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A new profile of the great Morecambe and Wise sheds sunshine on their comedy chemistry
The peak of British television light entertainment,” declares Louis Barfe, “began at 8.55pm on Sunday 25 December 1977.” And who would dare disagree with the author and expert on vintage British comedy? The 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show – featuring Elton John, Angela Rippon, the cast of The Good Life and a host of heavyweight broadcasters dressed as sailors singing There Is Nothing like a Dame – encapsulates everything we still hold dear about Britain’s greatest comic duo: their daftness, daring and deceptive guile. “Affectionate mockery was what they did best,” says Barfe , author of Sunshine and...
In her new memoir, Anita Rani is loud and clear about racism, family – and Strictly
Nearly six years on from her run to the semi-finals of Strictly, there remains a question in Anita Rani’s mind. “I still find myself wondering whether I would have got into the final if I didn’t have a brown face,” she says. It’s not just Strictly, either. “There are various points in my career where I wonder what would have happened if I was blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and sometimes I don’t think things would have played out the same way if I was white. I’ve put that Strictly question into my book to leave people pondering, because I’m just not sure.”...
When Richard Mabey wrote Nature Cure, it put his life back together. But 16 years on, he says it’s nature that’s in peril
In less than 12 months I’d recovered from a long spell of debilitating illness, left the family home in which I’d lived all my life, sold my beloved wood, moved into a hermit’s cell in a Norfolk farmhouse, fallen in love, and begun – for the first time – a shared life. This jump-starting all happened in a radically new landscape, and my book Nature Cure was the result: a compulsive, written-in-real-time account of a hectic rite of passage [and being republished to mark Mabey’s 80th birthday]. I’d roamed the Chilterns’ ancient beechwoods and chalk hills for half a...
Claire Fuller stumbled out of her marketing job to write her first book at 46. Six years later, she’s on to novel number four
There is a man standing in the middle of a four-lane highway in Reading with a placard that says “LESS DRIVING, MORE WALKING”. A woman is taking pictures of him, then she stops and they both run away, laughing. Months later the same woman comes across a notice in her local library advertising a Short Story Slam, where a paying audience votes on their favourite five-minute rendition. She turns up every six weeks for almost a year before she wins £9.87, her share of the takings on the door and, it would transpire, her first earnings from writing. The idea...
America’s Bomber Mafia dreamt of waging war without the killing, but sadly their aim was off, says Malcolm Gladwell
It sounds almost romantic, the way Malcolm Gladwell describes it. “Well, I guess this is a story about obsession. This group of men, in the middle of Alabama during the 1930s, who have this dream they can’t shake.” And if that seems an odd way to talk about a story that ends in millions losing their lives, that’s kind of the point. “The dream is that they can reinvent war – without all the killing.” The “Bomber Mafia” (so named by military peers for their sealed-lip secrecy) were a bunch of borderline-renegade US Air Force pilots who, together with some similarly...