The pitch meeting for Love Actually

Sorry if this is your favourite Christmas film.

There are lots more such videos on the Pitch Meetings YouTube channel.

Lib Dems beat Labour on penalties in Camden

On Friday evening Camden Liberal Democrat councillors and campaigners took on their Labour counterparts at football. At full time the scores were level at 6-6, but the Lib Dems won on penalties to repeat their victory from last year.

Richard Osley, our man on the press box with a mug of Bovril, reports for the Camden New Journal:

As usual when these two teams meet, it was not a match light on controversy.

The Lib Dems say a late equaliser by Labour housing chief Sagal Abdi-Wali to make the scoreline 6-6 was netted in "Eddie time". Mayor of Camden Eddie Hanson had been in charge of the stopwatch.

But the yellow team’s complaints died down when they promptly won a penalty shootout to take the bragging rights – just four and half months before the local elections.

Labour only scored one of their penalties with hot-shot captain Camron Aref-Adib among the missers.

The match was played to encourage donations to the New Journal’s Christmas Hamper appeal.

The Joy of Six 1449

"They can mess about with flags and play the national anthem and rail against DEI all they like. But if they shut down your mum’s nursing home, will you vote for them?" Helen Pidd looks at how Reform UK are coping with running the council in Lancashire.

Michael Savage dissects Liz Truss's attempt to win herself a share of MAGA gold: "The alternative media ecosystem has no shortage of comeback stories. It is always possible to rebrand yourself when you give in to a rabid political fanbase."

"Systematic synthetic phonics is taught using 'decodable' books that often have very limited content. But using real books is a way to motivate children through the imaginative ways that stories, poems and information are portrayed in these books." Dominic Wyse says England’s synthetic phonics approach is not working for children who struggle to read.

"In a story ... a boy runs into Jesus. He curses the child, who instantly drops down dead – though Jesus brings him back to life after a brief reprimand from Joseph." Mary Dzon on medieval Christians' enjoyment of tales about the young Jesus being a holy rascal.

Bob Trubshaw has studied the numerous east-west routes in north-east Leicestershire that continue into Lincolnshire and on to the Norfolk coast. They once transported wool in great quantities and were used by countless pilgrims heading for Walsingham.

JacquiWine reads Dark Tales, a collection of Shirley Jackson's later short stories.

For World Monkey Day: The death of King Alexander of Greece

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Today is World Monkey Day and to mark it here's the sad story of King Alexander of Greece.

Alexander came to the throne in 1917 after his father (Constantine I) and elder brother (Crown Prince George) were deposed by the Entente Powers and the Liberal statesman Eleftherios Venizelos. Alexander became a puppet king under the control of Venizelos, and Greece continued to fight the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria.

In 1919 Alexander married Aspasia Manos, a commoner. This became a major scandal. and the couple were forced to leave Greece for several months. 

Soon after their return to Greece, Alexander tried to separate his dog from a tame Barbary macaque with which it was scuffling. In the process, he was bitten by the monkey and died of sepsis a few days later aged 27.

Wikipedia spells out what his death led to:

Under the restored King Constantine I, whose return was endorsed overwhelmingly in a referendum, Greece went on to lose the Greco–Turkish War with heavy military and civilian casualties. The territory gained on the Turkish mainland during Alexander's reign was lost. 

Alexander's death in the midst of an election campaign helped destabilize the Venizelos regime, and the resultant loss of Allied support contributed to the failure of Greece's territorial ambitions. Winston Churchill wrote, "it is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey's bite".

The Rest is History podcast once chose the greatest 10 monkeys in history and unaccountably left this one out. I have never quite trusted it since.

Lib Dems get five new peers and drop opposition to government bill

Photo by Martina Jorden on Unsplash

I can't see behind its paywall, but the Telegraph is convinced that the Liberal Democrats dropped their opposition to the government's workers' rights bill in return for being granted five peerages.

Whether there's anything to this theory I can't say, but I'm pleased by both its elements.

