Chess keeps me young at age of 84
Corrie legend Bill Roache has revealed the secret behind his sprightliness at the age of 84.
Bil l – who plays Ken Barlow in the soap – says he keeps his mind alert by playing chess with his son.
He said: “I don’t eat par t icula r l y wel l or exercise particularly well but I enjoy life and have a positive attitude.
“For my mind, I play online chess and scrabble with Linus, who lives in New York. Every evening I have a go.”
He bel ieves learning lines also keeps his memory in peak condition.
Bill added: “I have a heavy story at the moment and it’s getting more challenging.
“We film sometimes 12 hours a day and then learn lines at night. I’ve a lot to do.”
Ken was rushed to hospital with a suspected stroke last month – the latest in a series of gritty storylines for the character.
And Bill says he would like a lighter plot for a change.
He said: “I always get the doom and the gloom. When Ken had a stroke it made me think about his mortality. I got a bit worried they might be writing him out.
“Fortunately, his recovery was quite quick.
I’d like a happy storyline. I used to get a bit of comedy with Blanche quite a lot but the Barlows tend to be the misery people.”
That goes without saying. But what hasn’t been getting said enough is this – let’s not escalate ourselves into total hysteria.
When news of the attack in Westminster broke, I was on a plane landing at Heathrow airport.
There was an American woman across the aisle talking to a friend on her mobile phone about how terrified she was and asking if she should just stay at the airport and fly home. “Listen,” I wanted to say to her, “you come from a country where about 30 people are killed by firearms every day and you’re worried about London?”
Within 24 hours of the attack, the rolling news channels were wall to wall with the Terror In London headlines.
There were pundits on American news shows talking about how the city was in “lockdown”. (It really wasn’t. Outside of a few square miles, life for Londoners went on normally.)
Fox News, the channel of choice for those with the IQ of a teabag, outdid itself, of course. They brought in the real British experts: Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins.
Farage was his usual rat-faced self, almost salivating with glee at the opportunity the attack had handed him to make racist capital.
Hopkins was arguably even worse. She went on national American news and said of London: “People are cowed. People are afraid. And people are not united.”
Wow. Imagine if London had someone as strong as Hopkins around during the Blitz? The second the first bomb fell: “Mr Hitler. We are afraid. We are cowed. We are not united.”
Thankfully, one thing Britain does seem to be united in is total hatred of Hopkins. Tens of thousands of people took to social media to point out to Americans that she was a coward and a national embarrassment.
Airtime was even given to straight-up sub-mental thug Tommy Robinson – the former English Defence League leader was filmed ranting and raving racist hatred in front of the Houses of Parliament, forever looking like he’d just been ejected from a pub for the umpteenth time that night.
I began getting messages from friends in Los Angeles asking if I was okay. People were taking to social media to reassure friends and family that they were alive. On Thursday morning, the BBC and ITV breakfast shows broadcast terror specials live from Westminster for almost the entire duration of the programmes, where – on top of everything else – we had to look at Piers Morgan spouting rubbish.
I am old enough to remember the IRA’s appalling campaigns of the 70s, 80s and 90s. Atrocities involving huge bombs and dozens of deaths. (Not that this is a competition, of course, and – once again, in case it needs repeating – everyone’s thoughts are with the families and friends of the people who were killed and horribly injured on Wednesday.) And I do not remember anything like the worldwide hysteria that greeted last week’s attack.
What’s different? Several things, obviously. There were no rollingro news channels back then with their insane appetite for content – even if the “content” is so often a reporter standing in front of a building where something happened a while ago and speculating about what might or might not be happening inside.
Even if the “content” is idiots like Farage, Hopkins and Robinson getting a chance to spew populist hate disguised as political commentary.
Even more glaringly, there was no social media back then, so no disgraceful sharing of photographs of the victims. No idle real-time speculation on the identity of the killer. No thousands of people taking to Facebook and Twitter to proclaim that they are “safe”, even though they are in a gigantic city of nearly 10million people and live many miles from the area where the incident took place.
And, saddest of all, back then there was no easily identifiable group to be demonised. So it was a lot tougher for the likes of Farage, Hopkins and Robinson to whip up hatred against a specific minority.
There were no calls to ban or deport Catholics in the wake of the IRA’s
George Bush now looks like a King Solomon of wisdom compared to the actual lunatic currently occupying the White House.
If all this hysteria was triggered by an attack that killed four people and injured dozens more (and, once again, for the hard of hearing, everyone’s thoughts are with the families and friends of the people who were killed and horribly injured on Wednesday), what would the Trump response be to another 9/11 on American soil? Even to another Bataclan?
The mind truly boggles.