#Robert Montgomery on the Radio

[cladriteradio]

Here are 10 things you should know about Robert Montgomery, born 120 years ago today. He was a talented and versatile actor who went on to also produce and direct.

[lesbiancolumbo]

the thing about lux radio theatre that i love is that sometimes it's an adaptation of a movie with the actors who made that movie famous and it is amazing (like only angels have wings or it happened one night or one way passage) and sometimes it is an adaptation of a famous movie with two completely different actors taking a spin at it, and it is so refreshing to see and most of the time it's even better. today i listened to his girl friday with claudette colbert and fred macmurray and they held their own against the cary/roz pairing for sure! here comes mr. jordan with cary in the robert montgomery role was also amazing. it's really fun watching other actors get to take on these famous parts and try and make them their own while still staying faithful to the story we all love

[pwmovz]

hcs + josie

give me a character and i’ll give you 10 headcanons ; josephine montgomery driscoll

seu sonho de criança sempre foi morar em uma casa bem grande no meio do nada, com um jardim enorme, rodeado por florestas e um lago - ainda não realizou esse sonho, mas não é difícil achá-la procurando esse tipo de propriedade no google.

nunca imaginou que se tornaria uma escritora best seller - na verdade, ela é formada em administração e era gerente de uma empresa de tecnologia, escrevendo apenas por diversão e para si. foi só quando elias nasceu que ela viu uma possibilidade de seguir carreira com a escrita. quando pequeno, elias exigia que ela contasse a mesma história antes de dormir, e todos os dias josephine acrescentava ou mudava algo, para o deleite do pequeno.

josephine publica seus livros sob o nome "josie mont", e entre seus maiores sucessos estão os livros a historia secreta, nona casa e o impulso, este ultimo que gerou certa polemica ao ser lançado, pelo fato de ser mãe.

josie escreveu seu primeiro manuscrito em apenas três meses, e depois o jogou completamente no lixo - nem robert conseguiu ler. se questionava constantemente se aquilo seria o certo para a sua vida, e depois de se afastar do oficio por um tempo, voltou a escrever o que viria a ser seu primeiro livro publicado: rede de sussurros.

abriu uma caixa postal e todas as semanas vai lá retirar cartas e presentes deixado por seus fãs, e sempre acaba encontrando algumas coisas bizarras entre os presentes - certa vez recebeu um dente humano.

elias, cecilia e oliver são sua razão de viver. ser mãe nunca foi seu sonho de vida ou sua prioridade, mas depois que seus filhos nasceram, tudo mudou, e ter passado a trabalhar de casa só intensificou sua conexão com os pequenos. assim que a relação com robert começou a complicar, seu maior receio de conversar com o marido era por não saber como o resultado da conversa influenciaria nos filhos.

josephine odeia estar sozinha e odeia silencio. antes de ter os filhos, quando robert estava de plantão, costumava deixar o radio ligado bem alto, não importava o que estivesse passando, só para ter a sensação de que não estava sozinha em casa.

tinha a mania de entrar em livrarias e autografar seu livros em segredo - inclusive, já quase foi expulsa de uma, o atendente alegando que ela estava avariando os livros - felizmente, sua foto estampava a orelha do livro. depois desse acontecimento, sempre avisa antes de fazer isso.

ama estar ao ar livre, e sempre que pode, organiza acampamentos e picnics para a família toda. uma vez alugou um barco e decidiu que todos da família iriam aprender a pescar, mas o passeio não durou muito pois elias acabou ficando enjoado.

josie fez aulas de dança de salão desde quando era bem nova, e se considera até que decente na arte - não é boa o suficiente para ganhar competições, mas esse nunca foi seu objetivo, e sim exercitar o corpo e se divertir.

[whileiamdying]

Tony Bennett, Jazzy Crooner of the American Songbook, Is Dead at 96

From his initial success at the Paramount in Times Square through his generation-spanning duets, his career was remarkable for both its longevity and its consistency.

By Bruce Weber

July 21, 2023

Tony Bennett, a singer whose melodic clarity, jazz-influenced phrasing, audience-embracing persona and warm, deceptively simple interpretations of musical standards helped spread the American songbook around the world and won him generations of fans, died on Friday at his home of many decades in Manhattan. He was 96.

His publicist, Sylvia Weiner, announced his death.

Mr. Bennett learned he had Alzheimer’s disease in 2016, his wife, Susan Benedetto, told AARP The Magazine in February 2021. But he continued to perform and record despite his illness; his last public performance was in August 2021, when he appeared with Lady Gaga at Radio City Music Hall in a show titled “One Last Time.”

Mr. Bennett’s career of more than 70 years was remarkable not only for its longevity, but also for its consistency. In hundreds of concerts and club dates and more than 150 recordings, he devoted himself to preserving the classic American popular song, as written by Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Duke Ellington, Rodgers and Hammerstein and others.

From his initial success as a jazzy crooner who wowed audiences at the Paramount in Times Square in the early 1950s, through his late-in-life duets with younger singers gleaned from a range of genres and generations — most notably Lady Gaga, with whom he recorded albums in 2014 and 2021 and toured in 2015 — he was an active promoter of both songwriting and entertaining as timeless, noble pursuits.

Mr. Bennett stubbornly resisted record producers who urged gimmick songs on him, or, in the 1960s and early ’70s, who were sure that rock ’n’ roll had relegated the music he preferred to a dusty bin perused only by a dwindling population of the elderly and nostalgic.

Instead, he followed in the musical path of the greatest American pop singers of the 20th century — Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra — and carried the torch for them into the 21st. He reached the height of stardom in 1962 with a celebrated concert at Carnegie Hall and the release of his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” And though he saw his popularity wane with the onset of rock and his career went through a trough in the 1970s, when professional difficulties were exacerbated by a failing marriage and drug problems, he was, in the end, more than vindicated in his musical judgment.

“I wanted to sing the great songs, songs that I felt really mattered to people,” he said in “The Good Life” (1998), an autobiography written with Will Friedwald.

It’s hard to overstate Mr. Bennett’s lasting appeal. He was still singing “San Francisco” — which led many people to think he was a native of that city, though he was actually a through-and-through New Yorker — more than half a century later. He sang on Ed Sullivan’s show and David Letterman’s. He sang with Rosemary Clooney when she was in her 20s, and Celine Dion when she was in her 20s.

