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McDonald Hobley
Dennys Jack Valentine McDonald-Hobley (9 June 1917, Stanley, Falkland Islands – 30 July 1987) was one of the earliest BBC Television continuity announcers, appearing on screen from 1946 to 1956. Childhood and early career Hobley (pronounced to rhyme with 'nobly') was the son of Charles McDonald Hobley, the naval chaplain at the cathedral in Stanley, Falkland Islands, and his wife Gladys, née Blanchard. He was christened Dennys Jack Valentine McDonald-Hobley and attended Brighton College, England, a public school, from 1931–1936. He began his acting career in repertory theatre, under the stage names Val Blanchard and Robert Blanchard, using his mother's maiden name, and toured before the Second World War in J. B. Priestley's ''Time and the Conways''. War service During the Second World War, Hobley served with the Royal Artillery. He was involved in an ultimately abandoned plot to abduct Adolf Hitler and bring him to Britain. He also served in Ceylon with the British F ...
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McDonald Hobley
Dennys Jack Valentine McDonald-Hobley (9 June 1917, Stanley, Falkland Islands – 30 July 1987) was one of the earliest BBC Television continuity announcers, appearing on screen from 1946 to 1956. Childhood and early career Hobley (pronounced to rhyme with 'nobly') was the son of Charles McDonald Hobley, the naval chaplain at the cathedral in Stanley, Falkland Islands, and his wife Gladys, née Blanchard. He was christened Dennys Jack Valentine McDonald-Hobley and attended Brighton College, England, a public school, from 1931–1936. He began his acting career in repertory theatre, under the stage names Val Blanchard and Robert Blanchard, using his mother's maiden name, and toured before the Second World War in J. B. Priestley's ''Time and the Conways''. War service During the Second World War, Hobley served with the Royal Artillery. He was involved in an ultimately abandoned plot to abduct Adolf Hitler and bring him to Britain. He also served in Ceylon with the British F ...
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Come Dancing
''Come Dancing'' is a British ballroom dancing competition show that ran on and off on the BBC from 1949 to 1998. Unlike its follow-up show, ''Strictly Come Dancing'', contestants were not celebrities. The show was created by Eric Morley, the founder of Miss World, and began in 1949 by broadcasting from regional ballroom studios, with professional dancers Syd Perkin and Edna Duffield on hand to offer teaching. In 1953, the format changed to become a competition, with later series seeing regions of the United Kingdom going head to head for the coveted trophy. In 1950, ''Come Dancing'' joined ''Television Dancing Club'', and the two programmes ran on alternate weeks until 1964, when the latter finished. At its peak, in the late 1960s and 1970s, it attracted audiences of ten million. The last regular series was aired in 1995 (with no series in 1982 or 1987), this was followed by ''International Come Dancing'' specials in 1996 and 1998. The final episode, a 50th anniversary sp ...
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John Osborne
John James Osborne (12 December 1929 – 24 December 1994) was an English playwright, screenwriter and actor known for writing prose that criticized established social and political norms. ''Look Back in Anger'' (1956) is his best known work. Osborne was one of the first writers to address Britain's purpose in the post-imperial age. Early life Osborne was born on 12 December 1929 in London, the son of Thomas Godfrey Osborne, a commercial artist and advertising copywriter of South Welsh ancestry, and Nellie Beatrice Grove, a Cockney barmaid. In 1935 the family moved to the north Surrey suburb of Stoneleigh, where Thomas's mother had already settled. Osborne, however, would regard it as a cultural desert – a school friend declared subsequently that "he thought ewere a lot of dull, uninteresting people." He adored his father but hated his mother, whom he described as "hypocritical, self-absorbed, calculating and indifferent." Thomas Osborne died in 1941, leaving the you ...
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The Entertainer (film)
''The Entertainer'' is a 1960 British kitchen sink drama film directed by Tony Richardson, produced by Harry Saltzman and adapted by John Osborne and Nigel Kneale from Osborne’s stage play of the same name. The film stars Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice, a failing third-rate music-hall stage performer who tries to keep his career going even as the music-hall tradition fades into history and his personal life falls apart. It was filmed on location in the Lancashire seaside town of Morecambe. Olivier was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role. Plot Jean Rice, a young London art teacher, travels to a seaside resort (not specified but partly filmed in Morecambe) to visit her family. She is emotionally confused, having had a row with her fiancé Graham, who wants her to emigrate with him to Africa. She also is deeply concerned about the Suez Crisis, having seen Mick, her soldier brother, go to the war. She has attended a peace rally in Trafalgar Square that was dir ...
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BBC Two
BBC Two is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network owned and operated by the BBC. It covers a wide range of subject matter, with a remit "to broadcast programmes of depth and substance" in contrast to the more mainstream and popular BBC One. Like the BBC's other domestic TV and radio channels, it is funded by the television licence, and is therefore free of commercial advertising. It is a comparatively well-funded public-service network, regularly attaining a much higher audience share than most public-service networks worldwide. Originally styled BBC2, it was the third British television station to be launched (starting on 21 April 1964), and from 1 July 1967, Europe's first television channel to broadcast regularly in colour. It was envisaged as a home for less mainstream and more ambitious programming, and while this tendency has continued to date, most special-interest programmes of a kind previously broadcast on BBC Two, for example the BBC Proms, no ...
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Does The Team Think?