We Lib Dems have been short of new peers since the debacle of 2015, so it's good to see three being appointed – working for the leader now seems to be the highway to ermine. 

In fact we were granted five peerages, but two of those went to hereditary peers who are party spokespeople – Dominic Addington and John Russell. It may a good sign that this has been done, because it suggests it's still possible that Labour will remove hereditaries from the House of Lords.

Reform of the Lord's is desperately needed – it's one of the largest legislative chambers in the world and, uniquely, larger that it's own lower house. But while it exists in its current Ruritarian state, we need good Lib Dems to be there.

And I am delighted to see the Lib Dems dropping their opposition to Labour's workers' rights bill in the Lords.

Since the last election we have come for landowners, for parents who send their children to private schools and for the owners of £2m homes. It's good to see us siding with the workers again.

So if there has been a deal, we've driven a good bargain. Because both sides of it are good for the Lib Dems.

Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore: Tragic Magic

This is a track from Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore's new album Tragic Magic. An advertisement on Lattimore's Bandcamp page says:

Tragic Magic brings together Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore, two of contemporary ambient, experimental and electronic music’s most celebrated composers, for a unique collaboration at the Philharmonie de Paris, with extraordinary access to the Musée de la Musique’s instrument collection, in partnership with the French label InFiné. 

The album features seven immersive, evocative compositions guided by the human spirit – intimate, grounded in friendship, both earthly and cosmic – and part of a greater continuum, reflecting the solace and transformative power of artistry across generations.

And KLOF Mag says its recording sessions were deeply influenced by the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires:

Melted Moon directly confronts the recent wildfires. Over Lattimore’s looping harp, Barwick’s voice, uncharacteristically clear of effects, sings with haunting hope: "Under the melted moon / The lights are all out… You may never go home again / At least not the home you know."

Reader's voice: You've been listening to Radio 3 late in the evening again, haven't you?

Richard Dimbleby, David Dimbleby, Henry Dimbleby and the hereditary principle

David Dimbleby's current television series is questioning Britain's hereditary monarchy. So it's time for a thumping ad hominem argument and some fun with the Dimblebys and the hereditary principle.

Here's his father Richard Dimbleby in 1956. Because of his work as the BBC's war correspondent during World War II, including reports from newly liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, he was Britain's most celebrated broadcaster and a significant public figure.

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Here's Richard's son David Dimbleby making his first broadcast for the BBC at the age of 12.

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And here's David's son Henry Dimbleby, at the age of 13, in one of the two BBC adaptions of Arthur Ransome books – Coot Club and The Bix Six – in which he played a leading role in 1984.

The Joy of Six 1448

David Howarth says Liberal Democrats should attack Brexit, not just "the Tories' botched Brexit deal".

"Many have had to take extensive measures to protect their staff and service users. They’ve hired security guards, put trackers on phones, removed company listings and names from websites. In some cases, they’ve even installed safe rooms." Nicola Kelly describes how far-right attacks against refugee charities are causing workers to leave the sector to protect themselves.

"Unable to defeat Ukraine quickly or force political capitulation in Kyiv, Russia has expanded the battlefield into the daily life of European societies. Moscow’s objective is clear: weaken Western unity by creating a constant sense of vulnerability, without crossing the threshold that would trigger a formal NATO response. This pressure is increasingly visible in Poland and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe." Piotr Arak on Russia's use of sabotage to wear down Europe

Louise Murphy explodes three myths about NEETs – young people who are not it education, employment or training.

Pete Paphides celebrates Madness and their song The Liberty of Norton Folgate.

"The main robbery takes place around the industrial warehouses that once sat behind King’s Cross. As vast changes and development has taken place, exactly recreating these shots is difficult. However, using old maps of the area, many shots can be roughly mapped." Adam Scovell goes in search of the locations used by the makers of The Ladykillers in 1955

Hunting ley lines in Shropshire: The view from Stapeley Hill

It turns out I've posted the second (Caus Castle) and third (Worthen) videos in this series, but not the first. So here it is.

