FAREWELL TO ARMS

When it wants to be rude the army has a way of falling back on the Alphabet as a weapon.

Paratroopers who jibbed at jumping out of a moving aeroplane carried forever after on their documents  the letters L.M.F. which stood for Lack of Moral Fibre. My lack of moral fibre was too obvious to be remarked. The best I managed was R.T.U. which was Returned to Unit. Quite an achievement on the Berlin Airlift, which the army used as a dump for what it quaintly called Undesirables. More, I was also sent away from airfields at Fassberg, Celle and Wunsdorf in turn before the army ran out of airfields to exile me to and RTUed me to HQ 7^th Armoured Division in Celle.

That was it. I decided to go into military business on my own account. I swapped my tam o' shanter for a beret without a badge, got a fraulein to embroider me a flash to go on my epaulettes which read “Official Army Observer”. Thus bedecked, I presented myself as “civilian attached to the army with the honorary rank, for purposes of rations and accommodation, of sergeant”.

There was a saying amongst the more gullible soldiery:  “You cannot beat the army.” Rubbish. I reckon in my short stay I got the best of three falls.

Certainly the army believed I was a “civilian attached” for nearly a year before the truth came out. Fortunately the RSM was an Irish guardsman with a head of polished bone who only had a vague idea about the work of Public Relations. To him PR equated with Provost. It all happened rather quickly. In the morning I was a layabout and technically a deserter of standing; by lunchtime I was re-kilted, tam o' shantered, brightly polished and Provost Sgt of HQ 7^th Armoured Division. At 19, I was the youngest provost sergeant in the British army and by a mile the most relaxed. My own experience of durance vile disposed me in favour of the prisoners. Mine were allowed evenings out, accompanied by a regimental policeman for whose beer they paid .

The army may have ended its war against the Germans in 1945. I was a still skirmishing against the army until 1949. To be fair, the army won. I was court martialled twice  in the last six weeks of my service, also, as far as I know, a Rhine Army record. Firstly for disobeying an order and being rude to the RSM, secondly for stealing W.D. property. It happened like this. I handed in a second-hand kilt my mother had bought for two pounds, secreting my issue kilt which was eleven and a half yards of black market potential. The RSM had his revenge. 7^th Armoured was cavalry and, so far as I knew, a hundred miles from the nearest Highland regiment. He found an elderly Argyll captain and asked him if the kilt was Government issue.  The Captain did his best. “Of course it is. There is the regimental number,” he said. 

The RSM was determined. “Can you tell from the number when it was issued?"

The officer looked at me with sad apology. “1918,” he said.

I always think the army was hasty in its judgement of me. In turn, it had my deep devotion in all matters other than discipline. It tried so hard to be helpful.

In Kings Rules and Regulations there was an example of how to give evidence which is the funniest prose I have ever read:

"Sir. As I was passing the regimental stables I heard the sound of an ammunition boot coming into contact with the flank of a horse. Proceeding stablewards, I observed 01746 Private Snooks A  kicking a horse, the property of the War Office.

"When I reprimanded him he took forage caps one, also WD property, from his head and dashed it to the ground where he proceeded to jump on it, saying: "You may do what you will, I will soldier no more."

My discharge book read: “Sgt Skidmore was an exemplary NCO.” The “Sgt” was crossed out  and substituted with “Corporal” which in turn was crossed out. The final version read “Private Skidmore was an exemplary NCO.”

Twenty years later there was a sequel. By this time I had become a freelance reporter in Chester, a garrison city. Every Friday I gave lunch to contacts. One week it was senior policemen, the next the Rural Dean and Cathedral Canons ,the next departmental heads of the County Council. But the lunch I enjoyed most was for the two majors who ran the army PR unit. One morning they asked me to do a favour. They wanted to bring in an officer newly posted. They explained they couldn’t find out anything about his history and asked me to try.

Brian, as he insisted I call him, was a half colonel, an extremely amiable man. As we sat over our brandies I asked him what was his favourite Command. His eyes moistened as he recalled: “I was commanding officer of the 3rd Military Corrective Establishment in Bielefeld."

“Know it well Brian,” I told him. "I had the honour to serve under you in 1948.”

“Oh Skiddy,” he said, “were we kind to you?”

That is the odd thing about the army. I had to admit they were.

THE EIGHTH AGE OF ACHE

For the general assemblage of letters no one approaches Shakespeare. He is the Tower of Babel with stained glass windows on every floor. But stand on me, the man is no mathematician. Seven Ages of Man?  EIGHT, and still counting.

Forget mewling and puking, ignore playing hookey. Dismiss bearded like a pard, whatever that is. A sighing furnace I will give him.  A world too wide for his shrunk shank? Oh, if only that were true. Twenty-one airborne stone give him the lie. Spectacles on nose, pouch at side, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. I have done all that. 

Not a word, you notice, about falling over. These days I do it all the time. Show me an escalator and I will show you a prone position. Wet grass and I am as Nureyev in modified leap.

This week in a city of dreaming spires I spiralled, ambushed by a kerb no bigger than an agate stone on the forefinger of an alderman. A crowd scattered before my stately edifice as I crumbled like a mill chimney, or, more accurately, a pot still.

I have a certain expertise in the architecture of falling over. You begin with a fond farewell to the perpendicular, the next and most graceful move is a panic stricken hover. Walking stick at the High Port, cap dislodged, spectacles awry, you plummet like a stout Stuka dive bomber, finally to sprawl like a homing pancake.

And that is when you discover how badly this country needs immigrants. In Peterborough two Indians, a Turk and assorted Poles combined to snatch me from the ravening jaws of an escalator. This week Poles were once again in the vanguard rushing to retrieve me from a recumbent posture. Thanks are also due to a brace of Pakistani ladies and a gentleman I took to be a forgiving Iraqi, which was pretty decent of him when you think what we have done to his country.

VIVE LA DIFFERENCE, say I. If it weren’t for immigrants, I could be lying there yet.

TO THE SKIES WITH LITTLE ARDUA

The only road to Berlin from the West  in 1948 ran through the Russian Zone. When they closed it in a fit of pique there were two options. World War 3 or an airlift. Airlifts were cheaper and the Americans war plans were based on using hundreds of atomic bombs but only about 50 bombs existed in mid-1948 So on balance the airlift seemed favourite.

Berlin only had  36 days' worth of food, and 45 days' worth of coal.  The city would need seventeen hundred calories per person per day. That meant 646 tons of flour and wheat, 125 tons of cereal, 64 tons of fat, 109 tons of meat and fish, 180 tons of dehydrated potatoes, 180 tons of sugar, 11 tons of coffee, 19 tons of powdered milk, 5 tons of whole milk for children, 3 tons of fresh yeast for baking, 144 tons of dehydrated vegetables, 38 tons of salt and 10 tons of cheese. In total, 1,534 tons were needed daily to keep the over two million people alive. Additionally, the city needed to be kept heated and powered, which would require another 3,475 tons of coal and gasoline.So they had to get their fingers out. They succeeded by using  689 aircraft..

The pilots and aircrew came from America, Great Britain Australia  Canada, South Africa and New Zealand. The most popular was a Yank Lieutenant Gail Halvorson. After visiting  children in Berlin, he began dropping candy with mini-parachutes from them as he flew over the city. Soon many pilots were following suit and providing the children of Berlin with treats. There was a stack of mail in Base Ops addressed to "Uncle Wiggly Wings", "The Chocolate Uncle" and "The Chocolate Flier". His commanding officer was upset when the story appeared in the news, but when the Top Brass approved  "Operation Little Vittles".became big news In the end, over three tons of candy were dropped on Berlin, and the "operation" became a major propaganda success. The candy-dropping aircraft were christened "raisin bombers" by the German children.When I arrived at Fassberg on attachment to the 8th USAF it gave me a great story for openers.

The cost of the Airlift was approximately US$224 million (equivalent to approximately $2.19 billion now). The C-47s and C-54s together flew over 92 million miles in the process, almost the distance from Earth to the Sun. At the height of the Airlift, one plane reached West Berlin every thirty seconds. Me and “Flookie” Anderson would like to have done more but our time was taken up arranging to steal one of the C45 Skymaster planes, fly it to the Russian Zone and sell it to the Reds.

Well, I say me and Flookie. Actually we had some help from an ex-IRA man who had found his way into a Highland regiment and an American PFC called Kerr who we thought would do the flying bit, him being in the air force.

Actually that was the flaw. We had everything worked out and then Kerr ruined the whole thing by admitting he couldn’t fly. Flookie was most annoyed. He said “You can’t fly? You are in the bliddy air force, man”

Kerr said he was but he was only a  corporal and you had to be an officer before you were taught piloting. He said he could drive but Flookie said; " What was the use of that. We couldn’t drive the bloody thing. The Russians have closed the bloody road."

I didn’t like it when Flookie got upset because he had a tendency to violence. A couple of nights earlier we were walking passed the war dog compound where Doberman Pinshers were trained to bite people

“See me,Sandy” he said “ I used tae train they dugs”

Flookie was one of those imaginative men who claimed to have done everything and I expressed mild doubts

“ Ye don’t believe me” he said, opening the compound door, dropping to his hands and knees,crawled towards a dozing Doberman and bit it on the paw.

It was like a Disney cartoon. The Doberman leaped to its feet, howling. After all here he was being shown every day how to bite two legged creatures but no one had warned him they bit back.

The Corporal Dog Handler was furious.” He’s just bitten my dog” he said. “ You must put him on a charge”

I said “ Its your dog. You put him on a charge”

“You are the ranking NCO “ he said

I said I am not a real sergeant I am in Army PR and I didn’t know how to put people on charges

He said “Charge him under Section 40 of the Army Act, that covers everything”

So I did. I do not want to go into details of what happened when we appeared before Col the Lord Langford, my Commanding Officer. He was to become my best friend in the years that followed and we have laughed about it. Well he has laughed

 I remember what he said when the Orderly Sergeant read out the charge “Under Section 40 of the Army Act causing damage to WD property, in tat he did bite a Doberman Pincher.“

 I was very shocked. I didn’t know that Lords were allowed to swear like that and what he said about National Service conscripts I could not bear to repeat

HANGOVERS ARE OVER
.

Never marry for love. You will never again win an argument. A week ago I lost the biggest ever.I have given up drink.It has taken me 42 years to cure alcoholism, fortunately with a few failures on the way. But after two dry days I feel I might have been more gainfully occupied

It feels very odd to have this uncomfortable feeling of being well.

 The only consolation was to read again this piece of magic prose by my all time favourite essayist. Bill Connor, “Cassandra” of the Daily Mirror;

“A hangover is when your tongue tastes like a tram-driver's glove.

When your boots seem to be steaming and your eyes burn in their sockets like hot gooseberries.

Your stomach spins slowly on its axis and your head gently swells and contracts like a jelly in the tideway.

Voices sound far off and your hands tremble like those of a centenarian condemned to death.

Slight movements make you sweat, even as you shiver from the deadly cold that is within you.

Bright lights hurt the eyes, and jeering, gibbering people from the night before seem to whisper in your ears, and then fade with mocking horrible laughter into silence.

The finger-nails are brittle and your skin hangs on you like an old second-hand suit.

Your feet appear to be swollen, and walking is like wading through a swamp of lumpy, thick custard.

Your throat is cracked and parched like the bottom of an old saucepan that has boiled dry. The next moment the symptoms change, and your mouth is stuffed with warm cotton wool.

When you brush your hair you are certain that there is no top to your skull, and your brain stands naked and throbbing in the stabbing air.

Your back aches and feels as though someone is nailing a placard to your shoulder blades.

Knee joints have turned to dish water and eyelids are made of sheets of lead lined with sandpaper.

When you lean on a table it sways gently and you know for certain that you are at sea.

Should you step off a kerb you stumble, for it is a yard deep and the gutter yawns like a wide, quaking trench.

You have no sense of touch and your fingertips feel with all the acuteness of decayed firewood smeared with putty.

The nostrils pulsate and smell the evil air.

You believe that you are in a horrible dream but when you wake up you know that it will all be true.

Your teeth have been filed to stumps and are about to be unscrewed one by one from your aching jaw.

