Alec Bregonzi (21 April 1930, London – 4 June 2006) was an English actor who appeared in a number of stage and television roles.

Bregonzi began his career as a professional actor in 1955 in repertory theatre in Farnham, then in York, Bromley and Leatherhead, amongst other places. Work in the West End followed, in Tennessee Williams' Camino Real, where he played two parts and understudied Ronnie Barker.

In 1957, Bregonzi appeared in Hancock's Half Hour for the first time. He went on to appear in 22 of the 63 television episodes Hancock made for BBC Television. In 1958, Bregonzi toured with Hancock, and they performed the famous "Budgerigar" sketch together on tour and in the Royal Variety Performance and on television (in Christmas Night with the Stars). They toured together again in 1961. Duncan Wood, the television director of Hancock's Half Hour recommended Bregonzi to other directors, so that he also appeared in 1950s/60s shows starring Benny Hill, Charlie Drake, Arthur Askey, Ted Ray, Frankie Howerd, Harry Worth, Jimmy Logan, and Alan Melville, among others.

Terence Alan Patrick Seán "Spike" Milligan KBE (16 April 1918 – 27 February 2002) was a British comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright, soldier and actor. His early life was spent in India, where he was born, but the majority of his working life was spent in the United Kingdom. He became an Irish citizen in 1962 after the British government declared him stateless. He was the co-creator, main writer and a principal cast member of The Goon Show, performing a range of roles including the popular Eccles.

Milligan wrote and edited many books, including Puckoon and his seven-volume autobiographical account of his time serving during the Second World War, beginning with Adolf Hitler: My part in his downfall. He is also noted as a popular writer of comical verse; much of his poetry was written for children, including Silly Verse for Kids (1959). After success with the ground-breaking British radio programme, The Goon Show, Milligan translated this success to television with Q5, a surreal sketch show which is credited as a major influence on the members of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Kenny Everett (25 December 1944 – 4 April 1995) was an English comedian, radio DJ and television entertainer. Born Maurice James Christopher Cole^{[citation needed]}, Everett is best known for his career as a radio DJ and for the Kenny Everett television shows.

Everett attended the local secondary modern school, St Bede's Secondary Modern, which is now part of Sacred Heart Catholic College.

He attended a junior seminary at Stillington near York with an Italian missionary order, the Verona Fathers, where he was a choirboy.

After schooling he worked in a bakery and in the advertising department of The Journal of Commerce and Shipping Telegraph.

Having revealed a natural comic and broadcasting talent, he began a career in entertainment. He adopted his stage name from film-star Edward Everett Horton, a childhood hero.

Everett's first break (as Maurice Cole) came when he sent a tape to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1962. He was interviewed at the BBC by Charles Fletcher and offered a job as a presenter on the Light Programme, the forerunner to BBC Radio 2. He declined, however, in favour of the less constrained world of pirate radio, where he began his career as a DJ for Radio London.

Anthony John "Tony" Hancock (12 May 1924 – 24 June 1968) was an English comedian and actor.

Popular during the 1950s and early 1960s, he had a major success with his BBC series Hancock's Half Hour, first on Radio from 1954, then on television from 1956, in which he soon formed a strong professional and personal bond with comic actor Sid James. Although Hancock's decision to cease working with James around 1960 disappointed many of his fans at the time, his last BBC series in 1961 contains some of his best remembered work ("The Blood Donor"). After breaking with his scriptwriters Ray Galton and Alan Simpson later that year, his career took a downward course because of Hancock's increasing dependence on alcohol.

Hancock was born in Southam Road, Hall Green, Birmingham, England, (some sources incorrectly say Small Heath, a different Birmingham district) but from the age of three was brought up in Bournemouth, where his father, John Hancock, who ran the Railway Hotel in Holdenhurst Road, worked as a comedian and entertainer.

Christopher Columbus (before 31 October 1451 – 20 May 1506) was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in what is today northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents. Those voyages, and his efforts to establish permanent settlements in the island of Hispaniola, initiated the process of Spanish colonization, which foreshadowed the general European colonization of what became known as the "New World".

In the context of emerging western imperialism and economic competition between European kingdoms seeking wealth through the establishment of trade routes and colonies, Columbus's speculative proposal to reach the East Indies by sailing westward received the support of the Spanish crown, which saw in it a promise, however remote, of gaining the upper hand over rival powers in the contest for the lucrative spice trade with Asia. During his first voyage in 1492, instead of reaching Japan as he had intended, Columbus landed in the Bahamas archipelago, at a locale he named San Salvador. Over the course of three more voyages, Columbus visited the Greater and Lesser Antilles, as well as the Caribbean coast of Venezuela and Central America, claiming them for the Spanish Empire.