Michael J Bird Tribute Website


News from the Michael J Bird Website
406 subscribers

August 2019

Read the Biography of Michael J Bird
(follow link for details)
WEBSITE DOWN

I took advantage of the temporary 'disappearance' of the website recently, following an upgrade by the site host, to give it a complete overhaul, fixing broken links and generally tidying things up. And to put together this long overdue newsletter!!

CRETE LOCATIONS

Here I was thinking that we had gone as far as we could tracking down and sharing the locations for Bird's series Who Pays the Ferryman? and The Lotus Eaters (all due credit to Anna Pereboom). Then I got an email from website visitor Simon Wray who said he had "just come back from a week based in Elounda and with help from Lynne McDonald at the bookshop, visited some of the locations."

Simon went on to suggest that I add the map reference to some of the sites as the latitude and longitude can be used in sat. navs. He also gave me the 'Google Maps' reference. From that it occurred to me we might also be able to tap in to Google Streetview - and it worked - so on the Ferryman locations page there is now a link that will take you on a visit to Annika's House without leaving home!

Simon also identified the Panaglia Kera church as the church featured in The Lotus Eaters for Ann Shepherd's dazed wanderings after killing Donald Culley. Simon provided some photos and, once again courtesy of streetview, you can enjoy a virtual visit. Isn't technology fun!

MICHAEL BIRD'S SCRAPBOOK

The Bird family were having a clear out last year and Michael (Junior) kindly sent me some artefacts - the writer's caption card from the Mr Rose episode 'The Unluck Dip', the partially completed tapestry "Burning for Burning ... Wound for Wound" and an autioneers' poster from The Outsider, and his father's old scrapbook in which Bird had amassed curttings from much of his early writing career.

I have added photographs of the artefacts to the relevants sections on the website.

The scrapbook contains dozens of cuttings, mainly from the late 1950s, from 'Titbits' - salciously illustrated accounts of war time heroines in France and Cyprus and features about competition winners on a 'day to remember' with radio stars. There is a piece about the TV series Dragnet Bird wrote for 'TV Times' in 1958, which I have added to a renamed 'Early Writing' (formerly 'Books') page. He also collected press reviews of some of his early TV contributions (e.g. Brett) which I propose to scan and add to the relevant pages.

MAELSTROM

Website visitor Menna Trinder-Widdess is a great fan of Michael Bird's Maelstrom series. She and her cousin have been making (incredibly good) copies of the paintings featured in the series and collecting replicas of the spooky dolls. It has been real labour of love. In the course of her research Menna has found stuff I didn't have on the MJB website - e.g. I discovered you can buy an MP3 of the Maelstrom theme from Amazon. She has also unearthed this short fan video on YouTube which was done by a fan in Norway and includes lots of production shots and plans of the sets with autographs of the cast and crew collected in the early 1990s. I have added a link to the Maelstrom production page.

In August this year Menna holidayed Alesund and met up with Bente Saxon. She is going to share photos and impressions of the visit which I will then showcase on the website with pictures of the stuff she has collected together so far.

* * *

While on the subject of Maelstrom I was amused recently when I stumbled across this Twitter feed promoting a book "Scarred for Life!" and including a thread about the series and, in particular, the opening credits.


Michael J Bird Tribute Website

This page was last modified: