logo
ENFRع
#

Latest news with #1940s

The Essex teenager living and working like it's the 1940s
The Essex teenager living and working like it's the 1940s

BBC News

time7 days ago

  • Entertainment
  • BBC News

The Essex teenager living and working like it's the 1940s

While some 16-year-old boys spent all their time playing video games or football, one teenager preferred to immerse himself in all things from around 1940 from Colchester in Essex, developed a love for the era as a child after learning about the World Wars. He said the period had a great sense of community support, and he loved the "elegance" of how people composed two years now, Lincoln has also been delighting customers at The Shed antiques shop and Nora's 1940s Tea Room in Sproughton, Suffolk, where owner Lesley Austin said he was "adored". "I liked the clothing, how they dressed, and the style," Lincoln explained."Just the elegance of how everyone was and acted... with the time of the war, everyone had to come together, everyone had to fight, and everyone had to survive together."Most people back then said it was scary, but it was quite fun to live then, and they could go out, help each other and apparently there's not that much stuff today that is similar to what that wartime experience was." Lincoln said he loved the music of the time, including Henry Hall, Jack Payne and Ambrose & His Orchestra. The teenager's wardrobe was also entirely made up of clothes from the era, which he said he preferred to modern-day clothes. He even cycled on a 1939 bike when out and about researching and finding items for his collection. Lincoln said his friends and family loved his passion, with his parents often helping him find memorabilia, a lot of which can be found all over his he has only just finished his GCSEs, Lincoln planned to eventually own his own home and decorate it with items from the era, and use only antique appliances."I would like to try it and give it a good go, even though it will be hard, I'm sure it will be good fun as well," he said. While a fun passion for the teenager, there was a more serious side to his love of the era."I feel like they did so much for us that we owe everything to them," he explained."I think people need to give more care. "Not many people really give a care anymore... I see loads of people sitting on a memorial, and I think they need to learn more and to remember the sacrifice that was given." Ms Austin met Lincoln when he visited the tearoom with his mother and brother, and she decided to offer him a job."I thought this was a special boy, he is so different, so passionate about the era, and so pleasant as well and chatty," she said."His knowledge is second to none. The customers adore him; they think he's wonderful."He always looks amazing, we never know what outfit he's going to come in." Lincoln's mother, Nicola Young, 47, said he was "not afraid of being bold" or "different in everyone else's eyes"."We're proud of him, proud of what he is doing," she said."This is Lincoln, we accept Lincoln as this person... this is his life and his passion."We support him with decorating his bedroom, we take him around antique shops, he'll trawl through vintage shops, we take him to all different places all over when we can."We will try and support him as much as we can." Follow Suffolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.

Sherlock's Mark Gatiss teases 'thrilling' new detective show Bookish
Sherlock's Mark Gatiss teases 'thrilling' new detective show Bookish

