From staging Scotland’s first British and European title fight to setting attendance records, Nat Dresner made remarkable strides in his six years as a promoter, writes Alex Daley
Don’t believe The Pursuit of Love – not all aristocrats are bigots, buffoons and bounders
Are the English upper classes an absurd alien race? The makers of The Pursuit of Love – and many more TV dramas – certainly seem to think so
Lily James as Linda in The Pursuit of Love
Credit: BBC
Emily Mortimer’s production of The Pursuit of Love presented her with an interesting conundrum. She was not just bringing the eccentric aristocracy to the screen, she was adapting them from Nancy Mitford’s adaptation, so she was already two steps away. A series such as The Crown is easier to dissect since it is the fictionalisation of real life people – it makes no attempt at reality at all, but does the unforgivable thing of creating cooked up situations for real people to the point that a large number of viewers – and even documentary makers - believe it to be true.
FROM 1931 to 1934, the mammoth shape of Hull Number 534, the unnamed Cunard ocean-liner that was to have been the salvation of the River Clyde, loomed unfinished in the stocks over the John Brown Engineering Works in Clydebank. Construction was suspended on 10 December 1931, plunging thousands into unemployment and poverty in the weeks before Christmas. Looking over Dumbarton Road from the tenements opposite, the rust-red hull of the unfinished ship must have resembled the skeleton of some extinct behemoth, and workers – from the riveters and caulkers of the black squads to the engineers, fitters and foremen – must have feared that extinction too would be the ultimate fate of their industry.