HE eased his 24 stone weight into a chair. “The fat man will disappear from the earth in the next 30 years,” said Willoughby Goddard.

“I think it’s a certainty, because the doctors are getting far too clever at reducing people’s weight.”

Goddard, one of the great British character actors of TV and films, with a status in Hollywood, too, plays Assistant Police Commissioner Sir Geoffrey Norton in Friday’s The Man in Room 17.

He mopped his brow with a huge red handkerchief. “I’m lighter than I have been for months,” he said. “I was 30st. on Broadway last year.” He played Bumble, the Beadle, in the British musical “Oliver!”

“I had to give the part up. I couldn’t stand another New York summer.” But didn’t New Yorkers flee the city in the humid months? “They do,” he said, taking a mighty draught of lime juice from a tankard, “but the place is swarming with tourists. There is hardly room to stand on the pavements.”

Goddard, well known on TV for his performance as Gessler in William Tell, sheds up to 6st. by going on a “savage diet” every 18 months.

He said: “I punish myself for three months, then eat heartily for the next 15. My life would be miserable if I watched my figure all the time.

“I’ve been lucky, really. I earn a good living from the theatre because I’m enormously fat. It’s the only way that one can cash in on obesity.

“There are plenty of fat extras, of course, but the poor dears can’t act. We are all cast according to our physique, but fat is no use to you unless you can act.

“And even as a fat character actor you are no use until you can play a man of 50. You have to be seething with age and decrepitude. It’s ghastly.

“If you are young and fat you play Billy Bunter, and then there’s nothing else. It takes years to decay sufficiently for an agent to take interest in you.

“I’ve been fortunate in that I entered the theatre in the middle of an era of fat villainy. It started in the early part of the century, and people like myself and Robert Morley have carried it on.

“As long as we’re about, I think fat men will be reasonably fashionable on stage. It’s not a promising future for newcomers, though, because as doctors find new methods of weight reduction there’ll be few fat men about.

“The playwrights will find less work for us to do, and only period parts will be available. That won’t bother me. I shan’t need work by then.”

Goddard, who lives with his wife and six-year-old son in Barnes, Surrey, has played all the classic fat roles, and Falstaff many times.

Without padding? “No,” he said. “The real thing doesn’t look as impressive. Anyway, no fat man should ever be asked to play Falstaff. There’s too much running around.

“Fat men should always play lovers and do nothing but lounge about elegantly. But always the writer sees the fat man as a character who must dash around to make the audience laugh — much to our discomfort.

“That’s the way it is in the theatre today. Fat men run, thin men lounge.”

Would he have done so well in show business if he had not been so fat? “I think so. You’ve got to be able to act as well. I didn’t begin to put on weight until I was 25.”

Did he worry about his weight? “Not any more. I’ve come to terms with myself over the years.

“But if my son shows the slightest sign of obesity, I shall put him on a diet instantly.”

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CONFEDERATE cannons blaze a trail of death across your TV screen. Frenzied Union cavalry horses totter in the turmoil. The air is rent by the cries of the dying and the smell of burnt cordite.

The scene is Gettysburg, bloodbath of the American Civil War, the savage, heroic conflict in which brother slew brother. An indelible chapter in American history written long before the movie camera was invented.

Yet in Camera in Action, a series of programmes (starting on Tuesday) which covers aspects of life and the world in the second half of the 19th century, the scene is reconstructed as accurately and dramatically as the day it happened.

How is it done? By painstakingly piecing together a jigsaw of still photographs taken at the time. Granada have made them come to life by using the “action stills” technique which they pioneered in Britain five years ago.

The idea is to take still photographs and drawings and range a stop-motion camera over them. The cameraman will start with a shot of the entire picture, then zoom in on a detail, pan across to another corner of the picture, and so on.

The film is shot frame by frame, re-positioning the camera after each exposure. When linked at speed, the pictures from the past become a dramatic moving story straight from the pages of history.

Why is the technique so effective? said director Peter Jones: “Because the photographers of the day did their job so well. In the ‘Prospect of Whitby,’ the second programme, for instance, I think viewers will be staggered by the beauty and quality of Frank Sutcliffe’s photography.

“And in each programme we have had access to the original negatives or a new set of prints.”

