Talking Pictures: Noel Coward

A retrospective look at television appearances made over the years by award-winning actor Noel Coward, with interviews from the archive and classic clips capturing the milestones and highlights of his life and career. Narrated by Sylvia Syms.

Now On BBC iPlayer.

There's a selection of programmes about the Master on BBC Radio 4 and 4 Extra this month.

A Choice Of Coward: 'The Gayest Thing I've Ever Watched'

A Choice of Coward is a mini-season of works by Noel Coward within the ITV Play of the Week strand, made at Granada under the steely eye of one of British television's most formidable directors, Joan Kemp-Welch. The plays are introduced by the author in as suave a manner as one could hope for - cravat, cigarette and all (he's not seen to actually smoke the cigarette, of course - that would impede the flow of his monologue). Coward cheerfully admits to have written tonight's play purely to give himself a meaty starring role, and professes (with a roguish twinkle) to have been horrified when it received excellent critical notices...

TV Minus 50.

This is an hilarious article - Peter Wildeblood produces Noel Coward starring Peter Wyngarde! - please read and die of gay mirth.

The Great War: The Gay Angle

By advertising in the international press after the war, asking people to send him accounts of their sexual experiences during the conflict, renowned German sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld (who features in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin writing) discovered there were transvestites in the trenches with ball gowns in their backpacks. In the archives of the Imperial War Museum, I discovered other personal diaries that detailed same sex behaviour between serving soldiers. Hirschfeld also found accounts of drug clubs, and nudist clubs in London, Paris and Berlin. Even in suburban Clapham, a teenage Noel Coward and Esmee Wynne, his companion/muse, wore “futurist pyjamas”, and swapped clothes to run riot, in drag, in the West End...

Lovely piece by Philip Hoare in The Guardian on how 'The First World War was about decadence as well as death'; "From 1914 to 1918 no fewer than 150 illegal nightclubs opened up in Soho alone. With new attitudes to gender and sex, the war might be regarded as a catalyst for positive social change"

There's rather a lot about the war in the papers today...

Peter O'Toole: 1932-2013

"If you'd been any prettier, it would have been Florence of Arabia."

Noel Coward.
x

Colin Firth: Begins Ambitious Project To Play Every Gay Man Who Ever Existed

'Rupert Everett will make his directorial debut with The Happy Prince, a comedic biopic on Oscar Wilde that will star Everett as the legendary Irish writer and playwright and Colin Firth as his friend and confidant Reginald "Reggie" Turner...'
Hollywood Reporter, 21st May.

'Colin Firth has signed up to star as Noel Coward in BiteSize Entertainment’s dramedy Mad Dogs and Englishmen, the story of Coward’s two weeks at The Desert Inn in Las Vegas in 1955...'
Hollywood Reporter, 19th May.  

As to whether either of these fillums actually get made...

Stephen Fry: Even More

"The reason two of my girlfriends married gay men is they make great, touchy-feely fathers, don’t object to lots of pink in the decorating, and have affairs with partners who don’t make the woman feel inadequate."

Liz Jones, being ever more baffling in The Mail On Sunday.
The article is called 'Watch Brief Encounter, boys. Then you might get us interested in sex'
Irony has just died.