You want to sleep, but when you close your eyes you are dizzy, and you heel over like a waterlogged barrel crammed with old, sodden cabbage stalks in the Grand Junction Canal.

When you read your eyes follow each letter to try to spell the words, but in vain – no message reaches your empty, sullen brain.

Should you look at a simple thing like a tree, it will appear that the bark is gradually crawling upwards.

Lights flash and crackle before you and innumerable little brown dwarfs start tapping just below the base of your skull with tiny, dainty hammers made of compressed rubber”

O Death, where is thy sting?”

SERGEANT MAJOR IS A SMOTHER TO ME

The adjutant at my new posting in Germany scratched his head when he read the charge sheet.

“I am a very bewildered officer,” he admitted. “You don’t look violent.”

I could see his point. Wearing ammunition boots, which have thick soles, I am still only 5ft 7 ins tall and in the kilt I look like a chubby reading lamp.

Yet according to the charge sheet I had assaulted six military policemen in the town square in Thetford causing actual bodily harm.

I explained I was just a bystander whilst the square heaved with angry Glaswegians hitting everything in sight including a pillar box mistaken for a red capped military policeman.

“Given the choice,” I said, “who would you arrest?”

He quite saw my point but said his hands were tied. It was a court martial offence. But he advised me not to make a fuss and plead guilty.

“They will see that it’s a trumped up charge and admonish you,” he told me.

I can honestly say that is the last time in the sixty-three years that followed I have taken any notice of good advice.

The court martial board didn’t see there was anything amiss. They awarded me 56 days in No. 3 Military Corrective Establishment in Bielefeld and there I was with a “Staff”, as the warders were known, looking up my backside for smuggled cigarettes.

The 56 days passed pleasantly enough and then I was back in Bad Oenhausen, making for the railway station intending to desert. It being plain the army and I were not made for each other. And that was the second time I heard the Voice From God. This time it was even louder. It came from a Scots Guards Garrison RSM “Jock” Graham who glittered fifty yards away at the end of the street.

Because of the army habit of speaking without spaces between the words I had no idea what he was saying but he did not give the impression he thought I was an asset to the Highland Division. I did catch his offer to rip the red hackle out of my tam-o’-shanter, stick it up my arse and make me hop up and down like a bloody rooster. And I fled through the first door I came to.

And that is how I became a newspaper reporter. The office I found myself in was the HQ of Army Public Relations and when a very amiable company sergeant major asked me what I wanted I said: “A job.”

“Have you any experience of newspapers?”

As it happened, I had. In civilian life I was an apprentice compositor on the Evening Chronicle. I started to explain but I got no further than “Evening Chronicle...” before he jumped up and grabbed my hand.

“A real reporter!  Kenneth will be delighted. Come and meet him…”

Kenneth proved to be the commanding officer. I had moved into another world where officers were called by their first name. Tobe fair Kenneth was no warrior.He had the air of one,no stranger to cosmetics. I later learned he had transferred to a cavalry regiment because they wore black berets which brought out the blue of his eyes

It only took two sentences to welcome me into the unit and then he said: “Just cut along to the QM stores and draw your three stripes. Then Paddy will take you to the sergeants’ mess…”

“A sergeant?” I said, and he got quite huffy.

“You cannot expect to be an officer straight away.”

There were revolving doors at the entrance to the sergeants’ mess but they didn’t revolve half as quickly as the Garrison RSM standing at the bar downing his dram.

Before I could speak, Paddy introduced me.

“SERGEANT Skidmore???” blustered Graham. “SERGEANT Skidmore? It took me three years to make lance corporal.”

After a pleasant luncheon Kenneth gave me my first job. It was the biggest story I have covered from that day to this.

It was the Berlin Airlift.

A BOOK TO START THE NEW YEAR

 Evan Morgan's  story is told in a book that is as good as any to swap for gift vouchers: " Aspects of Evan: The Last Viscount Tredegar " is by Monty Dart and William Cross. It’s a sometimes bewildering scrapbook but, like a rich plum pudding, filled with gold nuggets.

He had a pet parrot that bit both Goering and H.G. Wells. Tredegar shocked his way through Eton, Oxford, Rome, North Africa, Bali, Canada and America. The Bright Young Things of London’s Café Royal Society toasted him in aphorisms. Ogling dowagers indulged him whilst his straight-laced huntin, shootin a’ fishin family, with Royal vestiges, was shaken by his escapades. In the Great War he dodged rat-infested trenches on account of a weak chest. Claiming he was renouncing pleasure and his birthright, he turned to mysticism and Roman Catholicism, studying at Beda College, Rome, whilst acting as a Papal Chamberlain at the Vatican. 

Evan attracted iconic women and saw off two wives. He transformed the austere family pile of Tredegar House in South Wales for rave weekend parties and black magic rituals. Effeminate footmen in powdered wigs received houseguests from Hollywood stars to the Satanist Aleister Crowley.  

Cross has a fine sense of timing. His last book, a biography of Almira, the Countess of Caernarvon, came out when “Downton” was creating TV audience records. The story of the Hon. Evan, an extremely well-connected toff and a tart, has irresistible echoes of Savile.

This controversial book unravels Evan’s chequered life and tells of his amusing court martial in 1943 for offences against pigeons. Evan was in charge of MI 14, the loft of carrier pigeons dropped by parachute into war-torn Europe. His offence was to compromise the birds’ security by showing visiting girl guides the canisters which were attached to their legs in a room hung with maps of pigeon droppings on Occupied Europe. The book contains a verbatim note of the proceedings which is the funniest prose I have read this year. When Evan finally snuffed it in 1949 it was in disgrace. Naturally his terrified (mostly royal) cousins ensured a massive cover up (indeed along lines as wicked and seedy as Savile and Mountbatten.) 

His degenerate life can be measured by the number of posthumous love claims the Tredegar Estate received from those bedded by him. He had the last laugh on all, including the monks of Buckfast Abbey whom he persuaded to give him burial space in their private chapel. He endeared himself to fellow Welshman Lloyd George, who adored Evan’s rakishness, by pretending to admire his mistress, later wife, Frances Stevenson, and so secured a job at No. 10. He rocked more boats than a tsunami: he could never be discreet or silent, or, alas, happy. Aspects of Evan is just a start at unravelling the sad but depraved life of the incomparable Evan. William Cross now plans a follow- up volume next year entitled Not Behind Lace Curtains.

