Video

By: John from Leeds
27 Jan 2012 at 05:38

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Video 26th January 2012

Off out around the park, three other joggers one man two women, dog walkers commuters, but no Tai Chi this year so far, perhaps it has gone out of fashion? Cool and it will be colder later in the week.
Off out I go to pick up a video recorder from Freecycle, it doesn’t work, I now have a large selection of video recorders which don't work. The sound is okay but no picture I don't know if it is the video recorders the video tapes, the cable, or even the TV, but I will find out. I ought to go to see Joan, tomorrow perhaps, we are just too tired.
Sharland rings a mutual friend David Melville has committed suicide, leaving a note and his parrot Sunshine, who has gone to someones home. Poor troubled David he lived constantly on the edge of life and just slipped over. We feel that his problems what ever they were were just too deep and there is nothing that anyone could have done.
Partridge we watch Convict 99 dear old Will Hay, thrown out, literally from his old school, where he was a very dodgy headmaster, he manages to get a job as a prison governor. After first accidentally spending some time as a prisoner. He lets the prisoners run the jail, but is conned by Googie Withers, and gang. So they end up robbing a bank to put the money back in. Priceless.
Scrabble today I win but not bu much, but I am sure she will get a suitable revenge.

Fave Letters:

Shameless lying
I was saddened to read your leading story about declining standards of honesty (25 January). What concerns me most is the assumption that "everyone is doing it".
As I was reading about it on a train from Guildford to London Waterloo, which was running on time, I was forced to listen to a young woman behind me proclaiming through her mobile phone that she was "stuck outside Waterloo" and was going to arrive late at her destination, wherever that was.
Not only is this an unfair calumny against the train company, whose trains are rarely late, but I was shocked by the utter indifference to her fellow passengers, who knew that she was lying. Should the honest person stand up and protest in such circumstances? I am sorry to say that all I did was to resolve to write to your paper about it.
Bob Tomlin
Caterham, Surrey

Legalising drugs
SIR – As a Labour councillor for Merton in the Nineties, I spoke with the local police chief about drug legalisation (Letters, January 25). He thought fighting drugs was a war that could not be won, and that it diverted scarce resources from other issues. He went on to say that nearly all the police he knew shared this opinion.
I then spoke with some doctors. Nicotine, they pointed out, causes more deaths than all the illegal drugs put together. Alcohol causes more aggravation to hospitals than all the other drugs put together. Deaths by overdose are not normally caused by increased quantities taken, but by changes in purity. The intelligent policy would be to legalise drugs and supply “hard” drugs on prescription.
In an open council meeting I called for this to happen. All three parties were united in their condemnation of me.
Mickey Spacey
London SW20

SIR – MPs say they want their chips in a tower. After their expenses shenanigans, maybe their wish should be granted.
M. Bolton
Birmingham


Obituary:

The role of Ruby Finch, the dim-witted, put-upon scullery maid in Upstairs, Downstairs forever dreaming of running away with Rudolph Valentino, brought Jenny Tomasin fame worldwide. The familiar cry of "Oh, Ruby!" from the Bellamy household's cook, Mrs Bridges, in response to the accident-prone servant's clumsiness, was perhaps the closest the saga came to having a catchphrase.
Tomasin joined the programme for just one episode in its second series, in 1972, but her portrayal of the downtrodden Ruby was so admired that she was kept on until Upstairs, Downstairs ended three years later. She was seen "downstairs" alongside others including Angela Baddeley as the grumpy but warm-hearted Mrs Bridges, George Jackson as the dour butler Hudson, Jean Marsh as the pivotal housemaid Rose and Pauline Collins as the day-dreaming parlour maid Sarah in the drama set at 165 Eaton Place, London, against a background of events from the Edwardian era and First World War to the General Strike and Wall Street Crash. In typical fashion, Ruby once shocked her fellow servants by announcing that she was leaving for a job in a munitions factory, only for it to be blown up with her inside. She took the long walk back to Belgravia, her face blackened, and was reinstated.
The programme was Britain's most successful period drama of the 1970s, watched by 300 million people in 50 countries, including the US, where it won seven Emmys. When it ended, Tomasin felt a big hole had been left in her life and compared it to bereavement. Plans for Ruby to join Hudson and Mrs Bridges in a sequel, running a seaside boarding-house, were abandoned following Baddeley's death.
However, Ruby was a double-edged sword. The character was popular but frequently described as "TV's ugly duckling" and, Tomasin believed, left her typecast as maids, restricting her future career, while "upstairs" stars such as Simon Williams and Lesley-Anne Down saw their careers soar.
"I had to wear these drab outfits and no make-up," she recalled in the 2002 television documentary After Upstairs, Downstairs. "There was one particular incident when I was out with my boyfriend for a meal. I was feeling sexy and attractive, and suddenly somebody yelled out, 'Oh, look, there's Ruby!' I looked at my boyfriend and said, 'I don't want to stay here.' It just felt awful."
Born in Leeds in 1936, Tomasin had childhood ambitions to act or write. Despite her parents' objections, she broke into acting and appeared on stage until she made her screen début in 1972 as a Young Conservative whose parents try to marry her off to the fraudulent Australian of the title (Barry Crocker) in The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, a film written by Barry Humphries (who played Aunt Edna Everage) and the director Bruce Beresford.
Before she finished her run as Ruby, Tomasin took the carbon-copy role of a waitress, Florence Baker, in the motel-set soap opera Crossroads, which she played on and off from 1974-79. There were also one-off appearances in The Dick Emery Show (1976), The Onedin Line (1977) and the sitcom That's My Boy (1985), as well as the small part of Mrs Simmons in the little-seen film Mister Quilp (1975), based on The Old Curiosity Shop. Tomasin also acted one of the child mill workers in later episodes of Midnight is a Place (1977-78).
After she played Naomi Tolly, whose farmer father died in a tractor accident, in Emmerdale Farm (1980-81) and Tasambeker, "ex-ter-min-ated" by the Time Lord's nemeses in the 1985 Doctor Who story "Revelation of the Daleks", Tomasin's appearances became rarer. She took the role of a traffic warden in the 1990 film Just Ask for Diamond and was typecast as a maidservant in a BBC adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit (1994) and the cook in Beeban Kidron's television film of Cinderella (2000).
On stage and back to type, Tomasin played a parlour maid in a West End production of Man and Superman (Theatre Royal, Haymarket, 1982), starring Peter O'Toole, with the cast reprising their performances in a television film version the same year. She was also in pantomimes and national tours of Blithe Spirit (1988-89), as Edith, the maid, Lettice and Lovage (1990-91) and The Marquise (2004), in which she acted Kate O'Mara's devoted maid.
Tomasin believed her television career might be experiencing a revival when she returned to Emmerdale (as the serial was retitled in 1989) in the role of Noreen Bell (2005-06), a cantankerous, palm-reading, wig-wearing pensioner whose garden fence was painted by Val Lambert as part of a community service order. Noreen became friends with Val but died in a gas explosion while looking round a show home.
It was Tomasin's last screen role, but the character's legacy lives on. The money bequeathed by Noreen to Val enabled her to buy a half-share in The Woolpack pub, where last orders are called with the Noreen Bell bell. However, Tomasin – who never married – always remained optimistic that more work would come along. As she said in 2002: "I've been through such hard times, but I can always bounce back again. I still believe great things are just ahead."
Anthony Hayward
Jenny Tomasin, actress: born Leeds 30 November 1936; died London c. 12 January 2012.


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