Journalist, writer, editor, and media consultant with dual UK/US nationality. A British northerner who lives in, and loves London.
London, England
Joined March 2007
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What we didn’t know about wonderful Patrick Stewart
In 1952, an English teacher named Cecil Dormand secretly paid for a dirt-poor 11-year-old to take a drama course.
He never told him and the boy didn’t find out until decades later.
By then, he was a knight, that little boy’s name was Patrick Stewart.
He was born into a poor family in Mirfield, a small mill town in Yorkshire and his father came home from World War II a violent man, and he was violent toward Patrick’s mother.
Young Patrick learned exactly when to step between his father’s fist and his mother.
An English teacher put a copy of Shakespeare in his hand and told him to get up and perform.
He never stopped and left school at 15.
By 19 he was completely bald... most agencies told him he'd never make it because of that.
In 1987, the LA Times called him an “unknown British Shakespearean actor” when he was cast as Captain Picard.
Then he became one of the most famous faces on Earth.
You’ve probably heard that part.
Here’s the part you haven’t:
He spent decades as a patron of Refuge, sheltering women and children from domestic violence.
But he never stopped trying to understand his father.
He dug up a 1940 newspaper clipping that said his dad had come home with severe shell shock.
He went to France and walked the ground where his father’s unit was pinned down under bombing for hours.
He learned his father had PTSD, and nobody ever helped him.
So Patrick became an ambassador for Combat Stress, a charity that helps veterans.
In 2013, a young woman at a Texas convention told him she was a survivor of domestic violence.
He asked, “My dear, are you okay?”
Then he hopped off the stage, held her, and told her: “You never have to go through that again, you’re safe now.”
At Dragon Con, a Make-A-Wish girl dressed as Spock came to meet him.
2,000 people were waiting for him to speak... he sat down and talked with her for 15 minutes, making all of them wait.
He told her that since they were friends now, whenever she saw him on screen she could wave and say, “Hello Patrick.”
After 9/11, he felt helpless, so he brought his one-man A Christmas Carol back to Broadway for a full week of charity shows.
He played every character himself and donated every cent.
In 2019 he did it again, and every dollar went to feeding hungry New Yorkers.
In 2017, he fostered a pit bull named Ginger, who had been rescued from a dogfighting ring.
She was his first dog in more than 50 years.
He couldn’t bring her home to England, so he found her a family.
Then he kept fostering more.
When he said he was done with Star Trek so many people told him the show had gotten them through the hardest times of their lives.
So he wanted to see if Picard could do it one more time.
Rest in Peace, Sir Patrick 🖖
Lynne Bateson retweeted
Patrick Stewart, ‘Star Trek’ captain and ‘X-Men’ superhero, had died at 86.
Stewart died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles, a rep announced.
hollywoodreporter.com/movies…
Lynne Bateson retweeted
One of the best things about Babylon 5 was letting Walter Koenig play against the type we all knew him for and really show off some range. Treat yourself and watch some Babylon 5 and see Koenig play an absolutely terrifying and delightful freak.
Lynne Bateson retweeted
JAYNE MANSFIELD had an IQ of 163, spoke 5 languages, and was a more than proficient Violinist, as evidenced here playing Vivaldi's Concerto No. 6 in A minor on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1957.
Lynne Bateson retweeted
In the shelter of the Hundred Acre Wood they stood up straight again, to listen, a little nervously, to the roaring of the gale among the tree-tops.
“Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?”
“Supposing it didn’t,” said Pooh after careful thought. ~A.A.Milne
Lynne Bateson retweeted
This was just posted over on Facebook by @GeorgeTakei . #AdAstra Walter - and Pavel 🖖
My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today. Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man. Just last month, on Sept. 14, he turned 90, on the same day Brad and I celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary. I will always treasure that he and I shared that date.
Walter was more than Chekov. He was a writer, a teacher, a thoughtful man, and a loyal friend. To the fans who loved him for so many years, thank you. He loved you too. Rest well, my dear friend. Keep navigating a steady course.
– George
Lynne Bateson retweeted
Rest in Peace Walter Koenig. Thank you for navigating us through the final frontier, and bringing us such joy through your years of activism, writing, and memorable characters like the joyous Chekov and the sinister Bester. We're forever grateful that you lent your talents to our game. We'll see you again, in the stars.
Lynne Bateson retweeted
This is such a well conducted, sensitive and caring interview. Brilliant.
Very special conversation with a very special human.
Our interview with @DeliaOnline - Episode 2 of The Amol Rajan Connection - is out now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music.
Thanks for your time.
🙏🏾
Lynne Bateson retweeted
Google Cloud outage hits websites and apps as some bank customers report issues - follow live bbc.in/3UbY0K2
Lynne Bateson retweeted
BREAKING: Multiple online services are down or 'experiencing issues.'
Google Cloud has reported "issues" in its western Europe region affecting dozens of websites, including; Revolut, Royal Mail and HSBC.
Latest updates ➡️ trib.al/M16q5UZ
📺 Sky 501
Lynne Bateson retweeted
Pls share the below. Its one of those rules that may not get coverage as its technical, but needs to. I'm about to go on Good Morning Britain to discuss
Important News: @Ofgem’s just launched a ‘consultation’ about switching on the Market Stabilisation Charge as soon as November. It doesn’t sound a big deal, but it could be, it ain’t good for consumers and I don't want it to slip under the radar.
