BACK IN HER TRACKS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 786, 13 August 1954, Page 30

BACK IN HER TRACKS

OY NICHOLS, the BBC star of Take It From Here, who went home to Australia a year ago in a pique, is back in London, contrite and "sorry for all the fuss." A year in Australia and the United States, with few shows and no fame, has given her time to grow up. She admits it herself. On a rare day of sun, not more than the tenth this summer-and how sunstarved New Zealanders revelled in it! -she arrived from the United States with her two-year-old daughter Roberta. Wearing a gay little hat which looked to the untutored male as if a flyingsaucer had come to rest under a tipsy question mark, she confessed that she had been "a silly girl." "There is a time to leave adolescence behind. I was childish in some of the things I did before I left London. I insulted people, made bad friends." The words came tumbling forth. Temperamental "Temperamental is the word. Jack Hylton-I had a row with him over a contract-called me a ‘malcontent’ once. We didn’t speak. In the ship coming back I met him. I stretched out my hand and asked to be friends again. We made it up, I have a list of people I want to apologise to.

"What caused this behaviour before I went? An Australian doctor said I was sick, depressed, working too hard. I’m cured now. I know myself better. I’m down to 8st. 6lb. from 10st. 2Ib. "When I look at Roberta, I see myself as I used to be. When she is tired, she frets and becomes bad tempered, and then she’s sorry. "You know, just being back in London steadies me up again. I should not have stayed away so long. Now for work-and one day a week free." Out of Show Within a few hours of her arrival, Joy Nichols was on TV in a new parlour game I?t’s a Mystery, in which the panel were offered three crime sketches and asked to name the criminal or discover how the crime was committed. *"Was I nervous," Joy commented later. However, she was only @ make-weight there, and still has to persuade the BBC, with the aid of her old scriptwriters, Frank Muir and Denis Norden, to give her another series on sound radio or TV. She is out of the new series of Take It From Here. "I don’t say I’would not like to work with Jimmy Edwards and Dick Bentley again, but . . . well, maybe something else will turn up." When Miss Nichols left the BBC, she wanted a rest, she sought new fields of

show business to conquer, and it was said she wanted a break for her husband, actor Wally Peterson. Now Mr. Peterson is "top of the class" in his studies of direction of production on American TV. He is coming to Britain soon, hoping for a career in commercial TV. Tommy Trinder Back, Too Also back is Tommy Trinder after more than two years in Australia and eincatiesints es

New Zealand. He went for six months, told the Australians "You lucky people," and found the going too good to resist. He’s now well bronzed, almost brazenly so in a country where so many people look as if they’ve just crawled out from under a stone. His many varieties of show business across the Tasman included selling saus-ages-on commercial radio, of course, A (continued on next page) i

sausage manufacturer paid him £2000 a week. Trinder wrote his own scripts: "These sausages have skins like nine out of ten Hollywoed film stars, skins you love to touch." In the old Tommy Trinder manner, he commented: "They hed never heard anything like that before. And in theatres when I talked about my favourite subject-Trinder-they had to turn the customers away. "The Duke of Edinburgh asked me if they understo6d me. Understood me! Why, when a couple of English people came to one of my shows, they didn’t get a word I said. Now I’m home, I’m going to learn the English language again." Tommy Trinder is about to start a countrywide English tour, his second in 15 years. By the way, has he been forgiven for his remark about New Zealand Rugby?

J. W.

GOODWIN

(London)