Memories of Bob Holness, 1928 – 2012

Like anyone of an age, I’m very sorry to hear of the passing of former Blockbusters host, Bob Holness. His show was essential tea-time viewing for me in the mid 1980s, being a quiz with questions I had a reasonable chance of answering correctly. Not that I was ever brave enough to apply to take […]

Tony Curtis 1925-2010

Very sad to hear of the death of one of my childhood heroes, Tony Curtis, at the age of 85. A handsome, rugged and stylish man, he was a surprisingly versatile actor in his younger days. He received an Oscar nomination for his performance as John ‘Joker’ Jackson in 1959’s The Defiant Ones, starring alongside Sidney […]

Medium rare

I’m not one for giving free advertising to any old spooky crank but I feel it’s my duty to give this chap a little exposure. Meet John, who’s evidently the Austin Powers of the parapsychological world; he’s not just a psychic medium and clairvoyant, he’s an international psychic medium and clairvoyant. Just cross his palm with plastic […]

Bobby Hebb 1938 – 2010

IHGN mourns the passing of brilliant singer and songwriter Bobby Hebb, who died on Tuesday this week from lung cancer aged 72. Hebb will always be remembered as the writer of ‘Sunny’, one of the happiest songs of all time. Amongst my favourite versions of this often-covered classic (aside from Hebb’s own) are those by Andy […]

Oui, je bored… think I’ll just commune with the dead

Whenever my friend and I were bored during the long, winter nights of the early 1980s – when we were restless teenagers, fed up listening to Tears For Fears and there was only Bergerac on the telly – our thoughts inevitably turned to talking to dead people. Out would come the little table, the Scrabble […]

Alex “Hurricane” Higgins 1949 – 2010

R.I.P. Alex “Hurricane” Higgins. No matter what happens in world snooker, we will never see your like again. There will be many tributes paid to the most entertaining player snooker has ever known and most of them will speak of a great, if wayward, man who tore up the rule book, transgressed the written laws, […]

Fred Wedlock 1942-2010

It’s with much sadness that I note the passing of Fred Wedlock, the Bristol teacher-turned- folk singer and humourist. For me and many other pop pickers of my generation, he’ll always be remembered as the man who made ‘The Oldest Swinger In Town’ famous, taking it to number 6 in the UK charts in 1981. Although Fred wasn’t the […]

Is This The Most Miserable Advert Ever?

There really is no way back from this one. It’s an advert for the Alzheimer’s treatment drug Remynil XL – which, when taken once daily, apparently stops the elderly from dissolving right before your eyes. Frankly, this photo makes me want to take an overdose of them.

Poe Little Puddy Tat

“I had walled the monster up within the tomb!” I couldn’t help but shudder at the story of Richard Parsons, a funeral director from Ugborough, near Plymouth in Devon, whose builders uncovered a 400-year-old mummified cat in the wall of his cottage’s bathroom. It immediately evokes the terrifying climactic twist of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale, The Black […]

Lux Interior 1946-2009

The wider world may not be recording February 4th 2009 as ‘the other day the music died’, but it lost a true original with the sad death of Lux Interior. As a performer, innovator, macabre showman and fetishist extraordinaire, the man who was born Erick Lee Purkhiser taught us that ridicule really is nothing to […]