive Sighcology columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. 

Chess, cricket, Steve Winwood... it covers several topics dear to this blog's heart.

You can see Aksel Rykkvin as a treble above and as a baritone below.

Prodigious talent

Prodigies aren’t always popular with their elders. When Sir Martin Shee, the president of the Royal Academy of Arts, encountered the nine-year-old John Everett Millais in 1838, he suggested the boy should be sweeping chimneys rather than seeking to train as an artist. 

And sometimes prodigious genius is misunderstood. At a very young age, my favourite musician, Steve Winwood, was turned away by the man round the corner who gave piano lessons. He found that if the boy heard a tune once he could play it from memory, so it was hard to convince him of the point of learning to read music.

Others were more appreciative. In 1959 his elder brother’s jazz group found themselves short of a pianist, so he brought Steve along:

"He was only 11, but he played everything perfectly. They stood with their mouths open. Because he was under age, we had to get him long trousers to make him look older, and even then we'd sneak him in through the pub kitchens. He'd play hidden behind the piano so nobody would know." 

Soon after that Steve was jamming with newly arrived Jamaican musicians in his home city of Birmingham, and then backing some of the greats of American blues: Sonny Boy Williamson, T-Bone Walker, Charlie Foxx, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim.

So by the time he joined the Spencer Davis Group at 15, and they had their first number one when he was 17, Winwood was an immensely experienced musician. Something to open the eyes of these new Beatles fans who are convinced there was nothing before the Fab Four and precious little else at the same time as them.

******

The youngest person to play first-class cricket in England was Barney Gibson, who kept wicket for Yorkshire against Durham MCC University in 2011 at the age of 15 years and 27 days. He was also on the books of Leeds United as a goalkeeper.

Most of us heard nothing more of him for a decade. Then an article appeared in a cricket magazine saying Gibson had “chosen enjoyment and freedom” and given up professional sport:

"It wasn’t until I got to the age of 18 that I asked myself: 'Is this what I’m going to be doing forever?'" Gibson recalls. "I think it was just a case of no longer enjoying what I used to wake up looking forward to doing every day."

I hope he is happy, whatever he is doing now.

******

I once attended the first London recital by an 18-year-old Norwegian baritone called Aksel Rykkvin. What was interesting about the event was that a few years before he had been the most celebrated boy treble in the world. For once the American term ‘boy soprano’ seemed justified.

It soon became clear that his wonderful clarity and instinctive understanding of the text had survived his change of voice unscathed. But not every prodigy is lucky or talented enough to pass through puberty with such grace.

Leaving aside the many chess talents lost to a discovery of sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, a growth spurt can wreak havoc. The future England captain Nasser Hussain grew a foot in a single winter and found he could no longer pitch his leg breaks on a length:

"I went from bowling out Graham Gooch in the indoor school with everyone watching, to hitting the roof of the net or bowling triple-bouncers to deadly silence."

Hussain was able to reinvent himself as a batsman, but always said batting never felt as natural to him as spin bowling had.

And puberty is the great killer of child actors – boys at least. Either you lose your fetching looks and no one casts you, or you keep them and find you are still playing schoolboys when you are 20, with no one seeing you as a possible adult lead.

But maybe being a child actor isn’t much like being an adult actor. Take the case of William Betty, ‘the Young Roscius’, who enjoyed phenomenal success as a boy at the start of the 19th century. His appearance at the Covent Garden Theatre sparked extraordinary scenes:

Shrieks and screams of choking, trampled people were terrible. Fights for places grew; Constables were beaten back; the boxes were invaded. The heat was so fearful that men all but lifeless were lifted and dragged through the boxes into the lobbies which had windows.

Betty announced his retirement at the age of 17, only to spend the rest of his life making comebacks that failed to excite the public. Perhaps the great Sarah Siddons had him right: “My lord, he is a very clever, pretty boy but nothing more.”

******

If I didn’t love the music so much, I might agree there was something ridiculous about white, middle-class British boys playing the blues – “Can blue men play the whites/Or are they hypocrites?” as Viv Stanshall asked. But then I generally prefer to leave dreams of cultural purity to the right.

Besides, it’s widely claimed that the Spencer Davis Group had to film what we’d now call a video before their records could get played on white radio stations in the US. It had been widely assumed there, because of Steve Winwood’s vocals, that the band was black.