Things are much different now, though one could wish for more literate policemen.

The recent row between the police diplomatic (?) corps and government minister Mitchell establishes a new law of language in which the ultimate obscenity is acceptable whereas to call a man a ‘pleb’ is beyond forgiveness.

Personally I am proud to be a plebeian.

(Latin, plebs) Member of the general citizenry, as opposed to the Patrician, in the ancient Roman Republic. Plebeians were originally excluded from the Senate and from all public offices except military Tribune and they were forbidden to marry patricians. Seeking to acquire equal rights, they carried on a campaign called Conflict of the Orders, developing a separate political organization and seceding in protest from the state at least five times. The campaign ceased when a plebeian dictator (appointed 287 BC) made measures passed in the plebeian assembly binding on the whole community.

Englishman Alun Morgan woke up after suffering a severe stroke speaking fluent Welsh despite having never been to the country for 70 years. That is more than many natural Welsh speakers can claim. The Welsh taught in schools and spoken on Radio Cymru bears little resemblance to the language spoken on the hearth. By law, brochures are printed in both English and Welsh. I wrote a story about a Citizens Advice Bureau in predominantly Welsh-speaking Bangor where the English version of a brochure had to be constantly replaced whereas the official Welsh version, which hardly anyone could understand, remained stubbornly on the shelf. My old pal the Moelfre (Anglesey) lifeboat cox was reproved on Radio Cymru for using the ‘wrong Welsh word’ during an interview. Welsh was Dick Evans’ first language.

THE WAR AND MRS WILLIAMS

Field Marshall Montgomery will have his own memories, but for me the most significant moment of the war came during the bacchanalia which suffused the population on V.E. Day. Mrs Kitty Williams, the wayward wife of our religious neighbour, had her way with me behind our garden shed. The celebrations which followed our atomising of the Japanese were marked in a similar way with my Sunday school teacher. I began to regret there were not more enemies to defeat.

These momentous days began innocently enough when our parents brought tables and chairs into the street and the children worked their way through mountains of Shippon’s Fish Paste sandwiches, strawberry jam butties,  fairy cakes and vast troughs of jelly on which armadas of cake boats with paper sails sailed tranquilly. In the evenings it was the turn of our parents to celebrate with dances under waxed lanterns and Glenn Miller on the gramophones. It was then that Kitty struck. God Bless Her.

Disappointingly, the army seemed less anxious to secure my services. It was 1947 before they summoned me to their colours - and spent the next two years regretting it. I was designated an O. R 1 (officer material) before they really knew me, and less than a year after achieving that proud moment I was undergoing a humiliating physical search for cigarettes, in a place I would not have dreamed of hiding them, as preparation for 56 days in a military prison.

The trouble started within 48 hours of my enlistment when I was designated to take a party of fellow recruits to Chester, 20 miles away, to be fitted with spectacles at Saighton Camp. We had a jolly journey down and we were laughing and joking when we climbed off the bus, but all soon went silent. What I took to be the Voice of God roared “WHO IS IN CHARGE OF THIS F……SHOWER?”

It wasn’t God. It was a huge sergeant whose polished cap brim had been readjusted to flatten his nose and who shone from badge to boots. I would have preferred God.

In the army sergeants manage to make all their words run into one another: “YOUORRIBLELITTLEMANGETTHEMFELLINANDMARCHINASOLDIERLYMANNER!”

He was not very impressed with my attempts. His own were much more impressive. Shivering with fear, it seemed to take less than a minute to reach the Optical block. I was so shaken that when we returned to the railway station I discovered that I had left the travel warrants back at the camp. With my new found authority I ordered several of my men to go back and bring them. Alas, they had picked up the one word indispensable in the army: “F…..off. If you want the f…….travel warrants, you go and get the f……. things.”

So I did. Unfortunately when I returned to the station they had all gone home and I returned to camp alone, carrying 24 travel warrants.The Orderly Officer was obviously impressed. “ F…..  me,” he invited. “You have lost 26 men? We didn’t  f…....  lose that many on D-Day.”

It soon became obvious that the army and I marched to a different tune. We O.R. Ones were given aptitude tests. The most taxing was to assemble a domestic light fitting. I had a picture of preparing to charge a mythical enemy when my C.O told me: “There are Hun cavalry to the right of you, on the left a battalion of Japanese spinners, and ahead a squadron of Prussian artillery. God knows what you can do." “Leave it to me,sir,” I reply. “I will assemble a domestic light fitting.”

What with the prison sentence,  three courts martial  and various little escapades, it was nearly two years before I joined my regiment. The commanding officer carried a Cromach, a long walking stick with a hook on the end, of the kind shepherds used. Try as I might I could not think of any way you could win a war with a flock of sheep, hurling domestic light fittings at a baffled enemy.

GRACE NOTE

At last an addition to the sadly small list of competent BBC interviewers.

Olivia O’Leary is unobtrusive, thoughtful in her choice of questions. Her voice has warmth which envelops both  the audience and the interviewee. Her questions are brief and always to the point and she manages to sound as though she wants to know what the answer will be and is not just waiting for a slice of silence which she cannot wait to gobble up. And she NEVER says “what you are saying is this…” All things considered, I am amazed she got the job.

Many interviews remind me of the time my bookmaker Willy Birchall rang an optical firm for a progress report on the binoculars he had sent for repair. He announced himself “Willy Birchall from Chester” and the girl on the other end said: “Is that a suburb of Manchester?” Proud Cestrian that he was, Willy asked her through gritted teeth if he could speak to a man and he told him: “I have just been talking to your beautiful receptionist.” “How do you know she is beautiful?” the man asked. “There is no other way she could have got the job,” said Willy.

SCARS ON SUNDAY

The most innovative TV producer I met in thirty years as a broadcaster was called Jess Yates. He devised shows that attracted multi-million viewers like “Come Dancing” and launched “Miss World",  but "Stars on Sunday", the ITV show he wrote, produced and presented, was his major contribution to TV. It was watched in its two-year run by 3,500 million viewers. It was the ultimate “God spot” and inspired a series of imitations, among them Harry Secombe’s “Highway” and “Songs of Praise”. It is the only religious programme that had more viewers than “Top of the Pops” and it received fan mail of 2,000 letters a week. 

