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John Shrapnel -- that's a great name!

Edit: His ancestor Henry Shrapnel gave the name shrapnel to the English language.

UK comedian Bobby Ball. He was part of the comedy duo Cannon & Ball who featured in the early evening TV schedules in a show that ran between 1979 and 1988. They were ITV's relacements for Morecambe & Wise, who I seem to remember spent much of the decade fighting it out against the BBC's replacements for Morecambe & Wise Little & Large (Eddie Large himself passed away back in April). A lot of that era has long passed now and I would be surprised if anyone under 30 in the UK would recall any of those figures as none of those light entertainment shows have been shown on television in decades, unlike the staple of Morecambe & Wise (and The Two Ronnies) which still gets regularly brought out for repeat airings at Christmas time.

However Cannon & Ball did headline their own feature film made during the height of their TV fame with 1982's The Boys In Blue, directed by Val Guest and which was a remake of a 1939 Will Hay film Ask A Policeman.

yoloswegmaster wrote: Sat Oct 31, 2020 12:37 pm Sean Connery

All further discussion can take place in his own dedicated thread

The Russian conductor Alexander Vedernikov has died

He was 56, died of Covid-19. He should have conducted Beethoven's 9th symphony yesterday evening in Copenhagen but died in Moscow the day before (Thursday 29th). He caught the virus while in Moscow according to Danish papers.

> Alexander Vedernikov

How unfortunate. I think I have most of his (relatively few) recordings. He was perhaps the most engaging of Martha Argerich's recent partners. And his Prokofieff R&J and Khachaturian Spartacus are favorites.

Taiwanese filmmaker Chang Yi, known for films such as Kuei-mei, a Woman and This Love of Mine.

The comedian John Sessions who is probably best known for his appearances on Whose Line Is It Anyway? and QI, but turns up in small roles in lots of films as well from debut in Roger Christian's psychic horror The Sender in 1982 up to only a couple of years ago with appearances in Florence Foster Jenkins and the Rachel Weisz film Denial. He also played politicans Harold Wilson in Made In Dagenham and Edward Heath in The Iron Lady. He turns up in Princess Caraboo, the mid-90s live action Pinocchio film (in a strange cast including Udo Kier, Martin Landau, Rob Schneider, Jean-Claude Dreyfus and Griff Rhys Jones!), and apparently appears somewhere in Gangs of New York!

He also 'played Russian' a few times, in the Leo Tolstoy biographic film The Last Station and in the Robert De Niro directed epic The Good Shepherd.

TV-wise he probably got his best parts in the Stephen Poliakoff historical drama The Lost Prince, as well as in the 2000 BBC adaptation of Gormenghast. He also plays Henry Fielding in the 1997 BBC adaptation of Tom Jones (the only literary adaptation to have the author as a self insert character who gets knocked down by the carriage carrying the main cast in the opening scene?). But of course I will always remember his cross-dressed role (similar to the cross dressing in Monty Python) as long suffering cleaner Mrs Huggett in the Stella Street series which was the show with the conceit that famous superstar Michael Caine has somehow managed to promote a leafy suburban London street into becoming the new home for all of the famous celebrities of the time (including Mick Jagger and Keith Richards running the corner shop! I think the joke is that they are finally having to do some real work!), all of whom get divided up between Sessions and fellow comedian Phil Cornwell doing impressions of them. It has been a long time since I last saw it but I seem to recall a moment where in the kitchen during one of Michael Caine's apparently regular Zulu-themed house parties (featuring Roger Moore in blackface) that Dirk Bogarde gets cornered by Al Pacino wanting to talk to him in a threatening manner about "that film where you followed that young boy around Venice!"

I can't see any online obits yet, but Australian actress Lynne Murphy has passed at age 97. As well as acting on radio, stage and screen, she contributed to the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Johnny Kevorkian, director of Await Further Instructions and others. Age and cause of death so far unknown, but it appears to have been sudden and he can't have been old.

The invaluable Film Polski website has just posted its annual list of Polish film and TV people who've died in the last twelve months: virtually everyone is strictly domestic-interest only, although big international names like Krzysztof Penderecki very occasionally leap out.

(Although his passing was of course acknowledged here at the time.)

Ken Hensley, best known as a member of Uriah Heep.

Australian actress Joy Westmore probably best known for her long running role as prison officer Joyce Pringle in Prisoner (she was one of the sympathetic screws in the show):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Westmore

Geoffrey Palmer aged 93.

That one stings. A ubiquitous presence on British television. Lost track of how many times I've seen him turn up in
any number of shows (and some films) and always a delight to see.

Alex Trebek

He put up a valiant fight against one of the worst forms of cancer. RIP

That's a real shame to read. Alex was a trooper.

God fucking dammit

I'm surprised he was 80--he didn't look it

Back in 2017 there were many museum exhibits here in Montreal to commemorate Expo67, the World's Fair for that year. One exhibit focused on architect Moshe Safdie's contribution, the modular housing complex Habitat 67. Among the exhibits was a TV documentary on the project aired by the CBC at the time, and narrated by Alex Trebek. This is the earliest work of his I recall ever coming across.