He made his film debut in 1966, in a critically reviled Hollywood story, “The Oscar,” playing a man betrayed by an old friend. And though he did not pursue an acting career, decades later he was playing himself in movies like the Robert De Niro-Billy Crystal gangster comedy “Analyze This” and the Jim Carrey vehicle “Bruce Almighty.” He was 64 when he appeared as a cartoon version of himself on “The Simpsons.” He was 82 when he appeared on the HBO series “Entourage,” performing one of his trademark songs, “The Good Life.”

A lifelong liberal Democrat, Mr. Bennett participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, and, along with Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr. and others, performed at the Stars for Freedom rally on the City of St. Jude campus on the outskirts of Montgomery on March 24, the night before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the address that came to be known as the “How Long? Not Long” speech. At the conclusion of the march, Viola Liuzzo, a volunteer from Michigan, drove Mr. Bennett to the airport; she was murdered later that day by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Mr. Bennett also performed for Nelson Mandela, then the president of South Africa, during his state visit to England in 1996. He sang at the White House for John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, and at Buckingham Palace at Queen Elizabeth II’s 50th anniversary jubilee.

An ‘Elusive’ Voice

He won his first two Grammy Awards, for “San Francisco,” in 1963, and his last, for the album “Love for Sale,” with Lady Gaga, last year. Altogether there were 20 of them, including, in 2001, a lifetime achievement award. By some estimates, he sold more than 60 million records.

The talent that spawned this success and popularity was not so easy to define. Neither a fluid singer nor an especially powerful one, he did not have the mellifluous timbre of Crosby or the rakish swing of Sinatra. If Armstrong’s tone was distinctively gravelly, Mr. Bennett’s wasn’t quite; “sandy” was more like it. Almost no one denied that his voice was appealing, but critics strove mightily to describe it, and then to justify its appeal.

“The voice that is the basic tool of Mr. Bennett’s trade is small, thin and somewhat hoarse,” John S. Wilson wrote in The New York Times in 1962. “But he uses it shrewdly and with a skillful lack of pretension.”

In a 1974 profile, Whitney Balliett, the longtime jazz critic for The New Yorker, called Mr. Bennett “an elusive singer.”

“He can be a belter who reaches rocking fortissimos,” Mr. Balliett wrote. “He drives a ballad as intensely and intimately as Sinatra. He can be a lilting, glancing jazz singer. He can be a low-key, searching supper-club performer.” But, he added, “Bennett’s voice binds all his vocal selves together.”

Most simply, perhaps, the composer and critic Alec Wilder said about Mr. Bennett’s voice, “There is a quality about it that lets you in.”

Indeed, what many listeners (including the critics) discovered about Mr. Bennett, and what they responded to, was something intangible: the care with which he treated both the song and the audience.

He had a storyteller’s grace with a lyric, a jazzman’s sureness with a melody, and in his finest performances he delivered them with a party giver’s welcome, a palpable and infectious affability. In his presentation, the songs he loved and sang — “Just in Time,” “The Best Is Yet to Come,” “Rags to Riches” and “I Wanna Be Around,” to name a handful of his emblematic hits — became engaging, life-embracing parables.

Frank Sinatra, whom Mr. Bennett counted as a mentor and friend, once put it another way.

“For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business,” he told Life magazine in 1965. “He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.”

Mr. Bennett passed through life with as unscathed a public image as it is possible for a celebrity to have. Finding even mild criticism of him in reviews and interviews is no mean feat, and even his outspoken liberalism generally failed to attract vitriol from the right. (An exception was his call, after the drug-related deaths of Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston, for the legalization of drugs, a view loudly denounced by William J. Bennett, the former drug czar, among others.)

With the possible exception of his former wives, everyone, it seemed, loved Tony Bennett. Skeptical journalists would occasionally try to pierce what they perceived as his perfect veneer, but they generally discovered that there wasn’t much to pierce.

“Bennett is outrageous,” Simon Hattenstone, a reporter for The Guardian, wrote in 2002. “He mythologizes himself, name-drops every time he opens his mouth, directs you to his altruism, is self-congratulatory to the point of indecency. He should be intolerable, but he’s one of the sweetest, most humble men I’ve ever met.”

Son of Queens

Anthony Dominick Benedetto was born on Aug. 3, 1926, in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, and grew up in that borough in working-class Astoria. His father, Giovanni, had emigrated from Calabria, in southern Italy, at age 11. His mother, Anna (Suraci) Benedetto, was born in New York in 1899, having made the sea journey from Italy in the womb. Their marriage was arranged. Giovanni and Anna were cousins; their mothers were sisters.

In New York, where Giovanni Benedetto became John, he was a grocer, but beleaguered by poor health and often unable to work. Anna was a factory seamstress and took in additional sewing to support the family. Anthony was their third child, their second son, and the first of any Benedetto to be born in a hospital. Giovanni, who sang Italian folk songs to his children — “My father inspired my love for music,” Mr. Bennett wrote in his autobiography — died when Anthony was 10.

Anthony sang from an early age, and drew and painted, too. He would become a creditable painter as an adult, mostly landscapes and still lifes in watercolors and oils and portraits of musicians he admired, signing his paintings “Benedetto.” His first music teacher arranged for him to sing alongside Mayor Fiorello La Guardia at the opening of the Triborough Bridge (now the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge) in 1936.

For a time he attended the High School for Industrial Arts (now called the High School of Art and Design) in Manhattan, but he never graduated. He dropped out and found work as a copy boy for The Associated Press, in a laundry and as an elevator operator.

“I couldn’t figure out how to get the elevator to stop at the right place,” he recalled. “People ended up having to crawl out between floors.”

At night he performed at amateur shows and worked as a singing waiter. He had just begun to get paying work as a singer, using the stage name Joe Bari, when he was drafted.

He arrived in Europe toward the end of World War II, serving in Germany in the infantry. He spent time on the front lines, an experience he described as “a front-row seat in hell,” and was among the troops who arrived to liberate the prisoners at the Landsberg concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau.

After Germany surrendered, Mr. Bennett was part of the occupying forces, assigned to special services, where he ended up as a singer with Army bands and for a time was featured in a ragtag version of the musical “On the Town” — directed by Arthur Penn, who would go on to direct “Bonnie and Clyde” and other notable movies — in the opera house in Wiesbaden.