Yahoo

time16-07-2025

  • Entertainment
  • Yahoo

Sherlock's Mark Gatiss teases 'thrilling' new detective show Bookish

Mark Gatiss has always wanted to play a detective, and in his new series Bookish, he finally is able to fulfil that dream, but he admits to Yahoo UK it was "f***ing hard" to follow in the footsteps of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle by creating his own murder mystery. The writer wears many hats in the U&alibi series; he not only created the show he also co-wrote several episodes, and takes the central role of Gabriel Book — the aptly named bookseller whose hobby is helping police solve puzzling cases in 1940s London. It's a concept not dissimilar to another crime drama he co-created, Sherlock, but this time Gatiss is working with an entirely blank canvas and that made it an interesting challenge. "I'm a great student of the genre. I've always loved murder mysteries, obviously Sherlock Holmes, Poirot, Miss Marple, but also a lot of the others I read as a teenager — Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham, and lots and lots. I just love them, and I've always wanted to be one," Gatiss shares. "So I sort of had this idea in this form for about eight years, but it's a sort of synthesis of all of the bits I love, really." When it came to piecing together mysteries, Gatiss bows down to the Queen of Crime, Christie, for her incredible ability to create story after story and make it look easy. "Excuse my French, it's f***ing hard," Gatiss admits of creating his own murder mystery rather than adapting one like he did with Sherlock. "They are beasts. The reason that Christie is still preeminent is that her plots are amazing, and everyone bow down to her. "There is an amazing letter in her archive from Graham Greene, who wrote to her asking to buy plots off her because he couldn't think of any, and she just dashed them off. There are short story plots of hers which would sustain a novel, and it's just amazing, really, some of the cleverest twists and variations of a theme, you never know. "So they are difficult, and the big problems, the biggest challenges, are motive... but mostly it's clues, you have to lay clues that are not too obvious and not too obscure. One of the rules is you have to play fair with the audience; they have to be able to somehow piece it together, and that is the other problem, which is how your detective does it. "Every detective has a thing, and the thing for Book is the bookshop. It is a sort of analogue computer; it's all there somewhere, and he has so many obscure references that somehow he can kind of piece it together. He's a bit of Sherlock Holmes, a bit of intuition. A line I was very proud of is, he says, 'you can read a lot of things as well as books'. I thought that's kind of the ethos of the series." Bookish is more than just its initial premise, though. The six-part series features mysteries of a personal nature too, opening with Book and his beloved wife Trottie (Polly Walker) hiring Jack (Connor Finch), a young man just out of prison with a story to tell. And then there's Book, who has secrets of his own as a gay man in a lavender marriage during a period when homosexuality was illegal in the UK. The show's 1940s setting gave Gatiss the chance to explore interesting, important topics, as he says: "The setting is very crucial. I love this period; it's very under-examined. I love the films of the period hugely, it's the best decade of British film, I think. "What I wanted was to create something in the flavour of The Lady Vanishes or a great film — which if you haven't seen I really recommend — called Green for Danger with Alistair Sim, which is set during the war and is a very clever murder mystery with a central eccentric detective. It's my perfect film, really. "Plus, the idea that he was a gay man in a lavender marriage, and that would be a way of talking about now." Gatiss goes on: "I saw a discussion on TV a couple of years ago with a wide age range of gay people and they started talking about decriminalisation and the two youngest ones looked a little uncomfortable, and eventually the interviewer was saying 'what is it?' And one of them said: 'Oh, I didn't know it had ever been illegal,' and your heart just drops. "But weirdly, that is the great triumph of the gay rights movement; it's an extraordinary thing, and it is like fighting any battle — the real success comes when you don't have to think about it. But at the same time, you want people to acknowledge it or know about it because it's crucial. And also now it could be undone like that, and it's all around the world." "So that's why I think it's important to show 'here's a very dangerous time and you don't know how lucky you are' without wagging a finger," Gatiss says of Bookish. "But also that this dangerous time could come back in a heartbeat, absolutely it could. It's happening all over the world with banning Pride, banning representation across great swaths of the world. It's really frightening." It's a subject that Gatiss feels strongly about. But it was equally important for the writer not to make Book's queerness the central theme of the story, because in a way it heralded progress: "When people asked me the question about representation, I used to say one day, when a detective is incidentally gay, then we will have made progress. And that's kind of what we've done here, because if this show were made in 1980, it would be called 'The Gay Detective.' "The point is not that he is gay, that's a part of the series, but it's not the defining characteristic, like the way there was a show in 1980 called The Chinese Detective with David Yip. Once that would have been the issue, but now it's not. It's not incidental because it's part of the plot and part of the scenario and what we're trying to examine dramatically, but it's not the defining thing." He adds: "As much as people love period and I love period, we also wanted to make sure it wasn't stuffy. The music and the style of it are interestingly not 40s, so it's about trying to find what's common to our time without lecturing people." Gatiss took his role as leader of the production "very seriously" and part of that was ensuring that they had a "very happy production" on set. The writer admits he has no tolerance for pageantry or egos on his sets, and so was keen to ensure that kind of thing didn't occur on Bookish. "It was very, very, very happy company, and I take my responsibilities as leader very seriously, to welcome people, any guest actor, but also the regulars. You have to look after them and make sure they have a good time," he reflects. "I absolutely can't bear any kind of onset bullying or friction or bad atmosphere, I just can't stand it, and I won't tolerate it. It's my show to not tolerate it, you know. "But it's really important to have a happy atmosphere because you feel creative and you can do stuff, me and Carolina [Giammetta], the director, really take that very seriously. "I remember a friend of mine directed Breaking Bad, and they had a guest actor and he said it was just a nightmare. Bryan Cranston wasn't on set until later in the day, and he arrived and he could just see what was going on with this guy, and he just went: 'We like to have a good time on this show, OK?' And that did it. That's the principle I had." And as a writer, he admits that it is inevitable that his latest work is compared to other crime dramas, even his own, because they all share similarities by virtue of being in the same genre. "It's very difficult because in the end Sherlock Holmes said, 'There is nothing new under the sun,' so you have to find variations on the theme, really, and that's the key," Gatiss remarks when asked how he tried to make Bookish different to what has come before. "There's a little bit of Holmes in it, you have to do some sort of deduction because that's how it works, otherwise he either knows everything, or you have loads of scenes of him just looking at stuff. Some of it has to be intuition and some of it has to be cause and effect." Ever the Sherlock Holmes fan, Gatiss references one of Conan Doyle's short stories The Adventure of Silver Blaze as he adds: "You know the ultimate thing really is to find the equivalent of the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, because that's a piece of genius and everyone gets that. "Also, there's the beautiful simplicity of that idea. I thought it was genius: the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, but the dog did nothing in the night-time, and that was what made it curious. It still is just brilliant. So it's [trying to do] that sort of thing, it's inflected by Sherlock Holmes." While he is on the cusp of releasing the first series, Gatiss is already well underway with the second as he reveals he has just finished writing the new episodes with Matthew Sweet and is "cheek by jowl" to "publicising this one and shooting" the next. It's a lot of pressure on the writer's shoulders, but he also enjoys the challenge too. "It's thrilling to create this world, and I always think about it," he says. "There's a marvellous thing Steven Moffat and I used to say about Sherlock, our favourite bit always was before we started a new series. We'd sit in a room and just think about what it might be... it is very thrilling to think about where characters might go and what sorts of cases you might have." Bookish premieres with its first two episodes on U&alibi on Wednesday, 16 July.

