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People You Thought Were Dead

I heard an interview with him last year, and he was genuinely embarrassed that he wasn't dead yet (!). He does have a terminal illness, it's just taking a very long time to do him in.
He won plaudits for a poem* about a Japanese Maple that he imagined flourishing long after his own demise. I read an interview with him relatively recently in which he said that in fact he had outlived the tree.

*Can I just take a moment to add how downright strange it was for me to learn that a man I only knew from laughing at Japanese telly programmes was actually also lauded as a serious poet. We should all be people of parts, of course, and it sure beats Patrick Moore's damn xylophone, but still: I found this surprisingly hard to compute.
 
He won plaudits for a poem* about a Japanese Maple that he imagined flourishing long after his own demise. I read an interview with him relatively recently in which he said that in fact he had outlived the tree.

*Can I just take a moment to add how downright strange it was for me to learn that a man I only knew from laughing at Japanese telly programmes was actually also lauded as a serious poet. We should all be people of parts, of course, and it sure beats Patrick Moore's damn xylophone, but still: I found this surprisingly hard to compute.
Clive James's memoirs and his collected TV criticism from his days as the Observer's telly critic are worth reading if you haven't done so; I remember years ago (in the days when trains had compartments...) laughing out loud at the book I was reading, as was the only other occupant of the compartment, a young woman – turned out we were both reading different volumes of his autobiography. Maybe I should have asked her out – we at least had something in common!
 
Clive James's memoirs and his collected TV criticism from his days as the Observer's telly critic are worth reading if you haven't done so; I remember years ago (in the days when trains had compartments...) laughing out loud at the book I was reading, as was the only other occupant of the compartment, a young woman – turned out we were both reading different volumes of his autobiography. Maybe I should have asked her out – we at least had something in common!

Used to read him in the Observer, often pants-wettingly funny.

He puzzled me once with a reading on t'wireless about how he lost his virginity. Went into some detail, wasn't like anything I'd heard him do before, then at the end he said he'd made it all up. Dunno what the point of that was.

(There was a TV reviewer in the Guardian Weekend section who was also so funny that the former Mr Snail and I would take turns to read out the entire column without cracking up. One item I remember concerned the relative weights of various body parts which had been dismembered for disposal after a murder and wrapped in newspaper, after the Brookside murder/patio incident. Ex was actually crying and incoherent with laughter.)
 
My father was a year or two behind him at Sydney University, and remembers him holding the English Department common room in the palm of his hand with his stories, much the way he did 30 odd years later on TV (and often the same stories).

Then, some time later when we'd moved to Brisbane in the 70s, the father of the family that moved in next to us had been a couple of years ahead of Clive at Sydney University. (Because of the age difference, my father and he hadn't met before, apparently.) He's actually in Clive's first memoir, but I don't remember the name Clive used for him - they worked on the campus newspaper amongst other things together. Clive also mentioned him in passing on a TV interview, when he said an old friend of his had decided in his 50s to become a woman.

I've presumed he's not been dead these past few years because I expected to hear something about him. I knew he has terminal cancer, but I suspect the local news will be plastered with coverage when it happens.
 
I was shocked a few years ago when I read that Cyril Fletcher had passed away, mainly because I was surprised he was still alive. Although obviously he wasn't, because he'd just passed away.
 
David Daker, who has been in many great films, is still alive and living in France.

I have no idea what his health is like, but I'm glad he's still with us.

Edit: meant to say 'films and TV programmes'.
 
David Daker, who has been in many great films, is still alive and living in France.

I have no idea what his health is like, but I'm glad he's still with us.

Edit: meant to say 'films and TV programmes'.
I shall refrain from Googling him.
 
Yeah, it has no effect. He's indestructible!

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Just read that the actor Nicky Henson has passed away. I honestly thought he died earlier in the year. I could swear I remember reading about it.
 
Just read that the actor Nicky Henson has passed away. I honestly thought he died earlier in the year. I could swear I remember reading about it.

When this happens I think perhaps I've heard about the actor retiring or being ill, then someone else dies and it all gets mixed up in the swirling morass of my fevered mind.
 
He just stopped appearing on TV, because the BBC decided he was a global warming denier.
Was he a climate change denier? I never knew that! When he vanished from our screens, I just assumed he'd gone back to being a professor, or something.
 
Was he a climate change denier? I never knew that! When he vanished from our screens, I just assumed he'd gone back to being a professor, or something.
AFAIK, he didn't deny it was happening, he just didn't agree that it was an unnatural thing.
 
"A gin company has been ordered to pay Dame Vera Lynn £1,800 in legal costs after losing a case to trademark the singer's name for its drink.
Halewood International applied to register the trademark "Vera Lynn" in June last year, due to its use in cockney rhyming slang for the word gin.
The 102-year-old opposed it on the basis that using her name could be seen as an endorsement of the product.
The firm had argued 'Vera Lynn' is more known as slang, than for the singer.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-50820070
 
Not only the BBC, he was allowed (i.e. forced) to "retire" by ITV and other broadcasters too. Think he supported fox hunting too - didn't do himself any favours in his old age!
A bit harsh, if he was indeed "retired" in this way. Compared to some of the twats who fill our screens, I'd have far preferred to see Mr Bellamy doing his stuff.
 
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