My serious walking days in the Eighties and Nineties reinforced my scepticism about ley lines: once you've climbed to a ridge you stay up there as long as possible. But this video does explore a fascinating landscape: I remember finding an ancient and overgrown holloway on Stapeley Hill myself.

And if that doesn't convince you, just think of this as Shropshire hill porn.

John Carey and The Intellectuals and the Masses

The death of John Carey, the critic and former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, has been reported today. I discovered him through his 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880–1939, which skewered the snobbish and anti-democratic attitudes that pervaded modernist literature and Fabian politics.

Here is Ian Hamilton reviewing Carey's book in the London Review of Books the year it came out:

The book is not meant to be straight literary criticism. It is about attitudes, not artworks. And on the matter of attitudes, Carey’s testiness can be joyously unreined. He has no patience with high-flown talk about predicaments and alienation. He is first of all an educator. His sympathies are with readers rather than with writers and he believes that, with the advent of mass literacy, a great educational opportunity was missed. 

Instead of sneering at Leonard Bast’s pretensions, Forster should have been teaching him at night school. But that could never have happened because, however the intellectuals chose to dress up their disdain, it was actually class-based – it had its roots in a fear and loathing of the mass, a revulsion which in some cases turned into super man delusions or fantasies of mass-extermination.

Carey's views are, I think, less controversial now than they were when The Intellectuals and the Masses was published, yet the idea that modernist writers must be, or at least ought to be, on the side of social progress was held for many decades.

Here's my own personal Thirties poet W.T. Nettlefold expressing a generation's sense of betrayal when T.S. Eliot's Conservative politics and adherence to the Church of England became known:

HOW NICE for a man to be clever,
So famous, so true
So sound an investment how EVER
So nice to be YOU.

To peer into basements, up alleys,
A nose for the search.
To challenge with pertinent sallies,
And then JOIN the Church.

I had a very good teacher for A level English Literature, but I have shaken off his taste for the modernists over the years, now preferring Dickens and Auden to his gods Lawrence and Eliot. And I suspect we can all see now what Edward Mendelson's wrote in his introduction to W. H. Auden: Selected Poems in 1979:

Auden was the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century. He welcomed into his poetry all the disordered conditions of his time, all its variety of language and event. 

In this, as in almost everything else, he differed from his modernists predecessors such as Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot or Pound, who had turned nostalgically away from a flawed present to some lost illusory Eden where life was unified, hierarchy secure, and the grand style a natural extension of the vernacular. 

All of this Auden rejected.

I commend The Intellectuals and the Masses to anyone with an interest in the literature and politics of the early 20th century.

Stuffed Victorian dog returns to train station home

The judges didn't like "train station" but were won over by the second mention in the story below: "the beloved Victorian mascot".

So BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

This post is illustrated with a picture of this blog's favourite Victorian dog, Sir William Wallace, who belonged to my great great grandmother's brother Sandy Campbell. This photo appeared in The Sphere for 13 October 1900, so he was very much a late Victorian dog.

Just try cancelling your Your Party membership

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An anonymous letter to the Guardian's Consumer champions:

I subscribed to Your Party at its shambolic start and am now finding it impossible to cancel my membership. No one replies to emails. My local party branch told me it can’t help.

The portal requires me to open a new account and commit to another payment in order to cancel anything.

I tried to block the payments from my Amex card but they managed to sneak a £5 payment again this month. My attempt to reclaim the money from my card issuer was rejected. I’m so frustrated that they are helping themselves to my account when they’ve been messing people about so much.

The Guardian goes on to say:

Others have reported the same vain battle to cancel their subscriptions after months of public infighting among the founders.

A Your Party spokesperson gives an email to use if you want your money back and blames Zarah Sultana for causing the problem by setting up an unauthorised web portal.

Time for the Electoral Commission to take an interest?