''Does The Team Think?'' was a radio panel game broadcast originally on the BBC Light Programme (and later on BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio 4) from 1957 to 1976, and revived, again on Radio 2, with a new cast, in 2007. It also broadcast as a TV programme. Format The show was a parody of ''Any Questions?'', where audience members pose questions to an assembled panel. The questions and answers were played for laughs (in contrast to the serious political debate in ''Any Questions?''), with the panellists improvising witty answers. Original series 1957–1976 The idea of a parody version of ''Any Questions?'' was suggested by Jimmy Edwards in 1957. The Light Programme agreed to run a short series, which ended up running almost twenty years. The panel was chaired by Peter Haigh for the first series and by McDonald Hobley for the majority of its run. Regular panellists were Edwards, Arthur Askey, Tommy Trinder and Ted Ray, with a guest fourth panellist joining them each week. Other panel ...
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Wonderful Radio London
Radio London, also known as Big L and Wonderful Radio London, was a top 40 (in London's case, the " Fab 40") offshore commercial station that operated from 23 December 1964 to 14 August 1967, from a ship anchored in the North Sea, off Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, England. The station, like other offshore radio operators, was dubbed a pirate radio station, and went off air following the introduction of the Marine, &c., Broadcasting (Offences) Act 1967 which made it illegal to supply or assist such stations except in an emergency. The station was notable for helping to launch the careers of various disc jockeys who went on to work at BBC Radio 1. Its offices were in the West End of London at 17 Curzon Street, just off Park Lane. Origin of the station Radio London was the brainchild of Don Pierson, who lived in Eastland, Texas, United States. In a 1984 interview, Pierson said he got the idea in 1964, while reading a report in ''The Dallas Morning News'' of the start of Radio Ca ...
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It's A Knockout
''It's a Knockout!'' is a British game show first broadcast in 1966. It was adapted from the French show ''Intervilles'', and was part of the international ''Jeux sans frontières'' franchise. History The series was broadcast on BBC1 from 7 August 1966 to 30 July 1982; thereafter a number of specials were broadcast until 25 December 1988. An episode was made by TVS for ITV which aired on 28 May 1990 as part of its ITV Telethon that year with Bernie Clifton as the host. Welsh version A Welsh version, ' (''Games without Frontiers''), was broadcast from 3 August 1991 to 24 December 1994 on S4C. It had Welsh teams battling against European contestants dressed in pink colours. Nia Chiswell and Iestyn Garlick presented. Locations included Bodelwyddan Castle, with Nia dressed as Alice in Wonderland. The series won a BAFTA Cymru award in 1994. The series was later re-dubbed into English by Stuart Hall and broadcast on The Family Channel, from 1993 to 1994. Channel 5 version In A ...
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Granada Television
ITV Granada, formerly known as Granada Television, is the ITV franchisee for the North West of England and Isle of Man. From 1956 to 1968 it broadcast to both the north west and Yorkshire but only on weekdays as ABC Weekend Television was its weekend counterpart. Granada's parent company Granada plc later bought several other regional ITV stations and, in 2004, merged with Carlton Communications to form ITV plc. Granada Television was particularly noted by critics for the distinctive northern and "social realism" character of many of its network programmes, as well as the high quality of its drama and documentaries. In its prime as an independent franchisee, prior to its parent company merging with Carlton Communications to form ITV plc, it was the largest Independent Television producer in the UK, accounting for 25% of the total broadcasting output of the ITV network. Granada Television was founded by Sidney Bernstein at Granada Studios on Quay Street in Manchester and is ...
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Defecation
Defecation (or defaecation) follows digestion, and is a necessary process by which organisms eliminate a solid, semisolid, or liquid waste material known as feces from the digestive tract via the anus. The act has a variety of names ranging from the common, like pooping or crapping, to the technical, e.g. bowel movement, to the obscene ('' shitting''), to the euphemistic ("dropping a deuce" or "taking a dump"). The topic, usually avoided among polite company, can become the basis for some potty humour. Humans expel feces with a frequency varying from a few times daily to a few times weekly. Waves of muscular contraction (known as ''peristalsis'') in the walls of the colon move fecal matter through the digestive tract towards the rectum. Undigested food may also be expelled this way, in a process called ''egestion''. When birds defecate, they also expel urine and urates in the same mass, whereas other animals may also urinate at the same time, but spatially separated. Defeca ...
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Spoonerism
A spoonerism is an occurrence in speech in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched (see metathesis) between two words in a phrase. These are named after the Oxford don and ordained minister William Archibald Spooner, who reputedly did this. They were already renowned by the author François Rabelais in the 16th century, and called . In his novel ''Pantagruel'', he wrote ("insane woman at mass, woman with flabby buttocks"). An example is saying "The Lord is a shoving leopard" instead of "The Lord is a loving shepherd" or "runny babbit" instead of "bunny rabbit." While spoonerisms are commonly heard as slips of the tongue, they can also be used intentionally as a play on words. Etymology Spoonerisms are named after the Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), Warden from 1903 to 1924 of New College, Oxford, who was notoriously prone to this mistake. The Oxford English Dictionary records the word as early as 1900. The term ''spoonerism'' w ...
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Sir Stafford Cripps
Sir Richard Stafford Cripps (24 April 1889 – 21 April 1952) was a British Labour Party politician, barrister, and diplomat. A wealthy lawyer by background, he first entered Parliament at a by-election in 1931, and was one of a handful of Labour frontbenchers to retain his seat at the general election that autumn. He became a leading spokesman for the left-wing and co-operation in a Popular Front with Communists before 1939, in which year he was expelled from the Labour Party. During World War II, he served as Ambassador to the USSR (1940–42), during which time he grew wary of the Soviet Union, but achieved great public popularity because on being invaded by Nazi Germany the USSR stated its co-operation with the Allies and restoring peace, causing Cripps to be seen in 1942 as a potential rival to Winston Churchill for the premiership. He became a member of the War Cabinet of the wartime coalition, but failed in his efforts (the "Cripps Mission") to resolve the wartime cr ...
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