The Saturday briefing
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED
Is there anything you’re yearning to know? Send your questions, on any subject, to the contacts given below, and we will do our best to answer them...
Q
I’ve just seen the play Catch Me If You Can with Patrick Duffy, which got me thinking of Dallas cliffhangers. What were the others, apart from the shooting of JR?
P Rhodes, Leeds
A
Dallas set the benchmark for cliffhangers, keeping viewers in suspense for months, something of a rarity in these days of binge-watching, on-demand telly and spoilers.
Noteworthy examples included the Ewing inferno, when a candle was knocked over during a fight with oil baron JR, which caused his ranch to go up in flames.
JR’s wife, Sue Ellen, was the focus of another, clinging to life having crashed her car while drunk and pregnant.
And a couple of cliffhangers featured actual Cliffs – JR’s arch enemy, Cliff Barnes, finding a woman’s body floating in a pool, with JR loitering nearby; and another with Cliff in a coma.
Patrick Duffy, as Bobby Ewing, also starred in a few – he was shot in brother JR’s chair; hit by a car and killed; and then, at the end of the following series, found alive and well in the shower by his wife, with it transpiring the whole past series had been a dream.
But the shooting of JR, in 1980, became a global obsession for eight months.
Larry Hagman, who played JR, said he was even quizzed for the killer’s identity by the Queen Mother, when he was appearing at an event in London for her birthday. In November of that year more than 350 million people around the world tuned in to discover it was Kristin Shepard, JR’s long-time mistress and his wife’s sister, who had pulled the trigger.
Q
Is it an urban myth that William Shakespeare named the play Hamlet after his son?
Mike Allbut-King, Leicester
A
Hamnet Shakespeare was the Bard’s only son, and a twin to Judith. He was named after a friend of the family, Hamnet Sadler, a baker in Stratford-upon-Avon, and according to Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable.
Hamnet died aged 11, in August 1596, with the cause of death unknown. Three years later, Shakespeare began to write Hamlet, and it was bound to have served as a reminder of his loss. But Hamlet was likely to have been inspired by a play dating from 1587, called Ur-Hamlet, which Shakespeare may have penned. The pain of losing Hamnet can be seen more strongly in another play, King John, with the words: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me.”
Separated twins surface in Shakespeare’s plays, and Maggie O’Farrell, whose 2020 book Hamnet delves into his short life, believes that without this real-life tragedy, we wouldn’t have Twelfth Night or Hamlet.
Q
During the 1950s my father paid 6d a week into a fund called “Penny in the Pound”. What happened to this fund? Does it still exist today?
Mrs Mary Bartley, Cilcain, Flintshire
A
Penny in the Pound funds were created in the days before the NHS to support hospitals.With no welfare state, hospitals relied on legacies and donations to operate, and by the 1860s many were struggling.
A weekly collection in Liverpool was one of the first funds, starting in 1871, when a man pushed a wheelbarrow around the city’s dockyards, collecting a penny from every pound earned from workers.The contributions meant hospitals had a stable income and workers and their families could access free treatment. Funds would also raise money to buy ambulances.
During the Second World War, some funds increased to two pennies to support war relief authorities.The conflict intensified calls for a unified free healthcare service, and in 1948 the National Health Service was created – but it didn’t mean the end of Penny in the Pound funds.
It was only three years later that the NHS was having financial problems, so prescription charges were introduced and Penny in the Pound funds evolved to help fund dental and optical treatment or periods of hospitalisation instead.
Many still continue to fund healthcare.The Liverpool fund is known as Medicash and recently celebrated its 150th anniversary.
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