Latest news with #StratforduponAvon
BBC News
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Birmingham Mastermind winner finds love with rival finalist
Becoming the BBC's Mastermind champion is something even the most ardent quiz fanatic can only dream the man who won this year's final walked away from the competition with a lot more than the coveted trophy - after he and the woman he pipped to the post became an blossomed on set for John Robinson and Claire Reynolds, both from Birmingham, as the pair bonded over their shared love of quizzes."They say opposites attract," said Mr Robinson. "But I think in this case, very similar personalities are attracted." Mr Robinson, an English teacher in Kings Heath who previously took home £500,000 following an appearance on ITV's Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, won with a total of 30 points - just one more than Ms Reynolds' total of 29."I have forgiven him now, just about," said Ms Reynolds, who is originally from Kingstanding but now lives in Stratford-upon-Avon. During the final, though, Mr Robinson's thoughts were anywhere but love."It is very nerve-wracking indeed," he told BBC Midlands today. "Especially with the studio lights, and pitch black around you, and the spotlight, it can be quite intimidating."But I thought, I'm just going to stare straight ahead at Clive [Myrie, the presenter], focus on him, and and try and block out everything else around me."And somehow it worked."In fact, it was only after the finalists were able to put all thought of specialist subjects - for Mr Robinson, the Empire State Building; for Ms Reynolds, the early 20th century German mathematician Emmy Noether - out of their minds, that romance had a chance to bloom."During the actual filming of the final [in Belfast], there's not an awful lot of time to actually talk," said Ms Reynolds. "We did have a little chat, we said hello and said good luck."But we spent more time chatting on the flight back to Birmingham afterwards." Despite only missing out on first place by a single point, Ms Reynolds is adamant that the trophy is not for them to share: "No, no. I didn't win it so absolutely not.""You can reapply to go back on a future series," added Mr Robinson. "So it might be that she goes back on in a few years and gets one of her own."Now back home, surely the Mastermind champion and runner-up are destined to become the pub quiz power couple of the West Midlands?"We've been to a couple," said Mr Robinson, "but before anyone knew about our Mastermind experience. They went... rather well, shall we say?"But I'm not sure we can go back to any now." Follow BBC Birmingham on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
Daily Mail
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Mastermind finalists each make a pass - at each other: Winner and runner up go from rivals to lovers
Two Mastermind finalists have gone from rivals to lovers having entered a relationship after the show. Claire Reynolds, 42, of Stratford-upon-Avon, narrowly missed out on the top score in the final of the 52nd series of the show. John Robinson, a teacher at Bishop Challoner Catholic College in Birmingham, won the final and later his fellow player's heart. The couple said they became close as they embarked on their return journey to England, The Times first reported, after the final was filmed in Northern Ireland in November. 'The show was shot in Belfast and we were both flying back to Birmingham and were on a flight together,' Reynolds said. 'After we filmed the final, we had some time to kill at the airport. So we had a few drinks together and then got the plane back ... and stayed in touch. 'Although we started as friends it's more than that now, to be honest.' Reynolds added that 'one thing led to another' and the two former singletons became a couple. The pair have reportedly now combined their knowledge and are taking on locals at community games nights. Before the show, Robinson won £500,000 on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in 2019. Reynolds scored an impressive 12 points with no passes on her specialist round on the German mathematician Emmy Noether, and 17 points on general knowledge.
BBC News
20-05-2025
- Climate
- BBC News
Warwickshire farmer has 'written off' crop after a lack of rain
A farmer has blamed a lack of rain through the spring for part of his crop being "written off".Mark Meadows farms arable land in Alderminster near Stratford-upon-Avon, and said his spring wheat "hadn't been growing well" as there had only been one significant rainfall since the seeds were planted in late Met Office said this spring was so far ranking as the driest in over a Meadows added that his ground was "like concrete" and the ruined crop meant he had lost about £3,000. The field was due to be harvested towards the end of August, however Mr Meadows accepted that he had to "start again next year". "It just hasn't rooted as there should have been moisture.""We have lost yield and we can't manage that yield back - there's not enough time now to put a crop in that would be viable this year", he told BBC Midlands Today. The wheat from a nearby field that was planted eight days earlier had benefited from the March rainfall and could still be sold, but Mr Meadows said it was not as mature as he would have liked. Richard Simkin who farms in Essington, Staffordshire, said he could not remember a spring that had been as dry and sunny as this year, however he added that the strawberries he grew had not been strawberries were grown in polytunnels and drip-fed water which had been extracted from a borehole on his land. Although Mr Simkin had not been affected by the drought, he said the sunnier weather meant his strawberries were ready to be picked "at least 10 days earlier than normal".He added that his farm near Wolverhampton also grew pumpkins, which were due to be planted in the next two weeks. The farmer said if the drought continued, he could experience problems with his pumpkin yield. Follow BBC Coventry & Warwickshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