The Joy of Six 1447

Keir Starmer's digital ID project is a techno-authoritarian’s wet dream, argues Carole Cadwalladr: "This is a policy that wasn’t in the Labour Party’s manifesto, that no party faithful campaigned for and that no voters were told about on the doorstep. Instead, after some brief ground softening by pet journalists in friendly newspapers, it appeared out of almost nowhere in late September."

David Nowell Smith shows that accusations of "left-wing bias" against the BBC have a long history and arose from newspapers' fear of competition: "The first coordinated newspaper campaign against the ‘Reds’ at the BBC was initiated by the Daily Mail in January 1937, less than two weeks after a new BBC Charter had given the Corporation further editorial independence."

Carolyn Jackson and Mieke Van Houtte say the high-stakes tests common in English schools could be having a serious effect on children’s wellbeing.

"Academics warned that recovery from the October 2023 cyberattack, apparently by an international ransomware gang, has been 'agonisingly slow'. Even the imminent restoration of functions such as the library’s online catalogue will be of only limited help to researchers still unable to access key resources: Frances Jones finds a lack of concern at the plight of the British Library.

"We handed a loaded weapon to four-year-olds." Alex Kantrowitz on the regrets of the man who built the retweet.

Dick Weindling and Marianne Colloms tell the remarkable story of the two men who robbed eight London banks in a morning: "Robert wrote a lengthy confession and said he did it for: 'the devilment of the matter – the excitement, the ingenuity, the almost impossible success to crown it all, urged me to attempt the fraud'."

Argent: Hold Your Head Up

I loved this when it came out as a single in 1972. Almost 40 years later, I saw The Zombies play Market Harborough and Rod Argent shaking hands with the front row of the audience after playing this keyboard solo.

Taliban warn Afghans who wore 'un-Islamic' Peaky Blinders outfits

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Once again, BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Those Labour MPs who voted for (and against) the Lib Dem customs union bill in full

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Labour List has helpfully printed the names of the 13 Labour MPs who voted for the Liberal Democrat customs union bill yesterday and the 3 who voted against.

For the bill

• Sadik Al-Hassan (North Somerset)
• Fleur Anderson (Putney)
• Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower)
• Richard Burgon (Leeds East)
• Dawn Butler (Brent East)
• Marsha de Cordova (Battersea)
• Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch)
• Imran Hussain (Bradford East)
• Afzal Khan (Manchester Rusholme)
• Peter Lamb (Crawley)
• James Naish (Rushcliffe)
• Simon Opher (Stroud)
• Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Clapham and Brixton Hill)

Against the Bill

• Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool)
• Luke Myer (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland)
• Josh Newbury (Cannock Chase)

It's interesting that there are some old lags of the left on the side of the angels, which you wouldn't necessarily have expected. On the other side, Jonathan Brash is a fully signed-up member of Blue Labour.

Though if I were creating an overambitious Labour MP for satirical purposes, Jonathan Brash is just the name I'd choose.

Michael Slater reveals the origins of A Christmas Carol

The great Dickens scholar Michael Slater, who died last month, explains the background to A Christmas Carol, reveals Dickens' reasons for writing it and discusses its monumental success.

Peter Kellner: The pro-Brexit majority of 2016 has literally died out

Huffington Post had gone behind the New World (formerly New European) paywall and emerged with a story about the level of public support for Brexit today:

Peter Kellner, who founded YouGov and sat as its president until 2016 – the year of the Brexit referendum – predicted that there’s most likely a majority of 8 million now in favour of rejoining the bloc.

And, because psephology is a heartless science, he said a lot more, beginning with the observation that more than six million Britons have died since 2016:

Considering the turnout among older voters was higher than average and that 64 per cent of over-65s backed Brexit, he said it is safe to assume 3.2 million pro-Leave voters have died in the last nine years, compared to 1.8 million Remainers.

Kellner said: "This means that among people who are alive today and who voted in the 2016 referendum, Remainers exceed Leavers by 14.3 to 14.2 million."

In addition, the pollster pointed out that the six million young people who have reached voting age since 2016 are more likely to be pro-EU.

Even if just three million of them were to actually vote in a future referendum, that would take the Remain majority to two million.

