Remarkably he won their affection and respect as a flamenco guitarist, dancer, drinker and bon viveur, and was eventually accepted into a gypsy family, even giving away the bride at a huge gypsy wedding.On his retirement, Charles Fisher continued to travel, but now he explored the Far East and Pacific islands. But with the advent of the Second World War, Fisher volunteered and joined the Army Intelligence Corps. His place as co-writer on The Death of the King’s Canary was taken up by John Davenport and the book was eventually published in 1976, with an introduction by Fitzgibbon, who wrote warmly of Fisher’s early involvement.Fisher had married a Spanish singer some years older than himself but by the time of Dylan Thomas’s death in 1953, this marriage had broken up. But Fisher continued to write poetry and plays – his poems were published in the early issues of Kiedrych Rhys’s seminal literary magazine Wales alongside Dylan Thomas and other key Anglo-Welsh writers.Fisher and Thomas stayed in touch and they began to collaborate on a spoof murder mystery, The Death of the King’s Canary.

Dylan Thomas would describe these meetings at length in his 1947 radio broadcast Return Journey, writing “Charlie’s got whiskers now” and saying that he will become famous for “catching the poshest trout”.After their work on the local paper, they both moved up to London – Thomas to pursue his literary career and Fisher to continue his journalism, working for Reuters. All were talented artists in one field or another – the poet Vernon Watkins, the painter Alfred Janes and the musician and polymath Daniel Jones, together with other talented writers and musicians like John Prichard and Tom Warner. Fisher once described Thomas as “looking like an unmade bed”. But Fisher was the complete opposite, a well-groomed dandy, who, every Saturday, would don top-hat and tails and head for the local dinner-dance, where he cut a swathe through the Swansea girls.Fisher and Thomas were both part of a group of bright young men who have come to be known as the “Kardomah Boys”, after the Swansea caf?here they would meet up on an ad hoc basis. He loved the outdoors and country pursuits and was known to arrive at the urban newspaper offices dressed in riding breeches, having hitched his horse to a lamppost outside Even in 1930s Swansea this was eccentric behaviour. Fisher was by far the better journalist and wrote general news, music criticism and a well respected angling column under the by-line “Blue Dun”. He also claims that “Charles Fisher was more than just a journalist and was thought by many to show more promise as a writer than did Dylan”.
Born in Swansea in 1914, Charles Fisher was an almost exact contemporary of Dylan Thomas.

This staged clash of fundamentalisms now has an audience of billions The climax is likely to be grisly. European journalists have got the show fight they wanted, Flemming Rose, the culture editor of Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten, sought out controversial cartoonists to create caricatures of the Prophet Mohamed, not because they had something bold and compelling to say, but simply to enrage, like bullfighters goading a bull. Other newspapers have reprinted the cartoons in a supposed act of solidarity. What they have done, in fact, is belittle freedom of expression. How about, instead, a medley of national anthems, a catch of this, a snatch of that? It might work, especially if was played every morning at 5.30 on Radio 4.I’ve thought about the sporting angle, too And my principal suggestion is for a European cricket team. How that would unite us! Can you imagine Europe against India or Australia, with Spanish matadors of opening bats, guileful French spinners, fearsome German fast bowlers thundering in and Italians sledging? Marvellous.The delights and attractions of the Roman games are also said to have been a great unifying draw, so I’m now working on a pilot for European Heads of Government Strictly Come Dancing On Ice, in which the winner assumes the Presidency QED, DV, pax vobiscum.. As I’ve already noted, “Congratulations” was rejected in 1968, which is a great pity, but there is another catchy one with a pertinent sentiment, “All Kinds of Everything”, a winner in 1970 for Dana, who, you will remember, went on to become the MEP for Connacht-Ulster, although her attachment to “strict family values” ran a little counter to her anthem’s message.Perhaps not, then.