He returned to New York in August 1946 and set about beginning a career as a musician. On the G.I. Bill, he took classes at the American Theater Wing, which he later said helped teach him how to tell a story in song. He sang in nightclubs in Manhattan and Queens.

A series of breaks followed. He appeared on the radio show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” the “American Idol” of its day. (The competition was won by Rosemary Clooney.) There are different versions of the biggest break in Mr. Bennett’s early career, but as he told it in “The Good Life,” he had been singing occasionally at a club in Greenwich Village where the owner had offered Pearl Bailey a gig as the headliner; she agreed, but only on the condition that Joe Bari stayed on the bill.

When Bob Hope came down to take in Ms. Bailey’s act, he liked Joe Bari so much that he asked him to open for him at the Paramount Theater. Hope had a condition, however: He didn’t like the name Joe Bari, and insisted it be changed. Dismissing the name Anthony Benedetto as too long to fit on a marquee, Hope christened the young singer Tony Bennett.

The Hits Roll In

The producer Mitch Miller signed Mr. Bennett to Columbia Records in 1950; “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” was his first single. Miller was known for his hit-making prowess, a gift that often involved matching talented singers with novelty songs or having them cover hits by others, for which he was criticized by more serious music fans and sometimes by the singers themselves.

He and Mr. Bennett had a contentious relationship. Mr. Bennett resisted his attempts at gimmickry; Miller, who believed that the producer and not the singer was in charge of a recording, applied his authority. Still, together they achieved grand success.

By mid-1951, Mr. Bennett had his first No. 1 hit, “Because of You.” That same year, his version of the Hank Williams ballad “Cold, Cold Heart” also hit No. 1; three years after Williams died in 1953, Mr. Bennett performed it in his honor at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.

Other trademark songs followed: “Rags to Riches” in 1953; “Stranger in Paradise,” from the Broadway show “Kismet,” also in 1953; Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s “Just in Time,” from the show “Bells Are Ringing,” in 1956. That same year, Mr. Bennett was host of his own television variety show, a summer replacement for a similar show that starred another popular Italian American crooner, Perry Como. In 1958, he recorded two albums with the Count Basie band, introducing him to the jazz audience.

In the 1950s, Mr. Bennett toured for the first time, played Las Vegas for the first time and got married for the first time, to Patricia Beech, a fan who had seen him perform in Cleveland. The marriage would flounder in the 1960s, overwhelmed by Mr. Bennett’s perpetual touring, but their two sons would end up playing roles in Mr. Bennett’s career: the older one, D’Andrea, known as Danny, became his father’s manager, and Daegal, known as Dae, became a music producer and recording engineer.

In July 1961, Mr. Bennett was performing in Hot Springs, Ark., and about to head to the West Coast when Ralph Sharon, his longtime pianist, played him a song written by George Cory and Douglass Cross that had been moldering in a drawer for two years. Mr. Sharon and Mr. Bennett decided that it would be perfect for their next date, at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, and it was.

They recorded the song — of course it was “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” — six months later, in January 1962. It won Mr. Bennett his first two Grammys, for best male solo performance and record of the year, and worldwide fame. In “The Good Life,” he wrote that he was often asked if he ever tired of singing it.

“I answer, ‘Do you ever get tired of making love?’” he wrote.

Just five months later, Mr. Bennett performed at Carnegie Hall with Mr. Sharon and a small orchestra. He got sensational reviews — though The Times’s was measured — and the recording of the concert is now considered a classic.

But as the 1960s proceeded and rock ’n’ roll became dominant, Mr. Bennett’s popularity began to slip. In 1969, he succumbed to the pressure of the new president of Columbia Records, Clive Davis, to record his versions of contemporary songs, and the result, “Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today!” — including the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and “Something” — was a musical calamity, a record that Mr. Bennett would later tell an interviewer made him vomit.

His relationship with Columbia soured further and finally ended, and by the middle of the 1970s Mr. Bennett had formed his own company, Improv Records, on which he recorded the first of two of his most critically admired albums, duets with the jazz pianist Bill Evans. (The second one was released on Evans’s label, Fantasy.) Together the two opened the Newport Jazz Festival, which had moved to New York, at Carnegie Hall in 1976.

Improv went out of business in 1977, and without a recording contract Mr. Bennett relied more and more on Las Vegas, then in decline, for regular work. His mother died that year, and the profligate life he had been living in Beverly Hills caught up with him; the Internal Revenue Service was threatening to take his house. His second marriage, a tumultuous one to the actress Sandra Grant, collapsed — she would later say that she would have been better off if she had married her previous boyfriend, Joe DiMaggio — and he had begun using marijuana and cocaine heavily.

One day in 1979, high and in a panic, he took a bath to calm down and nearly died in the tub. In later years he would play down the seriousness of the event, but he wrote about it in “The Good Life,” describing what he called a near-death experience: “A golden light enveloped me in a warm glow. It was quite peaceful; in fact, I had the sense that I was about to embark on a very compelling journey. But suddenly I was jolted out of the vision. The tub was overflowing and Sandra was standing above me. She’d heard the water running for too long, and when she came in I wasn’t breathing. She pounded on my chest and literally brought me back to life.”

Mr. Bennett turned to his older son for help. Danny Bennett took over the management of his career, aiming to have the American musical standards that were his strength, and his handling of them, perceived as hip by a new generation.

Somewhat surprisingly, the strategy took hold. An article in Spin magazine, which was founded in 1985, declared Mr. Bennett and James Brown as the two foremost influences on rock ’n’ roll, and the magazine followed up with a long, admiring profile.

A Career Revival

Encouraged by executive changes at Columbia Records, Mr. Bennett returned to the Columbia fold in 1985. The next year he released the album “The Art of Excellence.” WBCN in Boston became the first rock station to give it regular airplay. Released in the emerging CD format, it spurred the sales of Mr. Bennett’s back catalog as music fans began replacing their vinyl records with CDs.

In 1993, Mr. Bennett was a presenter, along with two members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, at MTV’s Video Music Awards. The next year he gave an hourlong performance for MTV’s “Unplugged” series, which included duets with K.D. Lang (with whom he would later tour) and Elvis Costello. The recording of the show won the Grammy for album of the year.