The first in the series, “The Uprooted,” is the story of the vast European migration to American in the 19th century.

The “Prospect of Whitby,” is the story of the birth of the Yorkshire holiday resort; “The War of Brothers,” dealing with the American Civil War; and “Fashion Photographers,” a look at fashion photography down the years.

All the events will be seen as they happened, using photographs from museums, private collections, magazine libraries and family albums.

More than 250 photographs used in Tuesday’s programme came from pictures by Jacob Rüs and Lewis Hine. They were shot from different angles more than 90,000 times and then edited to make up the half-hour programme.

Action stills cameraman Ray Goode, who shot each one of those 90,000 frames separately, told me: “At first it was decided to write the script and then fit the photographs to it. But it was too stilted.

“Finally we decided to write the script to fit the photographs. There was a great deal of experimenting to be done.

“We have tried to make the stills come alive with the minimum amount of animation.”

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THE young Army lieutenant took no notice of what was happening on the screen. Instead he watched a girl two rows in front of him.

His chances seemed remote. She was the sergeant-major’s daughter and he was a poor subaltern. But today Northern TV personality Mike Scott is married to Sylvia, the girl he saw in the two-and-ninepennies.

On Friday, he takes over the commentator’s chair in Cinema, and that early real life cinema drama sticks in his memory.

It happened in 1952 when the then 20-year-old Scott was on National Service with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, at Bicester, Oxfordshire.

“At first,” Mike recalled, “it seemed I could never bridge those two rows between us. Then a mutual friend introduced us.

“All went well until I fell foul of the Army authorities some months later in that same cinema.

“I was orderly officer, and rather foolishly slipped off to take Sylvia to the pictures. There was a disturbance on camp and I was caught red-faced holding hands in the back row.”

Mike and Sylvia were married in 1956 and have a five-year old daughter, Julia. Scott is 6 ft. 2in. tall, angular, with classic features and has a humorous outlook on life. He’s a popular fellow, drives a 1932 vintage Lagonda, has done a “ton” in a Mini Cooper, and believes that cars are for driving and not just looking at.

Born in Earls Court, London, he has a flat in Kensington, but lives in Bowden, Cheshire. “I came North eight years ago and I love it,” he said.

“After public school I worked as a film extra while waiting for a production side union card which I never got. I wanted to be a film editor. I knew that most of the creative work was there and assumed I would rise to director.”

Mike worked for Rank for a spell and joined Granada ITV in 1956, working up to programme director within a year.

He made his screen debut on Scene at 6.30 in 1963, and made a big impact in the recent series, A Slight White Paper on Love.

Of his new charge he says: “I have been eyeing Cinema for some time. Like the previous presenters, Bamber Gascoigne and Derek Granger, I shall write my own scripts.

“I am not interested in being just a front man. My taste in films? I love Gene Kelly musicals, suspense films of ‘The Wages of Fear’ calibre, and colourful epics in the ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ mould.

“The essential thing in Cinema is dramatic entity. It’s no use showing a clip which doesn’t resolve itself. If it ends before the climax of the scene it merely frustrates people.”

I asked Scott if he would like to see any radical changes in the modem cinema. “Yes,” he said. “I’d like to see more leg room for people like me.”

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FOR the four years Mr. Swindley puffed and huffed his imperious way around the intrigues of Coronation Street, the man who played him, actor Arthur Lowe, had a problem on his mind.

As far as he was concerned, publicity, interviews and public appearances were OUT. “I don’t want to be type-cast,” he said.

Now, with the Chaplinesque-like Swindley projected as the star of Pardon the Expression (Wednesdays) the risk of lifelong identification seems higher than ever. Why the change in attitude?

“When I was first asked to play Swindley,” said Lowe, “I hadn’t the faintest notion that the part would last for four years. We all thought that Coronation Street was a modest little cameo of Northern life which would run for seven weeks and then finish.”

Arthur Lowe left Coronation Street for a spell earlier this year, to appear in the stage version of John Osborne’s play, “Inadmissible Evidence.”

“When the invitation came to star in Pardon the Expression, I was faced with a terrible decision. It took me weeks to make my mind up,” he said.

Why did he plump for Swindley? “Because I like to think of him as a funny man with international possibilities.