I still have to blow my nose vigorously every time I watch that scene in Casablanca when the band plays the Marseillaise, and my only connection with France is a liking for chips.”Ode to Joy”, the European anthem, isn’t the same, somehow. (For younger readers, a monastery is a little like a monosexual Big Brother House, but with better singing.)So the ideal candidate would seem to be a clever, portly and serious Belgian. Where is such a paragon to be found? While you tax your little grey cells, I shall consider some big unifying ideas and symbols A song is always good. And, like Charlemagne, was born in what is now Belgium, always most receptive to European ideals He, though, did like a joke. This is a crack of his: “To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse, German.” Which, in addition to being the forerunner of all those ones about hell being where the British are the chefs and everything’s run by the Italians, must now be a highly dangerous, if not illegal, thing to say on at least four counts, including animal rights.But if we’re deciding whether you need a sense of humour to run Europe, I should add that Charles V gave it all up and went to live in a monastery in Extremadura for the last years of his life, almost totally incommunicado. Still, I note that Charlemagne banned jesters at court, so he and the Home Secretary are also united by a taste for anti-joke legislation.

And, of course, they both share the same name, which, modestly almost forbids me to point out, has had a fair bit of success in ruling Europe: you might also recall the great Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.Who, as it happens, was another gout sufferer. He was also very keen on swimming, and, unusually or not at this level, could read but couldn’t write.Among contemporary politicians, I’m not sure who measures up to that, with the possible exception of, mutatis mutandis (vide supra), Charles Clarke, whom I’d not previously seen as the figurehead type, except, possibly, on a prow. How about the Emperor Charlemagne? What clues can this legendary figure provide? Well, he had a thick, short neck, a high voice, “a belly that protruded somewhat”, and he ended up with what sounds like gout, no doubt due to the red wine which stained his beard so much that his wife persuaded him to switch to white, thus giving birth to that excellent appellation, Corton-Charlemagne. Never underestimate the ability to buy obedience.”Nothing new there, then. And, when you’re looking for an inspiring figurehead, it’s easy to see the advantages of having an emperor who is also a god possessed of the power to end your life with the downward flick of a thumb and a high-pitched giggle. But I like a challenge.Before coming up with some big ideas, though, let’s look at how some other pan-Europeans have handled the problem.

And the first of my pan-handlers is an early mover and shaker whose thoughts have been interpreted by Wess Roberts in his management guide, Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun: “Harness your peoples’ desires for short-term gains … Even Tony Blair, in a speech last Thursday, has now conceded failure in his mission to provoke some genuine enthusiasm in the British for the idea of Europe. Boris Johnson, meanwhile, in a book and television series, is contrasting Rome’s methods of holding the place together with those of the EU, and has concluded, inter alia, as I believe the Romans used to put it, that what’s lacking is big unifying ideas and symbols, something to rally round, something uniquely European, something that will send pride surging into our European hearts as surely as our national football teams.
Or, indeed, someone. A definite entity, give or take a Ural or two, but difficult to pin down beyond that. Many have tried – one thinks of Napoleon and Hitler – but few have had any lasting degree of success, which is not altogether surprising when you consider that both Israel and Morocco have taken part in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Firms are slowly waking to the potential, but many believe that non-mainstream brands are being let down by the media agencies and their clients. They are accused of having failed lamentably to understand the complexities of Britain’s modern communities.The other major problem facing ethnic media is that the often crucial public-sector advertising, which was once placed in big volumes by government departments and local authorities anxious to be seen as equal opportunities employers, is becoming increasingly scarce.To overcome this, a new trade body will be launched at the House of Commons next Monday. Society has travelled a long way.
Britain’s ethnic minority media has a potential audience of 8 to 10 per cent of the population. After the high-profile pursuit of the pink pound and the grey pound, surely the race is on for the black or brown pound?The leading players behind some of the most successful ethnic media brands would say – if only it were that easy.

Today, black and Asian newspapers jostle for space on the newsstands. Bhangra and urban music stations ring out amid the babble of the digital airwaves, while African football results or the latest Bollywood news are just a remote control away. In 1951, a slim weekly digest of news and cricket results from the Caribbean’s oldest newspaper arrived in Britain. The Weekly Gleaner, targeted at the Windrush generation, brought with it a sunshine taste of home for the new arrivals shivering in the austerity and overt racism of post-war London. From these humble beginnings, the black and minority ethnic media were born. When Dave Morley and I decided to leave to start our production company, TV21, again Paul was completely supportive.