If you also take account of the Leave voters who have changed their minds since the referendum, then you arrive at Kelner's estimate of an 8 million majority for Remain today.

All of which means our government's policy on Europe is heavily influenced by a desire not to alienate dead people.

Matthew Green to fight South Shropshire again

At the last election Matthew Green and his team in South Shropshire achieved a remarkable 23 per cent swing from the Conservatives, finishing only 1,624 votes short of victory. Matthew was MP for the old Ludlow constituency, which covered much the same area, between 2001 and 2005.

Today comes news that Matthew has been reselected as the Liberal Democrat candidate for South Shropshire. He writes on his Facebook page:

In South Shropshire with the continued rapid collapse of the Conservative Party, at the moment it appears the next general election will be between the Liberal Democrats and Reform. We need to help stop the UK descending into a very dark place. This is the strongest motivation for me to stand and win in South Shropshire. I want to be able to look my children in the eye and say I didn’t stand back, and I played my part, to the fullest extent I could, in helping resist the rise of xenophobic populist nationalism in our country.

Many have already contacted me with messages of support and offers of help in order to fight off the threat of Reform in South Shropshire, and I believe it’s our patriotic duty to do so. If you want to help, please comment on this post or message me.

You can also follow Matthew Green on Bluesky.

And he concludes:

It’s going to be a busy three years but I’m confident I’ll still find the time for walking South Shropshire’s beautiful hills, visiting castles and abbeys, and if my knees permit, still playing a game or two of cricket for Much Wenlock.

Councillor quits Reform for second time in 2 weeks

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges wonder how our regular guest blogger Augustus Carp will cope with this when he posts his next survey of councillors changing parties.

Mark Pack will love it though.

Rutland mosaic depicts lost Aeschylus narrative of the Trojan War

The Roman mosaic discovered at Ketton in Rutland five years ago is even more remarkable than first thought. A story on the University of Leicester website explains why:

New research from the University of Leicester has conclusively determined why the famous Ketton mosaic in Rutland – one of the most remarkable Roman discoveries in Britain for a century – cannot depict scenes from Homer’s Iliad as was initially believed. Instead, it draws on an alternative version of the Trojan War story first popularised by the Greek playwright Aeschylus that has since been lost to history. 

The mosaic’s images combine artistic patterns and designs that had already been circulating for hundreds of years across the ancient Mediterranean, suggesting that craftsmen in Roman Britain were more closely connected to the wider classical world than has been assumed.

In this video from 2021, Time Team's community archaeologist Dani Wootton talks to John Thomas from University of Leicester Archaeological Services about the mosaic and the excavation of the wider site at Ketton.

The Joy of Six 1446

Cicero's Songs, making a welcome return, has naught for your comfort: "The decadence of the American Empire is upon us, and the consequences will be dire, unless the EU can manage to secure the defeat of Putin without American support.  Quite possibly the USA may now seek to obstruct the Europeans in their attempts to bring Putin's murderous misadventure to a close."

The allegations against British special forces operating in Afghanistan will not go away, argues Mark Urban.

John Sweeney says Reform's 19-year-old leader of Warwickshire County Council is skating on thin ice: "[George] Finch’s comments have the potential to jeopardise a fair trial and that, of course, would harm the victim and her family – and waste a huge amount of public money. ... Most people know that after someone has been charged for a serious offence, you must take care not to publish or say anything in the public square that could prejudice the criminal proceedings. ... Finch appears to have forgotten this."

"Here’s a rule I have developed for myself: never talk about a culture-war topic with anyone who only wants to talk to you about that topic. These conversations can only be helpful if they happen as part of a relationship. If you’re going in cold on a very hard topic, you will not be able to experience each other as people, only as opinions or symbols." Naomi Alderman offers 12 rules for online survival.

Dezeen chooses 10 key buildings by high-tech pioneer Nicholas Grimshaw.

