Caroline Phillips

Journalism

Caroline Phillips
“Caroline Phillips is a tenacious and skilful writer with a flair for high quality interviewing and a knack for making things work.”

Caroline Phillips

Journalism

All 1993 articles

Flaring up with Floyd

Evening Standard | 31 Dec 1993

KEITH FLOYD is about to dine in his arch rival’s establishment. He thinks that eating, drinking and sex go together. But he’d like the sex first, he announces loudly to the genteel clientele talking in whispers as they do in nice country hotels.

We’re in Gidleigh Park, Devon, an impeccable hotel set in Dartmoor National Park and a contrast to Floyd’s humble pub. Floyd hasn’t eaten here for four years – his protest vote at the no smoking rule in the dining room.

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The head girl who jollies up the kids at ITV

Evening Standard | 15 Dec 1993

DAWN Airey, network controller of children’s television at ITV, likes her job. It was, she told a Sunday paper, the best thing she could do with her clothes on.

She also remarked that she thought children should come home from school, put their feet on the table, stuff their faces with crisps and relax for an hour or two. In a stroke, she confirmed what all right-thinking parents had always suspected about children’s TV bosses: that all they want to do is turn their kids into couch potatoes and stuff their heads with the audiovisual equivalent of junk food.

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Anything Lynda can do…

Evening Standard | 7 Dec 1993

RICHARD La Plante, former rock star and psychiatric counsellor, martial arts expert, screenwriter, actor, novelist and husband of the first lady of screenwriting, Lynda La Plante, has written a thriller, Leopard. It is, according to the blurb, about ‘nature’s perfect killing machine’. But turn the pages of Richard’s own life to discover nature’s most unbelievable living machine – a tale of sex, drugs and a woman who was once paid to talk to him.

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We lost one son – why did we have to lose another?

Evening Standard | 3 Dec 1993

THIS week it was Jacqueline Bodger’s 40th birthday and she attended the inquest to hear why her five year-old son Terry died after going to have six baby teeth extracted, visited the stone which covers the ashes of her eight- year-old child Martin, killed by a car just six years ago, said `goodnight’ in her head to her dead children as she does every night, and sat on the sofa in her sitting-room with her husband Philip just wondering why. We’re talking in their council flat in Hendon. They moved there to start afresh, away from the painful memories of the home outside which Martin was run over. Now Terry’s bicycles stand in the hallway by the front door and and toys lie untouched in his bedroom. There are framed photographs of two smiling, healthy boys on the walls, and 70 sympathy cards line the sitting- room shelves.

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In the steps of Jamie…

Evening Standard | 5 Nov 1993

THE man who looks like George Bernard Shaw is queueing for Court One where two schoolboys stand accused of killing James Bulger. He has wild long hair, a streaming beard, carries three plastic bags and later, in the public gallery, he wears odd socks on his hands and eats a Cornish pastie. After him, another man tries to gain entry to the court with a bus ticket instead of a public gallery pass. He mumbles incomprehensibly as the police officers turn him away.

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The astonishing life of Sarah Miles

Evening Standard | 29 Sep 1993

SARAH Miles, the actress, is dying. She is in the terrible last stages of arsenic poisoning. Her face is awfully pale and her breathing difficult… She’s filming Dandelion Dead, a television drama based on the true story of a 1920s solicitor who murdered his wife. But her real life is more improbably dramatic and beset with tragedy than fiction.

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The A to Z of Aunty Pig

Evening Standard | 28 Sep 1993

A FILM should be made of the life of artist and writer Phyllis Pearsall – or Aunty Pig as she is called by Chris Patten, Governor of Hong Kong. An astute, mischievous and spritely 87-year-old, she was born into poverty, once tried to hit her mother’s boyfriend over the head with a bottle, walked 3,000 miles and has advised Prince Edward on his love life.

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The woman who fixes mother and child reunions

Evening Standard | 16 Sep 1993

THE television journalist Kate Adie, who was adopted as a baby, was reported yesterday to have been happily reunited with her natural mother and sister after searching for a year. But the newspaper stories made one person unhappy.

Ariel Bruce is a unique professional who specialise in tracking down the families of adopted children or those taken into care.

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Will the nasty girl ever be silenced?

Evening Standard | 31 Aug 1993

IN PASSAU, a picturesque Bavarian city at the confluence of the Danube, Inn and Ilz rivers, the Second World War is still being fought.

On one side are the respectable citizens of Passau and on the other, 33 year-old Anna Rosmus. Since she was a teenager she’s been obsessively trying to expose what she sees as the truth about her home town, an outwardly affluent and charming Catholic community.

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Goodbye F-factor, hello fluffy bathrobes

Evening Standard | 19 Aug 1993

SOMEONE recently said to Lis Howell that launching a television channel was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. ‘I must be dead then,’ says Howell, waggishly. Howell was the director of programmes at GMTV who was sacked from her £100,000-a-year job amid rows about the F for fanciability factor. Now she is launching UK Living, a women’s satellite channel of which she is head of programming. UK Living, she says unrepentantly, will have the F-factor too. But this time, F stands for feminine.

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Joking on the flight of hope

Evening Standard | 16 Aug 1993

The Hercules in which we are arriving in Sarajevo makes a tactical landing, suddenly nose-diving in case there is small arms fire. The Serbs take more pot shots in the afternoon when they’re drunk, but this is early morning. Still, the crew say they can’t underestimate the threat from the ground.

I feel frightened because, in contravention of the rules, I don’t have a flak jacket. This is Saturday, the day before this same plane is used for Operation Irma.

The homes around the airport have been razed by war and a black cloud of smoke hangs over Mount Igman. Serbs burning villages or villagers making tea, says one of the crew, wryly.

Joking on the flight of hope


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The grouse of Atholl

Evening Standard | 11 Aug 1993

GEORGE Iain Murray, who refuses to use the name George and is the 10th Duke of Atholl, lives in Blair Castle, Perthshire. The castle has white-painted pebble dash on it and was started in 1269. ‘The Earl of Atholl owned the land then. He was on a crusade when a local gentleman called Mr Cumming decided this was a nice place to build a house and started doing so,’ says the Duke. ‘The Earl returned and was somewhat annoyed to find a house in the middle of his grounds. So he turfed Mr Cumming out and took over.’ The Duke, whose father was killed in action in 1945, was evacuated to Blair Atholl during the war. (Before then, the castle was let to an American married to a Dutch diamond millionaire. ‘They used to play bicycle polo in the ballroom. When they left, they gave a new floor.’) He came to the title aged 26, through a third cousin three times removed. He doesn’t have a son and heir.

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