#Clive Dunn

[quotesfrommyreading]

Clive Dunn, as he is now better known, will for many people always be Corporal Jones, Dad's Army excitable veteran of imperial wars, but in 1941 he was just twenty-one and a stretcher-bearer and orderly for Captain Eden (cousin of Anthony). He had been on the run for weeks and was frail and suffering from dysentery when he was captured. Although the Germans who caught him were friendly, even sharing their last packet of cigarettes with him, he and thousands of other British, Indian, Yugoslavian and Palestinian prisoners were then taken to barracks in Corinth, 50 miles south of Athens, where SS guards punished anyone who failed to salute them properly. During the day he sought out slit trenches to escape from the searing heat and at night he shivered in the icy dormitories. Daily rations consisted of two or three bits of water biscuit and a quarter of an inch of olive oil; his friend who had managed to hang on to his gold engagement ring exchanged it for part of a loaf of bread.

Their clothes were baked for one or more hours in huge ovens delivered to the camp. Then they were ordered to march naked several miles to the sea, past women who pulled their gawping children inside. 'For some, this was probably the most degrading moment of their lives,' Dunn wrote later. At the beach a hose fired liquid carbolic at their groins and they ran into the sea to relieve the discomfort. The only sign of defiance left to them was to sing 'Tipperary' as they marched back, still naked, to their tattered clothes. The heat had weakened the seams of Dunn's uniform and the sleeves immediately fell off, making him feel 'more ridiculous than ever'.

From Corinth they were moved back to Salonika. One day they 'staggered' thirty miles in the blazing heat and a soldier Dunn had been treating collapsed and died; three guards died from heat exhaustion. They left Greece in cattle trucks, taking it in turns to stand or sit, and relieved themselves in one petrol can; a second can contained a small quantity of water for drinking. Light and air crept in through one small, barred window near the roof bringing clues as to their whereabouts – the cool mountain air and smell of pine trees – and the time of day.

'The surrending of physical privacy became a habit – everyone suffered from diarrhoea and the petrol tin was continually full to the brim with germ-laden liquid faeces.' Emptying it out of the window was a hazardous operation that usually left the men below soaked by its noxious contents.

  —  The Barbed-Wire University: The Real Lives of Allied Prisoners of War in the Second World War (Midge Gillies)

[gatutor]

Irene Dunne-Clive Brook "If i werre free" 1933, de Elliott Nugent.

[dialfrown]

hii dialtown AU???? thing?? kinda just adds me ocs. characters u can ask gingi oliver randy jerry norm karen and my ocs CJ Chino Leah Marvin (Marv) Alexander Tobey Nelson Waverly Levia

[justforbooks]

The actor Ian Lavender, who has died aged 77, played the awkward, impulsive Private Frank Pike in the long-running BBC comedy Dad’s Army, and was the last surviving member of the cast who portrayed Captain Mainwaring’s Home Guard platoon.

Most of the part-time soldiers depicted in the series, which ran from 1968 to 1977, were exempted from call-up to the army during the second world war because of advanced age. Pike, their junior in most cases by several decades, had been excused because of his weak chest, and always wore the scarf insisted upon by his widowed mum, Mavis.

In spite of their foibles and foolishness, Mainwaring’s pomposity and the frequent slapstick sequences, the heroes of Dad’s Army were courageous men prepared to give their lives to protect their country, and it was this innate nobility that lifted the series, written by David Croft and Jimmy Perry, to greatness. At its peak it had more than 18 million weekly viewers, and is still regularly rerun.

There were many catchphrases – Lance Corporal Jones’s “Don’t panic!”, Private Frazer’s “We’re doomed!” and Sergeant Wilson’s languid “Do you think that’s wise, sir?” – and the best-remembered belongs to the gangster movie-fixated Pike, though he did not utter it himself: Mainwaring’s weary “You stupid boy!”