"Screwball elements run through their films like runaway socialites: eccentric leads, unexpected reversals, physical comedy, chase sequences, false identities; best intentions go hilariously awry; hard-bitten cynics battle zany dreamers in matters of romance and will." Amber Sparks celebrates the Coen brothers' 1994 film The Hudsucker Proxy 

Tories and Reform have big falling out in Leicestershire over alleged threats of violence

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Leicestershire’s Reform UK and Conservative parties have entered into a public spat over alleged threats of violence, reports the Leicester Mercury:

Reform UK leader of Leicestershire County Council Dan Harrison used a speech at the full council meeting on Wednesday, December 3, to level accusations against the deputy leader of the authority’s Conservative group. 

He claimed that Councillor Craig Smith had “threatened” him with “physical violence”, including alleged threats to “knock [Cllr Harrison’s] block off” if the leader “hurt someone” Cllr Smith “cared for”.

And so on and on. It's worth reading the full report if you want a good laugh.

Labour and the Liberal Democrats are naturally making hay over this embarrassing display. Michael Mullaney, leader of the Lib Dem group on the council, told the Mercury:

“There are really serious issues facing this authority. We have responsibility for incredibly important services, whether it’s social care to the most vulnerable members of society, whether it’s the pressure on special educational needs, whether it’s the poor state of roads and pavements. ...

“So it’s very disappointing that we have got to a situation where personal disputes and threats of violence are down as the main issue for discussion.”

Given that Reform and the Tories are trying to attract the same voters, it's not surprising that they have fallen out. If this pattern is repeated in other parts of the country, it would make an electoral pact between the two parties harder to sell to activists on both sides. Neither is exactly a model of party discipline,

Giant purple dinosaurs, giant chickens and CCTV

Unusually, the contest for our Headline of the Day Award has ended in a tie, as the judges found themselves unable split two entries that share a common theme.

So our congratulations go to BBC News for:

Giant purple dinosaur caught fly-tipping on CCTV

and to Sky News for:

CCTV footage shows giant chicken replacing a car

Jethro Tull: A New Day Yesterday

It's 1978 and my favourite LPs, along with Kate Bush's The Kick Inside, are Songs from the Wood and Heavy Horses. So when I see Repeat: The Best of Jethro Tull Vol. II in a record shop, I naturally buy it.

I was expecting more songs about ley lines, poaching and outdated modes of agriculture, but what I got was the late British blues. I wanted to like it, and soon I did.

Sally Ann Howes couldn't cry for toffees: Why have child actors got so much better?

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I watched the 1945 Ealing period drama Pink String and Sealing Wax the other day. In it, the always-wonderful Googie Withers entangles a young Gordon Jackson in her wiles, only to be defeated by his father Mervyn Johns.

It’s a striking film in that the major characters are all unsympathetic, and an unusual one for Ealing in that the Jackson and his siblings’ dreams of escape to a better life come to something. Usually at Ealing such escapes were strictly temporary, whether they were Alec Guinness’s technological breakthrough in The Man in the White Suit or the people of Pimlico’s Burgundian summer.

A more minor point struck me too. One of Jackson’s young sisters was played by Sally Ann Howe. She appeared in Ealing films throughout the Forties and grew up to be a star of Broadway and, of course, Truly Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Yet when required to cry in Pink String and Sealing Wax her acting is wholly unconvincing.

And it’s not just her. Jon Whiteley made some really interesting films as a child in the 1950s, yet in an episode of The Adventures of Robin Hood, where he plays a boy whose pet goose had been stolen by the Sherriff of Nottingham, he can’t cry for toffees either.

By contrast, I have recently come across two examples of modern British filmmakers being astounded about what child actors can achieve. 

Here’s Garth Jennings talking about the two young leads in his delightful 2007 film Son of Rambow:

“They were self-confident, but still kids. They hadn’t been to any acting schools, they were still themselves. They were quite happy to play and if you wanted them to cry, they weren’t worried about not looking tough in front of anyone. 