The revival of Mr. Bennett’s career was complete. Not only had he returned to the kind of popularity he had enjoyed 40 years earlier, but he had also been accepted by an entirely new audience.

He recorded albums that honored musicians he admired — Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday — and he collaborated on standards with singers half, or less than half, his age. On the 2006 album “Duets: An American Classic,” he sang “If I Ruled the World” with Ms. Dion, “Smile” with Barbra Streisand and “For Once in My Life” with Stevie Wonder, and revisited his first Columbia single, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” with Sting. Five years later, on “Duets II,” his collaborators included Aretha Franklin, Queen Latifah, Willie Nelson and Ms. Winehouse.

As the century changed, he was once again touring, giving up to 200 performances a year, and recording prolifically.

In 2007 Mr. Bennett married a third time, to his longtime companion, Susan Crow, a teacher four decades his junior whom he had met in the late 1980s. Together they started a foundation, Exploring the Arts, that supports arts education in schools, and financed the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a public high school in Queens.

Mr. Bennett had lived in the same Manhattan apartment, where he died, for most of his adult life, except for a few years in Los Angeles and London, Ms. Weiner, his publicist, said. He is survived by his wife; his sons, Danny and Dae; his daughters, Johanna and Antonia Bennett; and 9 grandchildren.

If there was a magical quality to Mr. Bennett’s life, as suggested by David Evanier in a glowing 2011 biography, “All the Things You Are: The Life of Tony Bennett,” it is encapsulated by a story Mr. Bennett told to Whitney Balliett in 1974.

“I like the funny things in life that could only happen to me now,” he said. “Once, when I was singing Kurt Weill’s ‘Lost in the Stars’ in the Hollywood Bowl with Basie’s band and Buddy Rich on drums, a shooting star went falling through the sky right over my head and everyone was talking about it, and the next morning the phone rang and it was Ray Charles, who I’d never met, calling from New York. He said, ‘Hey, Tony, how’d you do that, man?’ and hung up.”

[j4m3s-b4k3r]

the rude roommate

There’s a presence following us everywhere. Insinuating itself into our lives, as we enjoy movies, TV shows and music. This rude roommate not only lives with us, but follows us to school, to work and everywhere else that we go, constantly blathering to wear us down. Posing as an indulgent pal, it offers tasty treats, with “go on, you’re worth it!” encouragements. Then, morphing into the concerned friend, it chides us “you’re getting some love handles there, buddy!” and pushes snake oil for that too. Yes, I’m talking about the shifting personas of ADVERTISING. 

You don’t truly notice the ever-present & manipulative jibber jabber of advertising till it’s not a part of your life. It’s like cigarette smoking in this. I was raised by on-again-off-again smokers, and for many years worked in offices permeated by ever present cigarette smoke. Soaking in it everywhere for my entire life, it was only upon moving to California (where it’d just been banned) that I truly became aware of smoking. After living smoke-free, I couldn’t believe the stench when visiting places that still allowed it in communal spaces. My own hair & clothes reeked of it, even though I didn’t smoke myself. Bleurgh!

Likewise, after soaking in advertising my entire life, I’ve only recently lived in a (relatively) ad-free bubble, enjoying media streaming services at home for the last few years. We just watched a movie in a cinema for the first time since 2019. Tickets were almost 20 dollars each for comfortable reserved seating in a beautiful theatre. Then we had to endure 30 minutes of constant advertising blather before the film. Not movie trailers mind you, but ads for clothes, soft drinks and so on. After living ad-free, this was excruciating, and eye-opening. Absence had not made my heart grow fonder. Quite the opposite.

The deal used to be that we tolerated the buzz of ads - like blowflies at a picnic - in exchange for free movies & music (on radio & TV). Nowadays, I pay extra for the ad-free option with entertainment media. Which is a blackmail shakedown - “Pay us, or you have to watch another incontinence commercial” - but at least I understand the terms of that arrangement. I don’t understand (or accept) any deal where I pay AND get ads too (which is why I didn’t have cable TV for very long). If theatres want us to come back en masse after the stay-at-home-years of covid, then making the experience special is key. For me, paying premium prices to watch Madison Avenue Punch & Judy shows is an absolute no no. 

Advertising is RUDE. The constant interruptions are simply annoying, but the purpose of the messages is insidious. In our real lives we are wary of people who constantly broadcast their own PR, because they’re trying to manipulate our perceptions of them. We must be on extra high alert for those who tell us what we are, because they’re trying to manipulate our own perceptions of ourselves.These are the goals of advertising’s trillion dollar industry. It is a nonstop psyop, fanning our hopes and inflaming our insecurities for profit.

“The spectacle of advertising creates images of false beauty so suave and so impossible to attain that you will hurt inside and never even know where the hurt comes from.” - Robert Montgomery

Ever since humans first gathered around fires and hearths, we’ve related to each other via stories. Stories are ‘lies’, in that many of them are 100% made up, but we know that and sharing them is fun. Besides, there may actually be a truth within the story. A parable. However, the human love of stories makes us vulnerable to manipulation by stories too. This is well known on Madison Avenue. Advertising subverts the parable, where the parable’s ‘moral’ has been substituted with a plug for Brand-X. 

It used to be that everyone was served the exact same ads at the same time, but we now live in the era of micro-targeted advertising. After sneakily looking through our private data, the rude roommate can now identify & hammer on each of our specific ‘problem areas’. Despite my attempts at internet ad-blocking, the rude roommate has a fairly accurate demographic profile of me, and websites I visit now display ads of male middle aged losers, worried about their dicks, bald spots, love handles & baggy eyes. The rude roommate has custom-curated these parables just for moi. If advertising was indeed your roommate, an actual person, they’d be the worst person you know. A passive aggressive, gaslighting master manipulator, and the last person you’d want constantly whispering in your ear. 

“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. — They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.” - Banksy

 “Narrative” has become a buzz word, and Hollywood folk (including story artists) now give story seminars to big companies. Wall Street, Langley, & Silicon Valley understand the appeal of storytelling, and Washington & Whitehall both use Spin Doctors to “get ahead of the story" and "control the narrative". The NSA & CIA know a little about narrative manipulation too, and even they are wary of internet advertising propaganda, and use ad-blocking software. Takes one to know one, right? Speaking of that, my own growing allergy to advertising is surely punishment for years of participation in the mass hypnosis. Yes, at one time I enabled the rude roommate, by animating parables that enticed kids to eat sugar bombs for breakfast..

Mea culpa!

Given that advertising so often subverts artforms, artists have been known to return the favour.  B.U.G.A.U.P. was a collective of Sydney graffiti artists active in the 1970s/80s who specifically targeted advertising, very active when I lived in that city. Their special brandalism defaced advertising billboards to subvert the intended message of the ad, revealing the hidden truth of the unhealthy product itself. These wittily-defaced billboards on commuter routes in Sydney were talking points at office coffee pots & tea urns each morning.

Their movement spread to other cities in Australia and even to other countries (I often wondered whether Banksy knew about them) and B.U.G.A.U.P. activism ultimately led to a ban on cigarette advertising in Australia in 1994. Advertising’s corrupted parables RE-made into truth telling parables again. Utterly brilliant.

PS: Full BANKSY QUOTE on advertising (as illustrated by Gavin Aung Than).

From www.James-Baker.com

[scotianostra]

Robert Banks Stewart was born on July 16th 1921 in Edinburgh.

He may not be a household name, but Robert Banks Stewart was responsible for some of the best TV shows on our small screens from the 60's right through to the 90's.

Robert started writing in primary school. He won a Burns essay prize and contributed stories to local newspapers. At age 15, he left school to become an office boy at the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch. He did his National Service with Field Marshal Montgomery's peacetime staff. He then worked as a newspaper editor. By this time he had written several plays and done a stint as a radio commentator. He eventually left Scotland for a post as foreign correspondent for Illustrated magazine. When that publication folded, he joined the Rank Organisation, providing rewrites and producing movie and TV scripts.

His shows in the 60's included Interpol Calling, The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre and Dr Finlay's Casebook, the 70's saw him pen Sutherland's Law, Doctor Who and Charles Endell Esq. The 80's he was responsible for Shoestring, and Bergerac, in the latter he fought to get John Nettles in the lead role, Nettles was a virtual unknown at the time and the role made him a household name. The 90's saw him write episodes of Lovejoy ad The Darling Buds of May, and in 2013 he returned to write a further episode of Dr Who

On 14th January 2016, Robert Banks Stewart died of cancer at the age of 84.

[citizenscreen]

On the radio - Louise Beavers, Robert Montgomery, Bette Davis, Frank Capra, and Sandy Barnett.

[televinita]

Top 100 Ladies of TV

Looking at old blog posts, many years ago I did a "100 favorite female characters" list, but I have met so many wonderful new ladies now that it is quite out of date and needs a major update to accommodate them. International Women’s Day seems like the perfect time to do so!

Only this time I'm restricting it to TV characters, or I will die of Overwhelm.

NOTE: This list is not in any kind of order, I just wrote them down as they came to mind. I considered alphabetical, but found it was nicer to keep everyone from a given show together. And rather than starting from scratch, I kept as much of the original list as I could and just added newer favorites on at the end, if you're wondering why some of these Very Old Fandoms are clustered at the top.

Rose Tyler (Doctor Who)

Donna Noble (Doctor Who)

Sarah Jane Smith (Doctor Who/The Sarah Jane Adventures)

Kimberly Hart (Power Rangers)

Katherine Hillard (Power Rangers)

Pamela Beesly Halpert (The Office)

Kelly Kapoor (The Office)

Angela Martin (The Office)

Amita Ramanujan (Numb3rs)

Abby Sciuto (NCIS

Ziva David (NCIS)

Abby Lockhart (ER)

Neela Rasgotra (ER)

Sarah Riley (ER)

Rachel Berry (Glee)

Quinn Fabray (Glee)

Tina Cohen-Chang, respect (Glee)

Marley Rose (Glee)

Juliet Burke (Lost)

Alex Rousseau (Lost)

Kensi Blye (NCIS: LA)

Nell Jones (NCIS: LA)

Marisol Delko (CSI: Miami)

Alexx Woods (CSI: Miami)

Calleigh DuQuesne (CSI: Miami)

Samantha Spade (Without a Trace)

Miranda Bailey (Grey's Anatomy)

Cristina Yang (Grey's Anatomy)

April Kepner (Grey's Anatomy)

Addison Forbes Montgomery (Grey's Anatomy/Private Practice)

Sara Sidle (CSI)

Jess Angell (CSI: NY)

Dana Scully (X-Files)

Summer Roberts (The O.C.)

Charlotte "Chuck" Charles (Pushing Daisies)

Olive Snook (Pushing Daisies)

Joan Girardi (Joan of Arcadia)

Kat Miller (Cold Case)

Tru Davies (Tru Calling)

Elaine Benes (Seinfeld)

Daphne Moon (Frasier)

Carla Espinosa (Scrubs)

Jordan Sullivan (Scrubs) -- it's either her or Ellie Torres from Cougar Town, real 6-of-1 situation

Donna Pinciotti (That 70s Show)

Jackie Burkhart (That 70s Show)

Kitty Forman (That 70s Show)

Kara Danvers (Supergirl)

Stephanie Tanner (Full/er House)

Grace Adler (Will & Grace)

Lexi Vaziri (Blood & Treasure)

Jaz Khan (The Brave)

Lux Cassidy (Life Unexpected)

Rachel Matheson (Revolution)

Julia Shumway (Under the Dome)

Nancy McKenna (L.A.'s Finest)

Paige Donohue (Scorpion)

Happy Quinn (Scorpion)

Max Black (2 Broke Girls)

Penelope Garcia (Criminal Minds)

Jennifer "JJ" Jareau (Criminal Minds)

Emily Prentiss (Criminal Minds)

Mae Jarvis (Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders)

Reba Hart (Reba)

Cheyenne Hart (Reba)

Jess Parker (Primeval)

Abby Maitland (Primeval)

Sansa Stark (Game of Thrones)

Tani Rey (Hawaii Five-0)

Kate Beckett (Castle)

Alexis Castle (Castle)

Kat Warbler (The Class) - FOREVER UPSET we were robbed of more than 22 eps of her snarky glory!

