Today in Comics History, September 8: Happy birthday, Peter Sellers!

Born on this day in 1925: actor and comedian Peter Sellers, who appeared (several times more than once!) in many films over a thirty year career, notably as bumbling Inspector Jacques Clouseau in the Pink Panther movie series.


from Film Fun #2095 (Amalgamated UK, 12 March 1960)

Today in Comics History, September 8: Happy birthday, Harry Secombe!

Born on this day 101 years ago (1921) in Swansea, Wales: comedian, actor, singer, and writer Sir Harry Secombe, one of the greatest Welshmen in modern history but mostly unknown to American audiences.



from Film Fun #2904 (Amalgamated UK, 5 March 1960), by Bertie Brown

Now Playing: Goon Show Classics, Volume 2 by Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, and Spike Milligan

A record I ordered has come! Yes, I had this in the 70s and foolishly got rid of it.


This record of 1950s radio shows was made in the UK in 1975. Now that is how you treat the name of a trans woman (Angela Morley).


There is no mention of her deadname on the record sleeve at all.

Today in Comics History: "The train arriving at platform four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine has come in sideways"

Panels from Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor #7 (February 2015), script by Robbie Morrison, pencils and inks by Daniel Indro, colors by Slamet Mujiono, letters by Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt
I oughtn't not to make the sort of joke I made in the title of this post about the Tay Bridge Disaster, which is a true, historical bridge collapse that killed 59 people — everyone aboard the train — on this day in 1879. The Disaster itself has been a bit of a long-running mystery because of the discrepancy in casualty figures, sometimes listed as 75 and as high as (as the comic depicts) 100. (I'm guessing the official reports couldn't account for extra men transported back in time aboard the train by Weeping Angels.)

So, no giggling matter, and yet: the Tay Bridge Disaster is the subject of an epic poem by truly one of the worst poets of all time,William McGonagall. In part:

Oh! Ill-fated bridge of the silv'ry Tay,
I now must conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

Well. That's...something.

McGonagall was frequently quoted, and parodied by Spike Milligan, one of my favorite comedians of the twentieth-century, and scripter for The Goon Show, the cult 1950s BBC radio show that helped introduce Peter Sellers to a larger international audience. These radio shows are brilliant, wild, surreal, with plenty of wordplay, humorous catchphrases, running gags, silly sound effects, familiar characters greeted with thundering applause from the audience, and a great sense of the overstated profundity of British history. The Tay Bridge Disaster was itself dramatized comedized as a 1959 episode of The Goon Show, which includes Milligan as "William McGoonagall," reciting terrible, terrible verse. You can hear the show online here and read the script here.

This Week on the BBC

Hey, let's find out what's playing this week on BBC Radio! (I listen to the Beeb a lot, and so should you!) Since they've recently extended the time period you can listen to most of their radio shows via the patented and yet oddly non-Apple iPlayer from a week to a month, there's no better time than right now (or anytime during the next month) to listen to BBC Radio programmes! (Extra M and E added for special British effect.)

Here's a handful of the shows I'm enjoying that I think the readers of this blog might like as well.

Show of the Week: Krazy Kat — A radio documentary on George Herriman's groundbreaking comic strip, hosted by noted illustrator Quentin Blake (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and other Roald Dahl books).

And here's some other cool stuff!:

