The Daily Mirror's Fosdyke Saga One

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In 1989 Tidy was dismayed at the arrival of a young new editor, David Thomas, the third in as many years. At 29, Thomas, an old Etonian, had edited the Mail On Sunday’s You magazine, and his brash style – declaring that “Punch could be mega – I mean, mega mega” – was not to Tidy’s liking, and he resigned. The Forsyte Saga, first published under that title in 1922, is a series of three novels and two interludes published between 1906 and 1921 by the English author John Galsworthy, who won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Literature. They chronicle the vicissitudes of the leading members of a large upper-middle-class English family that is similar to Galsworthy's. [1] Only a few generations removed from their farmer ancestors, its members are keenly aware of their status as " new money". The main character, the solicitor and connoisseur Soames Forsyte, sees himself as a "man of property" by virtue of his ability to accumulate material possessions, but that does not succeed in bringing him pleasure. This novel concludes the Forsyte Saga. Second cousins Fleur and Jon Forsyte meet and fall in love, ignorant of their parents' past troubles, indiscretions and misdeeds. Once Soames, Jolyon, and Irene discover their romance, they forbid their children to see each other again. Irene and Jolyon also fear that Fleur is too much like her father, and once she has Jon in her grasp, will want to possess him entirely. Despite her feelings for Jon, Fleur has a very suitable suitor, Michael Mont, heir to a baronetcy, who has fallen in love with her. If they marry, Fleur would elevate the status of her family from nouveau riche to the aristocratic upper class. The title derives from Soames' reflections as he breaks up the house in which his Uncle Timothy, recently deceased in 1920 at age 101 and the last of the older generation of Forsytes, had lived a recluse, hoarding his life like property. Fleur, Soames's daughter from his second marriage, to a French Soho shop girl Annette; Jon's lover; later marries the heir of a baronet, Michael Mont

Naughty, vulgar, downright rude, the rhymes in this book should appeal to children of all ages. By the author of “War Music” and “London in Verse”. His one major regret in his long career was his failure to save Punch from closure, despite trying, with other artists and journalists, to buy it. He drew for the magazine from 1959 but in spite of his best efforts it folded in 1992. A 1949 adaptation, called That Forsyte Woman in its United States release, starred Errol Flynn as Soames, Greer Garson as Irene, Walter Pidgeon as Young Jolyon, and Robert Young as Philip Bosinney.He produced some joyous work in recent years for Barrie Rutter's Northern Broadsides company in Halifax, and Peter Maxwell Davies's St Magnus festival in Orkney, a place he loved as deeply as anywhere in Britain. His Elizabethan comedy Sweet William (2005) for Rutter was a tremendous knees-up set in the Boar's Head, following "wee Willy Shaggers of Stratford town". The radio adaptation starred (among others) Miriam Margolyes, Enn Reitel, Christian Rodska and David Threlfall. In 1983 the strip resurfaced as a series on Radio 2, which Tidy co-wrote with John Junkin. He also adapted the strip for the stage with the playwright Alan Plater. Follow the uproarious antics of the Edwardian Fosdyke family as they work their way out of the mining pits of Lancashire to become rulers of a global tripe empire. An empire that the villainous Roger Ditchely will stop at nothing to try and bring down...

Soames, James and Emily's son, an intense, unimaginative and possessive solicitor and connoisseur, married to the unhappy Irene, who later marries Young Jolyon Winifred, Soames's sister, one of the three daughters of James and Emily, married to the foppish and lethargic Montague DartieBill was a firm family man. Bill married his wife Rosa in 1960, and they had two children, Sylvia and Robert. Sadly, Rosa died in 2019, shortly after he had a stroke.

Separate sections of the saga, as well as the lengthy story in its entirety, have been adapted for cinema and television. The Man of Property, the first book, was adapted in 1949 by Hollywood as That Forsyte Woman, starring Errol Flynn, Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, and Robert Young. In 1967, the BBC produced a popular 26-part serial that dramatised The Forsyte Saga and a subsequent trilogy concerning the Forsytes, A Modern Comedy. In 2002 Granada Television produced two series for the ITV network: The Forsyte Saga and The Forsyte Saga: To Let. Both made runs in the US as parts of Masterpiece Theatre. In 2003, The Forsyte Saga was listed as #123 on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's "best-loved novel". [2] The Fosdyke Saga has been adapted as a TV series (starring Roger Sloman and Sherrie Hewson), a radio serial by the BBC and a stage play. Following The Forsyte Saga, Galsworthy wrote two more trilogies and several more interludes based around the titular family. The resulting series is collectively titled The Forsyte Chronicles. Tidy’s other TV appearances included Watercolour Challenge, Through the Keyhole, Blankety Blank and Countryfile. His radio appearances include 1988 editions of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, when he stood in for Barry Cryer. He also wrote and presented Draw Me, a children’s television series in 13 parts.

