'THE NIGHT THEY TERRIFIED THE WHOLE COUNTRY' : BBC ORWELL'S 1984 INTERVIEWS

FROM 1960, Peter Cushing, Yvonne Mitchell, writer Nigel Kneale and director Rudolph Cartier reflect on the huge reaction to the live broadcast of the BBC Sunday Night Drama, '1984' aired 12th December 1954. For any television broadcast to prompt any reaction from the government at this time, was indeed quite rare. But watching Peter, Yvonne Mitchell and Morell here, gives a pretty good idea of THEIR fears too... To an extent it changed drama on the BBC and put Cushing into a another area of work all together, for many years to come... It's a short feature and certainly worth watching... 

PETER CUSHING: THE TUESDAY TOUGHY AND COCA COLA TARKIN!

#TOOCOOLTUESDAY! IT'S TUESDAY, and as well as cool, we have TOUGH! The TUESDAY TOUGIE! You'll find this week's question, interesting. The fact in the answer, I don't think is THAT well known. Unless of course..YOU know it! BELOW you'll find the ANSWER for last week. Which, is a pretty cool one. NO ONE provided the correct answer for THAT ONE!  Send your answer to our usual

PCAS email  address : petercushingpcas@gmail.com

LAST WEEK'S TUESDAY TOUGHIE ANSWER
IS BELOW!

THE ANSWER WE WERE LOOKING FOR, WAS THE NAME REGINALD BECK! If that surname looks familiar to you, here is why! Reginald (Reggie) Beck was a British film editor with forty-nine credits from 1932 to 1985. He is noted primarily for films he made with Laurence Olivier in the 1940s and with Joseph Losey in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the brother of Violet Helen Beck Cushing, wife of . . . Peter Cushing. Beck worked closely with Olivier on HAMLET in which Peter played OSRIC. It was Cushing's first major screen role in 1948. 

#TOOCOOLTUESDAY! CUSHING'S TARKIN and DARTH VADER, Coca Cola Posters!  In 1977, George Lucas recognized the value of merchandising his new movie, and he approached many companies about doing special advertising tie-in posters. He made four deals for the exact same posters with Coca-Cola! There was a set of 4 posters and one of the four deals was distributed through Burger Kings, and at the bottom of each, it said "A poster series from The Coca-Cola Company and Burger King", and each had "Number One of Four", etc. The second deal was through another burger chain, now defunct, Burger Chef, and at the bottom of each, it said "A poster series from The Coca-Cola Company and Burger Chef Systems Inc." The third set was distributed in Japan only, and at the bottom of each of those, it said "A poster series from The Coca-Cola Company (Japan)". The fourth set was distributed in the U.S. by Coca-Cola, it said "An original poster series from The Coca-Cola Company".

REMEMBER! IF YOU LIKE what you see here at our website, you'll  love our daily themed posts at our PCAS FACEBOOK FAN PAGE.  Just click that blue LINK and click LIKE when you get there, and help us . . Keep The Memory Alive!. The Peter Cushing Appreciation Society website, facebook fan page and youtube channel are managed, edited and written by Marcus Brooks, PCAS coordinator since 1979. PCAS is based in the UK and USA

CHRISTOPHER LEE SATURDAY: GET YOUR TICKET FOR TOMORROWS TRAIN AND YVONNE MITCHELL REMEMBERED

#CHRISTOPHERLEESATURDAY! THIS WEEKEND much of our time is more than taken making a short journey through the film 'HORROR EXPRESS' from 1972. It was film that both Christopher Lee and Cushing enjoyed making. Even though, as you will read above, Cushing was still much effected by the terrible loss of his wife, Helen, Lee managed to have Peter focus on the production at hand. The result is a film that was appreciated back then on it's release, and even today. Recent DVD and BLU RAY releases have sold well, and gained even more appreciation. The two roles that Lee and Cushing play, come over well. A change from their usual roles of one destroying the other, here we have interesting characters who are in competition, but have to pull together to destroy someone else and all their supporters!

BELOW: THIS SUNDAY sees CALLUM MCKELVIE's weekly feature focus on, HORROR EXPRESS TOO. A personal spin on his first memory of watching the feature plus we'll be uploading the ENTIRE film from our PCAS YOUTUBE CHANNEL, with many images and supporting images through out the feature. JOIN US TOMORROW! We will also be posting the FOUR WINNERS of our CINEFICCION  MAGAZINE prizes!

BRITISH ACTRESS YVONNE MITCHELL  was first and foremost a stage actress who began her career quite early as a teen. By the time of her death, she had performed under the theatre lights for over four decades. Her output in films and TV paled in comparison, but the work she put out in those mediums were of unusually high quality with mature themes. The dark-haired actress made her film debut in a key role in The Queen of Spades (1949) and proceeded to become a moving, thoughtful, often anguished presence throughout the 1950s, winning the British Film Award for her touching, sterling performance as the biological mother of a foster child in The Divided Heart (1954). A year before that, she appeared with PETER CUSHING in the BBC production of '1984' as Julia. The broadcast gained much publicity for both her and Cushing, stirring the public in it's two live performances.

THE PUBLIC WERE so upset by Orwell's story and the BBC almost uncensored production that a debate in the government  House of Commons, after the first LIVE show and the planned second live broadcast, debated if the broadcast should go ahead at all. It did. It certainly didn't mar her career, but for Cushing it set the motion of his career forever becoming tilted towards the Horror and Fantasy genre, on both the big screen and tv. Yvonne's  slovenly, cuckolded wife in Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957) won her the Berlin International Film Festival Award. Other important films included Escapade (1955), Sapphire (1959), The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) and Johnny Nobody (1961). On the sly, Yvonne was a novelist of both children and adult books and an award-winning playwright. She also penned an enormously successful biography entitled "Colette--A Taste for Life" based on the famed French writer. The wife of film and stage critic Derek Monsey, she wrote her biography in 1957.

YVONNE MITCHELL, changed her name legally in 1946 from Yvonne Frances Joseph to Yvonne Mitchell (Mitchell was her mother's maiden name). She also deducted a decade from her age, which is why many sources have listed 1925 as her birth year. She married author and critic Derek Monsey in 1952, the couple would later divorce, only to be reconciled. They would remarry in late 1978, just months before Monsey died of a heart attack on 13 February 1979, with Mitchell dying of cancer just over a month later.