Monday Miscellanea

Dave Haste
By Dave Haste Last edited 204 months ago
Monday Miscellanea
Porkys Revenge

This Day In London’s History

1916: Prolific actor Eric Christmas is born in London.

OK, so it’s slim pickings this week in terms of interesting London-related events that have taken place on this date. But we did discover that the wonderfully-named Eric Cuthbert Christmas was born on 19th March 1916 in London, and in the absence of anything more interesting occurring on this date in London we thought we would find out a little bit more about him…

Having trained at RADA, Christmas performed on the London stage and in a few television shows before the outbreak of the Second World War. After the war he moved to Canada, where he continued to perform on the stage in both comic and dramatic roles. In the sixties he returned to television once more, featuring in various TV dramas, before breaking into Hollywood in the 1970s.

By the late 70s and early 80s he was starring in more popular comedy releases, such as Attack of The Killer Tomatoes and the highbrow Porky’s trilogy (where he played Principle Carter). He went on to star in dozens more feature films and TV shows, including Bugsy, Naked Gun 33 1/3, Cheers, ER, The X Files, Ally McBeal and his final feature film Mousehunt. He died on 22nd July 2000 in California.

Has anything more interesting happened on 19th March in London’s history? Let us know!

Londoner Of The Week

Is Chris Morris a Londoner? We don’t know if he actually lives here, and we’re not quite sufficiently stalkerish to try and find out his home address, but he probably spends loads of time in our city anyway, so that’s good enough for us to consider him an honorary Londoner (at least for this week).

But why would we want to? Well, we’re just a little bit too over-excited at the prospect of his planned “comedy version of United 93” film, which we mentioned in yesterday’s blog round-up. We don’t know a great deal about this project, but we wouldn’t be surprised if the controversial satirist manages to find some mileage in the media’s reaction to terrorism over the last few years, doubtless to be followed by the shrieking self-righteous indignation of some parts of said media publicly failing to get the joke.

We can’t wait.

One Thing You Must Do In London This Week

In the 1580s, the illustrator John White sailed with Sir Richard Grenville on his voyage to the ‘New World’. His watercolours and drawings of the local wildlife, landscape and people would shape England’s early perceptions of North America, and are being exhibited at the British Museum’s ‘A New World: England’s first view of America’ exhibition for the next few months. Admission is £7 – full details here.

Last Updated 19 March 2007