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Mr McNally, 69, launched a tirade against Evening Standard and Tatler food critic Fay Maschler, claiming she only gave his restaurant a stupendous review because they were good friends. ....
Last modified on Mon 15 Mar 2021 14.22 EDT Betty Willingale, who has died aged 93, was one of the pioneers of British television drama. As a BBC script editor from the 1960s onwards she brought the works of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Emily Brontë, Alexandre Dumas, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emile Zola and DH Lawrence to small-screen serials. Later, as a producer, she had success in turning modern literature into popular television with the BBC’s big-budget Fortunes of War (1987), Alan Plater’s adaptation of Olivia Manning’s novels, starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson as newlyweds caught up in the aftermath of Hitler’s advance across the eastern front, and ITV’s long-running detective whodunnit Midsomer Murders (from 1997), based on Caroline Graham’s Chief Inspector Barnaby novels. ....
I t is 1972. I am 27. My friend Dusty Wesker, wife of Arnold Wesker who is great mate of my then husband Tom, thrusts an Evening Standard at me announcing a competition they are running whereby the prize is to be the paper’s restaurant critic. With one or maybe even both of my two small daughters – the younger only a few months old – in my arms or round my feet I am thinking I probably shouldn’t be considering a job, but grievously I miss working, having been a copywriter at JWT and a journalist on the new, improved Radio Times. And the prize obtains only for three months…what harm can it do? I enter on the closing date. ....