Pike was also involved in Dad’s Army’s most frequently quoted joke. “What is your name?” snarls the German U-boat commander who has been captured by the platoon. “Don’t tell him, Pike,” shouts Mainwaring. There was often great subtlety in the inter-platoon relationships, best exemplified by that of Pike and Wilson (John Le Mesurier). Wilson, whom Pike calls Uncle Arthur, is Mrs Pike’s lodger, and is forever fussing around the boy, making sure his scarf is on tight and gently steering him away from danger. It was not until the end of the final series that Lavender asked Croft if “Uncle Arthur” was actually Pike’s father. “Of course,” replied Croft.

Born in Birmingham, Ian was the son of Edward, a policeman, and Kathleen (nee Johnson), a housewife; his mother often took him to see pantomimes, variety shows and Saturday morning cinema, which gave him his first ambitions to become an actor. After performing in many school drama productions at Bournville boys’ technical school he was accepted, with the help of a grant from the city of Birmingham, by the Bristol Old Vic acting school. Clearly far from being a stupid boy, he passed 12 O-levels and four A-levels. “The only reason I don’t have a degree is because I went to drama school,” he said years later.

He made his first television appearance soon after he graduated from Bristol in 1968, playing an aspiring writer whose family want him to get a proper job, in Ted Allan’s play for the Half Hour Story series, Flowers at My Feet, with Angela Baddeley and Jane Hylton.

In the same year, he was cast as Pike, joining the seasoned veterans of comedy and the classics Le Mesurier, Arthur Lowe (Mainwaring), Clive Dunn (Jones), John Laurie (Frazer), James Beck (Private Walker), Arnold Ridley (Private Godfrey) and Bill Pertwee as Air Raid Warden Hodges. Janet Davies played Mrs Pike.

While Dad’s Army catapulted Lavender to national fame at the age of 22, the role of Pike haunted him for the rest of his long career. Not that he had any complaints.

Asked in 2014 if he got fed up with a lifetime of having “stupid boy” called out to him in the street, he replied: “I’m very proud of Dad’s Army. If you asked me ‘Would you like to be in a sitcom that was watched by 18 million people, was on screen for 10 years, and will create lots of work for you and provide not just for you but for your children for the next 40-odd years?’ – which is what happened – I’d be a fool to say ‘Bugger off.’ I’d be a fool to have regrets.”

After Dad’s Army, Lavender made further television appearances, including Mr Big (1977), with Peter Jones and Prunella Scales, and in 1983 he revived Pike for the BBC radio sitcom It Sticks Out Half a Mile, a sequel to Dad’s Army, but it was not a success and lasted only one series. In contrast, the original series, with most of the regular cast, had been rerecorded for radio from 1974 to 1976 and proved very popular.

He was also in the BBC TV series Come Back Mrs Noah (1977-78), co-written by Croft; and played Ron in a new version of The Glums (1979) for London Weekend Television, adapted from Frank Muir and Denis Norden’s original radio scripts of the 1950s. There were more smallish television parts in the 80s, such as two episodes of Yes, Minister, and bits in Keeping Up Appearances, Goodnight Sweetheart, Rising Damp and Casualty. He starred in the unsuccessful BBC series The Hello Goodbye Man in 1984 and provided the lead voice in the children’s cartoon series PC Pinkerton in 1988.

He was also in various quiz shows, including Cluedo (1990). On Celebrity Mastermind, broadcast on BBC1 on New Year’s Day 2009, when the presenter John Humphrys asked him to state his name, a fellow contestant, Rick Wakeman, shouted: “Don’t tell him, Pike!”

In addition to co-starring in the first film version of Dad’s Army (1971), he appeared in various low-level British sex farces of the 1970s, including Confessions of a Pop Performer (1975), Carry on Behind (1975), Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1976) and Adventures of a Private Eye (1976). He also starred in the thriller 31 North 62 East (2009). “I was close to getting two very big movies in the 70s,” he said without rancour in 2014, “but in the end they said: ‘We can’t get past Private Pike.’”

Lavender’s second best-known role was his delicate and sympathetic portrayal of Derek Harkinson, Pauline Fowler’s gay friend, in the BBC soap EastEnders from 2001 to 2005, and again in 2016-17.

