Twickenham Film Studios' sad end, gunfight at a vacant lot near the OK Corral and Joely Richardson's family semaphore habit
✒ Round where we live we're very sad indeed about the likely closure of Twickenham Film Studios. Many great British and foreign films have been made there, including the Beatles movies, Alfie, The Italian Job, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Fish Called Wanda, Blade Runner and more recently My Week with Marilyn and War Horse. The studio, which occasionally brought a faint dusting of star glamour to our suburb, has been on the site for 99 years. Now there's a petition to save it, signed by among others Steven Spielberg, Colin Firth and John Landis.
There is some puzzlement about why it has gone into administration. Someone who works there told me this week that it had been badly managed for years. Now comes the horrible news that Taylor Wimpey is in talks about developing the site, and we all know what that means. It's not a beautiful building, but it's a very historic place which could have a satisfying role in our cultural future. Nobody ever comes to Britain to see our executive apartments and office space, but films are a crucial part of our national character.
✒ I see that one in 10 medical students say they know of someone who has had to resort to prostitution to pay their bills. I've no idea if that's true, though it is reminiscent of the Alan Bennett story in his book Smut, where a student couple can't pay the rent so let their otherwise respectable landlady watch them at it.
However I fear there might be more of that sort of thing going on, especially among the cash-strapped young, than we might care to think. Years ago I knew the press officer of a very worthy national organisation. She was afraid of losing her job, but thought she'd survive in the end. A friend of hers had signed up with a very reliable agency, which only sent round men they had carefully vetted. Her main worry was not violence or disease but her parents finding out she wasn't really a secretary.
I thought it was desperately sad, and was delighted when my friend held on to her job. I rather doubt that even middle-class prostitution is at all like the life depicted by Billie Piper in Secret Diary of a Call Girl.
✒ A book I've been reading with enormous pleasure is The Last Gunfight, by Jeff Guinn (Robson Press, £20). It's nominally about the 1881 gunfight at the OK Corral, though that is just the centrepiece of a fascinating examination of the real American frontier. For one thing, the gunfight – which made the name of Wyatt Earp famous – wasn't at the OK Corral at all, but "Gunfight near a vacant lot not very far from the OK Corral" doesn't have the same ring.
Secondly, gunfights in towns – even Tombstone, Arizona – were incredibly rare, which is why this one became so notorious. "Cowboy" was a disparaging term for hoodlum rustlers, and decent folk cowered when the cowboys came to town. VS Pritchett said he had travelled the world and found that everywhere he went, what most people yearned for was respectability. The Earp family were desperate to be respected, but things didn't work out and they were regarded with great mistrust. Meanwhile, Tombstone wanted to be thought of as cultured. Even at the height of the troubles, you could see the latest plays at the theatre, and there were readings of poetry and the works of Sir Walter Scott.
✒ This week we went to see Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea, at the Rose Theatre in Kingston, Surrey. It's one of my favourite theatres, with its vast stage and friendly staff. I like the way people can sit on cushions on the floor in front of the stalls, and I'm delighted the Rose is finally getting the audiences it deserves. This is partly achieved by having slebs along to the press night, and you might see Peter Hall, Prunella Scales and Timothy West, Jerry Hall, Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin, Baroness Jay, even Mr and Mrs Gyles Brandreth. But the productions are never less than interesting, and sometimes remarkable.
The Ibsen heroine is played by Joely Richardson, which is brave since her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, and her late sister Natasha both took on the role. But, oh dear, she does have the family twitch, one of Vanessa's stock-in-trades. She can't stop playing with her hands, curling her hair, rubbing her nose, wiggling her fingers, waving her arms like a very slow semaphorist. You know that if, at the start of each act, you gave her a really big piece of paper, a corner in each hand, by the end she'd have made an origami duck. It is terribly distracting.
✒ Last autumn I noticed a special offer in the Daily Telegraph, for a canteen of Viners cutlery, half price at £150. It would make a nice present for my wife's birthday. But when she unwrapped it, it turned out some of the stuff was of different patterns. We phoned and they promised to send more, which they did, except it was the same. Then we noticed that there were actually three random patterns, from different sets. It was unusable. We rang again, and slightly less willingly they offered a refund. So we spent nearly £13 on postage and were refunded only £135.
Net effect: no birthday gift, loss of almost £28, and loads of inconvenience. I know the editor of the Daily Telegraph isn't sitting cackling at our annoyance, but I think I will stray no more and stick to Guardian offers in the future.
✒ Signs, labels etc: Roland Matthews got a speeding ticket from Hampshire police; they used to come from the central ticketing office, now they're issued by the summary justice unit, which sounds like Mogadishu (though not Tombstone, Arizona, where the forces of law were surprisingly meticulous).
Keith Hibbert obtained some prescription eye-drops: "Put in one drop every four hours. You only need to use these drops when you are awake."
I have lost the name of the woman reader who sent in a flier for Cinema City in Norwich. It shows George Clooney in beachwear in The Descendants, and promises "Dish of the day + drink, £9.95".
And on a BA flight, Alan Randall was given a Dairystix tube containing milk-style fluid for his tea. "Follow Dairystix on Facebook" it urges. "My dull life has just got interesting," he says.