• Doctor Who: Rebroadcasts of the classic Eighth Doctor Big Finish radio plays, including "Lucie Miller", "Prisoner of the Sun", "Relative Dimensions", and "The Resurrection of Mars".
• Night Waves: A segment from BBC Radio 3's arts show on fifty years of Doctor Who.
• The Goon Show: The brilliant and fast-paced anarchic, surrealist BBC radio comedy from the 1950s (it inspired Monty Python!), starring Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan, and Peter Sellers (yes, that Peter Sellers!). Episodes currently available on the BBC iPlayer include "The Moriarty Murder Mystery" (one of my faves; highly recommended), "The String Robberies", and "The Curse of Frankenstein" ("Blast!" he says.) Follow along using the Goon Show Scripts website!
• Ian Fleming's Thrilling Cities: Simon Williams (no, no, not this guy, sorry) reads abridged chapters from Fleming's travelogue of the world's most exotic cities. Three episodes are available: Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Chicago and New York.
• I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again!: Another of my all-time most-loved British radio programmes, a fast-moving sketch show starring John Cleese, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie (of The Goodies) and the proverbial "and the rest" (okay, Jo Kendall and David Hatch). Pretty much every episode has some fantastic stuff in it.
• Jeeves Live: I'm a nut for P.G. Wodehouse, and here's The Man Who Reads Everything (Martin Jarvis) doing his one-man show of Wodehouse classics before a live audience.
• Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation: There's still time to catch most of the brand-new series of left-wing comedian and commenter Jeremy Hardy (frequent panelist on The News Quiz) walking you through his acerbic guide to life. This is Series Ten, which means there's nine whole more series out there to look for after you enjoy these.
• The News at Bedtime: For all you comics fans, here's a sum-up of the concept behind this comedy show: imagine if Bill Willingham's Fables series had a nightly newscast of the events in their mystic land. Starring Jack Dee (the current host of the long-running I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue panel game) and a guy you may have heard of named Peter Capaldi. There's still time to catch the last few episodes of the series.

So there y'all go: lots of cool stuff to listen to on BBC Radio recommended to you by a Little Stuffed Bull, and you don't even have to pay the licence fee! Ha!

Now We Are Still Six

Hooray! Today is my birthday! And I am nine years old!. No, wait, I've made another one of my silly mistakes and I was holding my birthday card upside-down. Actually, this year I am six years old! Which is a very good age to be.

Birthday celebrations began just before dawn this morning when I jumped up and down on John and Randi's bed and sang "IT'S MY BIRTHDAY! IT'S MY BIRTHDAY! GO BULLY! GO BULLY! LET'S OPEN PRESENTS! IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!" until they told me to go back to bed and not wake up for several more hours.

I was too anxious to go back to sleep so I laid in my bed and read Batman comics until it was time to get up.


Panel from "The Blaze" in Detective Comics #95 (January 1945), script by Mort Weisinger; pencils, inks, and letters by Dick Sprang

Hooray! At last everybody got up and got going thanks to some gentle pushing from me jumping on the bed and singing. We went out and I got Nutella-filled French Toast! And a birthday strawberry on top.



We all went over to our friends Heather and Brian's house. They had a very special surprise for me in a box. What could it be? What could it be?



It's a fabulous birthday cake with my name written on it an' everything! Folks, I'm not to shy to tell you a tear got in my little button eye. Especially when they told me I had to share the cake with everybody else.



It was deeeeeelicious! Also on the top, there was a chocolate bar with my name on it! Even when Reggie Jackson had his candy bar it didn't have his name on the chocolate. How can you say someone is great who's never had his name on candy bars? Ah, I'm jus' joshin' ya, Reggie. I'll be over for those batting lessons later.



THEN IT WAS TIME FOR THE FABULOUS BIRTHDAY PRESENTS. I got a Lego set of Superman and Wonder Woman kissing fighting Lex Luthor in a giant robot. It's like Lego had reached into my dreams.



I received a box of the world's biggest Pop-Tarts™. Seriously, these babies are bigger than I am. And when I've finished them, I can use the box to make a cool fort!



In 2011 I featured "365 Days of the Warriors Three" all year on my blog, and by the end of the year Hasbro had produced Warriors Three action figures! This year I'm spotlighting Alfred Pennyworth and I got an Alfred action figure! So I think that means next year I need to do 365 days of Jane Wiedlin.



Speaking of heroes I've devoted a whole year to, I got a teeny-tiny Ben Grimm figure! I am going to hang him on my backpack. He will also come in useful for clobbering stubborn hard-boiled eggs. Also, if I ever get a pet guinea pig, I can do this with him.



I am a big fan of the 1950s BBC radio programme The Goon Show and here's the latest CD of four remastered episodes. This will have me walking backwards for Christmas all year long!



I got Mr. Toast comic books! Yay! They are funny and you should buy them right now.



Because I use a lot of batteries and I am green (by which I mean ecologically conscious), I got some really good rechargeable batteries for my birthday. This will power my toys for hours! Especially the loud ones! Which is important very early in the morning when nobody else is up to play.



