August 19, 2022 ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
AUGUST 19, 1971
A MACHINE that tapes and plays back TV programmes goes on sale in Britain next spring. It records while plugged into the back of a television set and is played back on the screen when plugged into the TV aerial. The video-cassette recorder — about 2ft long, 13in wide — is being made in Austria by Philips and will cost about £300. AUGUST 19, 2017
HIS career spanned 75 years and touched the lives of millions. Last night fans and showbusiness friends were in mourning after the death of Sir Bruce Forsyth at the age of 89. The former Strictly host had been unwell for some time and had not been seen in public since late 2015.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
DEBRA PAGET, 89. The U.S. actress starred in The Ten Commandments and Love Me Tender (right), Elvis Presley’s movie debut. Presley later discovered she assumed before shooting he was ‘ a moron’, and was ‘pleasantly surprised’ to find he wasn’t. She was a bridesmaid when Liza Minnelli married David gest in ‘one of the most bizarre celebrity weddings of recent memory’. JONATHAN COE, 61. The novelist from Birmingham wrote What A Carve Up! and The Rotters’ Club, which was adapted for a series on BBC2. He said he grew a beard for a short time only ‘so people would take me more seriously and start giving me prizes’. He shaved it off after winning the Costa award.
BORN ON THIS DAY
GENE RODDENBERRY (1921-1991). The U.S. screenwriter and producer served as a B-17 pilot in the Pacific during World War II and flew for Pan Am before creating Star Trek. Roddenberry said the series was born out of his crusade ‘to demonstrate that TV need not be violent to be exciting,’ and insisted ‘promiscuity, greed, jealousy’ had no place in his franchise. COLLEEN MOORE (1899-1988). The U.S. silent film star with a bob was ‘one of the premier movie flappers of the day’ and one of Hollywood’s highest-paid. Moore, who starred in The Perfect Flapper and Flaming youth, had a facial feature to which viewers of her black-and-white films were oblivious: one blue eye and one brown eye.
ON AUGUST 19…
IN 1974, the Three Degrees — said to be Prince Charles’s favourite group — were at No. 1 with When Will I See you Again. IN 2018, Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy giuliani said ‘ truth isn’t truth’, while explaining why the president should not testify for the investigation into Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Kook (c 1960)
A) Sound of drawing a cork from a bottle.
B) Eccentric or bizarre person.
C) A youth between boyhood and manhood. answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED
In full fig: Meaning wearing smart clothes suitable for an occasion. The 19th-century sense of ‘fig’ meant ‘dress’ or ‘equipment’.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
A BIKINI is not a bikini unless it can be pulled through a wedding ring.
Louis Reard, French inventor of the modern two-piece bikini (1897-1984)
JOKE OF THE DAY
DID you hear about the man who fell into the lens-grinding machine?
He made a real spectacle of himself. Guess The Definition answer: b.