ON THIS DAY

FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE JANUARY 9, 1954

The BBC yesterday chose Miss Margaret Lockwood to be chairman of the TV panel game Down You Go next Thursday. It will be the first time a woman has led a current TV or radio quiz, and Miss Lockwood may be the first woman quiz-master in BBC history. Officials could remember no other.

JANUARY 9, 1975

AND now for something completely different... accountants settling accounts with Monty Python. One of them says in the Law Society Gazette that the television team have gone too far in portraying accountants as ‘boring .. . rather than entertaining’. But a spokesman for the Institute of Chartered Accountants in england and Wales admitted: ‘Accountants do tend to lend themselves to this sort of satire.’

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

The Duchess of Cambridge, 37. A million well-wishers lined the streets of London when Catherine, now a mumof-three, married Prince William in 2011 and an estimated two billion tuned in to watch on TV. Her Alexander McQueen dress cost £250,000 and a reputed £50,000 was spent on placing six 20ft field maples and two hornbeams in Westminster Abbey for the ceremony.

IAIN Dowie, 54. The ex-Northern Ireland striker played in the Premier League for Southampton, West Ham and Crystal Palace. As Palace manager in 2004, he became one of the few football bosses to add to the english lexicon, as he described his side’s ‘bouncebackability’ in winning promotion having been on the fringes of relegation earlier in the season. The term was added to the Collins english Dictionary in 2005.

BORN ON THIS DAY

CLIVE DUNN (1920-2012). The actor starred as Lance Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army, immortalising the catchphrases ‘Don’t panic, don’t panic!’ and ‘They don’t like it up ’em’. Dunn — just 48 when he started playing the ageing Jones — was a prisoner of war for four years in World War II and said the role was his revenge on his former captors.

RICHARD NIXON (1913-1994). The Republican politician, who tried to join the FBI in the Thirties, became the first u.S. President to quit the White House, following the Watergate scandal. He once told a friend: ‘If you can’t lie, you’ll never go anywhere.’ Nixon was said to play five musical instruments — piano, saxophone, clarinet, accordion and violin.

ON JANUARY 9…

IN 1799, income tax was introduced by Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. IN 1972, coal miners launched their first national strike in almost half a century.

WORD WIZARDRY

GUESS THE DEFINITION: Thrisis (2017) A) Thriving on a crisis. B) A midlife crisis in your 30s. C) The threat of terrorism.

Answer below

PHRASE EXPLAINED

Queensberry rules: Meaning gentlemanly conduct in a dispute, they refer to a set of boxing rules, published in 1867, that were endorsed by the 9th Marquess of Queensberry who governed boxing in Britain