It's almost time to go back to school so I was really glad to get a Batman lunchbox! These are bigger on the inside so you can fit a whole four course meal and dessert in one of these.



I got Marmite. Um. Thank you for the Marmite.



And finally, as the dessert topping on this wonderful cavalcade of gifts, I got my own Bat-Signal. It's just my size!



It really works!



So, a very red satin-heart-felt thank you to everybody who celebrated my birthday and made it such a wonderful day for me. I had a great day and I can't wait until my next birthday! We'll meet back here at this exact spot in a year, okay?



So, as I eat one more piece of birthday cake, there's no better way to wrap up the festivities than with Ten of a King Cake Wrecks! Take it away, vintage comic book covers!























Thanks for comin' to my birthday blog party! And remember: always wish the birthday boy many happy returns!

Bully's Sketchbook: Roger Langridge

Mr. Roger Langridge! He's one of my favorite comics writers and artists. I remember his work first catching my attention in one of the old Amzing Heroes swimsuit specials. Did he draw Wolverine with water wings? Thor in a thong? No! His contribution was the cast of the much-beloved (by me 'n' others) BBC 1950s cult classic radio program The Goon Show at the beach!:


"FamousPeopleGoonHoliday" by Roger Langridge, from Amazing Heroes Swimsuit Special #1 (1990)

You can catch Roger Langridge currently writing and drawing issues of the relentlessly delightful The Muppet Show comic book from BOOM!, or, as Mister L. himself describes it: "currently drawing pigs in wigs and socks with ping pong balls glued to them to earn a crust."

So, y'know, if he can draw felt frogs and plush pigs...surely he can draw a little stuffed bull, can't he?

A: Yes he can.



Thank you very much for the sketch, Roger Langridge!

If you wanna see more of the work and art of Roger (and why wouldn't ya?), book yourself a room at The Hotel Fred, Roger's blog named after his sad-sack, lovelorn comic character Fred the Clown. Or, buy his stuff...you know you want it!



Roger Langridge: he's great, and he makes me look great.

If you're interested in reading more about Spike Milligan...

(Click photo to Harry Secombe-size)

For those of you who expressed an interest in Spike Milligan and reading more about or by him...well, you got plenty books to choose from. Most aren't published in the US (try Amazon.co.uk). But most of all I recommend picking up a CD or cassette of The Goon Show so you can hear The Great Man at work. (Heck, you can even probably find files on P2P trading sites.) The Goon Show is an acquired taste, but I can't imagine life without Spike.

Bully's Book Club: Spike & Co.

Hi hi hi, everybody! Welcome to Bully's Book Club! It's book review week here at the old bull-og, all day, every day. Which may bore some of you, but, hey, getcher own blog, complainey-guys! I'm not even talkin' comic book books—these are books with lotta words and only a few pictures, so they take a little longer to get through. And they're all about things British and English, so if you're not an Anglophile, your mileage (or kilometreage) may vary. But stick around! If you're not careful you may just learn somethin'.

Sitting on my "to read" shelf along with a bajillion Ian Rankin books and that Jonathan Lethem novel I keep meanin' to get to are most of the books I brought back from my British Christmas holiday, where I spent lots of time and pounds in lovely London bookshops. One of my favorites (or should that be "favourites"?) was actually a last-minute purchase at the extensive and bustling Heathrow Airport International Departures shopping centre, which includes a fairly densely-stocked Borders (formerly the Books Etc. chain), chock-full of all your last-minute gift and airplane reading needs. One of the quirky things I like best about buying books at Heathrow is the British publishing "airport exclusives," which are paperback editions of current just-released hardcovers: slightly lighter books perfect for airplane carrying at only slightly reduced prices. It was in Borders as I counted my last pocketful of chunky Queen-embossed pound coins that I finally picked up a book I'd been eyeing my whole vacation, a biography of my favorite comedian of 'em all, the brilliant and bristly Spike Milligan: Graham McCann's Spike & Co.: Inside the House of Fun with Milligan, Sykes, Galton & Simpson.

