ON THIS DAY
MAY 21, 1940
NO MuSIC will be broadcast from Paris, and dance halls are to be closed until the war is won. ‘After victory has been won, we will find plenty of time for amusement, but not before,’ said the Radio Paris announcer tonight.
MAY 21, 1973
BREAKFAST television is on the way, with ITV preparing the first early morning programmes. Thames Television has a twohour breakfast show planned for the autumn. Ever since the Government dropped broadcasting hours restrictions last year, Howard Thomas, managing director of Thames, has been pressing for breakfast TV to be tested. [Breakfast TV did not arrive in Britain until January 1983.]
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
LEO SAYER, 71. The AngloAustralian singer (right), whose manager was fellow singer Adam Faith, had a string of top-ten hits in the Seventies, including the u.S. No 1 You Make Me Feel Like Dancing. Less successful was his planned visit to meet Elvis at Graceland in August 1977. Presley died the day before a Sayer arrived. ANDREW NEIL, 70. The presenter and former Fleet Street editor’s popular BBC programme This Week will end in July after 16 years after Neil announced he was stepping down. A former BBC executive said it ‘secretly enjoys’ assaults on Neil for being too Right- wing, because they ‘undermine the usual claim that it is controlled by liberal Lefties’.
BORN ON THIS DAY
FATS WALLER (1904-1943). The American jazz pianist and composer had hits with Ain’t Misbehavin and Honeysuckle Rose. In 1926, Waller was kidnapped at gunpoint by friends of mobster Al Capone: they didn’t intend to harm him, but just wanted him to perform at Capone’s 27th birthday party — which lasted three days. ELIZABETH FRY (17801845). The Quaker social reformer from Norwich won the admiration of Queen Victoria for campaigning on behalf of prisoners and the homeless. A mother of 11, dubbed the ‘Angel of Prisons’, Fry said: ‘When thee builds a prison, thee had better build with the thought ever in thy mind that thee and thy children may occupy the cells.’ Her face adorned the £5 note for more than a decade (above) and there is a bust of her at Wormwood Scrubs.
ON MAY 21…
IN 1956, the u.S. exploded the first airborne hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. IN 1981, singer- songwriter Bob Marley received a state funeral in Jamaica.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Rum mizzler (mid-19th century) A) A grumpy old man. B) Someone clever at escaping difficult situations. C) A miser. Answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Set one’s cap at — refers to a woman who sets out to gain the affections of a man often with a view to marriage; coined in 1754, it derives from the lace cap unmarried young women would have worn in public.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
History . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. James Joyce, Irish novelist (1882-1941)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT do you call a bear without an ear? B. Guess The Definition answer: B.