Most of us gave it a wide berth, averting our gazes as we hurried home, fending off derelict, half-drunk old men wanting to drink na troikh (an offer which means pitching in some roubles and splitting a bottle of vodka three ways).Now, happily, we have people such as Mohammed (anxious about his bosses, he declines to give his full name). Letneye (summer) cafes have sprung up across Moscow in record numbers this year. At least half a dozen have opened within a few minutes’ walk of my home Business is brisk. “We do OK,” says Mohammed, cautiously.It matters for another reason Mohammed’s cafe does not serve vodka or wine. Time was when Westerners would rather have swigged the contents of a washing-up bowl than Russian beer.

But the domestic brewing industry has taken off, producing several drinkable varieties.And the Russians are taking to it. Mohammed concedes that his clients sometimes complain about the lack of the hard stuff But he never budges. Vodka, he says, is ruining the country and, with it, his clients Why should he help?. THIRTY THOUSAND dead; 3,226 villages burnt to the ground; 3 million people displaced from their homes; 14 years of violence and terror.

The major city of south-east Turkey, Diyarbakir, once dubbed the “Paris of the East”, is reduced to a vast, filthy, refugee camp. These are the costs of Turkey’s long and bitter struggle with the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a struggle Ankara will claim it has finally won today when a Turkish judge passes sentence on the PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan.
Mr Ocalan will be given one last chance to speak from his glass cage in the courtroom on the heavily guarded prison island of Imrali. Then the judge will read out the sentence.Nobody doubts that he will be condemned to death, but Mr Ocalan’s nemesis – the men who brought him to this final humiliation – will not be there. As always in Turkey, the generals who hold the real power will be out of sight.Mr Ocalan still has a long road to travel to the gallows By law, parliament has to confirm a sentence of death. His lawyers say they will appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. There are reports the all- powerful generals are divided, too, over whether he should be hanged, fearing that he may become a martyr..

And what about Noel Coward as Lime? Grant and Coward? Makes the mouth water, doesn’t it? And you can see Lime – smart, thin-lipped, sarcastic, cruel and the way Greene had him in the script: “A light, amusing, ruthless character, he had alwaysbeen able to find superficial excuses for his own behaviour.”Well, it didn’t work out. They offered Grant a piece of the profits – it would have been a fortune – but Grant was on the cheap side and he wanted his money up front, so it fell through And Coward went with him. So someone said, what about Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten? Cotten was another Selznick contract player, so that was easy. As for Welles, Selznick was wary: he said that Orson tended to mess around with material, and he and Cotten were old chums Put them together and a film could get out of control. But Reed had a hunch about Welles – if anyone could find him.That was only the start of the fuss Selznick also wanted to “help” on the script. So he begged Greene and Reed to go out to California for conferences – meetings that began at 10.30 pm and which were spoiled by Selznick’s reliance on Benzedrine and his habit of forgetting which picture they were talking about But he thought the guys should be American, not English OK, they agreed In which case why name one of them Rollo? cried Selznick. So Greene and Reed agreed that it was a little too Sloane Square They’d think of something else “Holly” was what they thought of Is he a girl? yelped Selznick Are these two fruits?Then there was the title The Third Man, mused Selznick.

Not bad, but what about A Night in Vienna? Something with a hint of romance Selznick still wanted Coward, but Reed was firm. He said Lime was too far from Coward’s image – and Coward, after all, was gay. In the end, Selznick had too many other problems to contend with – approaching bankruptcy and whether or not to marry Jennifer Jones When Welles saw the script, he knew it was for him. But he took money up front, too, and a fraction of what had been offered to Grant.So the unit went to Vienna in the autumn of l948, and they filmed at night in the streets, in the sewers, at the cemetery and at the Prater for the Ferris wheel scene. Reed was never sharper, adding little touches here and there Like the cat.

