Friday. We head off to London for a couple of touristy days before we catch our plane back to Oz. It’s a smooth drive down the M1 and M25 (for a change) and we drop off the hire car, get the Avis shuttle to Terminal 4 and catch the underground into town. We stay at the Mercure on Russell Square in Bloomsbury which Jan booked at favourable rates with some of her Accor hotel points. It’s a smart, quiet, well-designed room.
We walk down to The Strand to visit St Clement Danes Church. This is the church of the Royal Air Force and has remembrance books on display listing the names of all RAF personnel who died in service. We go to pay our respects to Jan’s uncle, Warrant Officer Ronald Dudley, DFM, a Lancaster bomber navigator who died when his aircraft was shot down on a raid over Germany.
The books are in glass-fronted cases, but the appropriate book is not open at the Dudleys. Jan talks to a helpful attendant who opens the case and turns the pages (with a special flat stick) to the Dudley page. There he is.
We wander back to the hotel, stopping off at the neighbouring pub, the Queen’s Larder for a pint.
That evening we ride the tube to go to the Theatre Royal in Haymarket. The play is Great Britain, by Richard Bean, who also wrote One Man, Two Guvnors which we saw, and loved, in Sydney. The subject is the notorious British newspaper phone-hacking scandal that saw red faces (and red hair) in the Murdoch Empire and the axing of the News of the World.
This is a very clever, very funny play. It’s especially funny for a journalist who knows the inner workings of the media, such as myself! The production is amazing, with some huge transparent panels on stage that show video of (supposed) TV news clips and front page headlines from various (supposed) newspapers such as The Guardener “We think so you don’t have to” and The Dependent.
The headlines are very witty and accurate pisstakes of the headline art. There’s a cast of thousands, all good, and many recognisable from TV and film appearances.
Afterwards we head for Chelsea and eat in a pleasant little Italian restaurant.