Some bosses would have been very possessive with their producers but Paul was the opposite, advising us in setting it up.I was only at Noel Gay for 15 months but it was an incredible experience and gave me the launch pad to later become a commissioning editor at Channel 4. If ever I’ve had any issues over programmes or my career, Paul has always found time. Everyone’s career goes up and down, and Paul has been there for me, on the end of a phone or willing to meet up. He has been in America for the last three years and every time I’ve been over there I’ve hooked up with him for another entertaining and gossipy lunch. Now he’s gone to ITV and that’s fantastic.Graham Smith is Controller of Comedy at Five and Paramount Comedy Channel.Paul Jackson is Director of Entertainment and Comedy at ITV.

“We are written about in the same breath [as Tatler], and it’s really important for us to distinguish ourselves. This is a subtle change, but I think still impactful enough.”The name Bazaar will instead be drip-fed to readers through the inside pages, with sections and supplements being re-christened as Bazaar Business, Bazaar Bags and Shoes, etc. The effect of all this, Yeomans says, is to drive home the message that the magazine is no longer a posh people’s journal.Despite all her efforts of the past two years, including axing Betty Kenward’s Jennifer’s Diary column in favour of a less snooty affair called Flash, penned by Stephanie Theobald, much of the media, and indeed the magazine-buying public, continues to regard Harpers & Queen as tailored for a privately educated elite. There has been a lot of speculation about whether we are going to go for a big Bazaar logo. That move brought derision from Vogue, whose editor, Alexandra Shulman, accused her rival of being embarrassingly “derivative” and “unoriginal”.Other than the name change, this latest redesign is also less than radical. For a start, whereas the US and other editions are known by the shorthand “Bazaar” and use that name in big type beneath a much smaller “Harper’s”, the UK edition will present itself the other way round, in order not to offend the sensibilities of existing readers, who tend refer to the magazine simply as “Harpers”.Yeomans says: “Our existing readers are so key to us and we have really done everything we can to make them feel as much part of this change as possible.

Circulation is up into six figures (from 85,000 when she took over) and next week’s six-monthly ABC will be the best Harpers & Queen ever managed. Advertising revenue is up 62 per cent year on year.So the radical step of changing the name of the magazine now is being taken from a position of strength.Harper’s underwent a more subtle makeover two years ago, a modest repositioning away from the Chelsea-set turf of Tatler and a raising of its game in the area of fashion coverage. “Although I think there are a lot of elements to the magazine that make us a different proposition.”Rumours of the name change have been bubbling for years, but the National Magazine Company has, until now, not been able to bring itself to take the plunge. This is partly a result of Yeomans’ success in the five years she has been editing the magazine.

The evidence so far suggests they do.In the first two weeks since the Parenting Video On Demand site was launched last month, it has been used 43,000 times. “The BBC2 pilot will embrace much more video content on its website, and more broadband presence. You will almost be able to touch and feel what is on the channel,” she says.
The hope is that the BBC2 trial will put the channel more in touch with its audience and “open out to people’s conversations”. The new series of trials hold out hope that BBC programmes and specially designed content will be increasingly available on demand on everything from mobile phones to DVDs and broadband platforms.

The experiments reflect the fact that more than 18 million people in the UK now have broadband connections and 700,000 new homes are signing up every month, according to the latest figures. The number of mobile phones now exceeds the size of the total population. The BBC will tomorrow announce its most dramatic experiment in providing online programming – a trial that could lead to all of BBC2 being provided on broadband. Jana Bennett, the BBC director of television who has commissioned the TV Plus trials, which are already providing online content covering comedy, drama and parenting programmes, promises that the new BBC2 site will be very beautiful.

