Actor Nick Moran – best known for his role in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – tells Tom Foot about Telstar, his play which tells the tale of music legend Joe Meek

NICK Moran is not the kind of person to mince his words. The star of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, annoyed because Stephen Fry neglected to mention his new writing career at a recent television awards, described the comedian as “a six-and-a-half-foot linen child”. He was talking to Fry’s sister.
He is a bit of a wide boy. Born and bred in Camden, Moran parades around with his thick square ginger side burns and retro outfit with a notorious swagger. He recently returned from ‘Gumball 2005,’ a kind of playboy car rally across America, where he was arrested for speeding.
But here he is, juggling a lead role at the Criterion as the 19th-century critic and artist John Ruskin in the Countess, and the opening of Telstar, which he wrote, at the New Ambassadors about world’s first independent record producer, Joe Meek.

In the first of a series of features about the lives of ordinary people during World War II, Piers Plowright describes how radio was everyone’s best friend

THE house was full of voices. Sometimes it was my mother arguing with the landlord in the small Welsh village we’d moved to in 1943 to get away from the bombs. But more often it was the radio: catch phrases from that surreal and liberating comedy series ‘Itma’ (It’s That Man Again) followed by gales of laughter from a live audience released for half-an-hour from the cares of war, solemn upper-class voices telling us (up to a point) what was happening in Europe and Asia, the Radio Doctor with his adenoidal advice on everything from appendicitis to wind, high-brow voices talking about things I couldn’t even pronounce and the treasured voices that brought us into the magic kingdom of radio drama.
I was aged five in 1943, so a lot of the things I think I remember may have been told me afterwards or transposed back by my later self. It doesn’t really matter. Memory, like history, is a selective business and, if I say I remember it, I do.