The Pope agreed to appear on the programme and gave it his blessing. ITV boasted in its glossy brochure:

“Stars On Sunday has succeeded in fulfilling its aims. And more! Today, it attracts a regular viewing audience of 15,000,000, which on occasions has reached 17,000,000, and it never falls far short of the 10,000,000 mark, even in the summer months. In January 1972, when it completed its centenary programme, it celebrated the event by becoming the first ever religious programme to enter the television viewing charts. And during its first year in 1969, over 250,000 requests were received. That figure has well and truly exceeded the 500,000 mark today.

“But probably the strongest testimonial for Stars On Sunday is the list of stars and distinguished people who have appeared on the programme. It includes the Archbishops of York and Canterbury, the Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson, Dame Anna Neagle, Raymond Burr, James Mason, Raymond Massey, Gerald Harper and Bill Simpson - who have all been featured regularly reading extracts from the Bible. Miss Gracie Fields, Miss Violet Carson, Anita Harris, Moira Anderson, Eartha Kitt, Shirley Bassey, Nina, the Beverley Sisters, Sandie Shaw, Harry Secombe, Cliff Richard, Lovelace Watkins, Norman Wisdom, Roy Orbison, Bobby Bennett, Howard Keel and the Poole Family, are just a few of the star names who have graced the programme and added their own interpretations to many well-loved songs.

“Yorkshire Television’s Stars On Sunday has now carved a unique place for itself in television history.”

The show's line-up of stars and the way they returned week after week was impressive. Even more

 impressive was the fact that none of them was paid more than £40, the union minimum for a day’s work of several recordings. No show cost more than £1,000 to produce. The elaborate sets - a palace, a ruined abbey and a country house library - were all borrowed.

Yates’s secret was that he had noted the way tape inserts were used in news bulletins. For “Stars” he taped eight songs or religious readings by every star that appeared, using songs from their repertoire which did not need rehearsal. Then he scattered the tapes through a season of programmes.

Perversely, the Independent Television Authority and its successor the Independent Broadcasting Authority, the controlling bodies of commercial TV, hated the show and loathed its presenter. Although it had no right under the Television Act to interfere with the content of shows, it re-wrote his scripts and finally used a savage newspaper campaign, based on half truths and inspired by a fading TV star Hughie Green, to wreck the show and destroy Yates. 

The News of the World missed a bigger story. Green had an affair with Yates’s wife a year after they were married and fathered her daughter Paula Yates, the wild child who married Bob Geldorf. In a torrent of spite from beyond the grave he boasted of cuckolding his one time friend. Think of him when you watch the rubbish the TV companies rehash over Christmas.

Good Heavens, is it that time already? I am off to watch "It’s a Wonderful Life" and "A Christmas Carol". Such a pity "Henry V" (the Olivier one) is worn out. I watched that film so often I qualified for the Agincourt Cross and was mentioned in despatches for climbing the Town Walls at Harfleur.

Do your best to enjoy Christmas, despite the fact that the next time we meet it will be Year 13. Those Mayans. They never got anything right.

BOMBS AND THE BEEB

We grew up to the sound of enemy bombers.You could always tell the "Jerries" by the way their engines seemed to function in bursts. Odd myths grew. People said you never heard the bomb that hit you, though I used to wonder how they knew because few people were still available for a chat after a bomb hit them. Later we learned to dread hearing the engines of the flying bombs which cut out when they were over their targets, but incendiary bombs never worried us. Flying bombs caused more casualties in my regiment when we occupied Germany and mounted guard on the sites. Two soldiers went blind after drinking the fuel.

My father was in our village police station when two excited children ran in to say there was an incendiary bomb stuck in a tree in the churchyard next door.. The only bombs that worried my father were the landmines, large canisters packed with explosives which were dropped by parachute. Which is what met his eyes when he went to inspect the “incendiary” bomb, swinging like a clock pendulum from the lower branches of a graveyard oak.

My father’s war was brought to his armchair by the British Broadcasting Service. He was addicted to “Auntie”, as the BBC has come to be known, a measure of the way we felt about radio. He listened until midnight when the National Anthem was played. Then, drunk or sober, he stood to attention until the last notes of "God Save the King” died on the air when he switched to the shortwave band to listen to the trawlermen in the North Sea swearing at each other over the ether. It was the novelty. Swearing was something one never heard on the BBC. Now one hears little else and it still shocks me because the BBC held a special place in my childhood. Years later the moment I stepped before a microphone I felt at home. I was in my element. Broadcasting, I found, added an extra dimension to writing. I do not remember ever feeling nervous of a microphone in the way I did every time I was sent out to write a story. I owe that to a peerless broadcaster, Wynford Vaughan Thomas.

He was a war correspondent I had listened to with awe as he broadcast from a bomber over Berlin with anti-aircraft shells bursting all round him, or as he landed with the first wave of troops on D Day. He was later to boast that he led the battle to free the vineyards of Burgundy and Bordeaux. “It's not nerves,” he told me before my first broadcast. "It is your mind summoning your body into action.”

Another friend in those early broadcasting days was Roger Worsley whose father wrote and produced a programme called “ITMA” (It’s That Man Again). It was credited with winning the war. We thought it was the funniest thing in creation and my father even hurried home from the pub to hear it. It was loosely based on a series of characters talking to the star, Tommy Handley. There was Mrs Mop, the cleaner, Colonel Chinstrap, the drunk, and Mr Funf, the spy whose “funny” voice was made by an actor speaking into a glass, a trick schoolboys used, and when his father heard Roger doing it he incorporated it in the show.The programme was recorded weekly in garrison theatres, RAF hangars and Navy mess halls. I listened to a recording this week which came from a ship. Introducing the star, the announcer said: “It’s a funny thing. Every time we visit the Navy he is all at sea.” And Tommy said: “Well, tickle my toe with an anchor” to roars of laughter and tumultuous applause.