If you don't know Spike Milligan, why, my goodness, your life is poorer for it. He's best known as the writing and performing genius behind the brilliant and groundbreaking 1950s BBC radio comedy programme The Goon Show (which skyrocketed the careers of Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe): a silly, surreal, frantic, frenzied half-hour of anarchy punctuated by harmonica and jazz quartet musical numbers. The Goon Show is rightly considered as the first major modern cornerstone of post-war British comedy: without The Goon Show we wouldn't have gotten Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Young Ones, or stand-ups like Billy Connolly or Eddie Izzard...at least not quite in the form we roar with laughter at today. Aside from The Goon Show, Spike's done many other amazing radio, TV, book and film projects with varying levels of commercial and critical success. I've read many, many biographies and autobiographies of Spike. I highly recommend his multi-book War Memoirs (here's a one-volume compilation, but I recommend the single volumes starting here), which start fairly silly (but wonderfully fun) but by the later books have turned wistful, detailed, and in some places, terrifyingly shaking memories of life on the front lines of Italy and Africa in World War II that contributed to Spike's nervous breakdown and later emotional problems. I've read histories of The Goon Show and biographies of Secombe and Sellers and timelines of British comedy, but I've got to admit that even for being a very intense and fevered little stuffed Milligan fan, I wasn't really aware of another great contribution of Spike to the history of British comedy: his co-formation of one of the great writer's collectives of English entertainment, Associated London Scripts.

If you're a fan of or follow British comedy you'll likely know the other three names mentioned in the book's subtitle: Eric Sykes. Ray Galton. Alan Simpson. And Johnny Speight, who joined them shortly after. The four of them together are as important as The Beatles or even The Fantastic Four to the modern British entertainment industry. Sykes was one of the first big-name comedy writers who built up the careers of entertainers like Frankie Howerd before embarking on his own, years-before-Seinfeld, successful television acting career. Galton and Simpson created Steptoe and Son (later remade in America into Sanford and Son), the pioneering sitcom that brought social and familial problems to the flickering telly screen. Speight took that groundwork to the next level by creating Till Death Us Do Part, the inspiration for the American All in the Family, which addressed such concepts as racism, politics, feminism, and toilets for the first time to a popular audience. Just as post-War British art changed that world forever, the work being done by Associated London Scripts, by these men and the others in the collective, took a fledging medium and gave it a brave new social conscience at the same time as providing deep bellylaughs.

As I said, I'm a major Milligan fan, but I actually enjoyed the sections of the book on the other ALS members even more than the Spike chapters. I knew little or sketchy details about Sykes, Galton, Simpson and Speight, and it's a wonderful introduction to the dramatic way entertainment was changed and evolved through the fifties, sixties, and seventies. The organization of the book is clever and organic: McGann starts by walking us through the London office door of ALS as it would have been in its heyday, then chapter by chapter visits different "offices" to paint vivid and detailed pictures of these comedy geniuses one by one. McGann then returns in later chapters to follow up the men with their work: extensive sections on the major shows and writing springing from their frenzied big brains. There's a lot of other big names in here as well from the British comedy and entertainment worlds, working for or with ALS: bug-eyed genius Marty Feldman was a member for a while, as was Terry Nation, inventor of the Daleks. The Beatles and Brian Epstein, Michael Caine, British comedy icons The Two Ronnies, Tommy Handley, Kenneth Horne, Frank Muir and Dennis Norden, Hattie Jacques—they're in here too. If you know 'em, you'll enjoy seeing this little-covered sides of their entertainment careers. If you don't, this is a wonderful introduction to the workings of how genius comedy and entertainment got made. Above all, it's an amazingly entertaining and funny book, chock-full of excerpts from some of the great radio and television shows they had a hand in, plus McCann's light and lively tongue-in-cheek writing style gave me plenty of chuckles. I of course highly recommend this book if you're a Spike or Britcom fan, but even if you aren't read it for a better understanding of writers at work, hampered by social and political pressures but still producing amazing innovation.