“I’m hoping that he will appeal to a much broader audience than Coronation Street. If we do well enough we might crash the overseas TV market and go some way towards fulfilling my next ambition to become an international star. ”

Arthur Lowe is an agile man — mentally and physically. He has many of Swindley’s mannerisms. He beams broadly, then his furrowed brow will crease in thought as he weighs your questions.

“Having made my decision to stand by Swindley,” said Arthur, “I am now wholeheartedly in the part.”

One thing he has learned to do is leave Mr. Swindley at the studio door. “I never take him home with me. I’m very fond of Swindley but he’s just another character whom I happen to have played longer than the rest.”

The post Mr Swindley goes it alone appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

FOR at least 10 people out of the millions of regular viewers, All Our Yesterdays will become a heartbreak programme on Monday.

Ten more widows, mothers, sisters, brothers and friends will see their loved ones wave farewell and give the thumbs-up sign in one of those cheery newsreel films of 25 years ago. Laughing troops who were later to die in action.

Every week on average, 10 people write to the All Our Yesterdays office asking for pictures of their dear departed.

Brian Inglis and producer Bill Grundy are aware of the heartbreak this weekly peep into the past can bring. They have weighed the cost and decided that this is one of the penalties that must be paid for the privilege of telling the story of Britain’s part in the Second World War.

Bill Grundy told me: “People are always writing to say I got a terrible shock last night when I saw my husband. Please try to let me have a picture of him. After that newsreel shot he was never seen again.’

“And, of course, within reason, we try to satisfy these requests. We have to confine ourselves to outstanding cases. Widows who ask for photographs of their husbands naturally get priority.

“It calls for a weekly picture hunt and a bit of detective work. We have to identify the face, track down the exact frame from thousands of feet of film, and get the picture enlarged.”

As the programme bites deeper into the war, Bill and company are preparing for more photo requests.

Going through the All Our Yesterdays postbag, I found the letters strange as well as nostalgic. A Welshman living in Oxford wrote to say that the war years were the happiest of his life.

He asked for a newsreel picture of his friends singing in the N.A.A.F.I. He wrote: “I am an invalid who has been desperately unlucky in life as a child and as a postwar adult.”

One of the most moving newsreel sequences showed a British European Forces platoon tramping through the snow in France. All Our Yesterdays received a request for pictures of every man in the platoon.

Not one of them had survived. But not one had been forgotten.

An infantryman wrote for a picture of a French farmyard near Gorre. “While I was sheltering from an air-raid,” he wrote, “a jagged chunk of shrapnel ricochettcd off the cobblestones and killed the man next to me.

“He was a Roman Catholic padre from Birkenhead. I want the picture to send to his sister.”

Often, it’s an innocent, cheery looking newsreel shot that brings the memories flooding back. Former RAF Flight Lieutenant Harold Perry, of Thornber Grove, Blackpool, saw himself and his crew clamber out of a battered bomber at Villeneuve, France.

The film was shot in March, 1940, after a typically hair-raising war incident. Mr. Perry takes up the story: “I was a wireless operator in the Whitley Mark V bomber. We had been on a fact-finding mission over Warsaw and landed by mistake at Saarbrucken, 15 kilometres behind enemy lines.

“The bullets began to fly as we tried to take off again on a very short runway. Luckily a drainage trench had been dug across the fields, and when the old Whitley hit it, we literally bounced off the ground.

“The Germans threw everything at us, but we managed to get away by some very fine ‘grass-cutting’ 3ft. above the ground.

I wrote because I am the only survivor of the crew of Old Queenie. We got back safely, but the rest of the boys were killed or reported missing on subsequent missions.”

And so the letters go on. Behind almost every incident and every face in the crowd featured in those newsreel films of 25 years ago is another story to match it in courage or sadness.

The post Pictures from the past appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

BURT BACHARACH… the name is almost certain to mean nothing to you. Yet I’ll wager his works have been buzzing around in your brain for the last 10 years.

Bacharach is one of the most talented and prolific songwriters of our time. A few hawk-eyed pop pickers may have spotted the name in fine print on the label of their latest record.

But outside Tin Pan Alley, few recognise this 34-year-old New Yorker for what he is — one of the greatest one-man influences on popular music this century. He is hailed by international artists, musicians and composers as a trend-setting genius.

