Clive’s talkin’ irks Bee Gees
QUESTION After Piers Morgan’s dramatic exit from Good Morning Britain, what other great TV walkouts have there been?
The Bee Gees famously walked out of an interview on the Clive Anderson All Talk show in 1997.
Anderson was throwing barbs from the outset. he compared the group’s falsetto to Mickey Mouse and said they were ‘hit writers’ with ‘one letter shy’.
The final straw came when he quipped the band will ‘always be Les Tosseurs to me’, which was a reference to the band’s original name.
‘We’re getting on like a storm, aren’t we Clive,’ Barry Gibb said sarcastically. ‘In fact, I might leave.’ Before he did so, he pointed his finger at Anderson and stated: ‘And you’re the tosser, pal!’
In a 2007 episode of the BBC’s pop quiz Never Mind The Buzzcocks, host Simon Amstell insisted on reading out excerpts from the autobiography of Chantelle houghton to her husband Preston, lead singer of The Ordinary Boys.
The couple had met on the set of 2006 Celebrity Big Brother and married after a short romance.
‘The Paris hilton work was a low point for me. It wasn’t what I wanted to be doing, and on top of that it caused me some real problems with my hair,’ read Amstell, as Preston gave him daggers.
‘What? It’s a good . . . haven’t you read it? I don’t want to spoil the ending for you!’ he quipped.
Amstell carried on reading: ‘The photo shoot was for the Daily Mail, which made me feel really posh and upmarket . . .’
This proved to be the final straw and Preston flounced off. In an interview with NMe about the incident, Preston claimed Simon Amstell ‘didn’t write his own jokes’ and called him a ‘snotty little posh boy’. he later admitted this was unfair as Amstell attended a state school in essex. Preston and Chantelle divorced three months after the incident.
In 2014, when anchoring ABC’s Nightline in the U.S., Martin Bashir asked Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis: ‘Do you believe a galactic emperor called Xenu brought his people to the earth 75 million years ago and buried them in volcanoes?’ Davis didn’t like this line of questioning and stormed off.
In 2011 on Radio 4’s Front Row, Mark
Lawson grilled Antipodean actor Russell Crowe over his english accent in the film Robin hood. When asked whether the Irish twang was deliberate, Crowe snapped: ‘You’ve got dead ears, mate. You’ve seriously got dead ears if you think that’s an Irish accent’ and walked out.
Mel Robertson, Telford, Shropshire. ONe famous example was in 1982 when John Nott, Margaret Thatcher’s Defence Secretary, was interviewed by Robin Day at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton shortly after Britain’s victory in the Falklands conflict. Nott had just made his address on stage and received an ovation from delegates.
Day went after Nott over cuts to Royal Navy spending, describing him as a ‘here today and, if I may say [smirking], gone tomorrow politician’. Nott did not take kindly to this jibe. Saying ‘I’m fed up with this interview’, he removed his microphone, smoothed his tie and walked out.
The Duchess of York stormed out of an Australian 60 Minutes interview in 2011 after she was shown footage taken by an undercover reporter who had secretly filmed her offering to sell access to Prince Andrew for £500,000. She eventually returned and completed the interview.
Rowan Price, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffs.
QUESTION Was soccer the correct name for football in the 19th century?
ON OCTOBER 26, 1863, a group of english teams created a standard set of rules to be used at all of their association football matches. The word association was to distinguish the sport from other team games, particularly rugby football.
Oxford University students known for their predilection for nicknames began distinguishing between rugger (rugby football) and assoccer (association football). This was shortened to soccer or socker.
The newly standardised rugby and soccer were originally sports for gentlemen. however, soccer became the sport of the masses. The term football appeared in the early 1880s and this became preferred over the posh name.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., a sport emerged in the late 19th century that borrowed elements of rugby and association football. This was gridiron football, which Americans tended to call football. As a result, U.S. association football players adopted soccer to refer to their sport.
Edward Newall, Ipswich, Suffolk.
QUESTION Why aren’t all vaccinations given in the upper arm?
MOST vaccinations are delivered into the deltoid muscle of the upper arm as it has few large blood vessels or nerves and is easily accessible. The anterolateral aspect (top side) of the thigh is used for infants.
Traditionally, buttocks were seen as an appropriate site for vaccination, but the layers of fat do not contain the right cells to initiate the immune response.
Vaccines containing adjuvants, a substance that enhances the immune system’s response to the presence of an antigen, are administered intramuscularly to avoid irritation, skin discolouration, inflammation and lumps that may occur if injected into subcutaneous tissue, the fatty layer beneath the skin.
Adjuvants, such as aluminium salts, are incorporated into inactivated vaccines, which have a weakened version of the virus to stop it from causing the disease.
Live virus vaccines, such as measles, mumps and rubella ( MMR), are traditionally given by subcutaneous injection because this is less painful and there is a lower risk of bleeding.
Maggie Hodges, Halifax, W. Yorks. n IS THERE a question to which you want to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question here? Write to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT; or email charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection is published, but we’re unable to enter into individual correspondence.
Visit mailplus.co.uk to hear the Answers To Correspondents podcast