Debbie Linden

Debbie Linden (22 February 1961 – 5 October 1997) was a British glamour model and actress best known for her role as old Mr Grace's secretary in the sitcom Are You Being Served? (1981). Born in Glasgow, she played roles in various other TV series, such as The Professionals, Just Good Friends, Bergerac, and The Bill; she appeared in several feature films, among them Home Before Midnight and The Wildcats of St Trinian's.

Linden was plagued with a drug problem for years. On the night of 5 October 1997, she died of a heroin overdose at home at the age of 36. Her boyfriend, Russell Ainsworth, was acquitted of manslaughter charges but sentenced to two-and-a-half years for supplying the drug.

Film credits

TV credits

The Kid (artist)

THE KID is a contemporary artist who questions social determinism and the frontier between innocence and corruption in modern societies. Half Dutch and half Brazilian, The Kid lives and works both in Paris and Amsterdam where he has, respectively, his painting and sculpture studios.

The Kid's socially-committed and thought-provoking art works include wall-size blue Bic ballpoint pen drawings, charcoal drawings, and oil paintings, as well as controversial hand-made hyper-realistic lifesize silicon sculptures and installations. In recent years, The Kid's works have been exhibited at the Louvre and Le Grand Palais and during solo and group shows at ALB Anouk Le Bourdiec Gallery in Paris, France.

Through the social and political dimensions of his subjects and due to an influential collectors' international audience, The Kid has also become a committed supporter of the leading International non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch, in particular for its fight against social discrimination and juvenile justice, two repeating themes of The Kid's art work. Beyond Paris, he has also lived and worked in New York, London, and Milan.

Kenny Everett

Maurice James Christopher Cole (25 December 1944 – 4 April 1995), known professionally as Kenny Everett, was a British comedian, radio DJ and television entertainer. Everett is best known for his career as a radio DJ and for The Kenny Everett Video Show.

Personal life

Early life and education

Everett was born in Seaforth, Liverpool, Lancashire into a Catholic family as Maurice James Christopher Cole. Everett attended the local secondary modern school, St Bede's Secondary Modern School in Crosby, now part of Sacred Heart Catholic College. He attended a junior seminary at Stillington, North Yorkshire near York with an Italian missionary order, the Verona Fathers, where he was a choirboy. After he left school, he worked in a bakery and in the Advertising Department of The Journal of Commerce and Shipping Telegraph.

While working at a pirate radio station Radio London he was advised to change his name to avoid legal problems. He adopted the name "Everett" from American film comic actor Edward Everett Horton, a childhood hero.

Steve Fairnie

Steve Fairnie (1951–1993) was a British musician, artist and actor, the frontman of the post-punk band Writz, and as one half - with his wife Bev Sage - of the 1980s pop outfit Techno Twins (later just The Technos).

Career

Born in Fraserburgh and raised in Bristol, Fairnie excelled in fine art, eventually graduating from London's Royal College of Art with an MA in Sculpture (contemporaries included Turner Prize winner Tony Cragg). He began the acoustic gospel duo Fish Co with fellow singer-songwriter Steve Rowles and released the albums Can't Be Bad in 1975 and Beneath the Laughter in 1978, the latter with a full backing band - now including Fairnie's wife Bev Sage - that would form the nucleus of their subsequent project Writz.

Writz became a fixture on the post-punk London scene, headlining at major venues including the Marquee Club. Outright commercial success was elusive but 1979 single Night Nurse (produced by 10cc's Kevin Godley and Lol Creme) was a minor hit and was followed by the album Writz. The band - now Famous Names - played in the Dennis Potter LWT production Cream in My Coffee. Famous Names folded in 1981, many of the band and crew moving on to other musical projects, most notably Willie Williams, who went on to become an integral part of the U2 entourage. Sound engineer Ken Watts has been tour director for George Michael since Wham! days and monitor engineer John Roden went on to become one of the industry's foremost live engineers with clients including Paul McCartney.

Are You Being Served?

Are You Being Served? is a British sitcom created and written by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft, (Croft also co-directed) with contributions from Michael Knowles and John Chapman, for the BBC. The show follows the misadventures and mishaps of the staff of the retail ladies' and gentlemen's clothing ground floor departments of a fictional London department store called Grace Brothers.

Broadcast between 1972 and 1985 on BBC1, the sitcom itself spanned ten series totaling 69 parts — five of which are Christmas specials. Are You Being Served? was a great success in the UK and also captivated a large audience in Canada, Israel and Australia. In the United States, it gained a loyal and enthusiastic following when PBS television stations began airing reruns of it in the late 1980s, along with other popular classic "Britcoms". Since its original release, all ten series — including the Christmas specials — are available on DVD home video.

In 2004, the sitcom was ranked 20th in the countdown of Britain's Best Sitcom. It is regularly repeated worldwide - (PBS and BBC America in the United States; and BBC UKTV in Australia and New Zealand). From 7 October 2013 to 17 March 2014, 61 episodes of the series were repeated in the UK on BBC Two as part of Daytime Classics. A further season of repeats were shown on BBC2 during the spring and summer of 2015.