ON AIR TONIGHT

Just a quick note to tell those who find themselves near a radio tonight at 11.30 that I will be on the BBC Radio 2 Art's Show this evening talking about the 40th anniversary of the 1970 feature film version of E Nesbit's The Railway Children, starring Dinah Sheridan, Bernard Cribbins and William Mervyn with Jenny Agutter, Sally Tomsett and Garry Warren, written and directed for the screen by the late Lionel Jeffries.


If you miss the broadcast you can catch it again for seven days via BBC Radio 2's i-Player.

PORT OUT, STARBOARD HOME...

And now the British film industry has lost one its great treasures, Lionel Jeffries. A superb and diverse character actor, he was wonderful in comedy, but equally at home in dramas: for example, he made a wildly demented Marquis of Queensbury in The Trials of Oscar Wilde.

His films, spanning almost forty years, included Up the Creek, Two-Way Stretch, The Wrong Arm of the Law, First Men in the Moon, The Colditz Story, Murder Ahoy! (managing to hold his own alongside that redoubtable scene-stealer, Margaret Rutherford), Rocket to the Moon, Camelot and, of course, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang...

He directed only a handful of films, among them The Amazing Mr Blunden and The Water Babies, but, if he had never done anything else in his prolific life, he would be remembered for his directorial debut (for which he also wrote the script): the utterly glorious, totally unforgettable, 1970 version of E Nesbit's The Railway Children.

Thank you, dear Mr Jeffries, for all the laughs and for one of the best endings any film ever had...

LIONEL JEFFRIES
(1926-2010)