“On the second day of shooting, we were shooting the end of the movie in the cinema. I thought, ‘This is going to be too much for little Will Poulter sitting there.’ I’m talking to him off-camera about what he’s looking at and there’s all these people sitting there in complete silence. He started to well up, tears start rolling down his face, and I was just thinking ‘Holy Jesus Christ, this kid is amazing! He has no idea, absolutely no idea how much he has just made my day!’”

And here’s Nick Holt, the director of Responsible Child, a BBC drama from 2019 that has just resurfaced on Netflix, talking about its 12-year-old star Billy Barratt in the Evening Standard:

“I was amazed with how much he let go, especially in the scenes we shot in the secure unit. These were some of our most traumatic set ups – but he realised them. He understood the darkness in the story but wasn’t intimidated or overwhelmed by it.”

Holt also said in an interview Drama Quarterly:

“With this story, not only do you have a young boy in every single scene, you have him in a story that’s incredibly raw and intense and involves a brutal murder. He needs to look quite adult and it’s difficult to find all that in the same place. 

“With Billy, as soon as we saw him he had those aspects. He’s incredibly mature for his age. There is a heart-wrenching scene I find difficult to watch even now. He was superb in that.”

Both Responsible Child (Best TV Movie/Mini-Series) and Billy Barratt (Best Actor) won International Emmys.

Involving children in such dramas, of course, raises ethical questions, but I know from my old day job how seriously production companies now take the safeguarding of young performers. And the networks wouldn’t risk touching them if the companies did anything else.

So why are child actors so good these days? The obvious answer is the growth of drama teaching in  both specialist and conventional schools. Will Poulter didn’t go to a stage school, but in interviews he often pays tribute to the drama classes at his school, while Billy Barratt attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School.

Will Poulter has gone on to a successful adult acting career, and Billy Barratt appears to have every chance of doing so, which suggests both are exceptionally talented, but then so was Sally Ann Howes. This suggests that child actors need teaching as well as natural talent.

Mention of Sylvia Young gives me an excuse to end with an anecdote from a Guardian profile of her published in 2022 (she died earlier this year):

Every year Young takes an assembly – the school has 220 full-time students, between the ages of 10 and 16, and 900 Saturday school attenders – and asks the children “what mustn’t we be?” she says, “and they all shout out ‘stage school brats!’”

Like Mr Bumble, one master of Brixworth Workhouse ended as an inmate of his own establishment

Replying to a comment on my post on Brixworth, I referred a the writer to a page on Brixworth Workhouse. Having done a little more research on the place, I have found a story with strong Dickensian echoes.

In the final chapter of Oliver Twist, Dickens tells us what becomes of his characters in later life. Charley Bates, for instance, seeing what has befallen his criminal associates, resolves to mend his ways and, after toiling as a farmer’s drudge and a carrier’s lad, finds himself "the merriest young grazier in all Northamptonshire".

Others are not so lucky:

Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, deprived of their situations, were gradually reduced to great indigence and misery, and finally became paupers in that very same workhouse in which they had once lorded it over others. Mr. Bumble has been heard to say, that in this reverse and degradation, he has not even spirits to be thankful for being separated from his wife.

And the same thing, says the Brixworth History Society site, happened to one of the masters of Brixworth Workhouse:

Brixworth Workhouse had eight Masters during its 98 year history with all their wives acting as Matrons. One Master, a James Macdonald in the 1890s, was a man with exceptional physique who would deter tramps from entering the Workhouse by exercising outside with a set of Indian clubs. It was the same Master who adorned his lavish sitting room with autographed photographs of Queen Mary and her brothers. 

Despite having taught deportment and physical exercise to royal pupils, when he left the Workhouse in 1898 he fell upon hard times himself and on returning to the Workhouse as an inmate, he died there a pauper.

I've also discovered that a study of the Brixworth Union – the collection of parishes that operated the workhouse – has been published. It's Protesting about Pauperism: Poverty, Politics and Poor Relief in Late-Victorian England, 1870-1900 by Elizabeth T. Hurren.

The more you find out, the more books there are to buy.