Janet Suzman and Kim Cattrall star in a production with profound message but which is full of laughs, writes Ruth Gorb

TAKE a very serious theme, write it as a comedy, and you have what Janet Suzman calls “a very English thing”. When she and Alan Bates played the parents of a mentally disabled child in Peter Nichol’s A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, and played it for laughs, they were told that the Italians wouldn’t buy it. The Americans were deeply shocked. British audiences, on the other hand, were able to laugh and cry at the same time.
Playwright Brian Clarke is in that tradition. His play, Whose Life Is It Anyway, is about euthanasia; it has a profound message, and it is full of laughs. In the original production Tom Conti played the bed-ridden, paralysed man around whom the euthanasia debate was conducted – he wants to end his life.

AT last, we have it straight from the horse’s mouth. The chairman of the Arts Council, rector of the Royal College of Art and noted writer on film Professor Sir Christopher Frayling definitively confirms: “Yes, architect Erno Goldfinger was the man whose name was used for the James Bond novel and film.”

THE front men and women of ITN’s nightly news bulletins gathered on Monday night to celebrate the launch of Richard Lindley’s biography of the news service – and bemoan the tabloidisation of the TV news reporter.
Mr Lindley, who lives in Gospel Oak, invited to the Foreign Press Association’s home in Carlton House Terrace behind The Mall the BBC’s election night anchorman Peter Snow and his colleague Peter Sissons, Evening Standard editor Veronica Wadley with her husband Tom Bowers – who are neighbours of Mr Lindley – and Sir David Nicholas, who was a pioneer in news broadcasting.