Because of its very British focus, of course, it wasn't published over in the USA, and you're prob'bly not gonna find Spike & Co. at your local bookstore. If you're lucky enough to frequent a shop that stocks a good selection of British imports (like New York City's wonderful Shakespeare and Co.), they may be able to order it for you. In this day and age of the worldwide internetmajig, of course, those of you with DIY tendencies can click on the link at the right and order it from ever-eager Amazon.com. At the price and time for delivery Amazon.com is currently listing, however, you might actually be better going straight to London—virtual London, that is—by clicking on this Amazon.co.uk link and ordering it direct from England. Current exchange rates are a little less than two bucks per pound, so expect it to run you about twenty-six bucks and change plus five to seven bucks international postage. But you'll get it a lot faster; usually within a week to ten days a chunky brown cardboard parcel straight from Amazon.co.uk's Slough warehouse will land on your doorstep with a resounding thump and you'll be buried in the world of Spike and Company by teatime.

I chose this book to review not merely because it's been sitting on my bookshelf since I've come back from London waiting for me to write a few dozen words about it, but I specifically chose today to write about it because April 16 is Spike Milligan's birthday. He passed away in 2002, but he would have been 89 today. Curiously or karmically, it's also my mom's birthday today, and she's thankfully still with us. Spike taught me the value of laughter, as well as the joy of whimsy, anarchy, rhyme, silliness and surrealism. By no coincidence at all, my mom taught me the same lessons. Happy birthday to both Spike and Ma Bull, and needle nardle noo to all of you too. Vivat Milligna!

London Song of the Day: There were angels dining at the Ritz ("A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square")

On my list of London songs, I have lots of favorites, but probably only one true obsession among them: the showtune standard "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square." (It's pronounced "Barkley," by-the-by, not "Berkley.") How obsessed am I with this one song? Well, I've got a dedicated playlist (entitled, tongue-in-cheek, "That Bloody Nightingale") for thirty-one different versions of it on my iPod, and I've only just on this trip discovered a couple more I like (the John Le Mesurier "definitive" version and the smooth silky Ellis Marsalis cover) that I'll be adding to the collection. Why such a fondness for a pleasant little ditty that debuted in a forgotten 1940 West End show (New Faces)? After all, it's a song about falling in love...and what does a little stuffed bull know about love? (Aside from quite fancying nose-kisses from Keira Knightley.)

I think it's less likely that I love this song because it's a love song alone, more that it's a love song set in London, about the transformation that London has on people in love, and vice-versily, the transformation that people in love have on London:

That certain night, the night we met,
There was magic abroad in the air,
There were angels dining at the Ritz,
And a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.

I first discovered "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" as a tune played by harmonicist Max Geldray on The Goon Show, curiously enough on an episode set in the American West. The Goon Show featured, as was customary in those days, musical numbers one-third and two-thirds of the way through the frenetic comedy action, partly out of following to the British music hall traditional of breaking of comedy acts with music, but mostly to give Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and Peter Sellers time to dash backstage for a quick brandy-and-milk before they had to go on again. The Ray Ellington Quartet filled the second musical spot and Geldray the first, and it's a tribute to his skill that I've never felt the need to fast-forward through a musical number to get back to the comedy faster. Geldray's one of my favorite harmonicists of all time: Larry Adler may be better technically, but did Larry Adler ever play straight man to Neddie Seagoon and get to say "ploogee" all the time? No, he did not.. Geldray's version starts out slow and sweet and is butter-smooth all the way through; his playing was the inspiration for me wanting to learn to play the harmonica for many years. Never could, but every time I listen to him play, and this number especially, it still makes me wish I'd learned. Let's take a listen to Max Geldray, shall we?

I next encountered "A Nightingale Sang" on that wonderful John Williams Echoes of London guitar album I told you about on my first day here in London, and like "London by Night" on that record, I still didn't realize that "Nightingale" has lyrics. My first inkling that this wonderful tune had words came from another classic BBC radio comedy: I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again (thank you NPR for broadcasting both these shows heavily when I was just a tiny stuffed bull in Clay, New York!). Sung by comedian and eventual bird-botherer Bill Oddie (lower right of the floating heads of the cast in the picture to the right), here's Oddie's very short but very funny parody of the tune.