If there’s an independent broker left, Sir Stanley Kalms, chairman of Dixons, would like to hear from you, so that you too can be signed up to the cause. Since even the chief executive doesn’t know what Freeserve is worth, it’s reasonable to assume nobody else does either. Those that do subscribe must therefore be prepared to enter into the spirit of Internet investment – this is not for widows and orphans but for those that don’t mind losing the odd bob or two, it may be an interesting gamble on the long term future.Freeserve is less than a year old, it loses money and its first year revenues are unlikely to amount to much more than pounds 3m. Moreover, the parallel with mobile phone and cable companies, which were floated on similarly fanciful valuations which to varying degrees are all beginning to be justified, is a false one. Mobile phone and cable companies operate under Government licence and therefore enjoy partial monopoly. By contrast Freeserve operates in a highly competitive market place already saturated by a plethora of copycat “free” service providers.All the same, the Freeserve flotation should not yet be written off as a fraud, as it already has in some quarters.

The company’s link with Dixons, still Britain’s biggest retailer of PCs, should provide a useful prop to its present market leading position, since every PC that Dixons sells is a potential new Freeserve subscriber.Freeserve is therefore well placed to benefit from the expected explosive growth in e-commerce. If it is to build on its position in cyberspace, Freeserve also needs highly valued paper as a currency to make acquisitions. At this stage, most Internet stocks are still largely funny money. But one day an awful lot of real money will be made out of the net, and for those with pounds 250 (the minimum retail investment) they can afford to lose, Freeserve may be as good an outside bet as any.. THE CONSTRUCTION group Taylor Woodrow has teamed up with Siemens of Germany to bid for the pounds 7bn partial privatisation of London Underground.

The two companies are part of a consortium called the Interail Strategic Transportation Group which plans to tender for London Underground’s deep tube lines. Interail’s other members are the civil engineering consultancy Gibb, transport consultants Mott MacDonald and Innisfree, a leading private equity investor.
It will be in competition with at least seven other consortia which are preparing to notify the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions of their interest in bidding before next month’s deadline.The Government’s intention was to complete the Underground’s part-privatisation by next spring but it looks unlikely that private contractors will take over any part of the network until 2001. The work is traditionally divided into 81 sections, which are grouped into two parts, the first character of each part (Tao sections 1-37 and te 38-81) having given the work its name. In China the transmission and interpretation of the Tao-te Ching goes back more than two millennia to the time of its first appearance.
The language and style of the Tao-te Ching is one of cryptic condensation,often relying on rhymes and parallelism.

Its unique blend of wisdom and mystery has undeniably made it part of world literature, and continues to attract the attention of academic and lay readers alike. That there have been, and will continue to be, so many differing translations of the Tao-te Ching is not a question of new understanding superseding old conceptions; it is the inherent mystery of the subject itself that challenges us to explore its depths. No other Chinese text has been translated so many times into Western languages as the Tao-te Ching (also known as the Daodejing, Laozi, Lao Tzu or the 5,000 Character Classic). It’s an intoxicating experience.`Finnegans Wake’, Naxos pounds 15.99 (tape), pounds 19.99 (CD); `Strong Poison’, BBC pounds 8.99; `The Unexpected Guest’, BBC pounds 8.99; `Bleak House’, BBC pounds 12.99; `Daniel Deronda’, BBC pounds 8.99; `Justine’, Naxos pounds 9.99 (tape), pounds 13.99 (CD).. Though the text can sometimes seem nearly as lush, obscure and demanding as Joyce (try saying “her blue-veined phthisic hands”) you emerge from this compelling reading as if from the sultry heat of old, polyglot Alexandria, “the great wine-press of love”.

Serious music these days seems to lean toward the geriatric: audiences on sticks and Zimmer frames, and pundits telling us the end is nigh. With Rattle in Berlin there promises to be a new tomorrow some of us had barely hoped for And of that I’m pretty confident, so you can hold me to it Sort of.. The American Film Institute has just announced the results of its poll of movie people as to who were the 50 “Greatest Screen Legends”. The results were predictable, which may be why neither the poll nor the wretched TV show that went with it attracted much attention. The top 10 males were Bogart, Grant, Stewart, Brando, Astaire, Fonda, Gable, Cagney, Tracy, Chaplin. For the women, the names were Hepburn (K), Davis, Hepburn (A), Bergman, Garbo, Monroe, Taylor, Garland, Dietrich, Crawford.