Eric Clapton had no doubts about Winwood’s authenticity. Here he his explaining his decision to switch to a Stratocaster guitar:

“Steve Winwood had so much credibility, and when he started playing one, I thought, oh, if he can do it, I can do it.”

Or as Clapton once put it more strongly:

“I’d always worshipped Steve, and whenever he made a move, I would be right on it. I gave great weight to his decisions because to me he was one of the few people in England who had his finger on some kind of universal musical pulse.”

Prodigious talent does encourage such reverence, though personally, when drawn against a chess prodigy, I found myself with a sneaking sympathy for Sir Martin Shee.

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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"There was little to no interaction between the three groupings at conference. The main hall hosted debates that were stitched up months ago, when the delegate line-up was elected, and the fringe events largely confirmed prejudices, instead of challenging them. 'This is why we were right all along,' was the lesson learned by all three groups." Seth Thévoz argues that Labour is split into irreconcilable factions.

Leo Litra and Gabrielė Valodskaitė say the success of Maia Sandu’s pro-EU party in Moldova’s parliamentary election holds three valuable lessons for protecting votes from Russian meddling in the future – whether in Moldova or in other vulnerable democracies.

"The Librarians, directed by Kim A. Snyder and recently released in the UK, is a documentary about the crackdown on American school libraries that began in 2021 in Texas and soon spread to other states. Ordered to remove 850 books from their shelves ... several librarians resisted. Some were fired; some received death threats." Anna Aslanyan on the battle against censorship.

Kenan Malik reviews a new book that challenges accepted views of the appeal of the arts: "Today, much of that working-class culture has not just slipped away but also been lost to memory. It is partly the result of the changing relationship between the state and the arts. Thatcherite free market ideology of the 1980s combined with New Labour’s stress on 'social impact' both to commodify the arts and to instrumentalise it – the worth of any work of art lay not in the work itself but in its capacity to promote economic growth, .urban regeneration and, most importantly, 'social inclusion”."

Natasha A. Fraser looks back on the cinematic legacy of her stepfather, Harold Pinter. She remembers his understanding of actors, the yellow legal pads he wrote his scripts on, his Hollywood flirtations and disdain for the clutter of Academy correspondence.

"It would have been fascinating to see where Tey's pen and her ingenious mind would have taken her. As it stands, a headline from the Scots newspaper, The Herald, from 2022 rather seems to sum it up: 'Josephine Tey,' it declared, 'the best crime writer you’ve never heard of'. Quite possibly. And it’s high time that changed." Alec Marsh champions the forgotten queen of crime fiction.

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"The puzzle for me is what drives Labour politicians (and some others) around the ID card loop? What is the enduring appeal of ID cards that always survives facts and logic? Paul Krugman talks about ‘zombie ideas’, ideas that keeping coming back to life no matter how many times they are apparently killed off by reason and experience, such as the idea that the path to national prosperity is taxing the rich less. For New Labour, with Tony Blair still out ahead, ID cards are a beloved zombie." David Howarth on Labour's fixation with the idea of a national identity card.

Tim Leunig argues that Angela Rayner's problems with Stamp Duty shows that our taxation system is too complex: "When Angela Rayner bought her flat in Hove she owned no other house, in full or in part. It seems to me that the government’s own website is clear that Rayner was not liable for the higher rate of stamp duty. None of the further information on that page suggests anything different."

"A student can easily feed a PDF of the assigned book chapter to their AI application of choice and pass off the bot’s lukewarm analysis as their own; construct a study guide by uploading their notes to an AI tool marketed on LinkedIn by their peers; and even generate plausible rebuttals to arguments posed in discussion sections – all without arousing any suspicion from their overworked teaching assistants." Maria Gomberg on AI in American universities.

Marc Morris asks if William I's "Harrowing of the North" should be regarded as genocide.

"The best comedy does not 'feed prejudice and fear' but rather makes them 'clearer to see' he tells his students. But this view is challenged by talent scout Challenor, a smarmy agent up from London who takes a very different line. Comics are 'servants to the audience', not ‘missionaries’ but ‘suppliers of laughter’.  And in those two opposing views, we have the central tension of the play." Gerard Clough marks the 50th anniversary of Trevor Griffiths' play Comedians.

