ON THIS DAY
29 January, 2024
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
JANUARY 29, 1968
Charles Wilson, the silent man of the £2,600,000 Great Train Robbery, spoke at last yesterday. And he said: ‘Course it wasn’t worth it. Look at me now. I know it wasn’t worth it, believe me, I know . . .’
JANUARY 29, 1990
Shrugging off the ‘new Olivier’ tag is going to be even harder from now on for showbusiness golden boy Kenneth Branagh. Last night, his stirring production of Shakespeare’s Henry V won the Best Film prize at the 1990 Evening Standard British Film Awards.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
KATHARINE ROSS, 84. The Bafta- winning U. S. actress played Mrs Robinson’s daughter Elaine in The Graduate. This year she celebrates 40 years of marriage to Mask actor Sam Elliott.
TONY BLACKBURN, 81. The DJ from Surrey started out on pirate station Radio Caroline before becoming the first DJ to appear on BBC Radio 1. In 2002 he was the first winner of the reality show I’m A Celebrity . . . Of boasting in a memoir that he had slept with 500 women, he said: ‘I didn’t read the autobiography before it went into print. I should have done.’
BORN ON THIS DAY
LESLIE BRICUSSE (1931-2021). The composer from Pinner, Middlesex, won Oscars for Doctor Dolittle and Victor/Victoria. He wrote the James Bond theme songs Goldfinger and you Only Live Twice, as well as Candyman and Pure Imagination for Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. Andrew Lloyd Webber called Bricusse ‘the most underestimated British songwriter’.
THOMAS PAINE ( 1737- 1809). The Norfolk-born radical writer started out as a corset-maker before becoming a founding father of the U.S. thanks to his pamphlet Common Sense, which — along with his Rights of Man and The Age of Reason — became one of the bestselling political essays of all time.
ON JANUARY 29…
IN 1888, Edward Lear, English author of The Owl And The Pussycat, died aged 75. IN 1942, the first edition of Desert Island Discs was broadcast on the BBC Forces Programme.
IN 2016, three weeks after his death, David Bowie equalled Elvis Presley’s 1977 record by scoring 12 albums in the UK Top 40.
WORD WIZARDRY GUESS THE DEFINITION: Palilalia (coined 1908)
A) Action of a feverish patient in picking at the bedclothes during their delirium.
B) Perpetual grief.
C) Speech disorder characterised by repetition.
Answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Pass the buck: meaning to shift the responsibility to someone else. Said to have originated in poker games in the U.S. where a buck-handled knife (made from antlers) was used as a marker placed in front of a player whose turn it was to deal in a poker game — it eventually came to mean passing on responsibility.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
What is valuable is not new, and what is new is not valuable.
Lord Brougham, Lord Chancellor
(1778-1868)
JOKE OF THE DAY
I CALLED my pets Omega and Rolex . . . They’re my watch dogs.
Guess The Definition answer: C.