In 1993, shortly after his 85th birthday, he was made a Doctor of Bradford University in recognition of his services to television.Thornton Howard Bridgewater, television engineer: born 1 June 1908; engineer in charge of outside broadcasts, BBC Television 1946-62, Chief Engineer 1962-68; OBE 1965; married 1934 Jean Bartlett (died 1985; one son); died 28 February 1997.. A prolific stage actress during a career that spanned 30 years of West End musicals such as Gone With the Wind and the original National Theatre production of Peter Nichols’s acerbic comedy The National Health, Isabelle Lucas won more widespread recognition on television in the Seventies, as Norman Beaton’s wife in The Fosters, Britain’s first all-black situation comedy. More recently, she appeared in the all-friction soap opera EastEnders as the disapproving mother of black lesbian hairdresser Della Alexander. Born in Canada in 1927, she was the daughter of a chef from Barbados who worked on the Canadian Pacific Railway. Lucas acted in amateur productions as a teenager in Toronto before moving to London in 1954 to train as a singer. The following year, she made her West End stage debut in the revue The Jazz Train at the Piccadilly Theatre, a production that also gave Bertice Reading one of her early successes.
Lucas went on to carve out a distinguished musicals career that included appearances alongside Elisabeth Welch and Millicent Martin in The Crooked Mile (1959), and as Barbra Streisand’s maid, Emma, in Funny Girl and Mammy in Harold Fielding’s acclaimed production of Gone With the Wind (1972). Her last stage musical role was alongside the vaudeville star Jack Gilford in Look to the Rainbow (1985), but the actress’s other West End roles included appearances in the straight play The Genius and the Goddess (adapted from an Aldous Huxley novel, 1962) and the Neil Simon comedy The Sunshine Boys (1975).Other landmarks in Lucas’s stage career included playing the first black Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Connaught Theatre, Worthing, and her first appearance with Norman Beaton, in the musical Bakerloo to Paradise (1969), which failed to make an impact and did not reach the West End.

With the National Theatre, she acted in George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (alongside Derek Jacobi, 1969) and the world premiere of The National Health (1969), both at the Old Vic, as well as Cyrano (Cambridge Theatre, 1970) and Tyger (New Theatre, 1971, with Norman Beaton and Maureen Lipman).When she was cast as the Leader of the Bacchantes in the National Theatre production of The Bacchae, Lucas objected to Sir Peter Hall’s insistence that all the female characters should appear nude and won a partial victory by taking to the stage carefully draped. She also acted Florrie in Trinidad Sisters (Donmar Warehouse, 1988), Mustapha Matura’s black version of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, and the Nurse in Dame Judi Dench’s production of Romeo and Juliet (Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, 1993), her final stage performance.Her few feature films included Miracle in Soho (starring John Gregson, 1957) and Outland (alongside Sean Connery, 1981), but it was as Pearl Foster in two series of The Fosters (1976-77) on television that Lucas gained screen popularity. She and the celebrated black actor Norman Beaton, as her husband Samuel, played the parents of a South London immigrant family. Among those playing their three children were the comedian Lenny Henry and the actress Sharon Rosita.Lucas also played “bald, black, lesbian mother” Velma in the sitcom Agony (1979); Pearl, one of the staff at Ashvale Advertising, in two series of My Husband and I (1987-88); Gertrude in the children’s series Bluebirds, starring Barbara Windsor; two characters in EastEnders – a district nurse 1985, and nine years later Alice Alexander, who found it difficult to come to terms with her daughter Della’s revelation that she was gay – and an old flame of the Peckham barber Desmond in the Channel 4 sitcom Desmond’s (reuniting her with Norman Beaton).

She also made appearances in the television film A Caribbean Mystery (1983) and the mini-series Ellis Island (1984).Isabelle Harriet Lucas, actress: born Toronto, Canada 3 December 1927; married 1957 Maurice Jennings; died Kingston- upon-Thames, Surrey 24 February 1997.. The art of propaganda lies in nouns, not verbs. Once you have said that your opponent is a heretic, a bigot, or a happy-clappy, it is irrelevant what they do Their character is indelibly stamped. And the same principle applies to praise: there are certain standards which function both as benchmarks for good behaviour and as rallying flags in a struggle with the forces of darkness; and one of the most pernicious of these is the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

It made its most recent appearance in Dr Jonathan Sacks’s articles plugging a forthcoming book earlier this week in what the Daily Telegraph used to call “another newspaper”. He finished with a ringing endorsement of “the Judaeo-Christian tradition, predicated on the sanctity of life, the priority of right over might, and the imperatives of justice and compassion for the vulnerable and disenfranchised, [which] has survived for almost 4,000 years, while the great empires which persecuted its adherents have crumbled and vanished”.
Seldom can so much nonsense have been summoned in support of a noble ideal. What exactly is this Judaeo-Christian tradition? There is undoubtedly an Abrahamic tradition: a line of descent in three of the world’s great religions from the Old Testament. Islam, Christianity and Judaism all acknowledge a common descent from the myths of Abraham, and all pay allegiance to the Ten Commandments. This has not prevented any of these religions from persecuting the others when they had the chance. On the contrary, the common descent of Judaism and Christianity is integral to the history of Christian anti-Semitism.As far as I know, the idea of a specifically “Judaeo-Christian” branch is an import from America, where it has only really become popular in the last 50 years.