All of which gives you a picture of the modern bias in film history

So long as we’re quite sure what “legend” means. Is it simply stardom, box-office power, or endurance? More or less, all those names – and most of the people in the 50 – stand up today and appeal to the majority of voters who must have been people born after 1940 and raised on current notions of who has survived. Only that could explain the absence of Rudolph Valentino (his funeral was the biggest in movie history), Lon Chaney and Ronald Colman (true giants of the 1920s), Hope and Crosby (dominant box-office figures from the late 1930s to the mid 1950s, and both also stars of radio). Indeed, Crosby was once the triple-threat giant of show business – movies, radio, records – yet he is nowhere in the top 25 men. Nor will you find Hope, Colman, Chaney or – I can scarcely credit this – Mickey Rooney (box-office champ from 1936 to 1945, dynamic screen presence, and the epitome of instantly identifiable uniqueness).
Turn to the ladies and you realise that while Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish are there, the list omits Gloria Swanson, Clara Bow, Janet Gaynor and Marie Dressler who were major attractions in an age when, proportionately, far more people went to the movies than do so now.

But there are later aberrations: Lauren Bacall is number 20 among the ladies, while Doris Day is omitted. Day was a major star through the 1950s, and the world’s top draw in the early 1960s. Bacall never had a big following, and it could be argued that she was only really “Bacall” in two films (To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep) made with “Bogey”.But bear with those quotation marks a moment They tell us something instructive. I grieve for Doris Day and the ignorance that regards her as old-fashioned. But “Bacall” has a case, even if it only has two films as proof. A “legend” is a story, a tale, a fictional pattern; it is a message that survives through the ages.

Maybe “Bacall” was just a 19- year-old being manipulated by Howard Hawks, as she fell in love with “Bogey”, or even Bogart, the humble Humphrey behind the legend. But “Bacall” in those films is something the world still loves – a foxy sexpot who seems far older in what she knows, and who will do whatever the guy wants He just has to whistle. It may not be respectable – but it’s a message we understand.More than that, “Bogey” could easily have missed his own meaning, if not for “Bacall”. Humphrey Bogart was in pictures a dozen years before anyone got his point. He was a mere tough guy: he snarled, he leered, he sometimes whined when he was getting his come-uppance. But he was no match for Cagney or Edward G Robinson (number 24). Then, in the early 1940s, he did The Maltese Falcon, High Sierra and Casablanca, and we learnt to see that “Bogey” was “really” tough, laconic, a loner, smart, sarcastic, hard to reach, but a sucker for dames.

Yes, it could only be I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue.

It announces itself as “the antidote to panel games”, and when I was much younger I used to get fantastically irritated by this as not only did the show seem to be steeped in self-congratulatory whimsy, it seemed to be very much a panel game, with four people being asked questions and required to answer them for points. Besides, what was wrong with panel games?
As I say, that was very long ago, shortly after the invention of the wireless I believe, and since then the quality of other Radio 4 material has plummeted, or at least slipped rather nastily, so what used to be a faint star in the broadcasting firmament is now impressively, embarrassingly bright And as for what happened to the calibre of panel games … I believe I have gone on about that before in this column, and need not repeat myself.The I’m Sorry.. team knows all this. They really are on song at the moment, and almost every second of it is a delight. The week before last, they had a crack at those very panel games, as well as the schedules re- organisation. Last week the biggest laugh of the programme – after the one they got for the Scunthorpe gag – was for this: “One show that goes from strength to strength, despite all the recent changes, is the Today programme. Ten minutes of top news and current affairs, packed into three and a half hours (huge burst of laughter and applause), packed into three and a half hours of trails.”This is more than just a joke; it is a howl of despair from a section of the country trapped in the decaying hell of Radio 4, people who cannot escape, because everywhere else is – worse.