On Wednesday night at 9.40, Dionne Warwick — Burt writes all her numbers — heads a star-studded cast who pay tribute to America’s Mr. Pop in The Bacharach Sound.

Bacharach “winners” include “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “I Just Don’t Know What to do with Myself,” “Message to Martha,” “Tower of Strength,” “Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa,” and dozens more.

There to sing them with Dionne Warwick will be Dusty Springfield, Chuck Jackson, The Searchers and The Merseybeats.

Bacharach, who began to learn piano at 10 (“I hated it, I wanted to be a baseball player”) wrote his first hit number “Magic Moments” for Perry Como, in the mid fifties.

He wrote the “Story of My Life,” for Michael Holliday, and never looked back. Four years ago he teamed up with lyrics writer Hal David.

But it was not until early last year that the Bacharach Sound was born — a lush sound created with an exciting orchestral backing like 15 strings, a drummer plus two percussionists, and brassy French horns.

Immediately arrangers, composers and singers rushed to copy him. Artists such as Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black and Sandie Shaw have been deeply influenced by Bacharach.

From his luxury suite on the 18th floor of a New York apartment block, Bacharach told me: “If I have helped to make pop music a little better I couldn’t be more delighted.”

I asked him if he thought today’s pop was worth preserving. “No,” he said, “the average song is so very fragile — 2½ minutes long — it is exposed to saturation. I don’t think any of my numbers will survive the next three years.”

There’s a legend in the music business that Marlene Dietrich won’t work without Bacharach. “Not strictly true,” said Burt modestly. “But whenever I can, I fly to her anywhere in the world. We work well together.”

The post The genius behind pop appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

IT was a moment that few but the brave would have relished. I was face to face with that impregnable fortress of the law, Chief Inspector Rose, in his own den.

“Why,” I began boldly, “are you such a swine to your subordinates?”

Expecting something like the lash of a kid glove across my cheek, I stepped back a pace. I needn’t have bothered.

The Rose mirage faded quickly and I was left with the actor. Jolly, home loving, family man William Mervyn.

Only similarity between William and the iceberg-cool Rose he portrays so majestically in Friday’s new series of the twilight thriller, It’s Dark Outside, is his careful attention to dress.

“Don’t be too hard on Rose,” he said. “He’s really quite an amiable fellow when you get to know him.

“People are always telling me to take it easy on those poor old sergeants of mine, but Rose niggles with a purpose — to draw people out.

“You have to needle some folk to find out what they’re really like. With policemen, you’ve got to see if they can take it.

“Rose is a pompous old thing, but he’s not a fool. He’s impeccably honest and on top of his job. His verbal duels are really for sharpening the wits.”

Well, Rose may not be the ogre we suspected, but he’s parted company with Sgt. Swift.

In the new series we find him searching for a new assistant and he has earmarked Det. Sgt. James McKenzie Hunter, played by 29 year old Anthony Ainley, a newcomer to television.

Will he get his man? Well, he doesn’t get off to the best of starts, because Hunter, a sort of wild colonial boy from Kenya, detests Rose and his pomposity.

New female lead in the series is Veronica Strong, a bubbling, vivacious redhead, who plays Claire Martin, a 24-year-old fabric designer.

Claire is engaged to Sgt. Hunter, but has a weakness for lame dogs like Fred Blanc (played by John Stratton), a hard-drinking, wild-living newspaper reporter.

Veronica, who started in rep 10 years ago at the age of 16, sees Claire Martin as a very “with it” bachelor girl, rather like her own life, I gathered.

She comes from Brighton, has a flat in London, drives a mini, but would love a big Bentley. Veronica has a passion for classical music and spends most of her money on records and going to concerts.

The post Rose blooms when it’s dark outside! appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

CLANG! Yes. World in Action certainly rang the bell with Seven Up — that delightful keyhole glimpse of the men and women who’ll be running Britain in the year 2,000.

“Please,” pleaded thousands of viewers. “Please may we see it again?” And Granada is happy to oblige at 9.40 on Wednesday.

This 45-minute programme, which came out of the blue in May this year, had such a stunning impact that TV people have already come to recognise it as a classic.

