ON THIS DAY
April 2, 2021
APRIL 2, 1957
TELEVISION’S sober magazine programme Panorama played an April Fool’s joke on viewers last night — and took hundreds of them in. it showed pictures of the ‘spaghetti harvest’ in Switzerland, with farmers gathering in festoons of spaghetti from trees. Afterwards BBC switchboards were jammed with as many inquiries as protestations.
APRIL 2, 2002
FROM deafening artillery gun salutes to poignant minute silences, Britain marked the Queen Mother’s passing yesterday, after her death on March 30. At Windsor, where she will be laid to rest in St George’s Chapel next to her beloved husband, the floral tributes grew steadily. Touchingly one mourner even left a bottle of gin, one of the Queen Mother’s favourite drinks.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
KEREN WOODWARD, 60. The Bristol-born singersongwriter is one third of Bananarama, who have had 25 top 40 hits since 1982, including Cruel Summer and venus. She says of the band: ‘i’m proud we became so successful wearing dungarees and Dr Martens.’ Woodward split from former Wham! star Andrew Ridgeley in 2017 after 25 years together.
JOHN THOMSON, 52. The actor from Salford, who was adopted at six weeks old, started out in comedy with Alan Partridge star Steve Coogan while both were students at Manchester Polytechnic. He has since starred in The Fast Show, Cold Feet and Coronation Street. Thomson, who has been described as an unlikely sex symbol, says: ‘i’m no stranger to a facial, occasional wax, eyelash tint.’
BORN ON THIS DAY
SUE TOWNSEND (19462014). The chain-smoking, Leicester-born creator of diarist Adrian Mole was the UK’s best-selling novelist of the 1980s. The angst-ridden teenager complained he had ‘never seen a dead body or a real female nipple. This is what comes of living in a cul-de-sac’. Townsend couldn’t read until she was eight — but then devoured books. As a teenager, she was fired from a job in a clothes shop for reading Oscar Wilde.
ÉMILE ZOLA (1840-1902). The French social crusader and author of Thérèse Raquin and Germinal was nominated for the first two Nobel Prizes in Literature. Zola insisted that a novelist was ‘nothing more than a court clerk … who simply records what he has seen’.
ON APRIL 2 . . .
IN 1977, ABBA had their fifth of nine UK No 1s with Knowing Me, Knowing You. IN 1978, Tv soap Dallas made its debut.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Bismuth (c1660s)
A) Judging by the eye instead of by measurement. B) A reddish, white metallic chemical. C) More on one side than on the other, ill-balanced, shaky. answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Backstairs: Something underhand in relation to intrigue, gossip or influence; it refers to large houses which originally had one staircase for the family and their guests and one for their servants.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
Exaggeration is a truth that has lost its temper.
Kahlil Gibran, Lebanese-U.S. writer (1883-1931)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHY is Snow White a good judge? Because she’s the fairest one of all.
Guess The Definition answer: B.