It is the giddy laughter of the damned, the exhilaration of the prisoners as they crazily set fire to their own mattresses.Then again, I’m not sure that it did get the biggest laugh of the programme (which means, effectively, given the somewhat precarious and rudimentary state of radio comedy, probably the biggest laugh of the week). Some jokes came from the round in which the panellists – Barry Cryer, Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Jeremy Harding – were asked to supply the most unlikely quotations they could imagine from famous people: “I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational scientific explanation for all this.” (Saint Paul) “Please! I’m married!” (Bill Clinton) “Of course, I’m no expert on this subject …” (Jonathan Miller)Or imagine the warped mind that will ask someone else to sing “Postman Pat” to the tune of “Robin Hood” (it works) or Madonna’s “Hanky-Panky” to the tune of “Land and Hope and Glory” (it works even better. Try it yourself: “Treat me li-ike a bad girl,/Even whe-en I’m good …”).The interesting thing about this is the way that it encourages the participants to humiliate themselves in a way they would not do, one imagines, over dinner in the privacy of their own homes. (Unless Jeremy Hardy is putting it on, his is the worst singing voice I’ve ever heard.)At one point, the compere, Humphrey Lyttelton (known as “Humph”), decided to get everyone to play Hunt the Slipper.

There followed his long explanation of the rules (“after a few seconds’ slipper-passing, I shall call out `slipper search on’ and then I’ll open my eyes”), then a pause, and a genuinely-embittered-sounding “I’m 78, for Christ’s sake” The game itself lasted about five seconds “Should, um … Humph …” said Graeme Garden, “should somebody have brought a slipper?”"What would have been the point of that?” said Humph, rather shortly.There was more surreal humour on Radio 3’s lunchtime concert from the Aldeburgh Festival. In common with many men in the autumn of their years, Alfred Brendel has decided that he is not only the greatest piano player in the world, he is also something of a poet. So while he got Pierre-Laurent Aimard to play piano music by Ligeti and Gyorgy Kurtag, he recited his own poetry between pieces.The effect was rather like …

well, rather like something from I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue. One of the piano compositions – I don’t know whether it was one of Ligeti’s or one of Aimard’s – was, strictly speaking, a composition for hands drumming on closed piano lid. That was sweet, really, but I draw the line at Brendel’s own poetry. I cannot quote any, as I wasn’t taking notes when the programme was broadcast, and my own complimentary copy of Brendel’s poetry (called One Finger Too Many) I had decided, after a quick skim, to sell for drugs.It wasn’t too bad – after all, it doesn’t really hurt your reputation as a poet to be pre-eminent in your field and have a charming mittel-European akzent to boot – but being in the audience would have been excruciatingly painful. The urge to shout out “don’t give up the day job, Alf” would have been unbearable.. We have Cyclops on Court Two,” said Bill Threlfall. He was referring to the electronic eye that records whether a serve is in or out, but I had spotted an elderly man in the crowd wearing an eyepatch, and prayed that the cameraman would give us a mischievous close-up He didn’t.

It was the first spontaneous street party in Tel Aviv for years.”

The reason the defeat of Netanyahu provoked such an emotional response in Amram and his friends was because they saw it as the victory of a more tolerant, open and less militarised ethic over the Prime Minister’s vision of Israel as a Jewish island permanently surrounded by Arab enemies. “I went out of my apartment into Rabin Square where thousands of young people were dancing. ROY AMRAM, a 25-year-old computer specialist in Tel Aviv, began to cry with relief on 17 May when Israeli television announced that exit polls showed Benjamin Netanyahu had been swept out of office after three years as Prime Minister “I started sobbing like a baby,” he said. Remember Bill Threlfall’s words: “The daughter of a very eminent doctor indeed.”.

