Morning music
Tasty, tasty, very very tasty
I was looking up some TV composers on Wikipedia, IMDB, and YouTube, and happened to see the ad below, a 1982 TV ad for breakfast cereal. People in the UK still remember it, though the music was also used for other ads featuring the same product, Bran Flakes.
I knew the actress featured, a lady called Fran, when I was in my mid-twenties, in the early 1980s. She was South African, 30-35, very lively, and whose father was at the time a director of the South African subsidiary of British Oxygen. I recall being told by a mutual friend that he would complain that he had paid out large amounts to keep Fran at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London. Her friends there apparently thought (perhaps not entirely wrongly) that her father was “some kind of millionaire“, when they saw her large rented flat and absence of financial struggle; many of them were in cramped bedsits.
Fran’s father’s complaint was not so much that he had paid out for her to attend RADA as a foreign student for —I think— 4 years, but more that, notwithstanding her desire to become a classical actress appearing in Shakespeare etc, she had had few roles offered to her once she graduated, possibly because she spoke with a mixture of South African, Australian and English accent(s).
The “Tasty Tasty” ad was the only fairly well-paid role —so to speak— she was ever offered, as far as I know, though I believe that she did appear in a couple of plays somewhere or other. The ad paid a flat fee of £5,000 (in 1982; you could probably multiply the value today by 5x if not more, so at least £25,000 in today’s money).
Bran Flakes put out about half a dozen other ads using the same jingle during the 1980s, but Fran was only in that one, which was filmed, if memory serves, in Sydney.
Fran never lost her accent, which was somewhere between her native South African speech and that of her husband, an Australian who had come to London seeking stardom as a singer, but who also fell short, eventually becoming an entertainer on cruise ships (I think P&O, mainly).
I found Fran easy to talk to, her husband less so somehow, though I only encountered them together once, I think. They tended to live rather separate lives much of the time, encountering each other at intervals, in the manner of comets or planets or whatever. He was on the cruise ships much of the time.
I think that they stayed married mainly for two reasons: they had a nice little boy, Sam, about 4 when I knew him. A lady I knew, and who had known the husband when he was a student who rented an attic room from her, sometimes babysat Sam when the parents wanted an evening out. At the time, they rented a flat in Hampstead. Later, I believe, they moved to a cottage in Surrey, or maybe Sussex.
The little boy seemed to like me when I called in at times during the babysitting. He loved the older lady babysitter more, though, because she let him stay up with her as long as he liked, watching TV with her. That older lady often told me about how she had, many times, in years past, had to shield the husband, David, from girls insistently calling and wanting to speak to him.
The other reason the couple stayed married was apparently financial. Both sets of parents had opposed the marriage for religious reasons. One set (I think the Australian) was Roman Catholic, the other some kind of Protestant. Or vice-versa. Both sets were strongly anti-divorce. Both sets were financially loaded and made it clear that “no divorce, or no inheritance“…
On the couple of occasions when our paths crossed, I found the husband of that couple rather melancholic, something not unknown in the world of entertainment, as I understand. As for Fran, I think she found it hard to find a place (in life) in the UK. She said (very truly) “In London, stick your nose out of the door and £15 is gone!” (make that £50 or £75 in the London of 2024). I remember that she enjoyed a day out we had at Ascot, and her humour that day. My parents were there, and liked her.
I heard this and that about the couple over the years (including a couple of amusing but unkind anecdotes better not included here), but the last time I saw Fran was at Raoul’s Cafe in Little Venice, along with the other lady mentioned here. Fran and her husband were now living in the Caribbean, on Grand Cayman. That must have been around 1994.
As I get older (67 now), I find that my inherent tendency to look back is intensified. I have always taken an interest in how people develop and live through their lives, and the relation of that to society and its structure.
I wonder what happened to that couple in the end. The husband must be in his mid-seventies, at least; as for Fran, maybe early to mid-seventies. Even the little boy, Sam, must now be about 44 or 45. Good grief.
Tweets seen
I see so many tweets from the usual “antifascist, no racism, Ukraine, FBPE, refugees welcome and bring millions of your tribesmen with you” idiots, mostly calling for people in Clacton to vote for anyone but Farage, and for voters all over the UK to not vote Reform UK.
Rarely, in fact never, do I see any of those Twitter/X idiots attempt to square the circle of a million immigrants per year coming in, yet only 200,000 dwelling units completed in 2023. Or how to keep paying liveable pay when the potential labour force pool increases steadily while productivity drops. Or how to maintain State benefits and/or State pensions when a million persons a year, who have never paid in anything, become “entitled” to receive the benefits and pensions. Or how to subsidize that million extra individuals every year, when the vast majority of them are not only not employed but often completely unemployable.
