ON THIS DAY
February 6, 2024
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE FEBRUARY 6, 1971
JUDI DENCH got her ‘stage directions’ wrong yesterday at her wedding to fellow actor Michael
Williams. She should have walked down the aisle on his left arm at St Mary’s RC
Church, Hampstead. Instead she held his right. At the reception, Dench asked: ‘It doesn’t mean bad luck or anything like that, does it?’ [The pair would go on to star together as a couple in ITV sitcom A Fine Romance ( pictured) and were married until Williams’s death in 2001.]
FEBRUARY 6, 1998
CHRIS EVANS has taken the first step towards catching BBC Radio 1 rival Zoe Ball by adding 650,000 listeners to his Virgin breakfast show. Evans saw his audience rise to 2.27 million, up 41 per cent, in the last three months of 1997. But he still has a long way to go after Ms Ball grew her audience to 4.77 million.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
MIKE BATT, 75. The Southampton-born singer- songwriter is the man behind novelty pop group The Wombles, whose hits include Remember You’re A Womble. He once landed a record contract after an audition in which he impressed executives more than Elton John and Bernie Taupin. ‘Bernie didn’t write music and Elton didn’t write lyrics . . . I did both,’ he said. JIMMY TARBUCK, 84. The Liverpool comic shot to fame on ITV’s Sunday Night
At The London Palladium.
He said: ‘Eric Morecambe told me when I was a kid,
“You’ve got something.
Never ask what it is or analyse it.” And I never have.’
BORN ON THIS DAY
EVA BRAUN (1912-1945). Adolf Hitler and Braun wed in his bunker the day before they took their own lives. Her biographer said she ‘is always portrayed as the dumb blonde who had the misfortune to fall in love with a devil’, but that ‘she was no mere bystander’.
LIONEL BLUE (1930-2016). The Londonborn broadcaster, a regular on BBC Radio 4’s Thought For The Day for nearly 30 years, was Britain’s first openly gay rabbi. He said his sexuality was like his Jewishness: ‘You’re landed with it, and there’s not much you can do about it. You make the best of it.’
ON FEBRUARY 6 . . .
IN 1918, Austrian symbolist painter Gustav klimt died, aged 55.
IN 1921, The kid, starring producer, director and writer Charlie Chaplin, was released.
WORD WIZARDRY GUESS THE DEFINITION: Scaphism (1913)
A) Loathing.
B) Spreading manure.
C) Persian method of executing criminals by covering them with milk and honey to attract vermin. Answer below. PHRASE EXPLAINED
Bright young things: said of hedonistic young socialites, the phrase was used in the 1920s by the Press to describe those who partied in the years after World War I.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on Earth — certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either.
Harold Pinter, playwright (1930-2008)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT car does Willy Wonka drive?
A Ferrari Rocher.
Guess The Definition answer: C.