The organisers told us that 100,000 had applied for the 5th series of Britain’s Got Talent, but whatever the numbers my youngest daughter Sara was delighted to be invited to audition. From the time we arrived, at 8am on a bleak Manchester Sunday morning, the TV cameras were there. And they were there to pounce on the most outrageous, the most outlandish, the most freakish. The first was a man with a saucepan on his head who sang with a Dalek voice. Then there was the fat middle aged man in the white Elvis suit; then the even fatter middle aged man in a suit made from the flags of the British Isles. Then “Veronica”, a 6ft 2 transvestite.
Sara was allocated to group A where we were delighted to make the acquaintance of the man with the saucepan. He calls himself Armitage Hanks, “because my act is complete toilet”. We were also with Hero (her real name) a lovely girl of 12 who plays the harp and whose mother told me she was named after the character from
Much Ado About Nothing. Hero is something of an old hand, after being a finalist in a similar show on sky- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0ImMPqWtRo.
Sara auditioned as Red Blaze and sang a rap song which she had been busy composing while we were having dinner last night. I’m not sure that all the contestants were as nonchalant, but they will have to be patient as we won’t know until next year who has got through to the next round
The video shows Armitage Hanks entertaining the crowds whilst we were queuing to enter the auditorium.
One November morning in 1995 Lucie Blackman’s mother, Jane, received a phone call from a stranger, a man, who told her that her husband, Tim, was sleeping with his wife. Jane’s reaction was to throw Tim out of the front door and his clothes out of the bedroom window. From that moment her life was dominated by bitterness, vindictiveness and thoughts of revenge. Any semblance of happiness in the Blackman family was destroyed.
In my three weeks away, I didn’t once switch on the TV or see an English newspaper and didn’t miss them one bit. On the other hand, I did miss my garden and it was a big disappointment to get back and find that the tomatoes had finished. But the flower garden, in spite of the onset of autumn, is still going strong. There’s colour everywhere, from the maples, which are turning a dark red, to the dahlias and cannas. At this time of year you expect the hybrid dahlias to start showing signs of wear and tear, but the tree dahlias are just getting into their stride and are covered in flowers.
Until very recently Paris was the undisputed capital of gastronomy. Then the Michelin inspectors turned up in Tokyo and found, to everyone’s amazement, that the standards in Tokyo were higher. Tokyo now has 14 3 Star restaurant’s compared to Paris’s 10 – and, to put things in perspective, London’s 1.
The first reaction of a visitor to Kyoto is often one of intense disappointment. Hearing that the city is Japan’s ancient capital and that it has 2,000 temples and gardens they expect something as resplendent as Bath or Venice. In fact, when you arrive at Kyoto station and step out into the street you see a drab urban landscape, as grim as you’ll find anywhere in Japan. Kyoto is a huge sprawling urban space, home to 1.2 million people. Very little of old Kyoto survives because nothing was built in stone or brick; everything was made of wood. Very few of the original houses remain and in fact nearly all of the temples are replicas of the originals. Wooden buildings aren’t designed to last, and they don’t. You get some idea of the vulnerability of the ancient temples from the fact that Tenryu-ji (the Temple of the Heavenly Dragon) has been destroyed by fire 8 times – always to be rebuilt exactly as it had been.