Mollie Sugden and me

Mollie Sugden, who died this week aged 86, was a British comedy actress best known for her character Betty Slocombe in the 1970s TV sitcom Are You Being Served?

Are You Being Served?, which was immensely popular and ran from 1972 to 1985, was set in Grace Bros department store. The show was full of corny jokes and delightful characters of whom Mrs Slocombe was one of the favourites.

Mrs Slocombe, whose hair was dyed a different, lurid colour every episode, was head of the Ladies Separates and Underwear department and was always spouting double entendres: “Captain Peacock, I do not respond to any man's finger!", she says in response to a summons from the boss; "Before we go any further, Mr Rumbold, Miss Brahms and I would like to complain about the state of our drawers. They're a positive disgrace."

A divorcee, Mrs Slocombe would return home alone each night to her "little pussy".

Why am I mentioning all this? Because reading her obituary sent my mind spinning back 30 years almost to the day when I met her.

I had just started working at The Daily Telegraph when Kirsten Cooke, an actress who was later to become famous for her role as Michelle Dubois in the British TV sitcom ‘Allo, ‘Allo, phoned me and asked if I’d like to see her in a play at Richmond Theatre. There was an afternoon matinée and I had the day off (4th July 1979).

How did I know Kirsten? I was indirectly responsible for her marriage to my friend, Billy Bottle, whom I have previously mentioned in my series on My First Newspaper. I was going out with Kirsten’s best friend, Felicity, who was a barmaid in The Ship pub in Herne Bay; she was doing a degree at Kent University and did bar work to supplement her grant.

One night Felicity asked me to turn up at the pub early as her friend was down for the weekend and wouldn’t know anyone apart from her and she was working. I did and I instantly liked Kirsten: stunningly attractive, smart and lots of fun. Billy Bottle was drinking at the other end of the bar and spotted this vision of loveliness. Within seconds, he was by my side asking to be introduced. He instantly fell in love as did Kirsten. They married about six weeks later; the marriage lasted about a year.

Anyway, back to my story. I went to see Kirsten in the play (I can’t remember the title) at Richmond and afterwards met her backstage where she introduced me to the cast. Kirsten and I then went to a teashop for a cuppa and a chinwag before she had to get ready for the evening’s performance.

Mollie Sugden popped in and asked if she could join us. She was a big star but didn’t have a big head. She was delightful and witty. At one point, a man came over and told Mollie he was a big fan and could he have her autograph. She chatted to the stranger while signing her autograph. The man thanked her and off he went. We carried on with our tea for a few minutes before Mollie suddenly shrieked: “I don’t bloody believe it – that little bugger’s stolen my bag!” An opportunist thief, he was never caught. Mollie stole the show and the “fan” stole her bag.

So, in a long-winded way, that is one of the reasons why I remembered Mollie Sugden, apart from her being a fine actress.

Mollie Sugden RIP.

Tennis babes and Andy Murray

Maria Kirilenko of Russia

Wimbledon is in its second week and the excitement grows as our very own Andy Murray progressed to the quarterfinals after a nail-biting five setter that ended late last night under floodlights on Centre Court.

But a few days ago I read an astonishing Wimbledon story that stopped me in my tracks: Apparently, the Wimbledon committee that decides who plays on the show courts has admitted that they have put lesser ranked women on Centre Court because of their looks. Sexist or what?

A top seeded player who looks like a dump truck is relegated to a Siberian outer court while a tennis babe with long legs, a pretty pout and lower ranking is put on Centre or No. 1 courts.

So, for example, on Thursday the ninth seeded Caroline Wozniacki, a gorgeous Danish player, pictured below left, defeated the Russian babe Maria Kirilenko, ranked 59th in the world, on Centre Court while the world No. 1 Dinara Safina of Russia was downgraded to an outer court.

Not fair, uh?

And on Wednesday, the so-called Battle of the Babes match saw the unseeded Argentinian Gisela Dulko, world ranking 45, beat the also unseeded Russian Maria Sharapova, ranked 60th, while top seeded players were assigned outer courts.

Surely I’m making this up in this day and age of political and sexual correctness?

No, the All England Club admitted that physical attractiveness was taken into consideration when allocating courts.

The Wimbledon spokesman, Johnny Perkins, said: “Good looks are a factor.”