The stock was heavily traded last week on the London options market, with a surge in demand for call options, indicating that traders are betting that either results will beat forecasts or that there will be a bid for the business. “TV Plus is trying to find out if audiences want this content, which might be available in more convenient forms, at more convenient times, on different forms of platforms and devices,” says the BBC television director. But they are weighty enough to exert a gravitational pull that prevents the stars in galaxies from flying apart.A paper on the research is in the final drafting stage and should appear in a scientific journal soon.It is not time for astrophysicists to relax quite yet, however. Once the question of dark matter is resolved, there is the question of the remaining 73 per cent of the cosmos – made up of something even more mysterious called dark energy, which is forcing galaxies apart at increasing speed.”It’s fair to say there is more work to do,” said Professor Gilmore..

But there were two further unexpected findings from the Cambridge research. The first showed that dark matter actually has a “temperature” higher than that of the surface of the Sun.If it was made of hydrogen atoms, dark matter would be 10,000C and appear as a blinding light. Yet, confusingly, it does not give off any heat.The second surprise was that particles of dark matter zip about at 9km per second and are loosely packed.They are transparent to light, and unlike most particles of ordinary matter, have no electric charge. “Which is that you only find this stuff in big, magical, rather dilute lumps, about 1,000 light years across, 40 million times the mass of the Sun.” However, he admitted: “We don’t know how to interpret this clue yet.”Dark matter does not give off any light, hence its name.

Sponsors distanced themselves.One such company was John Hancock, the New York financial services company; its chief executive publically tore the Olympic rings off his merchandise. This is aimed at preventing TV networks “warehousing” the rights.”We see our primary partners as television broadcasters,” says Lumme “They are becoming multi-media operators. They are best placed to ensure their viewers get the best coverage rather than us trying to guess what is best for the audience.”The corporate sector is also – perhaps surprisingly – showing a keen interest in associating itself with the games.The previous winter games in Salt Lake City were a nadir in the IOC’s long history, tainted by a money for votes corruption scandal. However, to promote broadband as a medium, there is a “use it or lose it” clause. Content such as the Olympics is easily streamed via broadband and mobile phone.

For the IOC, the dilemma is how to extract that extra money without jeopardising the exclusivity of broadcasters.Broadband rights are currently bundled into contracts bought by IOC television partners. Unfortunately, Europe is lagging behind in the evolution of this, and will miss the boat for the World Cup too. In the US, and in markets such as Japan and Korea, HDTV is a very important part of improving television coverage.”It is intriguing to hear the IOC’s commercial head talking so positively about new technology. It was only a short time ago that the IOC took a dim view of the internet as a medium. In Sydney, 2000, at the peak of the dot boom, the IOC prevented coverage of the games on the web.However, the entry of broadband into mainstream media, and impending convergence of broadband delivered television (IPTV) with digital TV, has led to a more enlightened view.This is in part because new media platforms offer a fresh revenue stream. Much of this increase in coverage in the UK is due to the BBC’s expansion into digital television. This means an increase in the corporation’s output, from 100 hours in Salt Lake in 2002 to 500 in Turin.

Few of the 84 sports on offer will fail to make it on to the screen in some form.”For us, these are the high definition games,” says Lumme, “the first time the whole of the Olympics will be broadcast in HDTV. “What the Olympics offers to a television partner is a huge live audience. For free-to-air networks their strength is that for events of national importance they still provide the only way a large proportion of the national audience can be aggregated”.He says beyond the rights fees paid, there is an increase in the hours given over to live coverage of the event by broadcasters. The revenue surge at IOC headquarters in Lucerne is due in no small part to broadcasters’ desire to protect advertising revenue by buying live content not vulnerable to “time shifting”.”There is a trend in increasing rights fees because of the premium on live events, whether that is the election of a Pope or the men’s downhill,” says Lumme. Europe’s free-to-air broadcasters, including the BBC, have agreed to pay $578m (£325m) for the rights to show the Turin Games and 2008 event in Beijing (in a deal brokered by the European Broadcast Union).The same group is to pay $750m for the 2010 and 2012 Games, Vancouver and London.

This would be 40 per cent up on the total for Beijing.The period of the new contracts corresponds with the age of the personal video recorder. Broadcasters also commit up to $150m worth of airtime to promotion of the Olympics through extra programming in the run-up. Jacques Rogge, president of the IOC, has predicted that revenues from broadcast rights for the 2012 London Olympics will top $3.5bn. When it comes to making money, where the IOC leads, others follow.By bundling the Winter Games with the summer version, the IOC has won huge fees from broadcasters. Over the next two weeks the Winter Olympics in Turin will create new heroes from sports as diverse as curling, biathlon and the luge.

