One of my favorite characters in one of my favorite british sitcoms:


www.generationq.net/articles...0001.html

Actor John Inman, most famous for the comedy Are You Being Served?, has died in London aged 71, his spokesman said.
Inman made his name in the 1970s show as Mr Humphries, whose catchphrase "I'm free!" entered popular culture.


In recent years he was a pantomime regular, most often taking the role of the dame. He also made appearances in BBC comedy show Revolver in 2004.


His former co-star Wendy Richard said he was "the funniest and most inventive actor" she had ever worked with.


The Preston-born actor had been suffering from a hepatitis A infection.


The infection, usually caused by eating contaminated food, forced him to cancel the opening of a pantomime in London in December 2004.


"He will always be remembered for making us laugh," said Richard.


"He will be greatly missed not just by his friends, who loved him dearly, but also by his legion of fans on both sides of the Atlantic," she added.

The former EastEnders actress visited him on Tuesday and said she had found it "upsetting" to see him look so

Nicholas Smith, who played store manager Mr Rumbold in Are You Being Served? said: "I always had tremendous admiration for him. He had a wonderful precision of movement and his comedy timing was impeccable."


Another co-star, Trevor Bannister, who played Mr Lucas in the series, told BBC News 24: "The 'I'm free!' was something put in because that is what people in those stores really said.


"We didn't realise it would become a running catchphrase."


Veteran actress and co-star Mollie Sugden, who played Mrs Slocombe, told the BBC: "It's a very sad day. As far as I'm concerned, it's the end of an era."


The BBC's head of comedy, Jon Plowman, said: "He was one of our great comedy actors who was responsible for one of the best loved TV sitcom characters of the last 40 years."


Inman devoted a lot of his raising money for the Variety Club, which helps disabled and disadvantaged children.


The charity's chief barker, DJ Russ Kane remembers him as being "charming, always polite and always funny".


Inman's long-term partner, Ron Lynch, is said to be "devastated" at his death.




His Bio from Wikipedia

Frederick John Inman (28 June 1935 – 8 March 2007) was an English actor who is best remembered for his role as Mr Humphries in the British sitcom Are You Being Served?.

Early life

Inman was born in 1935 in Preston, Lancashire,[1] and was a cousin of actress Josephine Tewson. At the age of 12, Inman moved with his parents to Blackpool where his mother ran a boarding house, while his father owned a hairdressing business.[1] Inman always wanted to be an actor, and his parents paid for him to have elocution lessons at the local church hall.[1] At the age of 13 he made his stage debut on Blackpool's South Pier.[1]

After leaving school, Inman worked for a gentleman's outfitters in Blackpool and then joined Austin Reed in London.[1] He later left Austin Reed to become a scenic artist at a theatre in Crewe so that he could earn his Equity Card.[1] Inman made his West End debut in the 1960s when he appeared in Ann Veronica.


Television fame

Inman made his television debut in the sitcom Two In Clover in 1970. In 1972, David Croft asked him to play a part in a Comedy Playhouse pilot called Are You Being Served?.[1] Following the pilot of Are You Being Served?, the first series was broadcast in 1973. Inman played the camp Mr Wilberforce Claybourne Humphries, whose catch phrase "I'm free!" soon entered popular culture.[3] Although the catch phrase and the character were popular, Inman came under attack by some gay rights groups for what they perceived to be his stereotypical portrayal of a homosexual.[4] However, both Inman and David Croft stated that the character was "just a mother's boy" and his sexual orientation was never explicitly stated.[1]

Are You Being Served? ran for ten series until it finished in 1985. Inman's portrayal of Mr Humphries won him the BBC TV Personality of the Year in 1976 and he was voted the funniest man on television by TV Times readers.[5] From 1980 to 1981, Inman also played Mr Humphries in the Australian version of Are You Being Served?. In 1992, five of the Are You Being Served? cast, including Inman, reunited in character for the sitcom Grace & Favour, which ran for twelve episodes until 1993.

During the 13-year run of Are You Being Served?, Inman also appeared in Take a Letter, Mr. Jones, a 1981 sitcom where Inman played Graham Jones, who is secretary to Rula Lenska's character Joan Warner, and Odd Man Out, a 1977 sitcom. In 1989, he made a cameo appearance in the film The Tall Guy and in 1999 appeared in French & Saunders. Inman also toured with his own shows.

Later years
After the end of Are You Being Served?, Inman became one of the nation's best known pantomime dames and appeared in over 40 pantomime productions across the United Kingdom.[5] In 2004, Inman made additional television appearances in Doctors and Revolver. On 27 December 2005, Inman entered in a civil partnership at Westminster Register Office with his partner of 35 years, Ron Lynch.[6]

In 2001, Inman was admitted to Paddington's St Mary's Hospital after suffering breathing difficulties and spent three days in intensive care.[7] In December 2004, Inman was forced to cancel an appearance in a pantomime as he was suffering from the Hepatitis A infection.[3] Following this, he never worked again.