Mr. Perkins said that court selection was “a great big mixture of where the players are in the draw, who they're playing, what their ranking is.” But box-office appeal has to be taken into consideration, he added.

He said: "We don't look at a player and say she is attractive or he is attractive, therefore they play on the big court. But if a player is deemed to be popular, for whatever reason, they are more likely to be on one of the bigger courts."

A BBC source said: “It's the Wimbledon play committee, not us who decides on the order of play. But obviously it's advantageous to us if there are good-looking women players on Centre Court.

“No one has heard of many of the women now, so if they are pretty it definitely gives them an edge. Our preference would always be a Brit or a babe as this always delivers high viewing figures.”

And there was I thinking it was all about tennis excellence. I’ll admit I derive a certain pleasure watching some of these tennis babes strut their tennis stuff. In the looks department my favourite player is Ana Ivanovic of Serbia, a former world No. 1 and winner of the French Open last year. She is drop-dead delicious AND a great player.

But at the end of the day’s play I’m more interested in who wins the match and moves on towards the final and the Wimbledon crown.

So how do the players who get bumped onto outer courts because their boat races don’t come up to scratch feel?

For an example, let’s take Svetlana Kuznetsova of Russia, pictured below right. She’s 24 years old and is the world No. 5. She is a grand slam winner having won the 2004 U.S. Open and this year’s French Open singles titles. She was the runner-up in singles at the 2006 French Open and the 2007 U.S Open. And to show her all-round tennis talent she also won the Australian Open doubles title in 2005. Kuznetsova has earned $12 million in prize money alone so far in her career and she has a face that looks like a constipated bag of spanners that has been awkwardly plonked on a midget bodybuilder’s squat body.

My wife was heard to mutter when Kuznetsova stepped onto the court for the French Open final this year, “Sacre bleu but she’s an ugly one, zut alors!” or words to that effect.

I rather like her (Kuznetsova that is, not my wife although she has her moments).

Kuzzy, as I affectionately call her, is a big tennis star and yet she turned up at SW19 to discover she was playing her first match on Court 14 (I think you have to catch a bus to get there). Kuzzy, who has a dry sense of humour, remarked, “I’m fine to put me wherever they want to put me.”

She added, “For some players, if you are good-looking, cute, you get good deals. If you’re not good-looking, nobody cares. I mind, but I let it go. Why should I be pissed off? Put it another way. What’s going to change? I’m not that popular, I know.

"Look how big Andy Murray is in Britain. He’s God. I’m God nowhere. But I’m enjoying myself on the court, and for me it’s the most important thing. I never look at another basket, you know. I look at my basket.”

She might look like a basket case or an old boiler to some people but she knows how to enjoy life. She went shopping at Harrods and admits she likes to spend money.

“In Russia we have this saying, ‘Live today. Not tomorrow’. Some Russians buy a Mercedes and have no apartment. When people tell me to be conservative with money, I say, ‘I have to keep it until I die and then spend it on a big box to lie in, eh?’ ”

That’s telling ‘em, Kuzzy!

Dying to be centre of attention

Life is all about timing and Farah Fawcett’s was slightly out in terms of her “deathday”: her tragic demise has been pushed well down the front pages by the unexpected death of Michael Jackson today.

I imagine it hardly matters to either star but they are not the first well-known people to die on the same day and thus cause headaches to journalists trying to weigh up who should get top billing.

The deaths of the Russian president Boris Yeltsin and the England footballer Alan Ball were announced on the same day in April 2007 while in August 2000 Sir Alec Guinness and Sir Robin Day popped their clogs about the same time.

Anthony Minghella, the film director, and Arthur C Clarke, the science fiction writer, both kicked the bucket on the same day in March last year.

Talking of film directors, what about the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni? Both gave up the ghost on 30th July 2007.

This mortal coil

The much-loved British comedian Frankie Howerd died on 19th April 1992 as did another British comic Benny Hill.

Leap back two centuries to 1826 in the United States when two former presidents snuffed it within hours of each other: John Adams, the nation's second president, and his successor, Thomas Jefferson. And the date of their deaths? 4th July, the 50th anniversary of American independence.

On 23rd April 1616 William Shakespeare shuffled off this mortal coil as did Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote Don Quixote.

