Skip to main content

Before I was famous

When you listen to the people turning up for auditions for the X-Factor, many of them are attending with the intention of becoming famous. It's an end it itself. They crave fame. I can tell you here and now that being an author is, for the vast majority, anything but a route to fame. For every J. K. Rowling there are thousands of us published authors who don't really appear on the radar. So any wannabe famous authors, get in that X-Factor queue.

This reality made it doubly pleasing to discover (thanks, Wendy, for pointing it out) that according to this website I am, apparently, one of the 20 most famous people to be born in my home town of Rochdale. The town is probably best known for being the place the modern format of Co-operative movement started (or these days, where the TV show Waterloo Road is set).

The list includes a fair smattering of actors, mostly bit part players on Coronation Street or Emmerdale (Rochdale is handily situated between the two), though we can claim the old stalwart Jack Howarth, who played Albert Tatlock many years ago. We've also general TV represented by Sky presenter Ginny Buckley and one-time comedy actor and now birder Bill Oddie.

Politics is represented by the 19th century trade reformer, John Bright, and 20th century MP Cyril Smith, while music gets a fair look in. Apart from Liz and Andy Kershaw and Lisa Stansfield, we have, of course, the early to mid twentieth century superstar, Gracie Fields. With my aversion to sport, I'm delighted that the only sportsperson we can claim is John Virgo - if you are going to have sport, snooker is about as ironic as it gets.

And saving the best for last, the real surprise for me was that actress Anna Friel was on the list. Shooting to fame with a lesbian kiss on the soap Brookside, she was stunning in the Stephen Poliakoff TV play, The Tribe. Most recently she has been a fascinating presence in the US show Pushing Daisies. Although its ambition exceeded its reach, this was a truly original programme (despite Ms Friel's rather so-so American accent).

So I want to thank the organizers of this list for including me. After all this is surely the closest I will ever come to Anna Friel.

Photo of Rochdale from www.latemeetings.com
Photo of Anna Friel from www.annafriel.org

Comments

  1. That is really cool. Sadly, there is no way I am ever going to appear on a list of one of the most famous people in the place I was born... London.
    But I am on Wikipedia as one of the most well-known personalities out of the small group of people with the surname 'Saini'... But since I haven't heard of anyone else on the list, I'm not sure that's significant.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You're older than me! Um, that's all I wanted to say.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think I am, Peet, though they haven't got my date of birth right.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense