ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE MAY 13, 1976
DOCTOR WHO is to lose his fearless young journalist assistant, Sarah Jane. But how she is to leave the series, and who the Doctor’s new companion is to be, is still a mystery. Actress Liz Sladen, 28, the Doctor’s fellow traveller in the timemachine police box Tardis, will be written out after two stories of the next series which begins on BBC TV in October.
MAY 13, 2010
SIDE by side they stood in the sun-dappled Downing Street garden. It was Prime Minister David Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg’s first public appearance as the couple in charge of the first British coalition Government since the war. Sharing jokes, exchanging meaningful glances and referring to each other chummily as Nick and David, they couldn’t have looked happier.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
SELINA SCOTT, 70. The TV presenter and former newsreader from Scarborough lives on her 200-acre farm in North Yorkshire, where she has been ‘ rewilding, creating a wetland for curlews and lapwings’. She used the mohair fleeces of her six Angora goats to start a sock business called Naturally Selina Scott. JOHNNY LOGAN, 67. The Australianborn Irish singer is the only person to have won the Eurovision Song Contest twice (with What’s Another Year and Hold Me Now, which was only the second song he had ever written). Several of his fans have Logan’s face tattooed on their backs. A film of his life, due to be titled Mr Eurovision, is in production.
BORN ON THIS DAY
TIM PIGOTT- SMITH ( 1946- 2017). The actor from Rugby played Prince Charles in King Charles III (pictured) and Army colonel Ronald Merrick in The Jewel In The Crown. His portrayal of the one-armed sadist was so convincing that people would squeeze his arm to see if it was real. BRUCE CHATWIN (1940-1989). The travel writer from Sheffield wrote six books including In Patagonia. He started out as an art expert and the youngest director ever at Sotheby’s. His friend, artist Howard Hodgkin, said Chatwin ‘looked like the captain of the first XI’, though the writer complained that he painted him as ‘an acid green smear’.
ON MAY 13 . . .
IN 1940, following the German invasion, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands fled to the UK where she formed a government in exile. IN 2007, the first episode of BBC sitcom Gavin & Stacey was broadcast.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Ersatz (c 1970s) A) A substitute product, typically inferior. B) Warm approval or admiration. C) Glitter. Answer below. PHRASE EXPLAINED Spike someone’s guns: meaning to spoil someone’s plans, to prevent him from realising them; the ‘spike’ is an obsolete word for a nail which was pushed into the barrel of the gun to prevent it from firing properly.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
Beware the fury of a patient man. John Dryden, English poet (1631-1700)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHY was the broom running late? It over-swept. Guess The Definition answer: A. Compiled by ETAN SMALLMAN and ADAM JACOT DE BOINOD