Amy Winehouse.Walking along Shaftesbury Avenue in London's west end is an absolute delight for me; I have walked along lots of famous thoroughfares – O’Connell Street, Dublin; Broadway, New York; Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles – even the walk up to the Taj Mahal in India – but nothing is quite like walking passed all those famous theatres in London's west end and see their facades depicting what is playing and who is in it.
I haven't seen or heard of Simon Williams since his days in the original series Upstairs Downstairs but I see he is starring in Yes Minister – or maybe Yes Prime Minister. It's strange how that TV series really got it right with the shenanigans that are going on now in the seats of power.
When we were first married, in 1966, we went to a west end theatre for the first time; it was at the Criterion, which is the first theatre you see when you get out of the tube at Piccadilly Circus; it's not in Shaftesbury Avenue itself but the other side of Eros which is the famous fountain on the island there which is the start of Shaftesbury Avenue.
We saw Loot, by Joe Orton; it starred Simon Ward and Michael Bates played Inspector Truscott; the role was written for Kenneth Williams, who played it at other times I think, who was a friend of Joe Orton and mixed with him and his gang.
It was very funny but the one thing I remember about it, all these years later, is that the female lead seemed to deliver most of her lines to the audience facing downstage; it's something I have come across many times – there you are on the stage, having a conversation with somebody and they are showing you the side of their heads.
The show went well last night at The Lord Stanley in Camden but just as I was driving up the street, maybe a quarter of a mile from the theatre, in a really nice part of Camden, we passed a 'Police incident;' the police had taped off a whole park and it seemed they had turfed everybody out of this particular park. We thought there must have been some sort of attack or mugging but it wasn't that kind of neighbourhood.
There were a few people with long lens camera pointing across the park to the street on the other side – about 100 yards or so. We thought no more about it and went to The Lord Stanley.
Our daughter arrived a few minutes after we got there and told us that they had found Amy Winehouse dead – that's what all the crowd was and the paparazzi.
It came as a bit of a shock just before my show; it shouldn't have been because anybody that knows anything about her would be half expecting it. I don't know much about her material but I know she was tremendously talented – and self destructive.
She consumed something in her short life that didn't agree with her; a chemical imbalance that it's very easy for us who don't have that unfortunate illness to criticise - and there was nobody to help her.
