The Daily Mail Henry Deedes watched the Health Secretary’s Downing Street briefing late on Monday and described him as ‘his usual zingy, Saturday night game-show host self. Part Leslie Crowther of The Price Is Right fame, part Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout.’ “He seems immune to the rusty grind most of us experience on Mondays,” he said. “To be fair, the year he’s had he’s probably forgotten what a weekend is.” He announced more than 12 million had been vaccinated and take up was 90 per cent - more than the Government’s estimated 75 per cent, he said. “That will have been a deliberate low-ball estimate just so Hancock could boast about surpassing it,” he added. “As for the test and trace programme, it was now performing ‘brilliantly’ he insisted. The Health Secretary is never shy about giving himself a glowing report, is he? His memoirs are going to be a hoot.”
The curse of Steptoe and Son: how the sitcom ruined its star’s career
John Gielgud praised his Richard II for Joan Littlewood, so why did Harry H Corbett end his days in panto? There s only one role to blame
7 February 2021 • 12:00pm
Harry H Corbett, pictured here with Wilfrid Brambell in Steptoe and Son, was stuck with the role for 14 years
Credit: Mike Lawn/Getty
Harry H Corbett – he of the lustreless, big red-rimmed eyes; “the hulking figure in the tatty overcoat and turned-down gumboots”; the faint rhotacism and a voice that was like a flame, swaying and trembling – was born in Rangoon in 1925. I picture a Kipling background – tough non-commissioned officers in a hot corner of the Empire; a world of duty and service and forbearance; of burdens carried. (“I’m beginning to be a burden, am I?” Albert Steptoe one day challenges his son, Harold, who replies: “No white man ever had a bigger one. But rest assured, I will not fail in my filial duty.”)
Director
Emer Reynolds
Starring
Phil Lynott, Scott Gorham, Adam Clayton, John Kelly, Huey Lewis, James Hetfield, Jim Fitzpatrick, Cathleen Howard-Lynott, Sarah Lynott, Caroline Taraskevics
Emer Reynolds presents a poetic and loving portrait of the Thin Lizzy hero in
Phil Lynott: Songs for While I m Away but glosses over the full story
Did anyone ever have a bad word to say about Phil Lynott? Well, how could anyone have a bad word to say about Phil Lynott? Seemingly the only black kid in Ireland in the 1960s, he was the mixed-race rock n’ roll flamingo who glided nimbly outta Crumlin and onto the world stage as frontman of the still fantastic sounding Thin Lizzy.
Even those of us who lived through Phil Lynottâs high period have trouble believing such a man ever existed. Internationally acknowledged Irish rock stars were, in the years before U2 and the Boomtown Rats, as rare as internationally acknowledged Irish Starfleet commanders.
In that depressingly monocultural era, his mixed-race background only added to the implausibility. And the records he made with Thin Lizzy still sound excellent. Johnny the Fox and Jailbreak merged American street life with Irish mythology in remarkable fashion.
âDown from the glen came the marching men with their shields and their swords,â he sang before moving on to the hustlers and dealers.