Briefly, it is a story about posh young people in the mid-18th century searching for suitable husbands and wives Everyone at court is fascinated by the spectacle And as it was then, so it is now. It is an extraordinary privilege, which we undervalue at our peril.There is now, I find, very little space in which to comment on Aristocrats, BBC’s lavish new costume drama I shall return to it next week. True, but that in turn will be of little consolation to the journalist John Diamond and his wife, Nigella Lawson, whose plight was covered in the previous week’s updated Inside Story.What, it has been asked, is the point of such documentaries? They win acclaim and awards but whose interests do they really serve? The answer is that they offer an insight into the human condition from a perspective usually enjoyed, if that is the word, only by doctors and nurses For like the medics, we are involved yet detached. If he starts to grate at least Tessa can turn him into someone else. Destiny will take the People’s Impersonator one of two ways: either obscurity on a Scottish farm doing dreadful impressions in his living room.

Or most likely, a future as the new Bob Monkhouse, hosting the Royal Variety Show or Saturday Night Live at the Palladium What a thought.. Imagine you’ve never heard of Wimbledon – don’t know what tennis is, who plays it, or why. Then bang! You open the tabloids, and it hits you like a shot between the eyes: tennis is that game played by serious sportsmen who earn obscene amounts of money, while the women create an amusing diversion in their teeny-weeny tennis skirts. In other words, you may have noticed that the spotlight at Wimbledon has focussed quite conclusively so far on one Anna Kournikova, an 18-year- old Russian “stunna”. In terms of tennis ability Anna’s an extreme long shot for the title but that hasn’t worried the headline writers.

The Sun’s Kourna corner promised: “We’ll run a pic a day until she goes out”, with the comforting caveat, “Don’t worry fellas she’s in the doubles too.” The Daily Mail dubbed her: “The girl who just can’t lose (even though she hasn’t got a hope of winning)”.
Even when Jelena Dokic spectacularly defeated top seed Martina Hingis in the first round, the Sun seemed most impressed with her choice of hairstyle: “With her blonde ponytail, Jelena cut Martina to pieces” was the headline. The Evening Standard called her the “executioner with the face of an angel”. At the press conference afterwards everyone seemed more interested in her birthmark than how it feels to beat the world No 1.This lack of regard for female talent is disappointing, but the real tragedy and disgrace is that the tabloid press has completely ignored an issue that desperately needs exposing – the vast number of drop-dead gorgeous male tennis totty playing down at SW19. OK, there are a few teenage men vying for a seat to watch Anna, but they’re way outnumbered by the number of randy female fans ogling Henman, Haas and Rafter.Head down to the practice courts and you’ll find gaggles of women jostling for position to watch Agassi knocking up.

She had been feeling tired but we thought that was because she was working so hard.”Krista had had an operation as a baby to correct a hole in the heart and had been monitored by the Royal Brompton ever since. Our results have improved but it is in the nature of the children we deal with that there will always be deaths.”CASE HISTORY 1Kept in the dark about her child’s conditionKRISTA OCLOO was a healthy teenager who wanted to be a doctor. She was studying for A- levels, was a keen athlete, and had a twin sister. Leslie Hamilton, consultant cardiac surgeon at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, said: “Paediatric heart surgery is the most technically demanding of all surgery. In the UK, the data are to be collected anonymously, but any surgeon causing concern who fails to identify him or herself will be “outed”.However, finding operations that allow paediatric surgeons to be compared on a like-for-like basis has proved more difficult than expected. In certain US states, such as New York, individual surgeons’ death rates are collected and published annually. Growing concern at the number facing allegations of incompetence – one in ten have been the subject of investigations during the course of their careers – led the Society of Cardiothoracic Surgeons to agree 18 months ago to collect individual surgeons’ death rates, the only surgical specialism to do so, in order to have early warning of killer surgeons.