Ivy Lynn (Smash)

Elizabeth McCord (Madam Secretary herself)

Carrie Heffernan (i'm sorry i LOVE HER) (The King of Queens)

Frankie Heck (The Middle)

Sue Heck (The Middle)

Mindy Lahiri (The Mindy Project)

Lisa Miller (News Radio)

Beth of no apparent last name (NewsRadio)

Sabrina Spellman (the Teenage Witch, Good Version [WB])

Tia Landrey & Tamera Campbell (Sister, Sister) (I know it's rude but they're both aces and this way my list is secretly 101!)

Jade McKellan (Family Reunion)

Holly Tyler (What I Like About You)

Anathema Device (Good Omens)

Eve Baxter (Last Man Standing)

Sabina of no official last name (Siberia)

Ryan Clark (Off the Map)

Phoebe Buffay (Friends)

Monica Geller (Friends)

Rachel Greene (Friends)

Janine Teagues (Abbott Elementary)

Melissa Schemmenti (Abbott Elementary)

Barbara Howard (Abbott Elementary)

Ava Coleman (Abbot Elementary)

Molly Flynn (Mike & Molly, a terrible show made watchable by its women, though I only have room for 1 today)

Henrietta/Hetty Woodstone (Ghosts [CBS])

Shirley Bennett (Community)

Alex Russell (Maid)

Jenny Hoyt (Big Sky)

Cassie DeWell (Big Sky)

In conclusion:

[classicfilmfan64]

Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a 1941 American screwball comedy film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, written by Norman Krasna, and starring Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery. It also features Gene Raymond, Jack Carson, Philip Merivale, and Lucile Watson.

Although Mr. & Mrs. Smith was the only pure comedy Hitchcock made in America, he later claimed that he agreed to do it only as a favor to Lombard. However, the files at RKO Radio Pictures show that Hitchcock himself actually pursued the project.

[meanstreetspodcasts]

Episode 382 - Robert Montgomery (Part 4)

We bid a fond farewell to actor, director, and occasional Suspense host Robert Montgomery. In addition to acting as emcee and narrator, Montgomery plays a man who may (or may not) be the homicidal maniac stalking the streets of London in "The Lodger" (originally aired on CBS on February 14, 1948). Plus, he recreates his big screen role of Philip Marlowe in "Lady in the Lake" from The Lux Radio Theatre (originally aired on CBS on February 9, 1948).

Check out this episode!

[lboogie1906]

Irene Amos Morgan Kirkaldy (April 9, 1917 - August 10, 2007) was a civil rights activist who won her 1946 SCOTUS case in Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, which declared interstate transport racial segregation to be unconstitutional, nearly a decade before the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

She was in Baltimore to Robert and Ethel Amos. She was raised as a Seventh-day Adventist along with her eight other siblings. She dropped out of high school to work and help her family during the Great Depression. She worked on the production line for B-26 Marauders at the Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Company in Baltimore. She married Sherwood Morgan and the couple had a son and a daughter.

She bought a $5 ticket and boarded a Greyhound bus to return home to Baltimore. She sat in the back of the bus, the spot designated for “colored” people. The driver came to her and the woman seated next to her with a baby in her arms and told them both to move for a white couple just boarding. The driver proceeded to the next town to have her arrested.

The officer gave her an arrest warrant and she tore it up in his face. She was arrested and charged with resisting arrest and violating Virginia’s Jim Crow transit laws. She pleaded guilty to the charge of resisting arrest and paid a $10 fine, but refused to plead guilty to violating “Jim Crow laws.” She appealed her conviction. The Virginia Supreme Court ruled her in violation of the law, she took her case to the SCOTUS.

They moved to New York City and her husband died. She married dry-cleaning business owner Stanley Kirkaldy. They owned and operated house cleaning and child-care businesses in Queens. She won a college scholarship from a radio contest and at the age of 68, she earned a BA in Communications from St. John’s University. At the age of 72, she received her MA in Urban Studies from Queens College.

She was honored by Gloucester City during its 350th anniversary and President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal. She was inducted into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame.

She moved to Gloucester, Virginia in the last years of her life. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[kwebtv]

Character Actress

Beatrice Joan Caulfield (June 1, 1922 – June 18, 1991) Stage, film and television actress and model. After being discovered by Broadway producers, she began a stage career in 1943 that eventually led to signing as an actress with Paramount Pictures.

In the early 1950s, Caulfield began guest starring on television shows such as Robert Montgomery Presents, Lux Video Theatre, The Ford Television Theatre, Schlitz Playhouse and Hollywood Opening Night. She said she preferred working in television.

In 1953, she signed a contract with CBS. In the 1953 and 1954 seasons, she co-starred with Barry Nelson (the original James Bond, albeit on television) in the television version of My Favorite Husband, which was based upon the Lucille Ball radio series that evolved into I Love Lucy.

She was in Celebrity Playhouse, Schlitz Playhouse again, Screen Directors Playhouse, and The Ford Television Theatre again.

Being the subject of an episode of This Is Your Life in 1957 brought Caulfield to the attention of television executives. In the words of a newspaper writer, "she photographed so beautifully that the show was hardly over before she was being approached for television appearances."

During the 1957–1958 season, Caulfield starred in Sally, a short-lived situation comedy, in the role of a traveling companion to an elderly widow, played by Marion Lorne. At midseason, Gale Gordon and Arte Johnson joined the cast.

When the series ended, Caulfield continued to guest-star on shows like Pursuit, General Electric Theater, Hong Kong, Cheyenne, Burke's Law, and My Three Sons.

In 1967, she starred in the TV series The High Chaparral as Annalee Cannon in the pilot episode. She was murdered in the episode and that was the premise for the whole plot.