Gardens, Heritage and Planning visits the lost village of Imber on Salisbury Plain.

King Charles III once appeared in a Joe Orton play

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I knew that Prince Charles, as he then was, acted in revues when he was a student at Cambridge, but I discovered only recently he also appeared in a Joe Orton play.

Over to the Trinity College website and a page about his acting career there:

Dr Parry also cast the Prince as the padre in Joe Orton’s play [The] Erpingham Camp, originally written for television in 1966 and set in a holiday camp where the campers rebel over the strictures of the manager.

The performance was well reviewed. Student-turned theatre critic Valerie Grosvenor Myer wrote of a "pleasantly poised portrayal" by the Prince in The Guardian:

"His voice is not strong, but it is very clear, and is face is mobile: his look of shrinking pain when one of the characters used a four-letter word was extremely funny. 

"And there was a certain piquancy in the future supreme head of the Church of England taking part in a ritual where this institution is shown as pretty effete … it’s not every festival which offers the spectacle of the heir to the throne getting a custard pie full in his face."

There's a Wikipedia page on The Erpingham Camp, which was broadcast on ITV in June 1966.

Shelagh Delaney is interviewed by an alien in 1959

The latest Backlisted podcast is a great edition on Shelagh Delaney and her 1958 play A Taste of Honey. It was her first play, written and produced before she was 20. It was then filmed in 1962 with Rita Tushingham, Dora Bryan and Murray Melvin.

As the Backlisted blurb asks:

How did a Salford teenager change the face of British theatre? Nearly 70 years on, why do the play's themes and characters continue to resonate in the 21st century? And what did Shelagh Delaney do for an encore (and why do so few people know about it)? This show will open your eyes.

The show certainly reminds us that the modern world did not start with the Beatles. Take the interview above from 1959, which you can hear in it.

Delaney comes over as a thoroughly contemporary figure, while the interviewer sounds like an alien. Where did he learn to pronounce the world "play" like that? 

It would be comforting to think his assumptions that Delaney must had help to write the play and faint derision for her "native Lancashire" are equally strange to us now, but I'm afraid I often hear echoes of such views.

I can't recommend this edition of Backlisted highly enough. Listen out for an anecdote about an exchange between Dirk Bogarde and Murray Melvin during the filming of HMS Defiant. 

And let's end this post with a piece of A Taste of Honey trivia from 2003:

Earlier in the day Home Office Minister and Salford MP, Hazel Blears, revealed that she appears in kitchen sink classic, A Taste of Honey, shown at the Festival. "They filmed it at the bottom of our road" she recalled "And I was in one scene wearing bunches and a little kilt. My brother sang `The Big Ship Sails On The Ally Ally O'..."

Meeting a nephew of Dennis O'Neill

Twenty years ago, I published a chapter (“Histories of child abuse”) in the book Making and Breaking Children’s Lives.

In it, I was feeling my way towards the thesis that child abuse is less a new discovery than a phenomenon that has been regularly uncovered and then forgotten. This belief grew from a time when I was producing psychology newsletters in my day job and studying for an MA in Victorian Studies in the evenings. 

This belief was strengthened as I came to realise that the caring professions knew as much about their own history as they did about 19th-century novels.

I began the chapter with the death in 1945 of Dennis O’Neill, a child in public care who’d been ‘boarded out’ at a farm in Shropshire. His death caused a national scandal, shared the front pages with the last stages of the war in Europe and led to the 1948 Children’s Act. Yet Dennis had clearly been forgotten by 1973, when the death of Maria Colwell shocked the nation to a similar degree.

What led me to the Dennis O’Neill case was a passing mention of him in a book by Bob Holman that had come into the office for review. It sent me – intrigued that Dennis’s death had taken place at a “lonely farmhouse in Shropshire” – to a book by Dennis’s older brother Tom, who had worked in child care. That book, A Place Called Hope, was one of the sources for my chapter.

I may write another paper on this case one day because, though it was forgotten for so long – it has been better remembered since the publication of Terry O’Neill’s book Someone to Love Us – you can find traces of it in all sorts of unexpected places in our culture. 

The most substantial trace is in Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap, which has the Dennis O’Neill case at its root. You can hear Phil O’Neill, one of Tom’s sons, talk about the O’Neill family’s connection with the play on the All About Agatha podcast.