Two British writers, C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley, died on 22 November 1963, which just happened to be the day John F Kennedy was assassinated. Their deaths went largely unobserved apart from by family and friends.

It would seem that “dying is an art, like everything else,” as Sylvia Plath, the American poet, wrote. She committed suicide on 11th February 1963; the Italian poet Amelia Rosselli also committed suicide on 11th February but 33 years later in 1996.

Game, set and cheque

Wimbledon is now in full swing and Britain’s tennis players once again have walked out into their own personal Somme.

Of the 11 Brits who started in the first round, only two have survived.

Much has been made of Andy Murray’s chances of winning Wimbledon this year, and so become the first British man to win the title at SW19 since Fred Perry in 1936. Murray's ranked No. 3 in the world, he’s beaten top guys like Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer on a regular basis, was in last year’s US Open final and a week ago won the grass warm-up tournament at Queen's Club.

But, although Murray won yesterday, he looked far from convincing against a journeyman player Robert Kendrick, who is ranked 76th in the world. Murray prevailed, 7-5, 6-7, 6-3, 6-4, but he looked tentative and sluggish at times. Perhaps too much shouldn’t be made of this – Bjorn Borg was a notoriously slow starter but got better as the tournament progressed.

The only other British survivor was Elena Baltacha but I expect her to be dumped next round. Murray was critical of his fellow Brits' performances. He said: "It's disappointing. The depth needs to get way better. It's not acceptable.”

Why don’t our boys and girls do better? Let’s take one example: Alex Bogdanovic fell in straight sets to 20th seed Tomas Berdych, completing a record run of eight career singles matches at Wimbledon without a win.

Bogdanovic, 25, said afterwards: "I'm getting better every year. I'm confident. I just need to play a few challengers, win some matches and then I'm going to start playing more ATP qualifiers."

What?! He’s 25 years old already and he’s won bugger all in his “career”; Borg retired at 26 with five Wimbledon crowns, six French Open titles and numerous other tournament victories. Perhaps Bogdanovic will get a late surge of talent when he's 43.

Bogdanovic, who was in the first round thanks to being given a wild card, walks away with a cheque for £10,750 (or 12,668 euros, or $17,778, or 20,400 Canadian dollars, or 22,260 Australian dollars, or 27,615 New Zealand dollars, or 2,265,951 Iceland kronur, or a sizeable swag bag of Dumdad doubloons), as will all the other Brit first-round losers. Nice work if you can get it.

Oui, c’est cricket

There are many good things about living in France but watching cricket isn’t one of them.

I’ve been starved of watching this game on television and, of course, live for years. I don’t have Sky TV (too expensive) or access to BBC and other British TV stations. I sometimes listen to Test match cricket on Radio 4 but it’s not the same as viewing fast bowlers pounding in to unleash mayhem or seeing a batsman hammer a six into the stands.

Cricket gets into an Englishman’s blood early and I can still smell the linseed oil with which I treated my new cricket bats when I was 7 or 8; I think my first bat was a Geoffrey Boycott although when I moved south I wisely bought a Colin Cowdrey one.

One of our former prime ministers, Alec Douglas-Home, was also the only British leader to have played first class cricket, turning out for the MCC and Middlesex.

Lord Home (pronounced Hume) once said: “My wife had an uncle who could never walk down the nave of his abbey without wondering whether it would take spin.”

So this Englishman only has his many fond memories of “organized loafing”, as William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, said of playing cricket in 1925.

Until this week.

By chance, I discovered that Eurosport 2 was staging, live, the ICC World Twenty20 tournament. Oh, deep joy!

I watched the final of this tournament yesterday, which was between Sri Lanka and Pakistan. For the record, Pakistan 139-2 (18.4 overs) beat Sri Lanka 138-6 by eight wickets with eight balls remaining.

Sri Lanka looked dead and buried when they were 2-2 but they rallied and in the end it was quite exciting although I always thought Pakistan would win.

Now here’s a funny thing and a first for me: listening to the commentary in French. Quite bizarre. Eurosport had two commentators one French and one English (he spoke good French but with a heavyish accent).

The Frenchman was very enthusiastic but didn’t really understand the game. In fairness, he tried but it takes years to understand the nuances, even in this shortened form of cricket. I thought the Englishman, never caught his name, did a good job of explaining the sometimes unexplainable.