Inman died early in the morning of 8 March 2007, aged 71, in St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington.[8] Inman’s manager Phil Dale told the BBC - "John was known and loved throughout the world. He was one of the best and finest pantomime dames working to capacity audiences throughout Britain"

I

New movie is the spawn of horse sex

By Danny Westneat

Seattle Times staff columnist


Some will say it was inevitable. Obvious, even. But I never saw this one coming.

I'm talking about horse sex, the movie. You all remember that story from the summer of 2005. You can deny it, but I know you remember: A man died from a ruptured colon after having sex with a horse in a barn outside Enumclaw.

The story became an international, Web-driven phenomenon. The Seattle Times' stories about it, though tantalizingly devoid of details, nevertheless became the most-read material in the paper's history.

Everyone had the same headshaking questions, mostly about the logistics of the act itself.

It turns out two Seattle filmmakers had questions, too. They drove out to Enumclaw one day. They were struck by the beauty of the place. It seemed at odds with the secretive, nocturnal society that had just been exposed there.

"By then the whole story had been reduced to joke fodder," says Robinson Devor, 43. "It made me wonder whether there might not be a more complex side to it all."

Against most advice — and, really, all sense — they set out to make a feature-length documentary about a circle of acquaintances drawn together by an unspeakable interest in sex with animals.

Astonishingly, the film appears to be succeeding. It was bought by a New York distributor, THINKFilm. Last week it was one of 16 documentaries accepted to the Sundance Film Festival (out of 856 submitted). It premieres in January.

It's called "Zoo," short for zoophilia. That means "abnormal fondness for animals."

The director, Devor, is quick to dispel the obvious worry.

"No, there's no horse sex in it," he says. "If anyone goes to our movie hoping to see horse sex, they will be greatly disappointed."

The Sundance judges called it a "humanizing look at the life and bizarre death of a seemingly normal Seattle family man who met his untimely end after an unusual encounter with a horse."

"They called us and were excited about the imagery, the poetry, the experimentation with the documentary form," says Charles Mudede, the film's writer and an editor at the alternative weekly The Stranger.

"We didn't want to focus on the tawdriness. That had been done. We wanted to look dispassionately into a world that exists here, but prior to this case few had ever known about."

Two friends of the man who died cooperated with the filmmakers, including one who was there and drove him to the hospital. Their voices narrate much of the film, describing the paths they took in life to end up in the orbit of that Enumclaw-area barn.

A third narrator is a woman who runs Hope for Horses, a Woodinville nonprofit. She rescued some of the horses once the sex ring was exposed.

State Sen. Pam Roach also appears, talking about the anti-bestiality law she drafted after the Enumclaw incident.

Mudede said he became fascinated by the notion that sex with animals was perfectly legal here. In more than a century of statehood, it either had never come up or, when it had, people were simply too embarrassed to do anything about it.

"It's unmentionable," Mudede said. "And then strangely, suddenly, in 2005, it becomes the talk of society. How exactly does that happen? How do we go from something being utterly hidden from view, and then suddenly we're consumed with it and so upset by it we need to pass a law?"

From what I gather — I was shown only five minutes of unfinished footage — the movie doesn't answer these questions so much as mull them.

I called the filmmakers to pose a simpler one: Why? Why make a feature-length movie about horse sex?

"It's not a movie about horse sex. That's the point," Devor says. "I guess I'm hoping that by looking at this sensationalized story more closely, at parts of it that people haven't heard, that people will find some universal human sentiment in it."

I told Devor: If you can find universal humanity in that story, you can find it anywhere.

And to those of you who are about to call me to say these filmmakers are slumming and the idea of a movie on horse sex is absurd: Yeah, I know none of you will go see it.

Just as none of you read all those stories about the Enumclaw case. Or greedily followed this long article about it down to the very ... last ... word.

Danny Westneat's column appears Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

Updated: 7:29 p.m. PT Nov 9, 2006

HOUSTON - A few short weeks ago, Garden Guy was just a mom-and-pop landscaping business that promoted itself as “making Houston beautiful since 1991” and promised to treat its customers with respect and honesty.

Since then, though, the business has been vilified around the world as a bunch of bigots because its Christian conservative owners refused to do work for a gay couple.

Michael Lord and Gary Lackey, a gay couple requesting bids for a landscaping job at their new house, received a polite — and, well, honest — e-mail from Sabrina Farber, a co-owner of Garden Guy: “I need to tell you that we cannot meet with you because we choose not to work for homosexuals.”
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Stunned, Lackey forwarded the e-mail to 200 friends, asking them not to patronize Garden Guy and urging them to pass the word on to friends and family. “I’m still shocked by the ignorance that exists in today’s society,” Lackey said in his e-mail.