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William Edward Tidy was born on October 9 1933 at Tranmere, Birkenhead. His mother was a barmaid, and his father a merchant seaman who left when Bill was a child. His mother crossed the Mersey to Liverpool when the war started, and he was brought up at her corner off-licence near Liverpool FC’s ground and left St Margaret’s School, Anfield, when he was 15. Galsworthy's sequel to The Forsyte Saga was A Modern Comedy, written in the years 1924 to 1928. This comprises the novel The White Monkey; an interlude, A Silent Wooing; a second novel, The Silver Spoon; a second interlude, Passers By; and a third novel, Swan Song. The principal characters are Soames and Fleur, and the second saga ends with the death of Soames in 1926. This is also the point reached at the end of the 1967 television series.

Each book included bizarre settings, such as the rugby game between a Welsh choir and a lady's casual rugby team held in a Salford hotel (the stairs collapsed in the first half), the hunt for the Tripe Naughtee and the unforgettable "Brain of Salford" competition. The jazz-loving, heroically cigarette-smoking, Hull City-supporting Plater was a populist all-rounder with more than 300 assorted credits in radio, television, theatre and films (his screenplay for DH Lawrence's The Virgin and the Gypsy, directed by Christopher Miles in 1970, is probably his best) as well as journalism, six novels, broadcasting and teaching. He was always busy, and always writing. In a short interlude after The Man of Property Galsworthy delves into the newfound friendship between Irene and Old Jolyon Forsyte (June's grandfather, now the owner of the house Soames had built). This attachment gives Old Jolyon pleasure, but exhausts his strength. He leaves Irene money in his will, with Young Jolyon, his son, as trustee. In the end Old Jolyon dies under an ancient oak tree in the garden of the Robin Hill house. A television adaptation by the BBC of The Forsyte Saga, and its sequel trilogy A Modern Comedy, starred Eric Porter as Soames, Joseph O'Conor as Old Jolyon, Susan Hampshire as Fleur, Kenneth More as Young Jolyon and Nyree Dawn Porter as Irene. It was produced by Donald Wilson and was shown in 26 episodes on Saturday evenings between 7 January and 1 July 1967 on BBC2. It was the repeat on Sunday evenings on BBC1 starting on 8 September 1968 that secured the programme's success, with 18 million tuning in for the final episode in 1969. It was shown in the United States on public television and broadcast all over the world, and became the first British television programme to be sold to the Soviet Union. [4] Radio adaptations [ edit ] Plater's agent for many years was the terrifying Peggy Ramsay, whom he memorialised in his Hampstead theatre play, Peggy for You (1999), with Maureen Lipman giving one of her greatest performances, ruling the roost in her St Martin's Lane eyrie with the eccentric hauteur of a mad Russian empress.A lighthearted exploration of the world of football commentary, from that first touch onto the woodwork to getting a result and concentrating on the league. It includes a course of essential terms and phrases for the aspiring football commentator. Plater was once asked how he managed to attract a cast including Dench, Ian Holm (playing the drums in drag), Leslie Caron, Cleo Laine, Billie Whitelaw, Olympia Dukakis, Joan Sims and June Whitfield. "They read the script," he replied, no doubt lighting up another fag. The show was rewritten in diminished form for the theatre, but it wasn't half as good, nor as wonderfully cast. Jazz was the cornerstone of Plater's life. He decamped to Chalk Farm, north London, from Hull in 1984, and virtually lived in Ronnie Scott's jazz club with his second wife, Shirley Rubinstein, from whom he was inseparable. They held their wedding reception on the premises. He prefaced his 2006 autobiography, Doggin' Around – the title, too, of his 1994 film about a crotchety jazz pianist played by Elliott Gould – with an open, explanatory love letter, almost, to Duke Ellington. He was hooked the moment he heard Mood Indigo on his grandparents' wireless set at the age of five: "Something about it made my ears tingle." Main article: The Forsyte Saga (1967 TV series) Susan Hampshire and Eric Porter in the 1967 television adaptation of The Forsyte Saga. Plater was appointed CBE in 2005. His final TV drama, Joe Maddison's War, with a cast including Kevin Whately, Robson Green and Derek Jacobi, is in post-production for ITV.