ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
JANUARY 8, 1973
MORE than a million wives in Britain are banned by their husbands from driving the family car, according to a survey by car dealership H.R. Owen. It found 11 per cent of husbands are either convinced only they are capable of taking the wheel — or are scared of their wives’ driving.
JANUARY 8, 2000
DISGRACED former Cabinet Minister Jonathan Aitken, 57, faces a battle to keep his MP’s pension, it emerged after his release from prison yesterday. Aitken, who served seven months of an 18-month sentence for perjury and perverting the course of justice, still owes £2 million after failed libel actions against Granada TV and The Guardian newspaper. His creditors’ lawyers plan legal moves to seize his pension — routine in most bankruptcies, but never before used in an ex-MP’s case.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
SARAH POLLEY, 45. The Canadian former child actress, now a filmmaker, won a 2023 Academy Award for Women Talking. Her directorial debut, Away From Her was Oscar nominated. The New York Times called her ‘a stunningly sophisticated observer of the world’.
MARC QUINN, 60. The London-born artist’s sculpture Alison Lapper Pregnant was displayed on the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square and he has a selfportrait in the National Portrait Gallery — a bust made of his frozen blood. A critic said: ‘The head- shaped plasma ice-lolly has novelty appeal, and that is about it.’
BORN ON THIS DAY
ROY KINNEAR (1934
1988). The actor from Lancashire played Henry
Salt in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and Algernon in The Beatles’ film Help! The British Film Institute said he ‘evoked a lovably flustered everyman’. His son, James Bond actor Rory, was ten when Kinnear was thrown from a horse and died while filming The Return Of The Musketeers. YVETTE MIMIEUx (1942-2022). The U.S. actress, who starred in 1960’s The Time Machine, played Olivia de Havilland’s daughter in Light In The Piazza and Charlton Heston’s sister in Diamond Head. Mimieux complained she was offered roles that were ‘sex objects or vanilla pudding’.
ON JANUARY 8 . . .
IN 1946, Elvis Presley received a $6.95 guitar for his 11th birthday in Tupelo, Mississippi. IN 1978, All Creatures Great And Small was first broadcast on BBC One, starring Christopher Timothy, Robert Hardy and Peter Davison.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Dragoman (coined 1430)
A) A scarecrow. B) A turnstile. C) An interpreter or professional guide for travellers.
answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED.
Have it at my finger’s end: meaning to remember perfectly, it alludes to work done with the fingers, like knitting, which needs no thought due to muscle memory.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion.
George Bernard Shaw, Irish dramatist (1856-1950)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHY did the match go to school?
To learn how to be a little brighter. Guess The Definition answer: C.