ON THIS DAY
MARCH 4, 1957
In WATERLOOvILLE, Hants, they wanted a nameplate for a road. Eventually it arrived... spelt Marilyn Avenue, — after Marilyn Monroe? ‘Who’s Marilyn Monroe?’ asked the locals. And yesterday the plate went to be altered to the spelling Waterlooville has known for 20 years… Maralyn.
MARCH 4, 1965
POP singer Davy Jones, right, [ soon to become David Bowie] lost a part in a BBC Tv show yesterday because he refuses to get his 15-inch-long hair cut. He said last night: ‘I wouldn’t have any hair cut for the Prime Minister, let alone the BBC. It took nearly three years to grow and it’s part of my stock-in-trade.’
TIM vInE, 53. In 2014 the London-born comic became the only person to win the Best Joke At The Edinburgh Fringe award for a second time, with the one-liner: ‘I’ve decided to sell my Hoover… well, it was just collecting dust.’ He once held the Guinness World Record for most jokes told in one hour (499). Despite his success, the younger brother of Tv’s Jeremy vine says he refuses ever to pay more than £2,000 (‘absolute maximum’) for a car. PATSy KEnSIT, 52. The former child actress, right, says she’s ‘worked every year of my life since I was four’ (when she appeared in an advert for Birds Eye peas). She was just six when she starred with Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby and 16 when she got cast opposite David Bowie in the 1986 film Absolute Beginners. Describing herself as ‘a hopeless romantic’, she has married and divorced four musicians, including Liam Gallagher and Jim Kerr.
AnnE HAnEy ( 1934- 2001). The U.S. actress appeared in Mrs Doubtfire and played Michael Douglas’s secretary in The American President. Explaining why she entered the film industry, she said: ‘My husband died, my daughter went to college, the dog got fleas, and the maid quit. So I had to come to Hollywood.’ JIM CLARK (1936-68). The Fife-born farmer- turned- F1 driver was world champion in 1963 and 1965 and winner of a then-record 25 Grand Prix races. Clark died aged 32 after his Lotus-Cosworth careered off the track into a wood at 160mph during a F2 race in Germany.
IN 1933, Frances Perkins became the first woman to serve in a U.S. cabinet when President Roosevelt made her Labor Secretary.
IN 1966, the London Evening Standard published an interview with John Lennon, in which he said of The Beatles: ‘We’re more popular than Jesus now.’ It set off an international furore when reprinted in a U.S. magazine nearly five months later.
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Novena (c1850)
A) nine-day service and devotion of prayers. B) A recruit. C) A novelty.
Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Play ducks and drakes: Refers to the game of skimming stones across the water to bounce more times than anyone else’s. By the 17th century, it came to refer to squandering one’s time and money. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
Alan Bennett, writer, actor and dramatist
WHAT do you call a Roman with a cold?
Julius Sneezer. Guess the Definition answer: A.