Dinner for One

…alias The Ninetieth Birthday. In Germany, Norway, Sweden and Austria this eleven-minute sketch is shown on TV every New Year's Eve. The little old lady is May Warden and her butler is Freddie Frinton, the accomplished comic drunk who gave the world the phrase "Good evening, ossifer." Bear with them - the comedy is cumulative:

Neighbourhood Rebel

Kevin Williamson of Rebel Inc fame seems to live in the same small network of streets as myself, and drinks in at least one of the same bars. Yet I've never knowingly clapped eyes on him, so bad am I at recognising faces, or so adept is he at dodging behind wheelie-bins when he sees a loony coming.

His blog The Scottish Patient is a daily dose of fierce opinion and often infectious pleasures, plus tons of snaps of national monuments (e.g. Alasdair Gray in a pub). Read some of his poems here.

Colossal

Rebuilding a wartime computer the size of a lorry - and pitting it against a modern PC. (Update: Colossus lost.)

Kipling away frenziedly

A properly full-blooded review by Ferdinand Mount of a new and rewarding-sounding book on Uncle Rudyard.

"I'm bog-standard"

Attorney General Baroness Scotland makes me warm to her.

Joys of Spring

Four strangely assorted male dancers go through their routine in the dressing room before the show - without the women they're meant to be dancing with, and with less than total recall of what their moves are supposed to be:

Clunk, click

Reluctant to link to a story about Sir Jimmy Savile getting mugged - even if he does claim he enjoyed it - but couldn't help noticing he lives in Roundhay.

Given that he is at least two hundred years old, can we be certain he isn't the elderly gent preserved for posterity in Roundhay Garden Scene?

The elusive Great American Novel

Best response I've seen to Norman Mailer's death, by John Walsh.

Young Mr Hari adds a necessary indictment.

Going without

Chastity achieved through "indolence, or mere inattention": Froog waves a flag for Asexualismo.

The Final Few

Charles Wheeler (born 1923) talks to Britain's surviving World War One servicemen.

Great knees-ups of history, 1843

Jane Welsh Carlyle has a whale of a time:

Once I cried out "oh for the love of Heaven let me go! you are going to dash my brains out against the folding doors! " to which he answered---(you can fancy his tone)---"your brains!! who cares about their brains here? let them go!"

Salvador Dali on What's My Line?

Not a hoax, not a spoof: the great surrealist takes part in a TV game show (9 minutes). Trouble is, he sees himself as a universal genius, and therefore replies "Yes" to whatever the panellists suggest he may be doing for a living…

RIP Hilda Braid

…who was Peter Vaughan’s charmingly out-of-it and dim-wittedly benign wife in Citizen Smith.

BBC news report

Guardian / Independent / Telegraph / Times

Open some bubbly

Betjeman "would have marvelled" at the restored Saint Pancras station.

Back from the dead

This news story about a mother who mistakenly identified the dead body of a stranger as that of her missing son, only to have the real son turn up alive and well after the funeral, echoes an episode in the life of Ellen Terry.

Bryan Forbes tells us in his entertaining history of the British acting tradition, That Despicable Race, that at one point in the late 1860s the actress disappeared. Separated from her husband G F Watts, she'd got together with the architect Edward Godwin and they were keeping it quiet, not just on account of the social risks but because her allowance from Watts was hers only "so long as she shall live a chaste life".

What she hadn't bargained for was the discovery in the Thames of the corpse of a girl who so much resembled her that Ellen's father identified it as his daughter's.

Fortunately, word of this reached her and she went hurtling back to the family home to find everyone wearing mourning for her. It was, says Forbes, "surely an incident that Dickens would have savoured."

One or two columnists may revive this tale in the Sunday papers, so don't forget, you read it here first.

Leonard Nimoy sings Bilbo Baggins

Let the nightmare commence:

Tumbleweed

In the wake of Derelict London, another treat for decay'n'desolation fans: Lost America: Night Photography of the Abandoned West.

Ugh, nasty

We have thankfully stopped seeing ethnic minorities as the Not-Us, the Thank-God-We're-Not-Them - and have neatly slotted the white working class into their place.

Johann Hari, defending Jeremy Kyle.

Nose, meet grindstone

Churchill's last surviving wartime personal secretary has died.

Birth of the movies

You thought they started in France with the Lumière brothers in the mid-1890s? So did I.

In fact they began in 1888 in, of all places, Leeds, and here's the evidence: two films shot by Louis Le Prince, each of which runs for two (2) seconds.

This one shows traffic crossing Leeds Bridge:



This one captures four folk milling about in a garden in the Leeds suburb of Roundhay:



Some of the scenes that didn't made it into the final cut:



A sombre postscript

• The lady walking backwards in the garden scene, Sarah Whitley, died ten days later.

• Louis Le Prince himself mysteriously vanished from a train in France in 1890.

• His son Adolphe Le Prince - the young man in the garden scene - was shot dead on Fire Island, New York, in 1902.