Seven Up was derived from the fact that today’s seven-year-olds will be running the country at the turn of the century. And a famous quote that goes: “Give me a child of seven and I will give you the man “

The idea was put up by award-winning Canadian drama producer Paul Almond. And those journalistic “hard cases” who cover the world’s trouble spots for World in Action were unable to resist it.

The programme’s present executive producer Alex Valentine, told me: “Standards on World in Action are perpetually high, but now and again, a programme rings the bell. This was one of them.”

Almond interviewed dozens of seven-year-olds from all branches of society. A boy from Liverpool’s middle-class suburbs. A girl from the Surrey stockbroker belt. A boy from a children’s home. Two girls from London’s East End. A farmer’s son from the Yorkshire Dales.

Their views on life are not just sensational — they are of vital importance in taking the pulse of the next generation.

Their outlook is amazingly decisive for seven-year-olds. They speak frankly on love, leisure, marriage, education, money. The Beatles.

Like the young toff who had dabbled in stocks and shares but found the city page “frankly, quite boring ”

Other kids expounded, “I think The Beatles are mad.” “I have a girl friend but I don’t think very much of her.”

One seven-year-old wanted to be a jockey. Another a missionary.

The response from viewers was tremendous and immediate. A number rang the TV centre on the same night of the programme asking if they could adopt the little boy from the children’s home. “These calls were genuine and the people were very sincere,” said Alex Valentine.

A mammoth post arrived. Education authorities wanted to borrow the film to show in teacher-training colleges. A children’s hospital asked if they could show it to their student nurses.

If you missed this programme and your mouth is watering, you can judge for yourself on Wednesday.

The post Young World in Action appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

FOURTEEN stone of Memphis muscle stretched over a 6ft. 2in. frame is slumped lazily on the edge of a piano stool.

We’re in Granada’s vast Studio Six and Jerry Lee Lewis, at 29 an “old timer” from the rock ’n’ roll scene of the ’fifties, drives his audience to hysteria as he winds up the spectacular beat show Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On on Wednesday.

Suddenly the fans are unable to contain their emotion any longer. They cut loose from their seats and swarm on the platform, reaching out to touch their idol.

Three out of four cameras are useless now. Hemmed in by the crowd, Jerry, who has just given an extraordinary performance on the keyboard with his feet, seeks safety in the last place of refuge — on top of the piano.

Director Phil Casson’s lone camera just manages to hold out through the finale.

Afterwards I talked to Granada’s light entertainment chief, Johnny Hamp [sic – Johnnie], and asked him how a man who was at the top almost a decade ago is able to drive a new generation to hysteria.

Said Johnny: “Jerry has the gift of the real performer. Like the Judy Garlands and Frank Sinatras of show business, he knows everything there is to know about audience reactions and emotions.

“In his own field, Jerry Lee Lewis is just as great. He is capable of lifting his performance to that tremendous pitch where the fans are eating out of his hand.

“He’s typical of Tennessee, which today is America’s undisputed centre of popular music and has produced world names like Brenda Lee, Roy Orbison and the late Jim Reeves.”

As a successor to the Little Richard show, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On is one of the wildest musical spectaculars ever seen on television.

The build-up starts with the Animals. Then comes Gene Vincent, another pioneer of the rock ’n’ roll era, clad from head to toe in shiny black leather.

“There were 60,000 letters requesting a repeat of our Little Richard show,” said Johnny Hamp, “and I forecast an even bigger response to Gene and Jerry.

“As far as technique goes and knowing the business, they have no masters. Almost every modern beat group and singer have modelled themselves on performers like Vincent and Lewis.”

It was in 1957 that Jerry Lee Lewis sold a million copies each of two records called “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’” — a staggering sale in those days.

“Great Balls of Fire” sums up the story of Jerry’s career. He flashed on the scene like a thunderbolt, then disappeared just as rapidly when he incurred the rage of the British public for marrying his 14-year-old cousin Myra Gale Brown.

Artists of the Lee Lewis calibre, however, are seldom down for long. His prolific performance at the keyboard and at the microphone would move the soul of most music lovers.

He’s a music machine who can take on any juke box.

But then enthusiasm never was a weak point with Jerry. Rather the reverse.

Like the time he studied as a youth at the Bible Institute in Waxahatchie, Texas.

