ON THIS DAY
February 2, 2024
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE FEBRUARY 2, 1952
HUBERT DE GIVENCHY created a sensation in Paris last night. He was showing the first collection of his dress house to a glittering audience. This 22-year-old has for three years been designer for the Schiaparelli Boutique. Now one wonders how it will be for ‘Schiap’ without him.
FEBRUARY 2, 2001 THE BBC is boosting its team of female reporters for coverage of the next general election. Leading the way will be Six O’Clock News presenter Fiona Bruce, right. She will be the first woman to join the studio contingent on polling night.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
SHAKIRA, 47. The Colombian is the most successful female Latin star of all time, having sold more than 80million albums and topped the UK chart with Hips Don’t Lie. In November, she struck a settlement with Spanish prosecutors over charges she failed to pay £12.7million in income tax, stumping up a £6.5million fine.
LIBBY PURVES, 74. The novelist became the first female presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today show. After her Midweek series was axed, she turned down hosting Pick Of The Week, saying: ‘I’m not Alan Partridge.’
BORN ON THIS DAY
BILLY ‘ BO’ HOPKINS (1938-2022). The u.S. actor starred in The Wild Bunch film and played James Garner’s lawyer in Tv’s The Rockford Files. He said when he took his family to see him on the big screen, ‘everyone who’d said I was gonna end up in prison said they always knew Billy was gonna make something of himself’.
LES DAWSON (19311993). The comic, right, shot to fame on Opportunity Knocks, saying it took ‘16 years to become an overnight success’. He was best known for mother-inlaw jokes, such as: ‘Please forgive me if I appear down in the mouth, but I’ve just had some bad news. Tomorrow is the mother-inlaw’s funeral… and she’s cancelled it.’
ON FEBRUARY 2…
IN 1969, Yoko Ono was granted a divorce from Anthony Cox. She married Beatle John Lennon the following month.
IN 1990, South African president F. W. de Klerk announced the unbanning of the African National Congress and the release of Nelson Mandela.
IN 2014, u.S. actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died of a drug overdose, aged 46.
WORD WIZARDRY GUESS THE DEFINITION Waff (coined 1808)
A) Just the slightest touch of illness.
B) Single ear of corn.
C) Speak in a prissy manner usually with pursed lips.
Answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED
To have a hunch: to have a sense about something comes from a u.S. expression of the 1900s from a gambling superstition that thought rubbing the hump of a hunchback would bring good luck; in the medieval world, hunchbacks were thought to have been given the capacity by the Devil to see into the future.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
What’s the point in growing old if you can’t hound and persecute the young?
Lord (Kenneth) Clarke, Conservative politician
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT did the fisherman say to the magician?
Pick a cod, any cod...
Guess The Definition answer: A.