FRANCO COSIMO PANINI
Publisher. Born 8 October 193, died 30 March 2007 aged 75.
Franco Cosimo Panini, was one of the Panini brothers from Modena in Italy, who built an international publishing empire on football stickers. They started out as newspaper distributors, but in 1960, two of the brothers discovered, in a warehouse in Milan, a large cache of unused cigarette cards depicting footballers of the day: these they re-packaged in envelopes of ten, which sold astonishingly well. Franco left his accountancy job in a bank, and joined this new business, eventually taking over its international development. The Paninis began to produce their own cards, and albums to put them in, and then, a few years later, developed the major attraction of their whole enterprise, the peelable sticker.
Russell Davies talks to Franco Panini’s daughter Lucia, Manlio Guidetti who was responsible for the development of the British arm of the Panini empire and to sticker collector Alan Dein.
SIR THOMAS HETHERINGTON
Director of Public Prosecutions who launched the CPS. Born 18 September 1926, died 28 March 2007 aged 80.
None of his friends seems completely sure why the late Sir Thomas Hetherington was always known as “Tony”, but he was, and that little suggestion of informality is perhaps a clue to why this eminent lawyer was so successful in filling two controversial posts: Director of Public Prosecutions, and head of his own creation, the Crown Prosecution Service. Thomas Hetherington was born in Dumfriesshire, but educated in England, at Rugby School. He studied law at Oxford, and was called to the bar, but instead of pursuing a lucrative commercial career, he went into government service instead. In 1962, he became Legal Secretary to the Law Officers’ department. He was Director of Public Prosecutions from 1977 and 1987 and in 1986 he oversaw the changeover to the Crown Prosecution Service. On leaving the CPS he conducted an inquiry into alleged war crimes committed by people still living in Britain.
Russell Davies talks to Solicitor-General of the time, Sir Geoffrey (now Lord) Howe, and to Stephen Wooler, the present Chief Inspector of the Crown Prosecution Service who both knew Hetherington during his long and tricky tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions.
TONY SCOTT Jazz clarinettist. Born 17 June 1921, died 28 March 2007 aged 85.
The jazz clarinettist and saxophonist Tony Scott inhabited two completely contrasting versions of himself, at the beginning and end of his career. As a young man in the bebop trade, he was a typical sharp young “cat” (in the jargon of the time), usually seen in a close-fitting Italian suit (he was born Anthony Sciacca, of Italian stock). But in latter years, he’d come to resemble the Old Man of the Mountains, still blowing his clarinet, but now through an enormous white beard. The change that had come over him was partly to do with the fact that jazz fell abruptly out of love with the clarinet. Scott’s solution was to seek a new idiom, in what later became known as “world music”: he had an interest in both eastern philosophies and oriental sounds --- and he was one of the first to tour the world, amalgamating jazz with local traditions. Once he had settled in Rome, however, he found he could return to his old repertoire, among younger Italian musicians including the pianist Romano Mussolini, the dictator’s son. Scott has been called “the loudest-ever clarinettist”, but his moments of violent musical passion did alternate with tender, even “fugitive” statements as in the track 'Easy Livin’.
'Easy Livin’ can be foundon'The clarinet album' by the Tony Scott Quartet on thePhilology label.
FELIX LEVITAN
Organiser of the Tour de France. Born 12 October 1911 died 17 February 2007.
The Tour de France has become one of the most clamorous and glamorous fixtures in the sporting world, unfailingly obsessing its home country year after year. Its success in the modern era is directly traceable to the 40-year input of Felix Levitan, a small but formidable administrator, who began as a runner for a Parisian cycling magazine in the 1920s. A Jewish citizen, he was interned by the Germans during the Second World War, but resumed a journalistic life on his liberation: the Tour de France resumed in 1947, and it was then that Levitan made his first efforts to make the event profitable. It’s often thought that the Tour pays towns for their hospitality when they host the starts and finishes of stages of the race, but on the contrary, the towns pay the Tour, and Levitan was particularly good at maximising that income. And he it was who instituted the finish of the Tour in the streets of central Paris, with everyone careering up the Champs-Elysees. The French nation awarded him three grades of the Legion d’Honneur, and all the prominent cycling people remember him well. Russell Davies talks to cycling reporter and broadcaster Phil Liggett, and to Barry Hoban, the only British cyclist ever to win two consecutive stages of the Tour.
MICHAEL DIBDIN
Crime writer. Born 21 March 1947 died 30 March 2007 aged 60.
The crime writer Michael Dibdin’s most famous character was an Italian, the Venetian detective Aurelio Zen, who may well have occurred to him as a creation during his four years of teaching English at the University of Perugia. Dibdin himself had read English at Sussex University, and also studied in Alberta, Canada, before settling down in Oxford in what has sometimes been called a “community” of crime-writers. Later, with his third wife, he moved to Seattle. The first Aurelio Zen story was published in 1988, and won the Gold Dagger Crime Novel of the Year award. Other prizes followed, though as Dibdin ruefully admitted, the books never sold all that well in Italy, the country he loved so much. The final novel in Michael Dibdin’s series, appropriately called “End Games”, is to be published in July.
An extract from “End Games” by Michael Dibdin, read by Nick Rowe.
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