Sheriff’s top of the charts
QUESTION Was Jackie Gleason, aka Sheriff Buford T. Justice in Smokey And The Bandit, a successful composer?
John herbert ‘Jackie’ Gleason (1916-87) was a successful actor/comedian from new York. As a young man, the quickwitted Gleason worked at new York’s Club 18, where he was hired to insult patrons. There he was spotted by Jack L. Warner, one of the Warner Brothers, and became a hollywood actor.
In the Fifties, he was a household name thanks to his comic TV shows The Jackie Gleason Show and The honeymooners. he gave a scene-stealing performance in the 1977 action-comedy film Smokey And The Bandit, starring Burt Reynolds.
he turned his star power to music promotion and claimed to have been inspired by Clark Gable’s movie love scenes where the romance was, in his words, ‘magnified 1,000 per cent’ by background music.
he reasoned: ‘If Gable needs music, a guy in Brooklyn must be desperate!’
his first album was the phenomenally successful Music For Lovers only, which still holds the record for the longest duration in the Billboard Top Ten Charts — 153 weeks. his first ten albums sold more than a million copies each.
Gleason could not read or write music; he was said to have conceived melodies in his head and described them to assistants, who transcribed them.
his tunes included the themes of The Jackie Gleason Show (Melancholy Serenade) and The honeymooners (You’re My Greatest Love). It has been alleged Gleason had little involvement in the music and that credit should have gone to the professional musicians who performed the tunes.
however, his musical collaborator, the cornet player and trumpeter Bobby hackett, once said: ‘Jackie knows a lot more about music than people give him credit for. I have seen him conduct a 60-piece orchestra and detect one discordant note in the brass section.
‘he would immediately stop the music and locate the wrong note. It always amazed the professional musicians how a guy who technically did not know one note from another could do that. And he was never wrong.’
Michael Keegan, Kidderminster, Worcs.
QUESTION Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum refers to the Anglo Saxon bishopric of Dommoc. Where was this?
DOMMOC was an important early bishopric in East Anglia. Its precise location is uncertain, though it is thought to have been in Dunwich, Suffolk.
This was once a great seaport that was submerged in the great storm surges of 1286 and 1287. It has been called Britain’s Atlantis. The Venerable Bede, writing in 731 AD, tells how the history of the Church of East Anglia began with the conversions of two of its kings, Raedwald in 616 AD and his son Earpwald a decade later. When Sigeberht became king in 630, he had already converted to Christianity while in exile in Gaul.
With the help of Felix, Bishop of Burgundy, Sigeberht established the see of Dommoc. Much of East Anglia was subsequently converted to Christianity.
East Anglia was split into two sees (the area of a bishop’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction) — Dommoc and Elmham, norfolk — due to Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury’s policy of dividing large sees.
Dommoc remained the seat of the bishop until around 870, when the East Anglian kingdom was taken over by Danes.
Keith Conrad, Sudbury, Suffolk.
QUESTION Who created the glass cushion, a memorial to the executed at the Tower Of London?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, artist Brian Catling who created the cushion is also a fantasy author, who has just completed his Vorrh trilogy.
Fantasy legend Michael Moorcock considers this to be ‘the new century’s first landmark work of fantasy’.
In his introduction, he says: ‘his affecting piece to mark the Tower of London’s former execution block, a tenderly indented cushion cast from glass so hot it required a year of careful cooling, a degree a day, displays the mixture of robust and sometimes hazardous material process with a deep, heartfelt humanity which typifies his work.’
Paul Stuart, Bath, Somerset.