Will Waspe
Press accounts of the collapse of baritone Thomas Allen in mid. number at last week's Prom performance of Carl Orrm's Carmina Burana were variously inaccurate: the heat of the TV lights caused Allen to fall not once but twice. The first time he staggered back to his seat, but after bellowing his top G flat, toppled into the 'cellos (a wonderful way to go).
In fact, the LSO had performed the piece a month ago at the Festival Hall. On that occasion William Mann of the Times lost control of himself in an inexplicable paroxysm against the 'Nazi ghoul' and his music, and the Times was inundated with. angry protests. Second time round, discretion prevailed: Joan Chissell was sent along and she, rather than rebuke her colleague, tactfully all but ignored the opening item. Mann can continue to gnash his teeth, though; the LSO and Previn are to record the work for EMI.
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Nicol s Nixon
They seem to be quite fussed at Granada Television because none of the American networks will buy their sly little play, I Know What I Meant, a dramatisation of the White House tapes in which Nicol Williamson played Nixon. NBC, CBS and NET all declined it.
Granada's naivete in even offering the thing in the US falls, I think, somewhere between the touchingly innocent and the grotesquely tactless. If the British government (or monarchy) had been shaken by events similarly embarrassing to the nation, would Granada, I wonder, have had the temerity to screen a snide American-made version of them?
No Sellers market
A strange blight seems to have fallen upon the career of Peter Sellers, against whose films the distributors — who have their ear to the box-office jingle — have turned increasingly chilly shoulders since the lavishly publicised disaster of his affair with Liza Minnelli. I hear that his latest completed picture, Ghost in the Noonday Sun is being held up for a more propitious moment of release along with a couple of others, The Great McGonagle, and The Blockhouse, which has been languishing on the shelf for a couple of years. All this may have nothing to do with Sellers (they may just be terrible pictures), but if there is no rush to give The Return of the Pink Panther a circuit booking, we shall have to begin to suspect some sinister hoodoo.
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