English writer Dick Clement is 87 years old (right). Together with his writing partner Ian La Frenais (88 years old, left), they created many popular series for British television, namely BBC sitcoms The Likely Lads (1964-66, sadly incomplete in the BBC archives), Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads (1973-74) and Porridge (1974-77). They also did the bulk of the writing on drama Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (1983-86 and 2002). La Frenais created and co-wrote Lovejoy (starring Ian McShane) for the BBC. They also wrote the films Hannibal Brooks (1969) and The Commitments (1991).
Jan Shepard is 95. She was in Elvis Presley films King Creole (1958) and Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966), and Attack Of The Giant Leeches (1959). She appeared on US TV throughout the 50s and 60s - umpteen Westerns, from Rawhide to The Virginian to Gunsmoke to The High Chaparral - until she left the business in 1973.
German actor Horst Janson passed away aged 89. A major TV star in the 70s he's probably best known internationally as the star of Captain Kronos. I'll be listening to Laurie Johnson's wonderful score to commemorate him.
German actor Horst Janson passed away aged 89. A major TV star in the 70s he's probably best known internationally as the star of Captain Kronos. I'll be listening to Laurie Johnson's wonderful score to commemorate him.
US actress Betty Harford is 97. She was in The Wild And The Innocent (1959), Inside Daisy Clover (1965), The China Syndrome (1979), The Paper Chase (45 episodes, 1978-86) and Dynasty (34 episodes, 1981-87),
Here she is (left) as cook Mrs Gunnerson, with Linda Evans in Dynasty (1981).
Former English actress and TV host Susan Stranks is 86. As a child she appeared in films The Blue Lagoon (1949), David Lean's Madeline (1950), The 39 Steps, with Kenneth More (1959) and then TV series Emergency Ward 10 (1961). She was a panelist on the BBC's Juke Box Jury in the 1960s, and then spent six years hosting children's television show Magpie (1968-74) for Thames Television, before creating and hosting her own children's TV show Paperplay (1974-81).
Here she is with Mick Robertson and Douglas Rae hosting Magpie in the early 1970s.
Just the other day I posted some missing names from the world of sports. One of them was Dick Button, the most famous of all American figure skaters from his 1948 Olympic gold medal and over 50 years as a premiere skating analyst on ABC. Well, he has passed away at 95, and this comes on the heels of fourteen members of the US Figure Skating team dying in yesterday's plane crash in DC (itself evoking memories of the death of the entire US Team in a 1961 plane crash). A black week for the sport in general.
And just last week I wrote the following in a memoir (near its conclusion). The context is a program aired the last Saturday in December, 1969. I was thirteen.
But I loved Jim McKay because he always displayed relentless enthusiasm in every broadcast, including this one. Which made the change in one segment so devastating. The latter was devoted to the US figure skating team that was killed in a plane crash in Belgium on its way to the World Figure Skating Championships in Prague, Czechoslovakia. I had never heard before of the incident that took place in February, 1961. The upbeat look remained just that but with a slight, noticeable something at story's conclusion, underscored by his "I will never forget..." and I was moved.
The plane went down in Washington yesterday. Re the timing of what I wrote, this morning my first draft editor emailed, "Creepy...almost a premonition." I'm not arguing with that.
Something similar happened to me the day before the crash. I was exchanging e-mails with a friend who has collaborated with me on buying reel-to-reel tapes on e-bay of rare home recordings of great sports broadcasts (some of which I've posted on my own YT channel) and I was mentioning in passing that the most tragic sports story I had ever read about was that of the 61 Skating team, especially the loss of 16 year old Laurence Owen who had just won the Nationals Championship and made the cover of Sports Illustrated as a rising star who would likely win Gold in 1964. She would have been as a big a name as Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill became in later years but never got that chance. And there's a haunting picture of a charred copy of that issue of Sports Illustrated with her on the cover that was found in the wreckage.
That I would be talking about that just before this crash happened (in which many of the skating team victims came from the same Boston club that most of the 61 team members had been part of) is something I won't forget.