Telegraph
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Mark Twain's bizarre obsession with ‘killing' Shakespeare
When Mark Twain was convinced of something, he seldom brooked disagreement. Over the two dozen books he wrote, he showed an exceptional level of intellectual vigour, commitment and acuity. Yet he used those mental powers to advance one particular unusual belief: that William Shakespeare had never written the plays attributed to him, and that credit probably belonged to Francis Bacon. Such was Twain's zeal on the subject, wrote his secretary Isabel Lyon, that one would have thought he 'had Shakespeare by the throat righteously strangling him for some hideous crime'. For two months, from January until March 1909, Twain beavered away at what would become his final published book, Is Shakespeare Dead? He had a bullheaded certainty. 'I know that Shakespeare did not write those plays, and I have reason to believe he did not touch the text in any way,' he told his friend and authorised biographer Albert Paine. 'It is the great discovery of the age.' Twain, it should be noted, cherished Shakespeare's plays, and saw them often. In the 1870s, he and his wife, Livy, had visited Stratford-upon-Avon, and Twain, in these early days, backed the creation of a Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. He had researched Shakespeare while preparing his novel The Prince and the Pauper (1881), and in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the King and Duke try to palm themselves off as Shakespearean actors, offering hilariously garbled versions of the Bard to backwoods audiences. But Twain had always questioned the authorship of Shakespeare 's oeuvre. His 50-year faith in Bacon dated back to his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, when fellow pilot George Ealer, 'an idolater of Shakespeare', read the plays aloud to him and bashed Bacon supporters royally. Twain begged to differ. After going to see one performance of Romeo and Juliet, Twain even told a companion, 'That's one of the greatest things Bacon ever wrote.' Why did Twain attack Shakespeare with such gusto? Partly it stemmed from his extreme disillusionment with people, which only grew in his later years: his belief that the planet was chock-full of fools and frauds such as the Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy: 'I think he [Shakespeare] & Mother Eddy are just about a pair – a pair of humbugs.' The Shakespeare cult, as Twain saw it, proved that people were merely sheep who followed a herd instinct and echoed what they heard. Twain's error was using his own career as a frame of reference. In his final years, he had devoted enormous time to his autobiographical dictations, which by this point amounted to 450,000 words: he simply couldn't believe that Shakespeare had left behind no manuscripts or letters. With an extreme paucity of original documentation, Shakespeare biographers had relied on a handful of mouldy anecdotes about the man, many recorded long after he was gone. Twain compared his own literary fame to the glaring emptiness of Shakespeare's record. Had Shakespeare been truly famous in his own time, Twain argued, 'his notoriety would have lasted as long as mine has lasted in my own village [Hannibal] out in Missouri... a really celebrated person cannot be forgotten in his village in the short space of 60 years'. He mentioned his Hannibal schoolfriends, who regularly retailed legends about him to reporters. Yet the comparison was odd: Twain lived in a very different media environment, one in which a thriving American newspaper industry published features, profiles and interviews, and in which celebrity culture had already taken root. Like many Shakespeare deniers, Twain also observed that the playwright was curiously well versed in law courts and legal proceedings. Nobody, thought Twain, could master 'the argot of a trade at which he has not personally served'. Some scholars have speculated that Shakespeare clerked in a law office before starting his theatre career in London, but Twain was convinced that Shakespeare plays betray knowledge that only a highly educated person such as Bacon might have known. Yet Twain failed to confront many obvious objections to his theory. How could Bacon's imposture have remained hidden during his lifetime and after? Did he confide in no one? How did he make necessary changes to plays during rehearsals? Or did Shakespeare, the man under whose name all this work was disguised, rush to Bacon's home each night for secret revisions? What about cases such as The Two Noble Kinsmen, in which we know that Shakespeare collaborated with other authors? Twain never dealt with the problem of the First Folio: the fact that Elizabethan actors thought so highly of William Shakespeare that they assembled this legacy for posterity only seven years after the playwright had died. It should further be noted that this wasn't for Twain a unique situation: he had also identified John Milton, not John Bunyan, as the true author of The Pilgrim's Progress. Even Twain's heartiest admirers, Paine and Lyon, appealed to him not to publish Is Shakespeare Dead? Colonel Harvey, his editor and publisher at Harper & Brothers, agreed that it would be ill-advised, both showing intellectual slippage on Twain's part and dealing another blow to his image as America's leading humorist. But Twain was hell-bent on publishing it; worse, he was desperate to beat into print another book, Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon by William Stone Booth, which aimed to show that Shakespeare's work was shot through with coded messages pointing to Bacon's secret authorship. As a result of the rushed editing process, Twain's last published book appeared on April 8 1909, a mere month after the manuscript was completed. It was greeted with something less than acclaim: no one endorsed it, then or later, as 'the great discovery of the age'. And the haste landed Twain in an embarrassing imbroglio with another writer, George Greenwood, who claimed that Twain had quoted freely from Greenwood's similar book, The Shakespeare Problem Restated, without crediting him – an awkward position for Twain, a militant on copyright issues. The problem, in truth, was a rogue footnote, and Twain's apology ended the kerfuffle. But it may have contributed to the health problems that increasingly plagued him. The Greenwood controversy blew up in June 1909, as Twain travelled to Baltimore. On the day he checked into the Belvedere Hotel, one newspaper carried the incendiary headline 'Is Mark Twain a Plagiarist?' Feeling worn out, Twain shunned newspapermen who came to elicit his reaction, and lay down in the hotel room with a book. When he arose and paced the room, he suddenly paused with one hand clutching his chest. 