Will Waspe
was intrigued to read that Paul Fox, ex-controller BBC 1 and now Controller of Programmes at Yorkshire TV, has lured his old colleague DuncanWood to join him up in the dales as head of light entertainment. I doubt, though, whether BBC's Billy Cotton jun. will be joining the lemming-like trek northwards. Cotton it was who was first offered the Yorkshire controller job some weeks back, and he very properly consulted his then BBC boss, Fox, as to whether he should take it. Oh no, said Fox, no prospects, terrible restrictions, don't touch it with a mike boom. Cotton didn't. When Fox himself accepted the job some days later, he had the unenviable task of explaining to Cotton why he had leapt at the offer he had just advised him, Cotton, to turn down. Would I had been a Waspe on the wall to overhear that little conversation.
Titillation
I always used to think that those in charge of London Transport's poster advertising were almost unique in their naivete: the smallest hint of a female breast, and out came the paint pot or the strategically placed sticker lest London's commuters should be turned into rampaging sex fiends; all this while artwork of grossly obscene phallic suggestiveness or mind-dulling violence was passed unchanged and usually rewarded with the free-lance graffitical emendations it richly deserved. Now that London Transport is running a huge poster campaign for the sleazy Penthouse ("Take me, 12 times a year," though one might have supposed that even a Penthouse reader might have managed a bit more than that) and for Forum, that corrspondence course for the sexually incompetent, naivete will' no longer do — this is a case, surely, of rank hypocrisy.
'Bonne off
General post in the dance world, just in case anyone cares. Royal Ballet New Group loses Patricia Ruanne, Kerrison Cooke and Paul Clarke to Festival Ballet; apparently they want to dance the classics, and they surely will with Festival until they come out of their Fokine ears. Just to keep things tidy, Festival's Alan Dubreuil joins the Royal, and Nona Telford and Michael Ho are part of a reputedly vast exodus from peryl Grey's dwindling troupe. More important, Peter Brownlee, the administrator who has kept Festival together almost single-handed for years, is off. Now that is a loss.
Previous page