People left shocked by 'absurd' requirements in resurfaced flight attendant job listing from the 1940s
People left shocked by 'absurd' requirements in resurfaced flight attendant job listing from the 1940s

Daily Mail​

time03-07-2025

  • General
  • Daily Mail​

People left shocked by 'absurd' requirements in resurfaced flight attendant job listing from the 1940s

A vintage flight attendant job listing from the 1940s has shocked people with its 'absurd' requirements. Posted in the Reddit forum 'OldSchoolRidiculous', the advert for Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc, (TWA) firstly required attendants to be aged between 21 to 26. Next on the list were height requirements. Wannabe cabin crew had to be taller than 5'2 and shorter than 5'6 to qualify. And if that sounds outrageous enough, the airline also stipulated that crew must weigh between 100 and 130 pounds. Applicants also needed to have one year of college education or be a registered nurse to be accepted and have good vision. And there's still one more shocking requirement. Cabin crew 'must be single', states the advert. One shocked person comments: 'Were they looking for absurdly small woman or is this one of those people used to be smaller on average sorta things? Pretty gross still, a 100 pound adult woman?!' Another person says: 'My mother was hired as a hostess by TWA despite not having had a year of college or being a registered nurse. She was what the 40's called "personality plus!"' They explain: 'In my mother's case, "personality plus" comprised indiscriminate effervescence that always favoured males. Hostesses were routinely terminated upon marriage, or upon reaching the age of 32. 'TWA even stated bluntly: "If you haven't found anyone by that age, we don't want you either". 'My mother lived on black coffee, skim milk and four packs of cigarettes a day when she was a TWA hostess, as well as afterwards, I recall.' Transcontinental & Western Air was a USA airline that operated from 1930 until it was acquired by American Airlines in 2001. Shockingly, the person even claims that their mother was 'suspended briefly' after gaining three pounds. Meanwhile, another commenter questions whether the airline was 'specifically looking for a college dropout'. However, another person explains: 'Getting hired as a flight attendant was considered an excellent reason to drop out of college back in the day, for someone who'd prefer to travel and earn a modest salary rather than pay tuition and study.' Another resurfaced United Airlines advert has similar requirements asking wannabe applicants to be 'unmarried', between 5'2 and 5'7 and not weighing anymore than 135 pounds. The advert also states that the 'starting pay is good' and flight attendants will get 'regular raises'. it comes after a flight attendant shared two forms of common passenger behaviour that 'send her over the edge' when she's having a particularly 'bad day.' Dallas-based air hostess Cher Killough, who has worked in the industry for six years, recently took to TikTok to highlight disruptive in-flight habits that often leave her 'clenching' her jaw. Sharing a video to her page, @cherdallas, the cabin crew noted she becomes frustrated when a passenger ignores crucial safety instructions because a previous flight attendant either turned a blind eye or allowed them to do so.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store