Word: queens
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Sellers, Spike Milligan and Michael Bentine, Secombe gave us our first taste of alternative comedy. In those ordered, respectable times, he created the enjoyable sense of participating in something rather daring and anarchic. Britain has a few people it calls "national treasures," to whom it gives uncritical affection. The Queen Mother is one of them; Harry Secombe was another...
...Checkpoint, a tin-roof shantytown next to the entrance to the former base, those young Catholic girls have had to grow up quickly. Melinda Basilan started working the strip stage at the Tahitian Queen when she was 16 years old. Now, she has two children. Stephanie is three, and her father is English. John Michael is two; his father is an American from Georgia. The Yank has promised to visit in May, but no one in the dirt alley is holding his breath. Checkpoint is filled with mothers waiting for fathers who never come back...
Which brings us to Sophie Rhys-Jones. The last few weeks have been no fairy tale for Queen Elizabeth's newest daughter-in-law. She had her own public relations business before she married Prince Edward in 1999 to become H.R.H. the Countess of Wessex. She seemed perfect for the post-Diana media fishbowl--a p.r. executive with stage presence, delighted to be part of the Firm instead of throwing acid on it. Then Sophie fell for the oldest trick in the tabloid book...
Harkin quit the firm and left the country. Sophie resigned her position for now. The truly serious revelation in the tapes was how keenly Sophie grasped that her title was a business magnet. The Queen gave her and Edward (whose career as a film producer has focused on royal subjects, which at first he had hoped to avoid) her "full support" in pursuing careers but also set up a review to make sure that "royal and business interests do not conflict...
...belong to Category One. I have not given more than 50 seconds of my life to thinking about the British royals, but I sided entirely with the queen and the duke when they hesitated to participate in the mawkish public outpourings that surrounded Diana's departure...