But it was interesting and amusing to me to listen to what various things were called in French.

For a start, runs were called points, which sounded odd but I got used to it. Luckily, all the graphics were in English; how the TV coverage has advanced from the days of black and white!

Here are a few translations in a case you ever have to watch cricket on French TV.

A batsman: un batteur

A bowler: un lanceur

A wicket keeper: un gardien de guichet

Fielders : joueurs de champ

Over : série

Bowled out: brisé

Caught: capté

Run out: hors jeu

Leg before wicket: jambe devant guichet

Bowling crease: ligne de retrait

Mid-off: mi-gauche

Pâté Bourbonnais, or spud pie to you, mate

Princess Perfect has broken up for the summer holidays and her brother Brainbox is soon to follow suit which means, as The Frog Queen is at work all day, that I shall be assuming cooking duties full time.

Today Brainbox doesn’t start school until 1pm so it is lunch for three. Actually, it is lunch for four because PP has her friend VV at the house; they are later going to the cinema and then on to ballet.

As you can see from the photos, pâté aux pommes de terre looks très tasty. And it is. I prepared and presented this with my usual savoir-faire and je ne sais quoi.

Oh, The Frog Queen will be reading this blog so I’d better fess up: she made and prepared the pie this morning before going to work. She placed the pie in the oven and then preset the timer.

Okay, so I’m not the top chef but I’m a sort of sous-chef and bottle-washer combined. I had to take the pie out of the oven when the timer rang its merry tune. Dangerous work, actually, as you can burn your fingers if you’re not careful.

Then I sliced off the crust and spread dollops of extra thick double cream over pie before putting the pastry lid back on.

I then served up this dainty dish to the hungry hordes. Delicious.

Pâté Bourbonnais is the Auvergne version of pâté aux pommes de terre. Her Royal Frogness was born in the Auvergne and is loyal to her roots.

Many a journalist at The Daily Telegraph and The International Herald Tribune have enjoyed this dish over the years when I would bring in a bumper pie on Christmas Day and other festive times.

Today’s lunchtime fare was gobbled up quickly. But we left you a portion, oh great cook.

Thank your lucky stars

I was chatting to my brother about life and mortgages and no money in general this morning, as one does, and we both agreed that our best chance for a happy and debt-free life was in winning the lottery.

Thus proving we are no different from the other billions of human beings that roam this dying planet; or, at least, an awful lot of brainy people keep insisting that our glorious little orb is on its last legs.

Everything in this life as we know it is down to chance. “You make your own luck,” many a drunken pub bore has droned into my ear over the years. Up to a point, Lord Copper.

What about the Air France plane that crashed into the Atlantic last week, killing everyone on board? Just awful bad luck. Men, women and children – all 228 of them – with everything to live for snuffed out in an instance.

So it was sheer dumb good luck that an Italian woman who had a ticket for that fated plane didn’t get aboard because she arrived late and missed the flight.

Lucky or what?

Except that same woman, Johanna Ganthaler, has been killed in a car accident this week, agencies report.

Johanna Ganthaler, a pensioner from Bolzano-Bozen province, had been on holiday in Brazil with her husband Kurt and missed Air France Flight 447 after turning up late at Rio de Janeiro airport on May 31. The couple had managed to pick up a flight from Rio the following day.

Mrs Ganthaler died when their car veered across a road in Kufstein, Austria, and swerved into an oncoming truck. Her husband was seriously injured.

Or what about this: a schoolboy has survived a direct hit by a meteorite after it fell to earth at 30,000 mph earlier this week.

Gerrit Blank, 14, was on his way to school in Essen, Germany, when he saw a "ball of light" heading straight towards him from the sky.

A red-hot, pea-sized piece of rock then hit his hand before bouncing off and causing a foot wide crater in the ground. He sustained a three-inch scar to his hand but is otherwise fine. If it had hit his head . . .

The chances of being killed in a plane crash are about 1 in 11 million.

The chances of being killed in a car crash are about 1 in 5,000.

The chances of being hit by a meteorite are about 1 in 7 million.

The chances of winning Euromillions is 1 in 76 million.

The lottery of life.

You've got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya?”