In the seventies she appeared in  episodes of Baretta and Murder, She Wrote.  (Wikipedia)

[zoyasmuses]

nome: josephine montgomery idade: trinta e oito signo: aquário pronomes: ela/dela orientação: heterossexual espécie: humana natural de: são francisco (eua) ocupação: escritora pontos positivos: criativa, acolhedora pontos negativos: indecisa, atrevida estética: grandes jardins, piqueniques ao ar livre, dançar até os pés doerem, inventar receitas com seus filhos, livrarias antigas, escrever durante as madrugadas faceclaim: kate siegel status: fechada

biografia:

tba

trivia:

seu sonho de criança sempre foi morar em uma casa bem grande no meio do nada, com um jardim enorme, rodeado por florestas e um lago - ainda não realizou esse sonho, mas não é difícil achá-la procurando esse tipo de propriedade no google.

nunca imaginou que se tornaria uma escritora best seller - na verdade, ela é formada em administração e era gerente de uma empresa de tecnologia, escrevendo apenas por diversão e para si. foi só quando elias nasceu que ela viu uma possibilidade de seguir carreira com a escrita. quando pequeno, elias exigia que ela contasse a mesma história antes de dormir, e todos os dias josephine acrescentava ou mudava algo, para o deleite do pequeno.

josephine publica seus livros sob o nome “josie mont”, e entre seus maiores sucessos estão os livros a historia secreta, nona casa e o impulso, este ultimo que gerou certa polemica ao ser lançado, pelo fato de ser mãe.

josie escreveu seu primeiro manuscrito em apenas três meses, e depois o jogou completamente no lixo - nem robert conseguiu ler. se questionava constantemente se aquilo seria o certo para a sua vida, e depois de se afastar do oficio por um tempo, voltou a escrever o que viria a ser seu primeiro livro publicado: rede de sussurros.

abriu uma caixa postal e todas as semanas vai lá retirar cartas e presentes deixado por seus fãs, e sempre acaba encontrando algumas coisas bizarras entre os presentes - certa vez recebeu um dente humano.

elias, cecilia e oliver são sua razão de viver. ser mãe nunca foi seu sonho de vida ou sua prioridade, mas depois que seus filhos nasceram, tudo mudou, e ter passado a trabalhar de casa só intensificou sua conexão com os pequenos. assim que a relação com robert começou a complicar, seu maior receio de conversar com o marido era por não saber como o resultado da conversa influenciaria nos filhos.

josephine odeia estar sozinha e odeia silencio. antes de ter os filhos, quando robert estava de plantão, costumava deixar o radio ligado bem alto, não importava o que estivesse passando, só para ter a sensação de que não estava sozinha em casa.

tinha a mania de entrar em livrarias e autografar seu livros em segredo - inclusive, já quase foi expulsa de uma, o atendente alegando que ela estava avariando os livros - felizmente, sua foto estampava a orelha do livro. depois desse acontecimento, sempre avisa antes de fazer isso.

ama estar ao ar livre, e sempre que pode, organiza acampamentos e picnics para a família toda. uma vez alugou um barco e decidiu que todos da família iriam aprender a pescar, mas o passeio não durou muito pois elias acabou ficando enjoado.

josie fez aulas de dança de salão desde quando era bem nova, e se considera até que decente na arte - não é boa o suficiente para ganhar competições, mas esse nunca foi seu objetivo, e sim exercitar o corpo e se divertir.

plot:

tba

tag ; otp tag ; pinterest

[clarklovescarole]

March 1938: The Los Angeles Flood

March 4, 1938 – Evening Standard

The death toll in the California flood disaster is mounting every hour. The latest reports state that 35 people have lost their lives. A number of them were killed by landslides; others were swept away by the flood water and drowned.

It is described as the worst disaster in the region since the earthquake of 1933, which wrecked Long Beach and killed 150 people.

Clark Gable Forced To Abandon Car

The homes of Miss Norma Shearer, Mr. James Stewart, and Miss Anita Loos, Miss Billie Burke and Mr. Robert Montgomery are also cut off by the flood water, which is in some cases entered the houses. 

High seas prevented some coast guard boats from reaching the marooned stars. Small bridges were torn from their foundations. 

Miss Kay Francis was rescued by the police from her car, which as standing in 4ft. of water. 

Miss Ginger Rogers and Mr. Richard Dix reached their studio after a thrilling race with the deepening water. 

The lower part of Miss Joan Bennett’s house in the lower Beverly Hills district was flooded. Miss Isabel Jeans only just escaped a landslide while in her car. 

Mr. Clark Gable was forced to abandon his car on a flooded road. 

Twentieth Century Fox Studios estimated that they have suffered damage to their sets amounting to more than £20,000. At the Paramount studios, all productions have been stopped and the executive offices submerged. 

Boats were used to take Miss Sylvia Sydney, Mr. George Raft, Miss Dorothy Lamour, Miss Mary Carlisle, and Mr. Ray Milland to and from the sound stages. 

Many studios made hurried arrangements to house their workers on sound stages and in dressing rooms last night. Shirley Temple stayed overnight in a bungalow at the studio.

Some of the ranches owned by film stars have suffered severely including those owned by Mr. Bing Crosby and Miss Carole Lombard. Mr. Robert Taylor and Miss Barbara Stanwyck, who own adjoining ranches, were rescuing horses from rising water. 

March 27, 1938 – St. Louis Globe

Carole Tired Out From Year of Work

Carole Lombard fans will find these bits of private drama enacted in Hollywood which isn’t screened.

Carole isn’t just one of those dizzy hoydens some of her recent pictures have made her appear: she has her serious moments and good impulses.

The other day, accompanied by Clark Gable, she made a tour of some of the districts devastated by the flood and was greatly impressed.

She saw the damage done – in some cases destruction – to private residences and the hardships of occupants who remained to salvage what they could.

Carole, pretty much worn out by her almost ceaseless work for a year past, recently refused a persistent radio chain offer of large financial proportions.

But what she saw in her tour made her forget a doctor’s warning that a long rest was imperative, and she had planned a vacation.

Evidence of the plight of so many women and children made her feel a sense of duty. She sent word to the radio chiefs that she will go on. 

The preparations for the broadcast will involve a lot of work and worry at a time she’s been told that she must build up her depleted strength.

All the proceeds of the broadcast for herself and the artists she will enlist to aid will go to the flood sufferers through the Red Cross.