All this is by way of saying that I met Phil O’Neill, who is (or would have been) Dennis’s nephew, for a drink the other day. We’d been in touch by email for a while, which is why I was able to suggest him as a guest to the podcast. 

We had a good chat despite the London heat, and he told me one particularly interesting fact. In the Sixties, the maker of television films Jeremy Sandford, most famous for Cathy Come Home, was interested in writing something about Dennis O’Neill and in touch with his family about it, but nothing came of the idea.

He also confirmed that the photograph here is the only one of Dennis known to exist – he is the dark-haired boy in the middle. Copyright must rest with someone in the O’Neill family, but I hope no one will mind that I have used it here.

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Blue Labour has become a destructive fantasy with little to say about the challenges of the country in which we live, says Marc Stears, who was one of the founders of the movement: "Everyone probably wants to reindustrialise, but we know that there is no future for the UK economy without a vibrant service sector. Everybody similarly wants strong defence. But there is no military alliance to be found in which the UK and Ukraine should be allied against France and Germany."

Eliot Higgins is not impressed by a report from the Cato Institute that claims public concern about misinformation is overblown: "The danger isn’t just that people believe lies. It’s that entire communities can become locked into belief systems that cannot be challenged - where loyalty replaces evidence, and disagreement feels like betrayal. That doesn’t merely distort truth; it breaks trust. When this happens at scale, it isn’t just bad information - it is a breakdown in how society makes decisions. We lose the ability to deliberate, to find common ground, to hold anyone accountable."

Brian Merchant has been collecting stories from tech workers at TikTok, Google and across the industry about how AI is changing, ruining, or replacing their jobs.

"Articles discussing the report offer lots of different answers as to why this happiness gap exists: better health care, high-trust culture, less pressure to excel academically. But when I asked parents and children in the Netherlands why they thought their children were so happy, they all had one answer: Dutch parents value giving their children independence, possibly above all else." Mary Frances Ruskell responds to a UNICEF report that suggests Dutch children are the happiest in the world.

"Attachments to places are how we make sense of the world around us. When these places are threatened, so too are our own places within the world": Ben Lockwood on the importance of mapping the meaning of forests in a time of destruction.

Caroline Davies visits an exhibition that explores Charles Dickens' love of the theatre and highlighs the dramatic impact of his works.

Services must share information better when children are at risk

Writing for Lion and Unicorn about the film No Room at the Inn and the death in 1945 of the foster child Dennis O'Neill, which inspired the play on which it was based, I said:

Sir Walter Monckton’s inquiry found what every such inquiry has found since: a need for different services to work together more effectively.

Could it be that government has finally noticed? 

Here's Jacqui Smith - Baroness Smith of Malvern, now a minister in the Department for Education  - speaking during the Lord's committee stage of the government's Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill:

My Lords, since the very first inquiry into the tragic death of Dennis O’Neill in 1945, we have seen time and again that poor information-sharing lies at the heart of serious child safeguarding failures. It is a persistent and deeply troubling issue, and if we are serious about protecting children, we must be serious about fixing this.

I think there has been in this group of amendments with respect to this clause a pretty strong consensus around this House on that point.

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"The idea of progression in prison is seductive but unachievable. Too many prisons are struggling to get men out of their cells for even an hour a day, there is little or no opportunity for education or work, the food is stodgy and there’s too little of it, contact with family is intermittent, and violence prevalent. How such a prison could possibly encourage people to go to non-existent work to earn early release is just pie in the sky." Frances Crook finds that David Gauke’s sentencing review tackles prison overcrowding but fails to challenge the system’s core flaws or offer a true path forward.

Lewis Baston says the Liberal Democrat by-election win in Sutton on Thursday underlines the trouble  that London’s Tories are in.

"The region that was the birthplace of rail has fallen behind Europe and the world when it comes to high quality rail network that meets the needs of the current age." Rob Naybour argues that it’s high time the cities and towns of the North of England were better connected.

Christopher Kaczor on the importance of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntryre, who died last week: "MacIntyre emphasised that the study of ethics cannot be separated from history, for it is an understanding of historically situated practices within communities that is needed to make sense of moral judgments. 'We should, as far as it is possible, allow the history of philosophy to break down our present day conceptions, so that our too narrow views of what can and cannot be thought, said, and done are discarded in the face of the record of what has been thought, said, and done,' he wrote in A Short History of Ethics."

