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Happy 90th birthday June!

2015-11-11T11:30:00+00:00

A very happy birthday to actress June Whitfield, who turns 90 today. Here we celebrate her career to date with a brief and selective jog through the listings and some photographs from the archive.

The star of stage, screen and the airwaves has been in showbusiness for seven decades, which means her Genome presence is very impressive. It starts with an uncredited role in TV programme The Passing Show, a 1951 look at 50 years of showbusiness.

June's first celebrated regular role was in sketch show The Glums, part of radio programme Take it From Here (above) which ran during the 1950s, carving out a penchant for comedy acting which can be traced down the decades.

This included a fruitful association with Tony Hancock, famously playing the nurse in The Blood Donor which was aired several times on the ��.

June played alongside Sid James in 1960s radio sitcom It's A Deal

June also made an appearance in Galton and Simpson's creation Steptoe and Son (above), playing a brassy gold digger chasing an unexpected windfall.

As colour television superceded black and white, June's career continued to develop, with a lead role in long-running two-hander Terry and June (below) which was renowned for its gentle humour based largely around her screen husband Terry Scott's haplessness. The pair also worked together on the show's predecessor, Happy Ever After.

With the march of time, June has become renowned for her 'senior' roles, with the most celebrated as Mother in Absolutely Fabulous, which first came to our screens in 1992. On the surface, her character seems to be an eccentric, batty nuisance to her daughter Edina, but comes out with some of the most withering put-downs. The actress is cast in the film version of the long-running comedy, due to be released next year.

As well as a stint in evergreen sitcom Last of the Summer Wine, one of June's most recent cameos was as a nun in EastEnders, who knows one of Kat Moon's darkest secrets. She is due to reprise her role as the Moons return to Albert Square.

Happy 90th birthday to June Whitfield. Are there any of her other roles that stick in your memory? Please share them with us in the space at the bottom of this post.

Mother brings a dose of eccentric charm and wisdom to Ab Fab

Evergreen fun in Last of the Summer Wine

June as a secret-sharing nun in EastEnders

Happy birthday Genome!

2015-10-16T09:00:00+00:00

Today marks the first anniversary since the public launch of �� Genome, the site that brings you the �� TV and radio listings printed from 1923-2009.

To date more than 107,000 corrections from our public community of editors have been accepted, while more than 9,000 links to playable programmes are now available.

The site has been visited almost 725,000 times in the past year and has amassed more than 6m page views. Visitors tend to hang around, leafing through some 8-10 pages when they land on Genome.

To mark this occasion, we decided to go back to 1924, when The Radio Times was celebrating its own first birthday.

The ��’s then Managing Director, John Reith, who went on to become the corporation’s first director-general in 1927, wrote a front page article for the magazine in which he spoke of the "problems, hopes and fears" that came with launching a publication.

But he continued: "The first issues were sold out.. today - on its first anniversary - it is phenomenal". Two years after the �� first started broadcasting, he put circulation at 600,000 copies.

"This journal of ours is, we consider, of the very greatest importance to the success of British broadcasting," said Reith, “It should be the connecting link between the broadcaster and the great listening public.

"If the broadcast service is to attain the maximum efficiency and the listener to reap the greatest benefit, it can only be secured through a considerable degree of intimacy and understanding between the two parties concerned in the undertaking.”

You can download a PDF version of Reith's birthday article by clicking on this link.

These days we have other ways of trying to secure this two-way communication, we call it interactivity and we think it’s a very modern idea (!), Radio Times of course continues in rude health, though no longer owned by the ��, but 91 years on from Reith’s words, the value of having a catalogue of the ��’s planned output shows what a very good idea it was.

As for �� Genome, it's still very a much a work in progress, with a lot of editing still needed to whip the listings into shape from the original scanning process. We also hope to include regional and national variations, as well as a record of when the actual broadcast varied from the schedule. We’ll keep you posted on our progress.

As Reith observed, “the personalities of the owners of aerials and the broadcasters are transient, but the ideas and the achievements remain.”

Thank you for all your support in the first year - long may it continue!

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Happy 90th birthday June!

Happy birthday Genome!

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