Parents therefore face an agonising choice: whether to resist treatment and enjoy their child in the knowledge that their life will be a short one, or gamble on a high-risk operation that could extend it.There are around 200 heart surgeons in the country and 20-25 who specialise in children. But an estimated 80 per cent of babies born with heart defects would die within a year without treatment. I have never been able to work out why they treat you in such a shoddy fashion.”The trust has pledged that all families concerned about the treatment of their children will be included in the review. But it may prove difficult to establish whether, if a higher death rate is found for any of the specialists, it is the result of a statistical blip or evidence of a worrying trend.Cardiac surgery on children is a high-risk specialism. Why didn’t he give me the information [about the risks to Krista]? Maybe he was too busy or maybe he felt it was not my business.”Some of the parents felt it was because they were young and working class that they didn’t get the time and the attention they needed. Ms Ocloo, a single parent, said: “I can’t help feeling that a stereotypical middle- class family might have been treated better. Josephine Ocloo, a university lecturer from north London and organiser of the group, whose own daughter Krista had narrowed arteries and died suddenly two years ago aged 17, said: “My consultant is incredibly arrogant.

“I thought: Oh wow – all these years I have been saying this.”A support group formed for the parents claims 40 families have made contact, many driven by grief and despair over the way they felt their own needs were neglected. How could he behave like that?”Mrs Boyes, 31, who with her husband, Peter, has three other daughters, described hearing on the TV news that the hospital was being investigated and feeling relief that at last someone would be made to listen. Julie Boyes, whose daughter Hannah, 13, has been a patient at the hospital all her life since undergoing a hole-in-the-heart operation when she was nine weeks old, said of one consultant: “It was not just his attitude He just wouldn’t answer you You would ask him a question and he just wasn’t interested I kept thinking there must be something wrong with this guy. But the wider issue of the doctors’ manner in dealing with all patients emerged as a key source of complaint at a press conference attended by seven of the families last week.Several parents described how they had felt belittled and humiliated for years by consultants who had shown them little consideration and scant respect. “The question of one surgeon’s attitude in dealing with Down’s syndrome patients is another matter, although that may have sparked the general complaint,” the spokesman added.The implication was that the hospital’s anonymous accuser was driven by moral concern over the treatment of disadvantaged patients. It issued a robust response: “We are confident our surgical performance is of the highest standard and will stand up to any investigation,” a spokesman said.There was, however, a revealing rider to this comment. The latest set of clinical indicators for hospitals show the Brompton has one of the highest death rates, with nearly four per 100 dying.

Since Bruno, now abruptly alert, realises how dangerous it would be to expose the lighter, he continues to clutch it in one hand while, with the other, awkwardly fishing a book of matches from his jacket pocket. The fellow passenger meanwhile stares at him as though he’s faintly mad.It’s a nothing moment, almost imperceptible, as I say The film doesn’t need it It would be just (or nearly) as good without it. He’s on the train again, mighty pleased with himself, so much so that he nonchalantly uses the stolen object, on which is embossed two small but distinctive criss-crossing racquets, to light one of his own cigarettes. (A celebrated anecdote, tirelessly repeated by the director but seemingly not apocryphal, tells of a chubby little Hitch locked up for five minutes by his father, as a joke, inside a police cell.) For anyone, then, seeing the film again, it’s no longer the familiar set-pieces which linger longest in the mind – the fun-fair murder, the wildly careening merry-go-round – but a few jarring moments that, even when almost imperceptible, instill that old Hitchcockian unease.Consider the scene, precisely, in which Bruno travels back to the funfair to plant Guy’s lighter. Beyond its quality as an entertainment (and Hitchcock’s films remain among the most entertaining ever made), there is to Strangers on a Train a formal sophistication unmatched by anything in the current mainstream cinema.It may be “only” a thriller but, like all his best work, it taps the unvoiced anxieties that lurk within all of us; for just as Chaplin never forgot his childhood poverty, so Hitchcock never forgot his childhood fears. With Psycho it’s the circle, Vertigo the spiral, North by Northwest the diagonal line and Strangers on a Train the criss-cross. Everything criss- crosses in this film: the two pairs of legs, of course, which are responsible for setting the whole plot in motion; the railway tracks; the swapped crimes (one blithely carried out by Bruno, the other naturally not by Guy, who has imagined, while airily half-entertaining the idea in Bruno’s compartment, that he is only humouring a harmless simpleton); and, above all, the marvellous sequence in which Hitchcock cross-cuts between Guy on the tennis court and Bruno, about to “plant” Guy’s cigarette lighter at the scene of his own crime, desperately struggling to retrieve it from under a sewer grating into which it’s fallen.