Now I can spin the virtual touchwheel of my iPod and listen at whim to dozens of versions of this charmer of a tune, from the soulful Nat "King" Cole version, to Vera Lynn's very-British rendering, a growly re-invented Rod Stewart singing oldies version, the bouncy and festive New Vaudeville Band (they of "Winchester Cathedral") or even the music-hall inspired cover by Robson and Jerome. But force me into a corner and ply with tea and crumpets to get me to tell you my favorite version and I will hem and haw and mull over thirty-one flavors of wonderful but I'll probably tell you my favorite version is by Frank Chacksfield and His Orchestra. Like the first couple versions I encountered of "Nightingale," it's an instrumental, but what an instrumental: a full-fledged, all-out symphonic overture that paints a picture in my little stuffed head of London so dramatic and beautiful that it doesn't matter where I listen to the Chacksfield version playing: whether I'm on the F train in Manhattan or walking through a street in Brooklyn, it's always Berkeley Square to me. Chacksfield's version is to me, the overture to the greatest London movie never made, and of course this movie should be titled A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square. There's already a movie by that name, of course, but it's a 1979 crime/heist thriller, and what I'm picturing is a WWII-era black-and-white romance with an American GI in London (Bing Crosby?) falling in love with a London girl (Vera Lynn?). Arthur Treacher's got to be in there somewhere, and Patricia Roc, and George Formby and "that man again" Tommy Handley, and while the whole darned world seems upside-down in the end the lovers are united as that pesky bird twitters away in the square. Wouldn't you go to see that? I sure would, 'specially if it featured Chacksfield's version of the song as the opening number, bursting into the theaters in glorious full resonance over the titles and shots of London by night. Chacksfield's "Nightingale" starts with that big fanfare, and then smoothly segues into the Westminster chimes (that's the bells of Big Ben to you and me), and a slight detour into the grand old song "London Pride" before the melody of "Nightingale" rises over the opening titles...oh, let's just take a listen to it right now, and you sit back and close your eyes and imagine that opening movie sequence along with me, won't you?

Did you see it in your head? Now tell me this: is that or is that not the best London movie you ever wanted to see in your life that has never been made?

The streets of town were paved with stars;
It was such a romantic affair.
And, as we kissed and said 'goodnight',
A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.

A Little Stuffed Bull's Christmas in London (in photos)

I want to wish all my readers the very happiest of Christmases! I've had a smashing one here in London.


When I woke up Father Christmas had come during the night! (How did he know I was here?) I got loads of brilliant stuff, like these books on the London Underground!


Oooh, more Underground stuff. Thanks, FC...I really wanted this book and CD!


And the new Goon Show and Just a Minute CDs, and a CD about my favourite Radio 1 disk jockey!


The new Everyman P. G. Wodehouse books! I think Father Christmas has been looking at my Amazon.co.uk wish list!


Bags of Thornton's toffee, the best toffee in the world! One regular and one banana flavour. I don't know which one to try first!


And a Cadbury Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut bar as big as I am! I hope Father Christmas bought me a toothbrush as well.


And Mrs. Weasley made me a new sweater.


After gifts we went out for a morning walk through lovely wild Holland Park...


...and then through the poshest districts of Kensington. Happy Christmas, posh people!


When we got back to the hotel I changed into my good clothes to go down to the restaurant for Christmas luncheon.


Free drinks! I thought this was orange juice but it is alcoholic. Hic!


There were Christmas crackers on every table! I like 'em but I have trouble pulling them open.


We also each got a free festive holiday hat. Mine is kinda big.


Yummy hearty tomato and pepper soup for starters.


Roast turkey with all the trimmings! I did not care for the Brussels sprouts but I thought the bacon-wrapped sausages were v. good.


The whole meal was topped off with a traditional Christmas pudding, plus tiny mince pies just my size!


In summary: it was our best ever Christmas. I hope you all have had as wonderful a holiday as I have. Now I'm off to watch the Doctor Who Christmas special!

Oh, and if you want to see more of my photos, here's a special Chrimble prezzie for you: an index to my holiday snaps so far:

• Day 1: Pizza Express and Kensington High Street
• Day 2: Bloomsbury, Russell Square, Leicester Square, Covent Garden
• Day 3: St Albans
• Day 4: Chelsea and Spitalfields
• Day 5: Christmas presents, Holland Park, Kensington and Christmas luncheon

Plus three specialty albums:

• Pub signs
• Signs of London
• The Cartoon Museum