In a nutshell, it means if wholesale energy prices drop sharply, the cheap fixes and switcher’s deals offered will be a lot more expensive, in order to protect energy firms’ profits.
That’s because any firm taking on a new customer, including on a cheap fix or other specialist tariff, will have to pay compensation to that customer’s old supplier, if they switch. It's basically a form of switching penalty.
While technically this is a consultation, it’s one of those where Ofgem has made up its mind, but is required to consult - it will almost certainly happen. Below is my ‘first look’ explainer on this...
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How it works (simplified to make it easy to understand):
Ofgem decided to put this power back into suppliers’ licences in May, so it could switch it on quickly if needed, and now it is trying to do just that.
It means if wholesale prices drop more than 10% below the level built into the Price Cap (and remember the January Price Cap is currently predicted to be 25% higher than now), and someone switches supplier from that or any tariff, the new firm must pay the old one 85% of the drop in wholesale rates beyond that 10%.
So very roughly, say the wholesale energy in the Price Cap costs £1,000 (a made-up number, to keep it simple. This is about proportions, not exact amounts):
- If prices drop to £900, there’s no Market Stabilisation Charge.\
- If prices drop to £800, you get the first £100 drop, but 85% of the next £100 (£85) goes to your old supplier.
So almost certainly the new firm will make you pay the difference, meaning the tariff will be up to £85 more than it would otherwise have been (other factors could affect the amount, but this is a rough illustration)
In other words, the new supplier can’t pass a chunk of the saving from lower wholesale rates on to you, because it has to hand much of it to your old supplier.
Why Ofgem says it’s doing this
Its argument is that the Price Cap requires suppliers buy energy in advance. If wholesale rates fall sharply and people leave in large numbers, those suppliers would be left out of pocket, and it doesn’t want suppliers who did the right thing by buying energy in advance to be penalised.
My View
I don’t like it. This is a ‘Market Stabilisation Charge’ but the supplier market is pretty stable, and I doubt we are at the domino risk of suppliers going bust in the way they did in the early twenties. A good few energy firms have made large profits since then, and protecting them over winter by effectively dampening competition because it’s ‘not their fault’ feels raw.
After all we don’t take their profits off them when they make them ‘through no fault’. Until now, my hope had been that at some point the Middle East situation would de-escalate, wholesale rates would drop. While it would take months for that to feed into the Price Cap, other cheaper tariffs would be available to switch to. That would still happen, but the savings could be no-where near as good as otherwise.
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As noted, these are my provisional thoughts and this has only just come out. I will need to do more looking/thinking.
Lynne Bateson retweeted
Here’s to humankind at its best, when we are both human and kind.
Here’s to compassion that knows no boundaries, to grace extended to all living things, especially the vulnerable and those in need.
Here’s to those who go out of their way, who see suffering and refuse to look away, who see a creature in distress and choose to act.
May we see more of this.
May we be more like this.
Op: @sassymediatv
Lynne Bateson retweeted
Lovely Matt Hood from @SpotlightUK sent me this: my mother's first entry from the actors' directory, from July 1953. Her home address listed as well as her first agent
Lynne Bateson retweeted
You know Gustav Klimt for the gold, but this is what he painted when no one was paying him...
It's Birch Forest from 1903: slender white trunks rise like columns out of a forest floor burning with autumn color, rust and orange and brown, with little flecks of blue scattered through it, maybe sky caught in puddles after the rain. Get close and the whole thing breaks apart into tens of thousands of tiny brushstrokes, laid side by side like the tiles of a mosaic.
Klimt painted it during his summers at the Attersee, a lake in the Austrian countryside, where he went every year with Emilie Flöge and her family to escape Vienna and the endless portrait commissions that had made him famous.
He would hold a square of cardboard with a hole cut in the middle up to the landscape, like a camera, until he found the view he wanted, which is why so many of his landscapes are perfectly square. Those summers were so productive that landscapes ended up making up a quarter of all the paintings he ever finished.
And this one has its own story: it belonged to the family of Adele Bloch-Bauer, and hung in the same Vienna home as her golden portrait, the Woman in Gold which I wrote about in one of my recent articles. In 2006, it was one of five Klimt paintings restituted to Adele’s niece after a long legal battle over works that had been seized by the Nazis in 1938.
The gold is what made Klimt a legend, but the forests are where you get to meet the man...
Lynne Bateson retweeted
That moonlight isn't real.
Every drop of it is oil paint...
It's called A Moonlit Lane, and it was painted by John Atkinson Grimshaw in 1874. A full moon hangs behind bare, tangled branches, the road below still wet from the rain, and every puddle and wall and dark hedge holds a little of that cold silver light. You can almost feel the chill in the air and hear the silence of the street...
The man who painted it was born in a cramped terraced house in Leeds, worked as a clerk for the railway, and taught himself almost everything he knew. At twenty-four, to his parents' horror, he quit his job to paint.
He even borrowed from photography, projecting scenes onto his canvas with lenses, and some of his contemporaries sneered that the results showed no marks of handling or brushwork, as if that were a flaw rather than an artistic miracle...
But the painter who mattered most saw it differently: James McNeill Whistler, the man famous for his own night paintings, came to visit him and admitted: "I considered myself the inventor of nocturnes until I saw Grimmy's moonlit pictures."