[thebirdandhersong]

girl let me name a few distinctly Canadian things

Nanaimo bars

Politeness Culture (a source of chagrin for those who dislike passive aggressiveness and Insinuation)

political party fun time (Conservative, Liberal, NDP, Green, etc.)

arguably some of the worst medical ethics arguments and policies in place (even worse than parts of the US, so I've heard, from especially incensed friends)

the Quebec-Canada hissy argument (is QC a part of Canada? they certainly don't consider themselves to be. Should we grant them independence? but why should we?? etc. etc. I don't think California or West Virginia are trying to be their own country)

the Alberta oil crisis thing was a pretty distinctly Canadian issue

I'm pretty sure the euthanasia debate is more heated in Canada right now due to MAID; we have a lot of doctors and pediatricians being very vocal against it at the moment

Canadian Christianity is SUCH a spectrum

maple syrup (it's in everything) (we use it in so many ways)

Anne of Green Gables. Y'all L.M. Montgomery is definitely not American

contemporary writers from Canada - Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Joseph Boyden, Thomas King, Robert Munsch, Malcolm Gladwell

not familiar with America's, but our Indigenous lit scene is growing rapidly, and Indigenous scholarship and Indigenous studies is on the rise in many departments (anthro, lit, linguistics, fine arts)

musicians from Canada: Shawn Mendes, Diana Krall, Feist, Arcade Fire, Joni Mitchell

Justin Bieber (alas he is Canadian)

Rupi Kaur (this is not a point of pride)

Michael Buble perpetually on the gosh darn radio every Christmas

Trans Mountain pipeline debate

there's a fair bit of heresy in the Catholic Church in QC, as far as I've heard

significantly less rioting and protesting, though that's on the rise in universities, I think

fewer homeschoolers

the Sarah McLachlan craze (every Canadian millenial has listened to her)

Emily St. John Mandel beloved!!!!

Yann Martel (of Life of Pi fame)

I'm pretty sure our Stella-Stella-Olla song is different

standard children's games in Canada: Stella-Stella-Olla, Concentration, Grounders

in-country flights more expensive than out of country flights

I don't think people are as keen to do a roadtrip across Canada as they are across the US

Hudson's Bay

more integration of Indigenous art and architecture(? I can't make any blanket statements about the US) we have a lot of totem poles, displays of Indigenous visual art and poetry, etc. also patterns and images woven into airport decor, etc.

our money is plastic. lol

LOONIES. TOONIES

currently movement towards supporting local farmers; it's a pretty prominent thing here to go to berry farms etc. during season; we also have organizations that help move and distribute produce from further north/harder to reach locations according to your monthly/yearly produce subscription

Newfoundland's a pretty unique place and subculture!

in my part of Canada, there's a pretty big craze over bubble tea, bubble waffles, Korean barbecue, sushi, poke bowls, laser tag, escape rooms, and hiking co-existing

lots of Asian, Black, and Middle-Eastern people on the West Coast; some on the East Coast, not a lot in between

Canada Day is not as explosive of a time as the fourth of July

FORCED TO COLOUR IN THE STUPID PROVINCES AND TERRITORIES IN SECOND GRADE. HAVE YOU TRIED TO COLOUR IN NUNAVUT AS A SECOND GRADER. HAVE YOU

Does Canada really count as non American though

Grace, how could you (wailing noises)

[scotianostra]

On 14th January 2016, the Scottish screenwriter, television producer and journalisRobert Banks Stewart died.

Many Doctor Who fans will remember Robert fondly as the creator of the Zygons.

Edinburgh-born Robert Stewart left school at age fifteen and parlayed his skill into a series of newspaper jobs. His career was interrupted by his National Service, during which he was part of Field Marshal Montgomery's staff. Stewart also began writing plays, and worked for the BBC as a radio commentator for Scottish football matches. He finally left the newspaper industry to serve as a foreign correspondent for Illustrated magazine, prompting a move to London. Stewart was twice married and twice divorced; his first wife bore a daughter, while he had three sons with his second wife, Helen.

When his job with Illustrated came to an end in the late Fifties, Stewart joined the Rank Organisation, initially as a story editor on Interpol Calling. He was soon providing scripts for the programme as well, and he began writing prolifically on shows like Danger Man, Ghost Squad and The Saint, as well as several editions of The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre. Stewart's first commission for the BBC came on a 1962 episode of Dr Finlay's Casebook. It was at this stage that he adopted “Robert Banks Stewart” as his professional name, in order to distinguish him from similarly-named writers; Banks was his mother's maiden name. He was also approached to develop ideas for Doctor Who during its formative stages in 1963, though nothing came of this.

The latter part of the Sixties saw Stewart write for everything from The Avengers to Adam Adamant Lives! to Callan. He was a script editor on Armchair Theatre, and earned his first credit as a producer on Intrigue. At the end of the decade, he travelled to Australia to produce and write for Riptide, until issues with the local labour unions prompted him to return to the UK.

In the early Seventies, Stewart wrote for shows like Jason King, Arthur Of The Britons, The Legend Of Robin Hood and Sutherland's Law, while script editing Harriet's Back In Town and Van Der Valk. In the middle of the decade, he developed three serials for Doctor Who, all featuring Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor. Stewart invented the Zygons for  Terror Of The Zygons- set in his native Scotland -- and then the Krynoids for The Seeds Of Doom. He had written most of the storyline for “The Foe From The Future” when Thames Television hired him to script edit Rooms and Armchair Thriller

The producer of Doctor Who during Stewart's time on the show was Philip Hinchcliffe, who subsequently moved to Target. When Hinchcliffe was preparing to leave the police drama, he suggested that Stewart take over, only for Target to be cancelled altogether. Instead, Stewart created two very popular series in a similar vein: first Shoestring, starring Trevor Eve, and then Bergerac with John Nettles. After an unhappy spell in the mid-Eighties as the executive producer of drama for London Weekend Television, Stewart returned to the BBC to produce Lovejoy and develop Call Me Mister. He rounded off the decade as the producer of Hannay and Storyboard.

The Nineties began with Stewart producing another hit, as he helped to launch Catherine Zeta-Jones' career with The Darling Buds Of May. He went on to produce another of his own creations, Moon And Son, before working on McCallum for Philip Hinchcliffe, who was now the Controller of Drama for Scottish Television. Stewart's final scriptwriting credit was for My Uncle Silas at the start of the new millennium. Although he was keen to continue working in television, Stewart was frustrated to find his age a barrier in securing work. Instead, he adapted an unsuccessful television pitch into a novel: The Hurricane's Tail was released by Kaleidoscope Publishing in 2012. Stewart followed it with his 2015 autobiography, To Put You In The Picture, from Miwk Publishing.

Robert Banks Stewart succumbed to cancer just three months later, on this day in 2016 hw was 84.