Richard Briers died today. He was such a lovely, cuddly chap with an amazing twinkle in his eye. He’ll be very much missed.
Radio 4 had Penelope Keith in the studio, chatting about him. They were great friends to the end. She said he was exactly like he was on screen – lots of fun with the twinkle ever present.
She also said he was pretty philosophical to the end, shrugging off his emphysema by laughing at his excessive smoking and saying he only had himself to blame.
He’ll be sadly missed by everyone who remembers him but, at least he’ll always be remembered for making people laugh and for that wonderful sense of comedy. And, of course, there’s always DVDs. So, for fans, he’ll never really be gone.
That was the news I woke to this morning. This struck me as quite amazing since the BBC was in the thrall of a journalist’s strike today. So, no Today programme, very little news, just a barrage of programmes about George Orwell.
Orwell was born in 1903 so I can only assume this sudden fascination stems from the fact that we are approaching his 110th birthday (25 June).
While we had a lot of Orwellian programmes today, it has seemed like there’s been an inordinate amount of them recently. I’ve always been a big fan of Animal Farm and read Nineteen Eighty-four in my youth but have never really read anything else by him.
Today they broadcast a short piece he’d written about the hanging of a prisoner while he was serving in India. It was beautifully written, full of dismal imagery, sadness and his sense of the futility of capital punishment. I was thoroughly enthralled when, three minutes before the end, the phone rang.
I knew Mirinda was working from the flat so thought it might be her even though I was in the general cold call time zone. I picked the phone up and said hello. The only response was silence. Exactly the sort of silence from the cold callers.
Rather than wait for the static-y voice of a sad person sat in a featureless box somewhere else in the world, I let go a string of invective, explaining I was listening to the radio and they’d interrupted it at the critical time. Just before I hung up, I heard Mirinda’s voice saying “OK then…”
I switched the radio off and rang her straight back, explaining the confusion. Oddly, she didn’t seem that bothered and said I could have listened to the end of the programme first.
Apart from walking the dogs completely around the park and generally catching up on last week’s housework, this was my day.
Well I was a bit offended
Who’s in the dog house now?
love mum x