And my mother had an 18-inch waist she liked to maintain, the maintenance of which did not pass me by. They made their mistakes, naturally enough, but I do not blame them for my concern about my weight My mother was the model of affection and encouragement. My father was conscientious about remembering to tell me I looked pretty, even though I never did quite believe him And still I have succumbed. I put it down to the culture in which I live.My rational side agrees with Rowling entirely. The children I have had, the novels I have managed to complete, the daily making of the school run on time, pale beside my dubious achievements in terms of weight Weight is so damn superficial and tedious and insignificant. Every reasonable person knows that, and yet it still plays a significant part in my inner life.Admitting it in public recently, I received a barrage of furious emails haranguing me to think about people in the Third World, which was to miss the point Others told me I should Get a Life, which was not just. I, like all “normal-abnormal” women who are neither obese nor anorexic, DO have a life.

And yet we still worry over-much about a few extra pounds which are not unhealthy and do not have any “extra” about them.I do not have any answers, except to say that pronouncements such as Rowling’s and Yukky Skinny features in magazines have to be a force for good. With any luck their drip, drip effect may begin to sink in with creatures like myself. I hope it might mean that some time soonish many more women will, like Rowling, be able to congratulate themselves for our maternal, spiritual and intellectual achievements instead of our purely bodily ones, and reach for the sticky toffee pudding in a spirit of pure pleasure, free of guilt. ‘Eating Myself’ by Candida Crewe is published this week by Bloomsbury. Ah, April: and life burgeons all around! Buds are unfurling.

Female frogs swell and turn the same pale yellow as Boris Johnson’s hair. I spent much of last week standing by the pond, cogitating on two things: why can I never see the exact moment when the spawn comes out? And what must it be like to have an affair with Boris Johnson? I still haven’t worked out the answer to the first question, but after much deep-browed thought, I’ve made progress with the second. The allure of Boris has been a hotly debated subject around these parts. “Is Boris an Errol Flynn de nos jours?” asked an email message.

The opportunity for any worker to migrate is an important and precious freedom. But the migration of health professionals is proving deadly for too many of Ghana’s citizens. In 2002, 72 new doctors graduated from Ghana’s two medical schools, but 68 have since emigrated. In most years about one in four newly trained midwives and nurses goes abroad. The aging populations of Britain, Germany, the US and other richer countries are the beneficiaries.Countries like Ghana need help to develop health systems that professionals want to build careers in.

But these changes will take longer than Africa can afford to wait. The right to health for millions of people cannot continue to be denied We need a constructive debate on what can be done today. One approach involves the training and use of para-professional health workers to fill gaps. These mid-level providers, less likely to migrate, have potential to deliver healthcare to those most in need, and least able to claim it.But investments made by African countries in educating and training their health personnel are benefiting health systems in richer nations. We have a responsibility for helping to create a virtuous cycle of co-development, which can improve health in the global North and South.Fortunately, that mind-shift is beginning to happen.

Codes of practice for recruitment, and plans for exchange of talent and training, are being put in place by countries like the UK and South Africa in recent agreements on the movement of health workers But more needs to be done. Africa has exported some of its most precious human resources. We must find ways to give something back, through increased training, technical help, equipment, and management expertise, such as the UK’s scheme to train nurses in Malawi to balance those who have left.We can encourage the aspirations of African health workers who have migrated to give back to their country. Diasporas are a vitalising force that is often overlooked.Health systems maintain the life of a country, and the people who work in them are its life blood. For too long the structural adjustment policies of the IMF and the World Bank, and the development approaches of donor countries have neglected the human resources that make health systems into public services. In the week of World Health Day, we should commit to doing more to support the hard-working people of Ghana, and their colleagues around the world who are struggling to make the right to health a reality. Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, is president of Realising Rights: the Ethical Globalisation Initiative.

