ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE OCTOBER 9, 1965
BRITAIN’S tallest building at 620ft, the GPO communications tower in London, was opened by the Prime Minister yesterday. After Mr Wilson’s first official phone call from it to the Lord Mayor of Birmingham, the official VIP party was taken to the tower’s revolving restaurant 540ft up.
OCTOBER 9, 1973
THE country’s first legal commercial radio, LBC, went on the air in London yesterday — important, as we have a round-the- clock radio station for the first time. england’s champion town crier shouted his way round the city’s boroughs to mark the day.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
BELLA HADID, 24. The American, right, is one of the world’s highest-paid models, according to Forbes magazine, and earns thousands of pounds for each Instagram post. She had hoped to compete i n equestrian events at the 2016 rio Olympics until contracting Lyme disease.
BRIAN BLESSED, 84. The Yorkshire actor, star of Z-Cars and Cats, says the Queen told him Flash Gordon, in which he was Prince Vultan, is her favourite film. Blessed said he met his brother Alan five years after his death — reincarnated as a Canadian boy. He was a friend of Peter O’Toole, but threw him ‘all over the house’ in anger at the hellraising actor having ‘ s** t all over your f***ing talent’. He has tried to climb everest three times without oxygen.
BORN ON THIS DAY
ALASTAIr SIM (1900-1976). The Scottish actor was Scrooge i n 1951 film A Christmas Carol, right, and the headmistress in 1954’s The Belles Of St Trinian’s. One obituary described Sim as ‘tall, bald and poucheyed, with a velvet voice, a droll wit and the face of a cunning bloodhound’. As a child, he wanted to be a hypnotist, saying: ‘I practised on gentle dogs.’ He married wife naomi, when she was just 18, and he 34, after persuading her mother to let her become his secretary even though she could not type.
ROD TEMPERTON (1949-2016). The songwriter from Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, penned hits for Michael Jackson, including Off The Wall, rock With You and Thriller. He had wanted to call the latter Midnight Man, until: ‘Something in my head just said: “This is the title.”’ Temperton filleted fish in a f actory before answering an ad f or a keyboardist with funk band Heatwave. He also wrote for Aretha Franklin, George Benson and Donna Summer.
ON OCTOBER 9 . . .
IN 1967, Joseph Pilates, the German gymnast who invented the fitness discipline Pilates, died aged 83. IN 2009, an announcement was made that U.S. President Barack Obama would be awarded the nobel Peace Prize.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Asphodel (c1595) A) Pimple. B) Priest’s mistress. C) Lily-like flowering plant native to Mediterranean.
Answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED To be taken for a ride:
meaning to be deceived or cheated. It derives from U.S. gangs of the 1920s and 1930s who would take people for a limousine drive ostensibly for a discussion but would rarely return them alive or unharmed.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
[Advice to actors] Know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture. Spencer Tracy, American actor (1900-1967)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT did the tooth say to the dentist on leaving? Fill me in when you get back. Guess The Definition answer: C