It’s one of the key concepts of Hitchcockian exegesis, and variations can be found in film after film (I Confess, The Wrong Man, North by Northwest, Psycho and so on) This is how, and why, the so-called auteur theory works. Even in the case of a literary adaptation, a truly personal film- maker already contrives to assert his identity and individuality in the choice of material.Another commonplace of Hitchcock criticism is the notion that the principal narrative elements of each of his films are, consciously or not, organised around a latent motif, one usually based on a simple geometrical form. It is, in effect, a perfect example of the “transference of guilt”, by which a protagonist finds himself forced both to assume and to expiate another’s crime. The someone, as it happens, was Patricia Highsmith, on whose novel the film is based. (Raymond Chandler was one of the scenarists.) But if Hitchcock chose to adapt it to the screen, it was surely because he knew that its premise was quintessentially Hitchcockian. Which is when Bruno declares his immaculately manicured hand. Why don’t they exchange murders? Each does away with the other’s bete noire; neither, therefore, will have any detectable motive; each gets what he wants and neither ends up in the electric chair.The basic idea is breathtakingly simple, except that someone had to think of it.

Take bananas: in the four Reading supermarkets we surveyed, they cost 45p per lb; in the US they cost 43p The same is true of eggs In Reading they cost between 79p and 85p; in America, 56p. Stephen Byers is monitoring Britain’s grocers: he plans to compare prices on up to 100 product lines with those in Europe.American prices are even lower. A basket of 20 standard household items, including milk, fruit and vegetables, cornflakes and household goods, cost 26.62 euros (pounds 41.23) in Reading’s Asda, but in the Kaiser supermarket, Berlin, the same goods cost 25 euros, and in Auchan in Calais we were charged just 18.75 euros.So why are we paying so much more than our continental neighbours? The big retailers maintain that they have to pay more for fuel, distribution and land in Britain But time may be running out for them. The stores have been under fire from the Office of Fair Trading which last year found that profit margins in this country were three times what they were on the Continent. And according to Mike Godliman, of the retail analysts Verdict, margins are still almost three times higher in Britain than Europe, although they are beginning to fall and stores are not making “exorbitant profits”, given their size.We compared prices in British, French and German supermarkets and found substantial differences in price. Meanwhile, the other big supermarket players have hit back with pledges of similar cuts in the cost of goods.

Safeway entered the fray with its Price Cut 99 campaign, on which it is spending pounds 30m, while Tesco remarked sniffily: “Whatever others claim to do, we will better.”But when one remembers that a large supermarket sells more than 55,000 lines, price cuts on a couple of hundred items seem less dramatic.But they do highlight just how continuous competition has become in the retailing world Yet shoppers do not seem to have benefited. Its research showed that customers preferred lower prices to promotional offers. Last week the Trade and Industry Secretary, Stephen Byers, announced that fines for companies found guilty of price fixing would be tripled, but the supermarkets insist they are in a period of intense competition, which is why prices on many items are so close.So confident is Asda of the importance of price to shoppers that it has ditched that holy grail of Nineties retail marketing, the loyalty card, in favour of price cuts. Prices for apples, onions, tomatoes, Nescafe coffee, orange juice, Kellogg’s cornflakes and Stella Artois beer, matched in all four supermarkets despite the retail industry’s insistence that they are set locally according to labour and location costs. We picked a typical basket of fresh and convenience foods and household goods, coming to a little over pounds 40 in each case, and found that the store beat its nearest rival, Safeway, by 79p.However, it was also clear that costs are exactly the same for many goods. The cuts are the latest attempt at aggressive pricing since Wal- Mart took over the Asda chain in July, and follow the company’s Rollback campaign which aims to discount prices this year by pounds 200m.
Our survey of prices in the big four supermarkets – Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury and Safeway – in one of Britain’s most prosperous towns, Reading, Berkshire, showed that Asda’s prices were indeed cheaper.