All the aforesaid idiots do is demand by tweet that “the Government” builds more and more houses for the immigrants, pays them more and more from State coffers, and so on. Complete unreality.
In Clacton, Farage is now firm favourite to win. In his place, I should “double and triple the guard“, after what has already happened. He has become such a hate figure for some that I do not rule out some sort of assassination attempt by pro-immigration loonies.
Typical msm “commentator”/”journalist” scribbler and talking head. Clueless.
Yesterday, Sam Coates on Sky News expressed the view that Nigel Farage might be elected in Scotland! Slip of the tongue, yes, but Coates just carried on without having corrected himself.
Take a look at the video clip. Hustings organized by the Jewish lobby establishment, and guarded by Jew-Zionist thugs on the door. The sole anti-Zionist candidate not allowed to enter.
Looks as if my bold —some say rash— prediction of as few as 50 Con MPs after 4 July 2024 might yet come true.
More music
Life is more usually grey than black and white and, after all, there were few places more grey than the DDR (East Germany)…
More tweets
Jewish-lobby puppet Largan treating one or more of his constituents with contempt. The little bastard has no place as MP anywhere, and least of all for the High Peak constituency. He was born and brought up in the southwest of the Manchester area, and until elected, narrowly, for High Peak, was an accountant working for Marks & Spencer in London.
Whatever one may think of the flags, Largan is supposed to be asking for the votes of all eligible voters, not treating those who are anti-Israel with contempt.
He’s toast. After 4 July, Largan will not even be a footnote, politically. Ordinary employment beckons…
More music
Late tweets seen
It may seem absurd, at first blush, to compare the likely destruction of the Conservative Party with that of the East German communists [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Unity_Party_of_Germany#Final_days:_collapse_of_the_SED], but in systemic terms there is not much difference.
A long-established party gets increasingly out of touch with the population in general, and there is institutional inertia (in the UK, the FPTP voting system, and ingrained popular “small-c conservatism”; in the DDR/East Germany, the repressive organs of the State (the Volkspolizei, the so-called “Stasi”, the “Aufklarung” etc) and absence of any but rigged voting.
However, that inertia is only effective up to a point, the point at which the situation gets to the tipping-point. The established power-party then collapses.
Montgomerie seems surprised that the very centre of Conservative Party misgovernment contains people (“special adviser” “SpAd” idiot-careerists, MPs, even policemen guarding 10 Downing Street) willing to sell their professionalism and even basic integrity and honour for a few hundred quid.
I heard similar stories about Moscow in the 1980s, when I was in a sense on the periphery of events there (though I never actually visited until 1993, after the Soviet Union had collapsed), and heard a lot from people who visited the Soviet Union, or had relocated to the UK. Policemen openly soliciting bribes, diplomats dealing in smuggled Western consumer goods, corruption in marking exams, you name it.
Symptomatic of a corrupt and collapsing system sliding into the mire.
Montgomerie has been pushing out “Conservative” scheiss for (?) 15 years, but he has always been able to at least pose as an upstanding and principled Conservative. Now? He has no choice, psychologically, but to turn against his own party, or lose all ideological integrity.
He seems to have belatedly woken up to the fact that the little Indian money-juggler neither looks like, nor behaves like, nor speaks like, nor thinks like a prime minister, a fact repeatedly noted on this blog.
This may be a “conspiracy theory” take, but there is something almost (?) orchestrated about the implosion of the Conservative campaign. Do the ruling circles and secret cabals want as bad a result as possible for the Conservatives, so that Keir Starmer, someone without any real ideology, and who is a puppet for NWO/ZOG, can impose a pseudo-democratic tyranny over the next 5 years and beyond? Open question.
Sunak’s “incredible anger” is about as convincing as the spoiled little girl of literature who threatens to “scream and scream until she is sick”. Entirely unconvincing.
The little Indian money-juggler seems to think that, after 4 July 2024, there will still be a Conservative Party out of which the corrupt defaulters can be “booted”. Sunak should read the (national) room. He’s toast. His party is toast. His candidates are almost all toast. Sunak himself will be “booted” out of both government and party in about 2 weeks.
Ha. “What goes around comes around“…
Well, Washington? Well, Paris? Well, Warsaw? Still want to give heavy and advanced armaments, including long-range missiles, to the Kiev regime?
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 