In addition to various live Dad’s Army productions, his stage work included the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Merchant of Venice, directed by Peter Hall and with Dustin Hoffman as Shylock in 1989, touring as the Narrator in The Rocky Horror Show in 2005, Monsignor Howard in the London Palladium production of the musical Sister Act in 2009, The Shawshank Redemption at the Edinburgh fringe in 2013, and his own one-man show of reminiscences, Don’t Tell Him, Pike.

Lavender had a great admiration for Buster Keaton, and was an expert on the silent comedian’s career. In 2011 he introduced Keaton’s Sherlock Jr (1924) at the Slapstick silent comedy festival in Bristol, and commented that finding Keaton’s grave in the Fountain Lawns cemetery in Hollywood had been one of his life’s special moments.

In 2016 a new cinema version of Dad’s Army was released, with Toby Jones as Mainwaring and Bill Nighy as Wilson. Private Pike was played by Blake Harrison, and Lavender was promoted to play Brigadier Pritchard. In a touching in-joke, his younger face was also seen on an advertisement poster in a street scene.

Lavender is survived by his second wife, Miki Hardy, whom he married in 1993; by his sons, Sam and Daniel, from his first marriage, to the actor Suzanne Kershiss, which ended in divorce; and by two granddaughters.

🔔 Arthur Ian Lavender, actor, born 16 February 1946; died 2 February 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[garadinervi]

All Keyboards are Legitimate: Versions of Jules Laforgue, Edited and introduced by Suzannah V. Evans, Guillemot Press, Cornwall, 2023 (book launch here)

Feat.: Kayo Chingonyi, Isabel Galleymore, Holly Corfield Carr, Christopher Reid, Ella Frears, Jessica Mookherjee, Cliff Forshaw, Degna Stone, J. R. Carpenter, Bhanu Kapil, Maurice Riordan, Gillian Allnutt, Gareth Reeves, Kayo Chingonyi, Jennifer Wong, Walter Conrad Arensberg, Khairani Barokka, Rowan Evans, Mark Ford, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Jay Gao, Hannah Hodgson, Nick Makoha, Hannah Sullivan, Will Harris, Katharine Towers, Jennifer Lee Tsai, Niall Campbell, Zoë Skoulding, Beverley Bie Brahic, Hart Crane, Francesca Bratton, Romalyn Ante, Suzannah Evans, Emily Hasler, Angela Leighton, Nancy Campbell, Seán Hewitt, Harriet Tarlo, L. Kiew, Rishi Dastidar, Tolu Agbelusi, Mina Gorji, Helena Fornells, Marina Martino, Jenna Clake, Sam Bootle, Gail McConnell, Douglas Dunn, S.K. Perry, Eley Williams, Tina Kover, Clive Scott

[peggsmackdown]

everyone, gather your propaganda! come and meet your tourney entrants:

dr. russel fell

shaun riley

nicholas angel

tim bisley

graeme willy

montgomery "scotty" scott

jack b. nife

buck wild

benji dunn

meredith houseman

the editor

liz

dianne

daisy steiner

jools

the andes

ed

clive gollings

oliver chamberlain

sam chamberlain

steven prince

peter page

andy knightley

dave (truth seekers)

dave (boat that rocked)

dr. nandor fodor

sidney young

flynn (ice age)

bruce garrett (cuban fury)

jack (man up)

charlie wolfe

[pulpsandcomics2]

Speed Adventure Stories     July 1944

Sea-Lubber M’Shane by Clive Trent

Scorched Earth  by E. Hoffman Price

A Drifter Can Die by Larry Dunn

Red Rubber by Felix Webb

Donovan’s Island by Hugh B. Cave

[leanstooneside]

Diving shoulder block

1. Peter Facinelli's faltering eyebrow

2. Michelle Trachtenberg's frugal eyebrow

3. Ludacris's melodic eyebrow

4. Keira Knightley's illustrative eyebrow

5. Leelee Sobieski's aligned eyebrow

6. Chris Cuomo's chivalrous eyebrow

7. Fernando Alonso's flawed eyebrow

8. Malin Akerman's networked eyebrow

9. Ryan Dunn's unwary eyebrow

10. Mariah Carey's semiautomatic eyebrow

11. Whitney Port's presidential eyebrow

12. Daniel Radcliffe's trusting eyebrow

13. Seann William Scott's pricier eyebrow

14. Carson Daly's nail-biting eyebrow

15. Jennifer Connelly's idealistic eyebrow

16. Michael Jackson's modernized eyebrow

17. Brad Paisley's low-carb eyebrow

18. Hugh Laurie's unmasked eyebrow

19. Cameron Diaz's commuting eyebrow

20. Terrence Howard's restrict eyebrow

21. Chris Pratt's all-round eyebrow

22. Jerry Seinfeld's folic eyebrow

23. Ana Ortiz's slender eyebrow

24. Clive Owen's stainless eyebrow

25. Kirsten Dunst's defective eyebrow

26. Sean Lennon's rubber eyebrow

27. John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s possible eyebrow

28. Viola Davis's penal eyebrow

29. Ed Westwick's boundary eyebrow

30. Kirstie Alley's specific eyebrow

31. Selena Gomez's accountant eyebrow

32. Joel McHale's luckless eyebrow

33. Amy Adams's disfigured eyebrow

34. LeAnn Rimes's mastered eyebrow

35. Shania Twain's beaten eyebrow

36. Aaron Carter's doable eyebrow

37. Elin Nordegren's dazzled eyebrow

38. Alyssa Milano's picturesque eyebrow

39. Lindsey Vonn's willing eyebrow

40. Boo Boo Stewart's no-fly eyebrow

41. DJ AM's shivering eyebrow

42. Kat Graham's foolish eyebrow

[slackville-records]

Behind The Music

Laura Nyro

She was not only an engaging performing, her songs were covered by everyone from Barbra Streisand to Three Dog Night

Writer and Music Historian John Einarson remembers the great singer & songwriter Laura Nyro on her birthday!

Born on this date, October 18, 1947, Laura Nyro (born Laura Nigro in the Bronx, NY), singer songwriter. She achieved critical acclaim with her own recordings, particularly the albums Eli and the Thirteenth Confession (1968) and New York Tendaberry (1969), and had commercial success with artists such as Barbra Streisand and The 5th Dimension recording her songs. Her style was a hybrid of Brill Building-style New York pop, jazz, rhythm and blues, show tunes, rock, and soul. Between 1968 and 1970, a number of artists had hits with her songs: The 5th Dimension with "Blowing Away", "Wedding Bell Blues", "Stoned Soul Picnic", "Sweet Blindness", and "Save the Country"; Blood, Sweat & Tears and Peter, Paul and Mary, with "And When I Die"; Three Dog Night and Maynard Ferguson, with "Eli's Comin' "; and Barbra Streisand with "Stoney End", "Time and Love", and "Hands off the Man (Flim Flam Man)".

Nyro's best-selling single was her recording of Carole King and Gerry Goffin's "Up on the Roof". For a time in the latter 60s her career was managed by a young David Geffen (photo below) who set up a publishing company for Nyro's songs and got her signed to Columbia Records after Nyro auditioned for Clive Davis in her apartment.

In late 1996, Nyro, like her mother before her, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. After the diagnosis, Columbia Records prepared a double-disc CD retrospective of material from her years at the label. The company involved Nyro herself, who selected the tracks and approved the final project. She lived to see the release of Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best of Laura Nyro (1997), and was reportedly pleased with the outcome. She died of ovarian cancer in Danbury, Connecticut, on April 8, 1997, at 49.