Liar! He knows that the people having their toy light-sabres framed and mounted and doing their nut trying to book more than 12 tickets in advance are not children. Yet, having apparently abandoned his adult audience, Lucas seems content to bore our sons and daughters to death. you wanted to get out and it was a fantasy world that you inhabited. Whether it was British modness or a pale imitation of Californian psychedelia, music was always an escape. Going to a club to see a group of Manchester musicians playing Chicago blues, for that 45 minutes or an hour, you could be part of another experience.” DH.

Whenever an adventure film goes wrong and everybody hates it, the director heaves round and claims it was intended for children, and didn’t we all know that that was the case, and how could we have possibly missed the fact? George Lucas did it with his latest Star Wars. Some musicians wanted to be the Beatles, some Bob Dylan.C P Lee, musician and historian, invokes Billy Liar: “I think in the 1960s … For some young Mancs the excitement was to be found in the more specialist soul clubs which were spinning the purer import sounds rather than the city’s pop sensations like Wayne Fontana and the Hollies.For others, weekends were for spending at folk clubs or Chicago blues jams. The group’s singer, Peter Noone, became a huge star in America, as did a second grinning Mancunian who went Stateside – Davy Jones of the Monkees, after appearances as Ena Sharples’s nephew in ITV’s Coronation Street.In Manchester in the mid- 1960s, with clubs galore, venues aplenty, bands and DJs by the score, all the ingredients for a good night out were in place It was not a narrow scene, easily pigeon-holed. What up until then had been a one-way process – with English music fans looking to the US for constant inspiration – suddenly was reversed. Alan Lawson describes the turnaround as “astronomic”.Freddie and the Dreamers, Herman’s Hermits, and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders: all had huge hits in the US in the mid- 1960s, though only Herman’s Hermits maintained anything more than temporary success there. Early that year, the Beatles went on tour in the United States, opening the way for other English bands in America.

The third of the big three in Manchester at the time, Freddie and the Dreamers, had had four releases in the top 10 by November 1964. Manchester’s first No 1 was by Herman’s Hermits, when they topped the Hit Parade in August 1964 with “I’m Into Something Good”, in August 1964. “Look Through Any Window” was a ninth hit single by the Hollies in a row that included their No 1, “I’m Alive”, of May 1965. Jimmy Savile’s one-off Disc Club at the Higher Broughton Assembly Rooms promised “Top pops and fun games on the stage with Jimmy”.The excitement in the city at the time was boosted by the success of local bands in the national charts. They talked between records, making a virtue out of a necessity since the technology to segue the records into one another hadn’t yet been developed.

Thus the patter and personalities of the DJs became important. Throughout the first half of the 1960s, most of Manchester’s best beat- room DJs were playing an eclectic mix of tracks, reflecting the music of local bands, the domination of the Beatles (and then the Rolling Stones), the soul classics (like Otis Redding and Dionne Warwick), rougher and ever-present rhythm and blues, (from John Lee Hooker to the Pretty Things), and the beginnings of Motown.
A typical playlist from September 1965 could include tracks by the Small Faces (“Watcha Gonna Do About It”), Wilson Pickett (“In the Midnight Hour”), the Hollies (“Look Through Any Window”), Manfred Mann (“If You Gotta Go Go Now”), pop like Sandie Shaw (“Message Understood”) and perhaps even something by the Beach Boys (“California Girls”).As a mark of the continued and now re-emerging interest in genuine rhythm and blues, at the end of September 1965, DJ Ric Vonn’s of the week at the Manchester Cavern was Jimmy Smith’s “The Organ Grinder’s Swing”.The DJs in the early 1960s were using very primitive equipment; Dave Lee Travis at the Oasis was using a Dansette autochange. Herman’s Hermits brought the city its first ever No 1, and the Hollies had nine hits in a row … Even so, he had had that one chance – so that, decades later, we just can’t get him out of our heads..