The Oldie December 2022

Madeline Smith (p13) played Miss Caruso, the Bond Girl in Live and Let Die who has her dress unzipped by Roger Moore with a magnetic watch. A Hammer horror star, she was also in Up Pompeii. Ronald Blythe (p3o) is our greatest living rural writer. He turned too on 6th November. He is author of Akenfield and Word from Wormingford: A Parish Year. His new book is Next to Nature. Anthony Haden-Guest (p34) lives in New York and is the model for Peter Fallow in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. He wrote The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night. David Hepworth (p65) presented Live Aid and The Old Grey Whistle Test. He is author of Abbey Road Studios at 90. He presents the Word in Your…

Theatregoers who are keen on Dickens face a joyful December. Almost wherever one looks, A Christmas Carol is being staged - not least Dolly Parton's Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol, which the show's star, Robert Bathurst, writes about on page 37 of this issue. The Royal Shakespeare Company is doing A Christmas Carol in Stratfordupon-Avon. London's Old Vic is doing a production. And Deborah Warner has scheduled it at the Ustinov Theatre in Bath. Sir Nicholas Hytner has recruited Simon Russell Beale for a version at his Bridge Theatre. Further adaptations are to be had this year in Kingston upon Thames, Windsor, Bristol, Doncaster, Coventry, Exmouth, Chesterfield, Woking, Portsmouth, Wilmslow, Salisbury, Crewe, Liverpool, Bolton and Buxton and at Sheffield Cathedral. Until a decade ago, Dickens's tale of redistribution was seldom known on stage. Since then,…

Man ‘hid three snakes in pants’ Drunken barber tried to break into car Dundee Courier Empty canoe retrieved by police Orcadian £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The January issue is on sale on 14th December 2022. GET THE OLDIE APP Go to App Store or Google Play Store. Search for Oldie Magazine and then pay for app. OLDIE BOOKS The Very Best of The Oldie Cartoons, The Oldie Annual 2023 and other Oldie books are available at: www.theoldie.co.uk/readers-corner/shop Free p&p. OLDIE NEWSLETTER Go to the Oldie website; put your email address in the red SIGN UP box. HOLIDAY WITH THE OLDIE Go to www.theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours…

‘Keep a diary and someday it'll keep you.’ Whoever said it - Mae West used the line in a film in 1937, but both Margot Asquith and Lillie Langtry were reported as saying it in the 1920s - was bang on the money. I started keeping a diary in 1959 (when I was eleven) and I have been profitably mining it almost ever since. It's because I Keep a diary that I can tell you that I first met Queen Elizabeth II on the evening of Thursday 2nd May 1968.1 was a 20-year-old student at Oxford at the time and Her Majesty, 42, came to visit the university debating society, the Oxford Union. When she had gone, I reprimanded William Waldegrave (the Union President, now Baron Waldegrave of North Hill and Provost of…

This question may look deceptively rhetorical, but it begs a starkly literal answer. Is laughter the best medicine? No, it is not. If it were, those diagnosed with atrial fibrillation would be prescribed a Seinfeld box set instead of a blood-thinner and beta-blockers. But imagine for a moment that laughter is a uniquely effective drug. In that event, anyone exposed to John Cleese these past several decades has been in the placebo group. Mr Cleese's bitter resentments and ravening sense of entitlement denied have transformed him from arguably the funniest man on the planet to the least amusing life form in this, or any, quadrant of the galaxy. Yet we cannot damn an apcrçu out of contempt for its mouthpiece. So the time comes, as every fourth year, to trot out the Michael Frayn line…

WHAT WAS a British Visitor's Passport? The British Visitor's Passport (BVP) was a simplified version of the standard passport and was introduced in March 1961. It could be used by any British citizen, British Dependent Territories citizen or British Overseas citizen who had been resident in the UK for more than eight years. It could be obtained from any post office, as long as the applicant could provide a passport photograph and a birth certificate or valid ID. It could be used for holidays or private visits of no more than three months’ duration to specified European countries - and Bermuda! The visitor's passport was valid only for a year. However, if you booked a last-minute break and then discovered that your BVP had expired, there was no need to panic. You had…