Oh, interesting. Apparently, he'd never been especially healthy, but his biggest problems at the end (according to Wikipedia) seem to be bladder/etc related

Oh, that is quite odd

I haven’t, it’s true

The Office - Who Cares Wins - UK #theoffice YouTube video by Dave | SkyTechBites

Peter Purves is, too, apparently

Oh, how lovely

Yes! Lovely detail

Yes, it's nice to hear someone is/was a good'un. Peter Purves, too (same mate worked with him on the training video which is shown in an episode of The Office)

Footnote: my best mate did a panto with Brian Cant once, and said he was a deeply lovely man

Playschool out take YouTube video by VHS Gold

Plus (of course) no mention of Play School could be complete without...

BBC Four - Remembers..., Derek Griffiths Remembers... Bod Derek Griffiths looks back on the 1970s animated children's series Bod.

...and for those who need a bit more of Lovely Derek

BBC - About the BBC Clips, Black British History Play School Derek Griffiths Black British History Play School Derek Griffiths

By popular demand (of @itsjoels.bsky.social...)

Good point!

BBC2 was supposed to launch the night before, rather more grandly, but it was one of those occasions where everything that could go wrong did. A fault at Battersea Power Station, and the failure of a cable bringing electricity from the Midlands meant a blackout right across west London

“We killed a mouse once. A beautiful little white mouse whose keeper came along to sedate it so that it slept. It was put on a velvet cushion and I had to present it to the king or queen. I think if you kissed it, it became a prince or something. But anyway, I do remember the whole thing because the poor mouse had too much sedative and died. It wasn't my fault, but I was walking towards the throne thinking: ‘What if the children knew I was acting with a dead mouse?’”

The same article tells us, incidentally, via Emma Thompson’s gloriously eccentric mother, Phyllida Law, that they once (accidentally) murdered a defenceless creature in the name of children’s entertainment

How we made: Joy Whitby and Phyllida Law on Play School 'If I got frustrated, I'd just punch Hamble, the doll with the squashed face. She couldn't sit up and that's not helpful'

Brian Cant said he succeeded at his audition by sitting in a box and sailing “away with a broomstick” to find “a wellington boot full of custard”

Brian Cant and Floella Benjamin smile out from the cover of an album: Songs from BBC TV's Play School and Play Away

At 11am on 21 April 1964, Play School made its debut, and became the first programme ever broadcast on BBC2

Ooh, I might have to look out for that

Its appearance is understandable once you know who approved (and probably paid for) it – it’s basically trolling in bronze

Oh, I do, thank you

Yes, the sculpture at the end of the thread went up in 2000, so is presumably one of the fruits of Vlad's obsession with his predecessor

Have You Seen London's Strangest Sculpture? | Look Up London Along the Thames path in Deptford, you're going to want to take a closer look. This might just be London's strangest sculpture

...and he was (in a way) behind something of more debatable aesthetic properties

Evelyn’s Mulberry in London Legend has it this gnarled old tree was planted by Tsar Peter the Great during his visit to London.

Still, he did leave behind in Britain one apparent improvement to the landscape: a mulberry tree in Evelyn’s garden (now Sayes Court Park) – although he may not have planted it at all...

Peter went on to be tsar for 23 more years (he’d already been in the post for 16 years by the time of his Grand Embassy), before making himself emperor in 1721, and then popping his clogs in 1725 at just 52 (perhaps not helped by his vast appetites for drinking and shagging)

Evelyn wrote that he visited “to view how miserably the Tzar of Moscovy had left my house after 3 months making it his court”, and we know the bill for the damage came to at least £300 – not that Peter paid that, of course. The Lords Commissioners of the Treasury did

A list of damages: For 150 yards of Painting For 244 yards of Whiting in the House For 300 squares in the Windows For 20 Quarries... For 3 Brass Locks For 9 more that's dammag'd For Keys wanting to all the said Locks For 90 foot of Dutch Tyles to repaire in Chimneys For 100 foot of Flemish Tyle paving to repaire For 90 foot of Purbeck paving to repaire in ye Kitchen For mending the Stoves there... For plaining the Dressers For repairing an oven dammaged All the floores dammag'd by Grease and Inck For 2 new Deale Dores For a new Flore to a Bagg House For repairing 300 foot of flint and Pebble paving For 240 foot running of Posts and Pales of Firr For 170 foot running of Post and Railes of Oake For 100 foot running of border board in ye garden For new pollishing 4 marble foot paces and a marble table For 3 wheelbarrows broke and Lost Measured by William Dickinson Clarke. Total: £107 70

The ‘troublesome tenant’ link above says the “3 wheelbarrows broke and Lost” in this bill may be down to Peter and friend’s “habit of racing in a wheelbarrow, crashing through John’s beloved hedges” – but that there’s no “source for this earlier than Victorian times”, which is rather disappointing

Excerpt from History Today: After Peter’s departure from England, the Treasury on the petition of Benbow appointed Sir Christopher Wren, the King’s Surveyor, Mr. Sewell of the moving wardrobe, and Mr. London, the King’s gardener, to survey Sayes Court. Their report describes the destruction in detail. No part of the house escaped damage. All the floors were covered with grease and ink, and three new floors had to be provided. The tiled stoves, locks to the doors, and all the paint work had to be renewed. The curtains, quilts, and bed linen were “tore in pieces.” All the chairs in the house, numbering over fifty, were broken, or had disappeared, probably used to stoke the fires. Three hundred window panes were broken and there were “twenty fine pictures very much tore and all frames broke.”

Some of the stories about the damage he and his entourage did to the house are apocryphal. It’s alleged that he twatted a hole in John Evelyn’s garden wall, for example, in order to get to the dockyards more easily. But there was an official inquiry

Bailiff John Strickland wrote to his employer, poor John Evelyn (the cultivated courtier, diarist, gardener, and co-founder of the Royal Society), to say “There is a house full of people, and right nasty. The Tsar ... is very seldom at home a whole day...”

That programme also says a curator at the Ashmolean heard that in one evening “... he drank two bottles of brandy and four of sherry” (and that he was “a very uncouth fellow ... his sword hung as if he had never worn one before. He stooped much. His hands were dirty, and he scratched as if itchy”)

Witness History - Peter the Great in London - BBC Sounds How the young Tsar's visit to 17th Century England inspired him to modernise Russia

Peter was just 25, and – at 6ft 7 – bloody enormous, which may account for his immense capacity for booze. An Anglican bishop wrote: “He is a man of very hot temper, that’s soon inflamed, and very brutal in his passions. He raises his natural heat by drinking much brandy, with great application”

Peter the Great in England

Benbow was persuaded to vacate the house, and Peter moved in. History Today says his interests were practical – ships, watches, “an instrument in the royal apartments which showed the direction in which the wind was blowing” – but he did also have an appetite for letting his hair down...