'I have a curious pain in my breast,' he told Paine. 'It's a curious, sickening, deadly kind of pain. I never had anything just like it.' Twain's instincts were accurate: at 73, he was suffering from angina pectoris, with a reduced blood flow to the heart muscle producing sharp, frightening attacks. Twain rallied enough to address the graduates at St Timothy's School, in Catonsville, Maryland, a tiny, elite and very proper all-female boarding establishment. On his way to the graduation, he chomped on a cigar and glanced admiringly at the parade of Baltimore girls traipsing down the sidewalk. 'Pretty girls – and you almost have a monopoly of them here – are always an inspiration to me,' he told a reporter. In addressing the graduates, Twain's eyes sparkled, and he spiced his remarks with trademark mischief. He advised the girls not to smoke or drink to excess, then delivered his punchline: 'Don't marry – I mean, to excess.' It was to be the last speech of his 43-year lecturing career. In terms of health, Twain knew that he had passed a watershed. After the Baltimore trip, among many restrictions the doctor placed on the writer's activities the most onerous was an exhortation to cut down on smoking and try to heal his 'tobacco heart'. Since boyhood, Twain had remained defiant on this score – as defiant as his lifelong pro-Bacon stance. 'It isn't going to happen,' he insisted. 'I shan't diminish it by a single puff.' In the end, he did, slashing his consumption from 40 cigars per day to four. 'I don't care for death,' he wrote, '& I do care for smoking.' But this consummate American showman knew exactly what approached. 'I came in with Halley's comet in 1835,' Twain said. 'It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't.' After 75 years away, in April 1910 the comet returned, appearing above Twain's home in Redding, Connecticut. Twain, having suffered successive angina attacks, was heavily sedated and probably didn't know. On April 21, with the comet still in the sky, he breathed his last.
The Guardian
08-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Eve Thompson obituary
My grandmother Eve Thompson, who has died aged 95, was variously a theatre stage manager, a secretary and a nursery nurse – until later in life she became involved in voluntary work and advocacy, particularly in relation to mental health. After Eve's son Ben was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the early 1980s, she volunteered for the National Schizophrenia Fellowship (now Rethink Mental Illness), working with service users, carers and professionals to improve services, establish supported housing and ensure families received the help they needed. She became its national chair in 1990, a position she held for five years, and was also a trustee. Outspoken about funding shortfalls, in a 1993 article in the Independent newspaper she said: 'The size of the cheque is the most important thing. You cannot make bricks without straw. There are simply not the cash resources available for what needs to be done.' Eve was born in Birmingham to Ernest Salt, a chartered accountant, and his wife Joan (nee Morgan). She attended Edgbaston high school for girls until, during the second world war, the family moved to Northamptonshire and then Stratford-upon-Avon, where she went to Leamington high school for girls. At 15 she joined the Birmingham repertory theatre school, and the following year travelled to Charleston, South Carolina, on a theatre scholarship. Later she worked as a stage manager for repertory theatre companies in Yorkshire and the south-west of England, until in 1950 she decided the theatrical life was not for her. Moving to London in the early 50s, she completed a course at St Godric's secretarial college in Hampstead, north London, before taking on various secretarial jobs, including as secretary to the political cartoonist Vicky (Victor Weisz). After marrying John Thompson, a civil servant, in 1954, she concentrated on raising their young family – they had three children, Katy, Jenny and Ben. In the early 70s, despairing of finding a nursery place for Ben, who had additional needs, Eve trained to be a nursery nurse at Barnet College in north London, after which she worked for a number of years in a nursery for children with learning difficulties run by the Westminster Society. When she and John moved back to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1981 she retired. For many years Eve and John had been functioning alcoholics. Matters came to a head in the mid-80s when Eve was hospitalised and then treated at the Woodleigh Beeches alcohol and substance abuse unit, which she credited with saving her life. Afterwards both she and John remained sober for the rest of their lives. They also became active in Alcoholics Anonymous, supporting others in recovery with practical advice and compassion that drew on their own experiences. Known for her intelligence, dry wit and determination, Eve retained deep commitments to family and mental health advocacy, as well as a lasting love of the theatre. John died in 2007 and Ben died in 2016. Eve is survived by her two daughters, four grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