During the war the BBC moved its Light Entertainment Unit to Bangor, a seaside town in North Wales
where the only entertainment was a one-legged diver who would dive off the pier to retrieve coins thrown in by holiday makers. Inevitably he appeared on the show as “Dick the Diver” whose roof-lifting catchphrase was “Going down now, sir.”

The invasion of Bangor by arty, colourful ladies of both sexes came as a shock to the chapel-going population. Describing producers of the day, one broadcaster Gilbert Harding said: “They tend to wear corduroys and beards…and the men aren’t much different either.”

One housewife told about her lodger, a man whose kindness had overwhelmed her: “Do you know, Mrs Jones, every Saturday he goes down to the port and finds a lonely sailor. He treats him to a fish supper, then he brings him home and takes him upstairs to let him sleep in his bed. There’s kind for you.”

She was deeply shocked when Mrs Jones told her what the kind lodger was doing. She told the BBC man that she was a bit worried about having strange men coming in the house and would he not do it any more. The next night she heard the BBC man come home and was relieved to hear only one pair of footsteps but when she looked out she saw him giving a sailor a piggy back upstairs.

“Good God,” she told her husband, “he’s bringing home cripples now.”


THE WEIGHT ON MY MIND    

I rather like being twins but you may not be surprised to hear that my recruiting policy has not been wildly popular in the Domus.

Predictably, the reaction of the Head Ferret borders on the explosive. The worst four-letter word available, D I E T, is frequently on her lips. I am a foe of the diet but not, I hope, unreasonable.I have reduced fish and chip luncheons to fish and mushy peas.

My dear friend the late Jimmy Goodwin, Maitre de of the Blossoms Hotel in Chester, suffered a heart attack and was asked by a doctor to confess his drink level. He told him a bottle of gin and tonic and the doctor said that was a lot of tonic. But Jimmy put him right. “Not tonic. Gin,” he said. The doctor said he must give up the bottle a day and he did. He changed to whisky and tonic and had another heart attack. He said to me: “I have cracked it. It’s the tonic that is the common denominator." Not another drop of tonic passed his lips before he died a fortnight later.

Now I am the sort of chap who likes to benefit from diligent research. In the interest of peace in the home I have given up gin and tonic. In its place I am a Vodka Martini sipper. Not just any Martini. My grandson, a Wall Street banker, speaks highly of the New York Martini, and I am indebted to my good friend Brian Hitchen and his chum, a former Capo di Capo Tuti  of the New York Mafia, who have honoured me with the receipt of the Ultimate Martini. It is as follows:

Place ice in a Martini glass, pour over it vodka to the count of ten (I find that counting slowly improves the taste). Add two drops of dry Vermouth and twist peel from a lemon to release the oil, drink and enjoy. In the interest of my diet I have forgone the olive.

I was alarmed to read that a middle-aged man had died of a heart attack attempting Gangnam style dancing at a Christmas party. His doctor warned that though the chances of death are small (I can think of many office parties where death would have been welcome) he advised against taking untypical exercise. He said further: “Let the lady dance round you.” Doctor, any lady who made it round my 60-inch waist would have little energy left for the dalliance which is the only point of such parties.

Sadly the profile of the portly person was dented by the disclosures about the loathsome Cyril Smith MP but we have been more than redeemed by my political hero, the Communities Minister Eric Pickles, who weeps over Italian Opera and on a recent “Desert Island Discs” radio programme described it as “Chicklit”, by a mile the best description of that lovely art.

A SOBER NOTE
I haven’t been bothered about Press Regulation .The print newspaper is to the future of the media what the magic lantern is to Light Entertainment. It will be lucky if it outlives me. However, Lord Levenson has told an Australian audience that he has got his eye on sundry blogs, including, I am sure, Skidmores Island which is already banned in China. So I am forced into the fray.

Our Culture Secretary Maria Miller is paid primarily to go to Covent Garden and other jollies but her expenses are plainly not enough. She has not told Parliament, as required, that she has rented a house from a Tory donor for £6,000 a year below its market price. There is also an inquiry into her £96,000 expenses which include costs of a house she owns in which her parents live.

Very properly the Daily Telegraph decided to publish details of this dubious deal. Only to be warned by Craig Oliver, the Tory Communications Chief, that the article may be poorly timed as “she is looking at Levenson at the moment.” Taxed by the paper, he denied the remark was a threat. I suppose that also applies to Joanna Hindley, the Culture Minister’s adviser, who twice telephoned Daily Telegraph executives to flag up the minister’s role in implementing new press rules.

When I read that MPs' expenses were now back to the level they reached before The Great Row I decided to accept that our lot were just as bad as other European countries. It is not that which worries. It was the total incompetence of this Hoorah Henry Government. I expect the editor of the Telegraph is rubbing his hands in glee at the prospect of getting two stories.
A correspondent puts it beautifully]
Dear Sir, 

Now run this by me again...

A clearly mentally disturbed character who defaces a painting by Mark Rothko, a painter who died by slitting his wrists when the balance of his mind was disturbed, gets two years in prison.

A cynical thieving MP, escapes the prison she richly deserved and gets a supervision order, by pleading that she was mentally stressed.

If you needed any further proof that we are a sick society, where the politicians have the judiciary in their pockets, then this is it.

Yours,

Dai Woosnam

A RATION ALL EXPLANATION

For the Allied Powers 1939-40 were the years of the Phoney War. I took a rather different view. For me it was a fight to the death. I wasn’t bothered that Our Side was being trounced all over Europe, that Dunkirk was a humiliation however much the Prime Spin Doctor Churchill was desperately trying to sell it as a victory. The nightly bombings were exciting and there was always the chance of another sighting of Olive Cobbold’s bosom. But not even that could distract me from my major strategy. I was determined not to be evacuated.

I had an early victory by faking spectacular ill health when, in 1939, all the city children in the kingdom were evacuated to the country, leaving only a hard core of refuseniks behind. What a blissful period that was. School hours were cut to an hour and a half a day and kindly teachers were brought out of retirement to cosset us. The streets seemed knee-deep in desirable shrapnel, even precious parts of downed Nazi bombers.

My parents were wondering which was doing the most damage, Hitler’s Luftwaffe or the mobile anti-aircraft guns which for reasons unclear went from street to street firing so noisily they broke every window in sight. My father said it was just like France in World War One when the Royal Artillery competed with the Germans to see who could kill the most Allied troops. It was decided it would be safer to send me to stay with Aunt Isobel in Blackpool. It only took me a week of tears and tantrums before Aunt Isobel decided if she could have the choice she would send me home and my mother could send her the anti-aircraft gun. What, she asked, is so bad about broken windows?

Somerford Hall was much harder to shed. Somerford Hall was a sort of public school for the working class. It had been a holiday camp before the war - which was the way my father sold it to me. I was a bit suspicious but the feeling was temporarily lulled when we ‘new boys’ gathered at the station and were handed plates of chocolate biscuits whilst the camera man from the Daily Herald took our photographs. I thought this was a good sign because chocolate biscuits were rationed. Alas, when the cameraman finished the teacher collected all the biscuits and put them back in the tin, and I began to plan The Great Escape.

Unfortunately it was hard to find anything to complain about. The Hall was set in the rolling Cheshire countryside by a river. The boys were housed in wooden chalet-like dormitories and the teachers seemed intent on teaching us as little as possible. I searched for several days before I found something to complain about.

The food won by a mile.  Every morning after breakfast I put fried egg and baked beans in an envelope and sent them to my parents so they could see how little we were given to eat. I believe it was the postman who was instrumental in getting me home. If memory serves, he offered to collect me in his van. He said that people were complaining because bits of egg were seeping out of my envelope and coating his letters with albumen.

It was good to be home and, since by this time the other stay at home kids had been farmed out, I had all the shrapnel to myself.

Food was severely rationed. Each person got a weekly ration.  4 ounces of bacon, 4 ounces of sugar, 2 ounces of tea, a shilling’s worth of meat, 2 ounces of butter, one egg, 3 pints of milk.

Every eight weeks we were allowed a tin of milk powder; every month, eight ounces of jam.  Fortunately my policeman father, who was a “speed cop”, was given the job of driving the three-man team of detectives set up to control the Black Market under an Inspector Stainton who had a different interpretation of controlling. To him it meant running it.

Within a very short time our house was stocked with sides of bacon, bolts of cloth, cartons of eggs and huge tins of jam which he shared at very reasonable rates with selected neighbours. Much of the whisky he kept for himself. I developed quite a taste for it and since he marked the level in the bottle I would take my share and then fill it up to the mark with water. To the day of his death he swore the distillers were watering their whisky. The older I got the paler the whisky became.

On the food front the only competition he had was a battalion of American infantry, posted in the village in the run up to D-Day. To my father’s chagrin, they gave away food, cigarettes, chocolates, even bottles of whisky to the families on whom they were billeted. The wives and daughters in the billets suddenly blossomed with silk stockings, and chain smoked. My mother hinted darkly - and perhaps a little enviously - what they were offering in return. It was a toss up whether it was General Eisenhower or my father who waited more anxiously for June 6^th.

OH BEAST ITY

I all but choked on my vodka martini, and my partridge and mushy peas went down the wrong way, when R4 broadcast a “2 way” between two obesity experts in Mexico and Rotherham. It wasn’t so much that, like most female broadcasters, they had voices like cheap scent, nor that if I wanted to conjure up a vision of Hell it would be an even bet between those two cities in which one I would hasten death by over eating.  Though I suspect fish and chips would win easily as a death hastener over tortillas and there was little to choose between massacre by drug dealers or kicked to death by football hooligans.

The programme lacked balance. No voice spoke up for the suffering portly. I am 21 stone, twice the recommended weight for an elderly gentleman, 5ft 8 ins from natty footwear to jaunty cap. You see the point. Whatever computation you use there are now two of me. I am, in a word, twins. Or as Shakespeare prettily put it, a two backed beast.

And there is the rub. Speaking for my other half we should be eligible for two personal allowances for tax purposes. Whereas the single person is allowed four units of alcohol we should be able to claim eight. Six rather than three large vodka martinis would be gratefully received and perhaps a brace of partridge to each cheek.

Be fair. That is all we ask. When I buy a suit I am charged extra for the cloth involved yet justice surely demands I get two suits for one. Two old age pensions would be nice and a £200 fuel allowance seems a bit niggardly when I am keeping a brace of people warm.

A CORNUCOPIA OF GIFTS

Intriguingly, we have been sent a Fortnum and Mason’s Christmas hamper with no clue as to the donor, not even a U NO WHOO to tax the mind. Best of all, my lovely granddaughter-in-law Sarah announced this week that I am once again to be a great-grandfather, or indeed two g.g.f.

I do know one  Lordly F and M regular. He caused quite a stir as a boy when he called in to complain about the lack of jam in a school hamper.

A Jeeves like creature in a frock coat shimmered up to ask if he could be of assistance to the “young gentleman”

“And who might you be” the young gentleman demanded

“I am in charge of this floor”

“ Then I should get it swept. It’s filthy”

TIN HAT TIME

An American reader invites  me to write "Skidmore’s War" to help his fellow countrymen see those years through British eyes. Alas this Britisher's eyes are bleary with age and dissipation and seen through any eyes my war, like the rest of my life, is comedy to the point of farce but I will seize on anything that takes my mind of the coming fester-ivities

SKIDMORE'S WAR

My family fought at Crecy, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Waterloo, in the Boer and Zulu Wars and World Wars One and Two, so I never really forgave Hitler for starting his war when I was only ten and too young to join in; though I had the Martini Henry rifle my Uncle Alby used to despatch Zulus.  In my bed in Manchester I slept with it by my side longing for invasion.

I vividly remember the lovely autumn day in 1939 when our Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told us that Herr Hitler hadn’t written so we were at war. We were sitting round the powerful radio my dad bought so that he could hear the Orkney fishermen - and on one glorious occasion the Queen Mother -,swearing on the ship-to-shore radio. He always reckoned the Queen Mother had a wider vocabulary.

Later in the war we listened nightly to another broadcast from Berlin of Lord Haw Haw, a loquacious traitor, telling us we were going to lose the war. It was quite unnerving because he would find the home addresses of various Britons and tell them there was a special bomb for them which would be delivered within a week.

