In a big tizzy with Tiziano
QUESTION
Who is the very excitable Italian star of the Ladbrokes gaming adverts? MADCAP Italian football commentator Tiziano Crudeli is a fanatical supporter of AC Milan — the worl d ’ s least neutral commentator.
His emotional outpourings are legendary in Italy, where he features on the Diretta Stadio programme for Italian TV company 7Gold.
The programme is a bit like the BBC’S Final Score, and rather than watching a game, viewers see the scores come up on the screen while commentators watch and report the day’s matches.
During Milan games, Crudeli’s commentary is frenetic: when they score he shouts and gesticulates for minutes on end. The faces of his fellow presenters are always priceless.
Crudeli was born in Forli near Bologna, but moved to Milan aged 12 with his older brothers when their parents died. His first job in sport was at 30, working for the Italian Tennis Federation for whom he later become press secretary.
He edited the tennis magazine Tennis Lombard before moving into TV broadcasts. But his true love was football, and he changed media to report on football for the Milan-based Radio Peter Flowers.
Work for newspapers followed, before he became more widely known for his heated debates with Inter Milan fan Elio Corno on talk show Telelombardia.
He also works on the AC Milan channel on Sky Italy, and writes columns for the sport’s weekly publication Sprint & Sport Lombardia.
But it is his outbursts on Diretta Stadio, that made him nationally famous and attracted the ad men from Ladbrokes.
Jim Cutter, Manchester.
QUESTION
In the Sixties, I bought a set of golf clubs made by Browning. Was this the same company that made guns? THE reader must have bought the clubs later than suggested, as Browning didn’t start making golf clubs until 1976 when the Browning Arms Company (established 1927) was acquired by Belgian firearms manufacturer FN Herstal.
Herstal used the Browning name and technology to produce a range of conventional sports equipment including golf clubs, tennis and squash racquets, all made in Belgium.
Browning Golf is perhaps best known f or its innovative and unusual-looking 440 golf irons.
These had a very shallow face and low centre of gravity, designed after high- speed photography proved that the ball rolls up the club face of an iron when struck.
They were manufactured between 1976 and 1985, and were known for launching a crisp clean strike from a fairway lie. The downside was that some control was lost when hitting out of the rough.
The design was so successful it was copied by other manufacturers in clubs such as the Slot line Low pro iron and Titleist Super Slim irons.
In 1987, rights to the Browning Golf Co were sold to a group of investors who started a component company called UT Golf. In 1998, the company was sold to Golf works, which didn’t receive the rights to the Browning name — instead, they returned to Browning.
The company is making clubs under the brand names Cynergy and Premier which mirror the names of some of Browning’s best rifles. They are sold mainly in Belgium, Holland and France.
C.W. Adam, Formby, Lancs.
QUESTION
Is there a difference between atheism and secularism? ATHEISM, from the Greek ‘without God’, differs from secularism in that the latter doesn’t preclude religious faith. Atheism is a belief system, secularism is a political opinion.
An atheist doesn’t believe in the existence of God or, more accurately, the existence of the supernatural, either divine or diabolical.
A secularist believes there should be strict ‘separation of powers’ between church and state, namely that particularly political day-today activities of the socio-political State should not i nclude or incorporate religious authority or elements and vice versa.
Many Americans support state secularism as practised in the U.S. because in their view it has protected religious faith f rom political interference by the political state. In the UK, however, secularism is aimed at protecting the political state from religious interference.
Secularism differs from atheism because it doesn’t preclude proponents from having a religious faith. Early religious pro-secularists included Muslim scholars such as Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), as well as Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), third U.S. president and an Episcopalian Christian Church Governor, and British writer George Holyoake (1817-1906), a Christian who coined the term ‘secularism’ itself.
Perhaps the greatest irony of secularism is t hat religious supporters of secularism take their stance f rom the Bible itself, specifically the Gospels, in which Jesus Christ plainly told Pilate: ‘I am no part of the world, and my disciples are no part of the world.’
Christ later reiterated this to his Apostles: ‘You must be no part of the world, just as I am no part of the world’, to veto any involvement of Christianity in politics.
Catherine Stewart, Sheffield.
QUESTION
Were any major actors killed fighting in World War II? FURTHER to the earlier answer, the mysterious death of Leslie Howard in 1943 was largely an exception. Most prominent British stage and screen actors survived World War II unscathed.
For instance, Ralph Richardson volunteered — along with Laurence Olivier — to join the Fleet Air Arm as a reserve pilot for the RNVR (Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve), where he eventually attained the rank of lieutenant commander.
Less fortunate was South Africanborn actor Donald Gray, a handsome l eading man who, although medically unfit with a duodenal ulcer, joined the Gordon Highlanders and was l at e r commissioned into the King’s Own Scottish Borderers.
Fighting around Caen, northern France, in August 1944, Gray lost his left arm to a German anti-tank bombardment during the D-day forces’ advance.
In peacetime, Gray played the eponymous, one-armed private detective in a filmed TV series Mark Saber (1956-1962) and provided character voices for Gerry Anderson’s puppets in Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons (1968).
A major loss to British films between 1939 and 1945 was director ‘ Pen’ Tennyson. The greatgrandson of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Frederic Penrose Tennyson was a talented filmmaker of promise, having assisted Alfred Hitchcock on classics like The 39 Steps and Sabotage.
Pen completed what was to be his last picture, the morale-boosting seafaring drama Convoy, in May 1940. A year later, on July 7, 1941, having ignored ‘reserved occupation’ status to enlist as a sub-lieutenant in the Fleet Air Arm, he was killed in a plane crash en route from Shetland to Rosyth.
Cy Young, London W10.