Sean Wilentz takes us back to the winter of 1965/6 and the making of Bob Dylan's album Blonde on Blonde.

"From the opening it has precision, style and wit, as well as a dash and sparkle that is all its own, and it doesn’t matter if future readers know nothing about his relatively fleeting fame, because this book’s not about a famous person – it’s about someone who wants to be famous." Lissa Evans recommends Emlyn Williams’ autobiography George.

The Joy of Six 1360

"If Morgan can beat the BNP in Barking, goes the argument, then surely he can do the same for Reform in Britain too. Yet in all the coverage of McSweeney’s supposedly unique ability to slay the far right, through deploying tough messages on crime and immigration, almost nobody has actually bothered to check whether it’s true." Adam Bienkov explodes the founding myth of Morgan McSweeney.

Nandi Msezane says migrant workers prop up the UK’s social care system, but are now being forced out.

Cameron Joseph argues that Donald Trump is borrowing a playbook from other elected leaders who have used the tools of democracy to destroy it: "Would-be autocrats often move to eliminate structural checks on their power. They intimidate opposition parties, threaten potential dissenters within their own ranks, and defy the courts. Autocrats punish and bully the news media, protect allies from legal prosecution while targeting political opponents, and purge senior military and government ranks of career staff in favor of loyalists."

"There were numerous attempts at creating Labour-affiliated clubs, as Labour became a serious party of government for the first time. It is also easy to see why the inherent contradictions around that gave these clubs a limited appeal within the Labour Party." Seth Thévoz on the attempts to establish a London club for Labour parliamentarians.

"It was a reminder of a time when democratic politics wasn’t viewed with contempt but was understood as a form of collective expression and - for some (for very many in the 1940s) - as a means of making a better world." Municipal Dreams looks at the at creation and reception of the 1943 County of London Plan.  

Katherine Stockton explores the problematic implications of Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys.

I Regret to Inform You That My Wedding to Captain Von Trapp Has Been Cancelled

I heard this mentioned on a podcast about The Sound of Music and have now come across it online. It's by Melinda Taub and you'll find it at McSweeney’s.

It's the kind of piece you want to reproduce in full, but I have limited myself to a couple of short quotations:

I must confess to being rather blindsided by the end of our relationship. It seems Captain Von Trapp and I misunderstood each other. I assumed he was looking for a wife of taste and sophistication, who was a dead ringer for Tippi Hedren; instead he wanted to marry a curtain-wearing religious fanatic who shouts every word she says.

And:

While I was a bit startled to be thrown aside for someone who flunked out of nun school, I assure you that I will be fine, and my main pursuits in life shall continue to be martinis, bon mots, and looking fabulous. You’ll also be glad to know I have retained custody of the Captain’s hard-drinking gay friend, Max. Anyone who gets tired of sing-a-longs should feel free to look us up.

Illustration by courtesy of Monty Python.

The Wilfred Pickles School for Spastics, Rutland

No, the name's not something out of Lord Bonkers' Diary: as this video shows, it really existed. The school was at Tixover Grange, which is near Stamford but in Rutland.

I have seen something of Wilfred Pickles lately, because Talking Pictures TV repeated the situation comedy For the Love of Ada. I watched it on the grounds that anything with Irene Handl in it was worth seeing.

It proved to be gentle and likeable - I can see why it ran to four series and a cinema film. Pickles himself strolled through it rather like a North Country Kenneth Horne.

Pickles (1904-78) had a remarkable career. As a young man in Halifax in the 1920s, he was a keen amateur actor and a friend of another actor from the town, Eric Portman. He joined the BBC North Region as an announcer, and was to become the first national BBC newsreader with a regional accent.

According to an old BBC page:

This was not an early attempt at appealing more to the general public, but actually a move to make it more difficult for Nazis to impersonate BBC broadcasters!

After the war he acted in the West End and on television and radio. He found greatest fame as the compere (with his wife Mabel) of the quiz show Have a Go. In the Fifties it attracted an audience of 20 million for each episode, making him a national figure.

You may remember Pickles playing Tom Courtney's father in Billy Liar, and he seemed to be a jobbing television actor through the 1960s. For the love of Ada ran from 1970-1 and the film came out in 1972.