My father had joined The Royal Scots when he was 15 in 1914. He served  alongside his father and three of his brothers. Another brother was on his way to join them but his train was involved in the Gretna Green train crash and we still have the brass plaque the Government sent to the families of the war dead. Naturally, as an expert, my father took the war very seriously. All families were issued with Anderson air raid shelters, steel huts which families had to erect in the garden. That was not enough for my father. He buried ours three foot deep in a large pit, then covered the pit with a two foot thick ‘roof’ of concrete.

“There you are,” he told me proudly as he posed for a photograph. “Not only bombproof. Waterproof as well.”

Alas, it was also water-tight as we discovered a year or so later when the bombing started and he pushed me in, to find it had become an underground pond and I  bobbed twice to the surface before he was able to grab my shirt collar and drag me out.

The upshot was we spent the bombing years sharing a shelter with Mrs Cobbold and her daughter Olive across the way. I do not remember much about the bombing but will never forget the first sight of a female bosom when Olive undressed in the confined space we shared.

The other benefit of the war was that it taught me a deep and lifelong mistrust of Government. We were told that all our aluminium domestic utensils were needed for melting down to make Spitfires. Park gates and iron railings went to build tanks. After the war the Government came clean. Neither utensils nor park furniture would have been made into weapons. It was the Government's way of getting us involved in the war. I often wonder how much it got for the scrap.

Then there was the matter of carrots. The Ministry of Information announced the reason our fighter pilots could see in the dark was that they were fed exclusively on carrots. Anxious to improve my chances of getting in the Forces I ate piles of carrots a steeple chaser could not jump over. After a week of carrot chewing I waited for darkness, stepped out of the back door and barked my shins on the dustbin. It was only after the war that we discovered the story was invented to use up a glut of carrots.

We spent every night for the next year in the Cobbolds' shelter. We would wait for the sirens to go which were followed by a Niagara of lavatories being flushed. Followed by the shout of newly married Mrs Cooper at  Number 32 to her husband: “Willis, put your trousers on.” It was odd. Whatever time the sirens went they caught Willis trouserless and my mother glanced significantly at Mrs Cobbold who blushed, becomingly.

My mother took a subjective view of the war. She noticed that both Chamberlain and Hitler had moustaches and was proud of the fact that Mr Chamberlain’s was the more militant. She was always convinced that the Head of the Luftwaffe, Marshal Goering, was in the aeroplane that bombed Maycroft Avenue, where we lived, and wondered how anyone so fat could squeeze into a cockpit.

We children thought being bombed every night was great fun and made huge collections of shrapnel and the fins of incendiary bombs. We knew where to look because whenever a shoal dropped our fathers rushed out with stirrup pumps to douse them with water they carried in buckets and frequently spilled in their haste. Usually after they had refilled the bucket the fire had burned out leaving only the fins.

Going to school the next morning brought the other side of warfare. We passed house after house which had suffered a direct hit and some from which the front walls had been sheared off, exposing the rooms behind them with all the furniture, down to the ornaments on the sideboards, still eerily in place.

At school there were more empty desks in the classrooms most mornings as the casualty list mounted. But when school ended we scrabbled through the ruins of our dead friends’ houses looking for shrapnel.

(to be mercilessly continued).

READERS LETTERS

My learned friend Revel Barker, sometime Managing Editor and  Consiglieri to the late  Robert Maxwell of the Daily Mirror and Editor of the European writes:

Because it was said that Jesus was laid in a manger, the animals were simply assumed for the story development - and of course the later artwork.

In fact, in 'Biblical architecture' it was the norm for the animals to be on the ground floor, and the residents upstairs. The animals provided warmth, and handy food, and fresh milk, etc.

In the Bible there's no mention of an inn (no room at the...) or a stable or a cave. Just the manger, to fire the imagination.

As Bob Maxwell once said to me: "We are not in the business of flattering f...... krauts", but a better query for the Pope to have kicked off might be: What has Bethlehem to do with anything?

The plot is that Joseph had to return to the home of his fathers for a census.

Roman records, normally reliably thorough, don't mention a Jewish census any time around the date when BC became AD.

More to the point - a census isn't about where your family came from. It's about how many people live where... in the present day.

In a Roman census, people were counted where they lived.

So for somebody to live in Nazareth, but go to Bethlehem to be counted because that's where his ancestors came from, is nonsense.

Worse, for a man to trek all that way with a heavily pregnant wife is even greater nonsense.

It's about 80 miles, and via belligerent Samaria.

(The Bible doesn't mention a donkey.)

In Roman-Judaic rule, the man would provide the information on behalf of his entire family. Women had nothing to do with it (except to be counted). 

Bethlehem, of course, was put into the story only so that Jesus could be "born in David's City"... and providing the bloodline from David to Jesus.

Joseph was supposedly a direct descendant of King David.

Fair enough.

Except, according to the version that the Pope accepts... he wasn't the blood father of Jesus. So Bethlehem is a Jewish insertion (to provide a Messiah), not a Christian one.

The Christians, of course, call him Jesus of Nazareth.

Not Jesus of Bethlehem.

Perhaps they know more than they're saying.

NOTE TO THE VATICAN: The Pope has Revel’s permission to use the above  in his Christmas Message.

MORE GOOD NEWS

BeWrite Books has left a new comment on your post "BEDTIME STORIES": 

What makes you think your Lusty Ladies won't see the gaslight of night, Skiddy? Said ladies currently lie upon my desk, and I assure you that they'll have a fair doing-to and fully revealed in all their naughtiness almost before you can say Madam Whiplash. There'll just be a different publishing house logo on the editions now. Everyone should have a lusty lady in the library. Bestests. Neil 

A FINAL THOUGHT

The Leveson Inquiry has ended with the expected vilification of the press and the police whirewashed. I am surorised no one has noted that it was the Media who produced the evidence which prompted the inquiry. An earlier reluctant inquiry was curtailed by the Metropoliton police. It was only after the press, led by the Guardian, had made a fuss about the cover up that a new inquiry was set up. The result is that 90 newspapermen and establishment figures are facing possible jail sentences, The News of the World has closed down with the loss of 300 jobs and around £2 million has been paid by newspapers to victims. Proof, surely, that existing law is protection enough?