Brekkie Crumbs (Notes from the NewsRadio Breakfast team) for Tuesday November 17th
Mark - Breakfast E.P. : …
Vale Edward Woodward.
The iconic British stage, screen and film actor died overnight in hospital.
He was 79.
When I was a kid, my parents were great fans of the spy show “Callan”, where Woodward first cut his teeth in television.
When those titles with the twangy guitar and the swinging light bulb that gets shot out came on Aunty, I knew it was bedtime.
Not only because it was 9:30pm , but because you were unlikely to get another sensible word out of the parentals.
Why?
They’d be riveted by Edward Woodward’s performance.
“Mmmmmmmmmm….yes dear”, was about the extent of the answer to any question, eyes never moving from the screen.
I finally found out what I was missing when I was 13, when my aunt dragged my parents and me along to see a new Australian movie about some bloke in the army who was good with horses….and got court-martialled and shot for his trouble. Boring!
In fact, it was exactly the opposite.
I knew straight away I was watching a work of greatness….and a performance by a master.
I couldn’t take my eyes of “The Breaker”.
It was clear straight away Woodward’s mere presence on the set had lifted Bryan Brown and Jack Thompson to a new level.
On NewsRadio Breakfast today, we played some of Jack Thompson speaking about Edward Woodward and “Breaker Morant”:
“We had a sense of the strength of it. It was certainly an extraordinarily ensemble and we understood that it would always be a very good film. We had no idea of the stature of the film, really. I didn’t think any of us did, really.”
Have a look at this clip:
Amazing.
Edward Woodward - R.I.P.
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Debbie - Sport:
The old cliche “first in, best dressed” doesn’t appear to apply in cricket these days. Seems the fixture that arrived last on the international scene could end up being the one with the best outfits.
The Indian Premier League might stand to gain the most if Brett Lee finds his body can’t take the rigors of Test cricket anymore. Lee is apparently weighing up his options after finding the elbow injury that forced his early return from the recent one-day series in India has flared up again. He’s told Channel Seven this morning that he’s going to look at alternatives to surgery but, with or without the knife, it seems highly unlikely he’ll be able to get back into the test team during the coming series against the West Indies.
Even if he gets himself fit in time for the test series against New Zealand in March, he’d be battling to earn selection. And he’d have to choose anyway between the Test series and the mega-bucks on offer in the Indian Premier League, which is on at the same time.
It would make sense for him to go the Andrew Flintoff route and take the easier-on-the-body, more-beneficial-to-the-bank-account route of focusing on the shorter forms of the game. Lee is particularly in demand in India where he’s also a recording star, having had a single reach number two on the charts.
If the cricket authorities don’t somehow rationalise the current calendar for Test and one day matches, they’re going to put more and more stress on the bodies of their established stars. And that’s going to herd them more towards the less physically demanding Twenty20 format. Remember when the argument against the IPL was that it was going to overload the playing schedule? Well, now that overloading is taking effect, the IPL stands to gain. What came first, the chicken or the golden egg?