He was asked to play the organ and was sent down the same day for jazzing up “The Old Rugged Cross.”

The post Memphis magic that rocks the fans appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

LIKE a snow-covered volcano that has fumed impatiently for weeks below the surface, World in Action could shake everyone when it erupts for the third time on Tuesday.

The six-week break between the last series and the new was meant to be a holiday for its globe-trotting team of reporters and cameramen.

Instead, World in Action‘s sensitive fingers have been on the pulse of every major international story that has broken since the end of July.

Some holiday! When the Vietnam crisis broke in the evening papers, a World in Action team flew out to Indo-China at midnight the same night.

In the hair-raising fortnight that followed, producer Mike Hodges and cameraman Mike Boultbee were ambushed in the jungle while on a river patrol and almost blown to pieces in their hotel.

I met the two Mikes the day they arrived back in London, sunburned and travel weary from their trip half-way round the world.

Hodges told me of their march through Vietnam to the 17th Parallel with an American jungle patrol.

“We were trudging down a jungle track,” he told me. “when suddenly we were met by a hail of bullets — right from nowhere. All we could see was trees and greenery.”

“Our American friends fired back speedily while Mike Boultbee, risking life and limb — leapt in front of the soldiers to snatch the film we wanted.

“We didn’t give chase. There was no point when you consider it takes three days to cover a quarter-of-a-mile in jungle territory.

“On another trip into the interior with a river patrol boat, we were nearly blown out of the water by a mine.

“Lucky escape number three came when the cinema next door to our hotel was blown up by a home-made bomb. On all the occasions, both soldiers and civilians were lucky to escape death.

“The only time I felt safe was on a helicopter raid on Mekon Delta. At least we were in the air with the guerillas on the ground!

“Apart from that other occasion, I was expecting to be shot or blown to pieces at any moment. It was the most nerve-racking experience I have ever encountered.

“The Americans afforded us every protection, but if you stopped a bullet it was purely at your own risk.”

Next, I spoke to the programme’s executive producer, 40-year-old Alex Valentine, a rugged, good-humoured Scot of Italian extraction.

Alex graduated to the top of this go-anywhere, do-anything outfit after years in top-flight journalism.

“The programme thrives on a get-up-and-go technique,” he told me, “so this has been no holiday for any of us. The team was always on tap — never more than a telephone call away.

“Our lightweight camera gear — carefully weighed and packed — means that we can fly off to any spot on the globe at a moment’s notice.”

What will be in the new series? “It wouldn’t be fair to tell you precisely what our programmes will cover,” said Alex, “in case we disappoint you by throwing them out at the last minute.

“But I can tell you that World in Action cameras have whirled in Indo-China, Malaysia, New York, Chicago and Washington — all during the past four weeks.

“In Vietnam, we played a waiting game in case the situation flared up. We played it the same way in Cyprus and Zanzibar earlier this year and it paid off.

“Our team, which had been in Cyprus for four weeks, snatched some valuable material before they were kicked off the island by the authorities.

“This sort of situation calls for nerve and shrewd handling. Try bull-dozing your way in Cyprus and Vietnam and you’re likely to end up with a bullet in your back.”

I asked Alex for the ingredients of a typical World in Action programme.

He told me: “It should be topical — we did the Beaverbrook story in six hours flat. And it should tell, in an interesting way, a great number of things that are not known to the public.

“In particular, we set out to expose falsehoods and commonly-accepted assumptions that are not true.

“The golden rule on World in Action is to take nothing on trust and always try to find out for yourself.”

The same thing might be said of Alex himself. A favourite yarn spun in the team’s “local” in London’s Soho recalls his dynamic coverage of the Lakonia shipping disaster.

When the story broke, Alex was in Cyprus. He was immediately told to cover the Athens end of the Lakonia story.

Then came a cable urging him to interview the Captain of the rescue ship, the Montcalm, in the Adriatic just off Venice.

There is no recognised flight from Athens to Venice so, like a true newspaperman, he “jumped” a plane from Athens to Zurich; boarded another from Zurich to Rome; sped from Rome to Venice by car; then hired a tug to find the Montcalm.

He boarded the Montcalm, interviewed the Captain and got his report safely away, all within the space of 48 hours.

Spectacular progress, even by World in Action standards!

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