And word was indeed passed on — as fast as the Web could carry it.

Within days, the e-mail had been forwarded to thousands of people around the world, and quickly became the subject of heated and often ugly debates on the Internet. Because of the furor, a professional association of landscapers created a nondiscrimination policy.

A forum on the Garden Guy Web site, normally reserved for discussions about landscaping and shrubbery, was bombarded with angry comments and venomous attacks from as far away as Australia.

Some people attacked the Farbers’ beliefs, threatened the couple and their five children, and said they ought to be sodomized. Others condemned gays as sinners headed toward damnation.

Farber, whose company’s Web site has long included Biblical quotes and a link to a Web site that opposes gay marriage, said she was shocked by the reaction.

“It was just our intent to uphold our rights as small business owners to choose our clientele,” she said. “All the hate, the threats of sodomizing my children, the threats of me being murdered, came out because of a very businesslike straightforward e-mail I sent. The crowd of tolerance and diversity is not so tolerant.”

But Farber said she and her husband have also gotten hundreds of calls and messages offering encouragement and have been touched by that. “We just cried. We have been through so much,” Farber said. “We become accidental crusaders for Christ.”

Lackey and Lord did not return calls from the Associated Press.

“Imagine if it had been a black or Hispanic couple that they wouldn’t provide services to. It’s really bad,” said Jack Valinski, a Houston gay activist. “A lot of gay couples have kids, live in the suburbs and have neighbors that are straight. Yet, we still have instances like this. There is still always that underlying discrimination we all have to deal with.”


Houston, unlike Austin and Dallas, has no ordinance prohibiting businesses from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation.

Farber’s e-mail reached the Harrisburg, Pa., offices of the Association of Professional Landscape Designers, which said that the Farbers were misrepresenting themselves as current members of the group and no longer belong.

After receiving hundreds of outraged calls and e-mails, the 1,200-member association issued a statement criticizing the Farbers and created a nondiscrimination policy.

“It has come to our attention that a former member has declined a professional engagement on the grounds of the prospective clients’ sexual orientation. This conduct does not conform to the policy and practice of APLD,” the organization said.

© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Pierce County man first in state charged under new bestiality law

By Jennifer Sullivan

Seattle Times staff reporter

A Spanaway, Pierce County, man has become the first person charged under the state's new felony bestiality law.

Michael Patrick McPhail, 26, was charged Thursday with one count of first-degree animal cruelty after his wife allegedly caught him having sex with the family's pit bull, according to charging papers filed in Pierce County Superior Court.

The woman snapped two photos with her cellphone camera, then dialed 911, authorities said.

McPhail was bailed out of jail on Friday, two days after the alleged incident.

According to Rita Morgan, national cruelty coordinator for Pasado's Safe Haven, McPhail is the first person in the state charged under the new law, which makes bestiality a Class C felony, punishable by a maximum of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

The law was spurred by the case of a Seattle man who died last year after having sex with a horse at an Enumclaw farm.

Because the Enumclaw case involved filming the sex acts, the law also says that anyone videotaping could be convicted under animal-cruelty laws. People who allow bestiality on their property might also face prosecution.

Sen. Pam Roach, R-Auburn, who sponsored the bestiality law, said she hopes McPhail's case sends the message that anyone who "abuses animals in this way" deserves to be punished.

Neither McPhail, who was released on $20,000 bail Friday morning, nor his wife, could be reached for comment. A condition of McPhail's release is that he can't have contact with animals, said Deputy Prosecutor Karen Watson.

Morgan said she was trying to reach the family to offer safe housing for the 4-year-old dog. The tan-colored dog was left with McPhail's wife after his arrest, deputies said.
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"We see this as a case of animal cruelty; this man is subjecting this animal to intentional cruel behavior," Morgan said. "He's certainly in need of counseling."

Cops: Chicken Dies, Wife Shoots Husband
By Associated Press

2 hours ago

CHESHIRE, Ore. - A woman shot her husband in the back after he killed her pet chicken, the Lane County sheriff's deputies said. Deputies said they were sure that Mary Gray, 58, intended to shoot her husband, Stephen Gray, 43. They weren't certain if the husband meant to fire at the chicken.

"We don't know if it was an accident or if it was on purpose," Sgt. Clint Riley said. "It depends who you ask."

Riley said the couple had been drinking for much of Monday while they did yard work at their rented home in the town northwest of Eugene, and they began arguing after Stephen Gray shot the chicken with a .44-caliber handgun.

Deputies said he was then hit with a shot from a .22-caliber rifle, and is recovering. Mary Gray was arraigned Tuesday on an assault charge.