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Dixon Of Dock Green
''Dixon of Dock Green'' was a BBC police procedural television series about daily life at a fictional London police station, with the emphasis on petty crime, successfully controlled through common sense and human understanding. It ran from 1955 to 1976. The central character, George Dixon, first appeared in the film ''The Blue Lamp''. Dixon is a mature and sympathetic police constable, played by Jack Warner in all of the 432 episodes. Dixon is the embodiment of a typical "bobby" who would be familiar with the area in which he patrolled and its residents and often lived there himself. The series contrasted with later programmes such as ''Z-Cars'', which reflected a more aggressive policing culture. It retained a faithful following throughout its run and was voted second-most popular programme on British television in 1961. Jack Warner Warner's success as Dixon was well received by police forces. He was made an honorary member of both the Margate and Ramsgate Police Forces in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ted Willis
Edward Henry Willis, Baron Willis (13 January 1914 – 22 December 1992) was an English playwright, novelist and screenwriter who was also politically active in support of the Labour Party. In 1941 he became the General Secretary of the Young Communist League, the youth branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Early life and War service Born in Tottenham, Middlesex, Willis described when he was leaving school at the age of fourteen: "I had a two-second 'career interview' with my Headmaster. He asked me what I wished to do for the future and I told him that I intended to become a writer. His response was a cackle followed by the remark: 'You will never make a writer in a hundred years. You haven't got the imagination for it or the intelligence. Go away and learn a good trade.'" Willis was elected Chairman of the Labour League of Youth as the candidate of the left in 1937. In 1939, along with much of the League of Youth leadership, he joined the Young Communist League. He ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Birmingham
Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the West Midlands metropolitan county, and approximately 4.3 million in the wider metropolitan area. It is the largest UK metropolitan area outside of London. Birmingham is known as the second city of the United Kingdom. Located in the West Midlands region of England, approximately from London, Birmingham is considered to be the social, cultural, financial and commercial centre of the Midlands. Distinctively, Birmingham only has small rivers flowing through it, mainly the River Tame and its tributaries River Rea and River Cole – one of the closest main rivers is the Severn, approximately west of the city centre. Historically a market town in Warwickshire in the medieval period, Birmingham grew during the 18th century during the Midla ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Billie Whitelaw
Billie Honor Whitelaw (6 June 1932 – 21 December 2014) was an English actress. She worked in close collaboration with Irish playwright Samuel Beckett for 25 years and was regarded as one of the foremost interpreters of his works. She was also known for her portrayal of Mrs. Baylock, the demonic nanny in the 1976 horror film ''The Omen''. Early life Whitelaw was born in Coventry, Warwickshire,Prior to 1 April 1974 Coventry was in Warwickshire the daughter of Frances Mary (née Williams) and Gerry Whitelaw. She had one sister, Constance, who was 10 years older. Whitelaw grew up in a working class part of Bradford and later attended Grange Girls' Grammar School in Bradford. At age 11, she began performing as a child actress on radio programmes, including the part of Bunkle, an extrovert prep-schoolboy on Children's Hour from Manchester, and later worked as an assistant stage manager and acted with the repertory company at the Prince's Theatre in Bradford during high school. H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Widower
A widow (female) or widower (male) is a person whose spouse has died. Terminology The state of having lost one's spouse to death is termed ''widowhood''. An archaic term for a widow is "relict," literally "someone left over". This word can sometimes be found on older gravestones. The word "widow" comes from an Indo-European root meaning "widow" and has cognates across Indo-European languages. The male form, "widower", is first attested in the 14th century, by the 19th century supplanting "widow" with reference to men. The term ''widowhood'' can be used for either sex, at least according to some dictionaries, but the word ''widowerhood'' is also listed in some dictionaries. Occasionally, the word ''viduity'' is used. The adjective for either sex is ''widowed''. These terms are not applied to a divorcé(e) following the death of an ex-spouse. Effects on health The phenomenon that refers to the increased mortality rate after the death of a spouse is called the ''widowhood e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Byrne (actor)
Peter James Byrne (29 January 1928 – 14 May 2018) was an English actor and director. He was born in West Ham, Essex; his father was a musician. He was educated at grammar school and trained as an actor at the Italia Conti Stage School. He made his name by playing George Dixon's son-in-law Andy Crawford in the long-running BBC Television serial ''Dixon of Dock Green'' for twenty years from 1955. He was Director of Productions for the Bournemouth Theatre Company (1965–66). Stage appearances included '' Boeing Boeing'', ''There's a Girl in My Soup'', '' Double Edge'', ''The Unexpected Guest''. Films include ''Reach for the Sky'' and ''Carry On Cabby''. TV appearances included ''Mutiny at Spithead'', ''The New Canadians'' and more than 300 appearances in ''Dixon of Dock Green''. He also made many appearances in pantomime. In 2005, the Dixon series was revived for BBC Radio Four, but without Byrne, though he commented, "Various people have said the series was a bit cosy and the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
East End Of London
The East End of London, often referred to within the London area simply as the East End, is the historic core of wider East London, east of the Roman and medieval walls of the City of London and north of the River Thames. It does not have universally accepted boundaries to the north and east, though the River Lea is sometimes seen as the eastern boundary. Parts of it may be regarded as lying within Central London (though that term too has no precise definition). The term "East of Aldgate Pump" is sometimes used as a synonym for the area. The East End began to emerge in the Middle Ages with initially slow urban growth outside the eastern walls, which later accelerated, especially in the 19th century, to absorb pre-existing settlements. The first known written record of the East End as a distinct entity, as opposed to its component parts, comes from John Strype's 1720 ''Survey of London'', which describes London as consisting of four parts: the City of London, Westminster, So ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lime Grove Studios
