So we need a campaign that young people can directly relate to.” She said the Aardman T-birds were “humourous and enduring” and would appeal to all ages.What was unsaid yesterday was that if the new creatures proved popular, it will be the end of the chimps after 46 years’ service to the tea industry.Apart from Creature Comforts, the Wallace and Gromit films and Chicken Run, Aardman has made ads for Lurpak, starring Douglas the butter man, Comfort fabric softener with the cloth people, as well as the chocolate Cadbury figures on Coronation Street. The series of ads based on the characters fromCreature Comforts were voted the fourth-best advertisements of all time in a poll by Channel 4.Leading article, Review, page 3. The Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday that he was opposed to the idea of all-Christian schools. “Even so, they should include some children of other faiths, and of no particular faith, as well as the children of Christian families,” he added. “That will be easier with the hundred additional secondary schools we hope to develop and acquire.”The Church of England is clear that our schools should be distinctively Christian in ethos and inclusive in approach. Almost all Church of England schools already include pupils of other denominations and faiths and of no particular religious faith.

They nurture Christian children in their faith, encourage those of other faiths and challenge those of no faith.”However, concerns have been expressed in some areas – notably Oldham, the scene of race riots last summer – that C of E schools have barred non-Christian children. An amendment supported by Liberal Democrats and some backbench Labour MPs seeks to ensure at least 10 per cent of the pupils in religious schools are from outside the faith.Estelle Morris, the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, has also stressed that all new church-run state schools should accept pupils who follow other faiths or none at all. Guidance is to be sent out to school organisation committees, which decide on new school proposals, urging them to turn down applications from religious groups who refuse to open their doors.. Fei-Ping Hsu, pianist: born Gulangyu, China 20 December 1949; married (one daughter); died Qiqihar, China 29 November 2001. The life of the Chinese-American pianist Fei-Ping Hsu – “a fully developed performer of particular ability”, as The New York Times described him at his 1984 US d?t – almost comes ready-wrapped as a screenplay: from child prodigy via the cataclysmic upheavals of the Cultural Revolution to recognition and success in the United States, and now to an abrupt and tragic end.The tale begins almost idyllically. The island of Gulangyu sits on the south-east Chinese coast, in the lee of Taiwan, just offshore from the city of Xiamen.

One of its local nicknames is “Piano Island” because of the inordinate number of instruments there, a legacy of the Jesuit missions – in the early 1950s, when a piano was a rarity on the mainland, there were over 500 on Gulangyu; there is now a piano museum there, and even the main dock is piano-shaped. So it is hardly surprising that when Hsu Fei-Ping (his name is transcribed also as Xu Feiping) was born there, in 1951, it was into a musical family – his brother, Xu Feixing, likewise became a pianist (as since has Hsing-ay Hsu, his niece). From his pastor father he also acquired a Christian faith so strong that he refused treatment for, and survived, childhood cancer.Hsu was playing the piano at five, precociously enough for his primary and secondary schooling to be undertaken at the Shanghai Conservatory. In normal circumstances that would have guaranteed him the foremost musical education available in Communist China: the staff had benefited from the influx and influence of Russian and German teachers fleeing the persecutions of earlier generations. But China’s own 10-year wave of cultural Bolshevism came with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, and the Conservatory was shut down.Hsu, already a member of the China Symphony Orchestra, was expelled to the provinces, to work on a rice farm and in a factory, moving heavy equipment. That fate befell a number of China’s most gifted young musicians: Eileen Huang, for example, another pianist, similarly had to put her career on hold for seven years while she planted rice and cooked for 200 “farmers” (other banished student musicians).