‘An ancestor of Monty Python’s famous Dead Parrot comedy sketch has been found in a joke book dating back to Greece in the 4th Century…

[The ancient gags] have been published into a multimedia online e-book, which features video of veteran comic Jim Bowen bringing the old jokes back to life in front of a 21st Century audience.’

BBC

One of the old jokes:

‘Someone needled a well-known wit: “I had your wife, without paying a penny”. He replied: “It’s my duty as a husband to couple with such a monstrosity. What made you do it?”‘

The water company is digging up the road at the junction of Deansgate and Peter Street. They’re replacing the old Victorian water pipes.

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When William Lygon, the 7th Earl of Beauchamp was outed as a homosexual by his brother-in-law, in June 1931, his family banded together to protect him.

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Cine City in Withington is the latest historic building to go in the epidemic of greedy, short-sighted and inept development that has swept Manchester over the past ten years.

Formerly The Scala, it opened in 1912 and was only the third cinema in Britain.

Meanwhile the Victorian railway arches on Store Street, near Piccadilly, are being demolished.

Sackville Street used to run right down into the north-east part of Chorlton On Medlock. Though, in Victorian times, the southern part of the street was called Zara Street. Then, in the early 1960’s, the Mancunian Way (motorway) was built and sliced across the area from east to west.

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In his talk on Tuesday, Ray Gosling mentioned something that I’d heard before. Namely that ‘moors murderer’ Ian Brady met his final victim, Edward Evans, in the Rembrandt Hotel.

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On YouTube I found an episode of Most Haunted from 2005 in which they visit the studios and outdoor set of Coronation Street.

The studio is built on a former graveyard they claim. This is not the 1960’s Granada block but a studio that was constructed next to Lower Byrom Street in the late 1980’s.

It’s a good story, but a quick look through some photographs on the Manchester City Council local image library suggests it isn’t true.

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	Workmen demolishing the spire of St. Peter’s Church, St. Peter’s Square, Manchester, 1907

Looking through the pictures in the Manchester Local Image Collection, I came across this wonderful photograph.

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As a photographer myself, I broke out into a cold sweat reading how this poor man lost most of his image library in the Lever Street fire. Equipment can be replaced but unique transparencies, negatives and digital images can’t be.

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We tend to think that guns, robberies and violent crime in Manchester are a modern phenomenon. But there was lots of it going on in Victorian times too. Even in Didsbury (heaven forbid).

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