Nyro's influence on popular musicians has also been acknowledged by such artists as Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Tori Amos, Patti Smith, Kate Bush, Janis Ian, Diamanda Galas, Bette Midler, Rickie Lee Jones, Elton John, Jackson Browne with whom she had a romantic relationship in the late '60s, Alice Cooper, Elvis Costello, Cyndi Lauper, Todd Rundgren, Steely Dan, Melissa Manchester, Lisa Germano, and Rosanne Cash. Todd Rundgren stated that once he heard her, he "stopped writing songs like The Who and started writing songs like Laura." Cyndi Lauper acknowledged that her rendition of the song "Walk On By", on her Grammy Award-nominated 2003 cover album At Last, was inspired by Nyro. Elton John and Elvis Costello discussed Nyro's influence on both of them during the premiere episode of Costello's interview show Spectacle. When asked by the host if he could name three great performer/songwriters who have largely been ignored, he cited Nyro as one of his choices. Elton John also addressed Nyro's influence on his 1970 song "Burn Down the Mission", from Tumbleweed Connection, in particular. "I idolized her," he concluded. "The soul, the passion, just the out and out audacity of the way her rhythmic and melody changes came was like nothing I've heard before."

A biography of Nyro, Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro, written by Michele Kort, was published in 2002 by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press.

One of the finest singer/songwriters ever.

Photo Laura Nero Collection

[quotesfrommyreading]

Since the Germans concentrated their efforts on those men most likely to know anything of strategic importance – high-ranking officers or airmen – POWs such as Clive Dunn, Andrew Hawarden and my father were probably spared too gruelling an interrogation. Quizzing the enemy also became less of a priority when the Germans were struggling to cope with large numbers of prisoners, as in the summer of 1940.

A typical RAF prisoner, however, was whisked off to a special transit camp, Durchgangslager Luftwaffe – Dulag Luft, for short. If he was unlucky, the Gestapo might question him or he might be threatened with such an ordeal. Some airmen were given bogus Red Cross forms to complete in the hope that they might reveal more information than was strictly necessary: the type of aeroplane and where they had set off from were particularly useful. All prisoners should have been aware that they were only required to provide their name, rank and number – a holy trinity that muy father, given the correct prompt, would fire off with bullet-like speed decades after he had left the army. The Ministry of Information provided a film called Information, please that warned the RAF what to expect should they end up in enemy hands. The narrator spoke with a thich German accent and described, from the enemy's point of view, the sort of details that would be most useful and the tactics used to obtain them. The film showed the POW arriving in camp and being interviewed by a series of German stereotypes who might easily have secured bit parts in the action films that were later made about the war. Some airmen were equipped with silk scarves with maps printed on them and miniature compasses and a few, but by no means all, received lectures on escape tactics, including advice that they should try to give their guards the slip before they reached their POW camp, rather than wait until they were behind barbed wire, deep in enemy territory.

  —  The Barbed-Wire University: The Real Lives of Allied Prisoners of War in the Second World War (Midge Gillies)

[metaleterno]

El pasado 4 de diciembre en la ciudad de Quito Ecuador en el marco del #Quitofest se presentó la leyenda del metal @venom ofreciendo un emotivo show totalmente impresionante paseándose por su amplia discografía y haciendo brillar su extrema calidad que nos regalan hace 43 años. Material cortesía de nuestro equipo en Ecuador. @enmanuelochoa Venom es una banda británica pionera del metal extremo formada en Newcastle, Inglaterra en 1979. Originalmente formada como un quinteto por los guitarristas Conrad "Cronos" Lant y Jeffrey "Mantas" Dunn, el batería Tony "Abbadon" Bray, el vocalista Clive "Jesus Christ" Archer y el bajista Alan Winston. #venom #blackmetal #recital #recitalesmetal #quitofest #ecuador #ecuadormetal #metaleternopresentes (en Quito,ecuador) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cl2jjUAN26H/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[oldbumpy]

UK Chart Hits - 1970

Clive Dunn - Grandad (28 weeks in chart peaking at No. 1)

[the-casbah-way]

i just found my new favourite photo

[all-action-all-picture]

Clive Dunn, Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier.

They don't like it up 'em.

[ivovynckier]

Lance Corporal and veteran of the British Empire Jack Jones (Clive Dunn) is a butcher. Still, I'm confident he's not the butcher of Bucha.