Lime Grove Studios was a film, and later television, studio complex in Shepherd's Bush, West London, England. The complex was built by the Gaumont Film Company in 1915. It was situated in Lime Grove, a residential street in Shepherd's Bush, and when it first opened was described by Gaumont as "the finest studio in Great Britain and the first building ever put up in this country solely for the production of films". Many Gainsborough Pictures films were made here from the early 1930s. Its sister studio was Islington Studios, also used by Gainsborough; films were often shot partly at Islington and partly at Lime Grove. In 1949, the complex was purchased by the BBC, who used it for television broadcasts until 1991. It was demolished in 1993. Gaumont-British Picture Corporation In 1922, Isidore Ostrer along with brothers Mark and Maurice, acquired control of Gaumont-British from its French parent. In 1932 a major redevelopment of Lime Grove Studios was completed, creating one of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Riverside Studios
Riverside Studios is an arts centre on the banks of the River Thames in Hammersmith, London, England. The venue plays host to contemporary performance, film, visual art exhibitions and television production. Having closed for redevelopment in September 2014, Riverside Studios reopened in August 2019 with one of the first television broadcasts from Studio 1 being Channel 4's UK election coverage. Film studio In 1933, a former Victorian iron foundry on Crisp Road, London, was bought by Triumph Films and converted into a relatively compact film studio with two stages and a dubbing theatre. In 1935 the studios were taken over by Julius Hagen (then owner of Twickenham Studios) with the idea of using Riverside as an overflow for making quota quickies. However, by 1937 his company had gone into liquidation. Between 1937 and 1946, the studios were owned by Jack Buchanan and produced such films as ''We'll Meet Again'' (1943) with Vera Lynn and ''The Seventh Veil'' (1945) with James Ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Light Entertainment
Light entertainment encompasses a broad range of television and radio programming that includes comedies, variety shows, game shows, quiz shows and the like. In Great Britain In the early days of the BBC virtually all broadcast entertainment would be considered light by today's standards, as great pains were taken not to offend audiences—which is not to say that they always succeeded in this. Singers, magicians and comedians were drafted from the music hall circuit to fill the schedules. Stage acts were transferred directly to screen and in the case of productions such as ''Sunday Night at the London Palladium'' the broadcasts actually came from large theatres. Many future household names, including The Beatles, were given their first public airings during these programmes, which attempted to cater for varying tastes through staging variety acts. Bruce Forsyth was one of several hosts for the show and went on himself to present the studio-based '' Generation Game'' which ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ITV (TV Network)
ITV is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network. It was launched in 1955 as Independent Television to provide competition to BBC Television (established in 1936). ITV is the oldest commercial network in the UK. Since the passing of the Broadcasting Act 1990, it has been legally known as Channel 3 to distinguish it from the other analogue channels at the time, BBC1, BBC2 and Channel 4. ITV was for four decades a network of separate companies which provided regional television services and also shared programmes between each other to be shown on the entire network. Each franchise was originally owned by a different company. After several mergers, the fifteen regional franchises are now held by two companies: ITV plc, which runs the ITV1 channel, and STV Group, which runs the STV channel. The ITV network is a separate entity from ITV plc, the company that resulted from the merger of Granada plc and Carlton Communications in 2004. ITV plc holds the Channel 3 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dirk Bogarde
Sir Dirk Bogarde (born Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde; 28 March 1921 – 8 May 1999) was an English actor, novelist and screenwriter. Initially a matinée idol in films such as ''Doctor in the House'' (1954) for the Rank Organisation, he later acted in art house films, evolving from "heartthrob to icon of edginess". In a second career, he wrote seven best-selling volumes of memoirs, six novels, and a volume of collected journalism, mainly from articles in ''The Daily Telegraph''. During five years of active military duty during World War Two, he reached the rank of major and was awarded seven medals. His poetry has been published in war anthologies; a painting by Bogarde, also from the war, hangs in the British Museum, with many more in the Imperial War Museum. Having come to prominence in films including ''The Blue Lamp'' in the early 1950s, Bogarde starred in the successful ''Doctor'' film series (1954–1963). He twice won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jimmy Hanley
Jimmy Hanley (22 October 1918 – 13 January 1970) was an English actor who appeared in the popular Huggetts film series, and in ITV's most popular advertising magazine programme, ''Jim's Inn'', from 1957 to 1963. Early life Born in Norwich, Norfolk, Hanley began his career as a child actor before becoming popular in juvenile roles. He was groomed by the Rank Studio system during his teenage years and earned film stardom as a "boy-next-door" type. The young actor attended the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts and whilst he was studying there, made his stage debut at age 12 at the London Palladium, as John Darling in ''Peter Pan''. He began to make films in his teens. Career During the Second World War he served as an officer with the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, and in a commando raid in Norway he was wounded in the leg and was invalided out of the service. He returned to films, including ''Salute John Citizen'' (1942), ''Henry V'' with Laurence Olivier (1944), ''F ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