(And yes, I do have a small car, but I try not to drive more than 3,000 miles a year.)The website of NHS Direct is frank about the connection between atmospheric pollution and ill health. One of the causes of bronchitis is breathing a polluted atmosphere; to be more specific, chemical irritants such as environmental or industrial pollutants damage cells in the lungs, as well as causing the glands in the air passages to produce too much mucus. The Government knows this, as do we, yet ministers continue to have an Augustinian attitude to a problem that might be summed up as “Make us green, Lord – but not yet.”Last week, responding to the latest grim report, all the Government could come up with was a weedy plan to make things a bit better by 2020 – that’s 14 years from now, for God’s sake, and the aim is only to increase average life expectancy by three months. Ben Bradshaw, the latest in a long line of environment ministers who have announced targets and initiatives since 1997, admitted that air pollution is not declining “as quickly as expected”, although I don’t know why he expected anything else.The Government has never been anything like tough enough about reducing harmful emissions. Like any political party operating under a democratic system, Labour knows that clean air is achievable only by all of us making radical changes in our lifestyles, and it fears the consequences at the ballot box of saying so. So we can carry on buying new cars, driving to out-of-town superstores, clogging up urban streets in SUVs, using patio heaters and flying to Prague and back for £14.99. Now let’s get on with something really important, like fretting over avian flu

More from Joan Smith.

Over the coming months we’ll be inundated with cheap paperbacks as former punks (now nearing their fifties) cash in on that brief moment when anarchy was in the air, safety-pins were in your nose, a swastika was stencilled on your forearm and gobbing the fashionable form of greeting. But when is the official anniversary of this brief spurt of musical hyperactivity, which ended at the end of 1977?

It seems to have started in New York, at a club called CBGB in the winter and spring of 1975. Punk magazine was launched the next year, promoting bands like the Ramones. But things really took off in the UK on Valentine’s day that year when the Sex Pistols played at Andrew Logan’s Valentine’s Ball. After about 10 minutes Johnny Rotten’s microphone broke, a fight broke out and it ended in a punch-up.
At the time I was presenting a TV series for young people on Sunday lunchtimes, The London Weekend Show. I met and “interviewed” the Clash, the Pistols, the Buzzcocks, Poly Styrene and Siouxsie and the Banshees long before they were signed by record companies. It takes a lot to scare me – spiders, rats, eels, nights in the jungle and solitary walking aren’t a problem.

Indeed Elizabeth Speller’s memoir is compelling in her candid examination of the fact that her allure was intensified in men’s eyes by periods of mental fragility.I first became keenly aware that madness in a woman might not be viewed as entirely undesirable when I was a student at Oxford in the late 1980s. The Gallic shag-fest Betty Blue was a seminal film for my generation. You soon came to understand that any male undergraduate with pretensions to the arts was looking for a sultry sack-artist who renounced such dreary qualities as reason, humour, kindliness and restraint, and might ultimately prove her lunatic credentials by gouging out a chunk of flesh. I suspected several female contemporaries of affecting their bruised demeanour and hurling of crockery to better enhance their bid to be a femme fatale. It was hard not to slap some lovelorn male friends with their Pavlovian refrains of, “I’d better go after her – I don’t know what she’ll do.” “Read Tatler in bed with a packet of Hobnobs until you turn up, you deluded sap,” I often thought.But there were plenty of other women who had no need to strain for effect; their less flamboyant aberrations weren’t so highly prized, however. Brilliant girls whose quest for academic excellence was undermined by a crippling lack of self-confidence, who rocked sobbing in lavatory cubicles at the Bodleian Library.

Females whose intellectual and social insecurities were sublimated to a pitched battle over food, while their wasting and bingeing took place behind closed doors. The most severely affected trudged back and forwards between tutorials and the Warneford psychiatric hospital, leaving little space for relationships. In any case, anorexia is often linked to the rejection of puberty and womanhood, while bulimia is frequently rooted in self-loathing. Neither is conducive to revealing your body to another person.I too binged and vomited throughout my student years, though I have to admit I wasn’t a very convincing bulimic and even gained weight. I lacked the discipline to ensure every last bit of food was purged.