Category: Petula Clark

Hey, all of you British natives, nationals, and residents! Richard Harries has written to remind me, to remind you, to please sign the PETition to have Petula Clark promoted from MBE to full-fledged Dame! I will be very petulant if there aren’t at least 1000 signatories on the form before the March 12 deadline. I may have a Brit name, but I’m a Yank, so I can’t sign, but as Rich points out, “US citizens (and other non Brits ) can sign if they have a UK address. Sheila Ferguson of the Three Degrees signed on that basis!” So there you have it.

Go to THIS LINK NOW and add your name to those who have already signed. In thanks for your participation in this worthy cause, here is a very special and personal song by Pet.

[flv:/Video/NOV07/PetLive.flv 400 300]

Today is Petula Clark’s birthday! Happy birthday! In 30 excellent minutes, the divine and sublime Pet tells her own story.

[flv:/Video/NOV07/ThisIsMySong.flv 400 300]

Still smarting from the loss of the Petula Clark blog, it falls to me to carry on. Here is some more of Pet in Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/SEP07/MrChipsParty.flv 440 200]

I could have sworn I made a comment elsewhere about sneaking a peek at a movie my parents were watching one night, after I’d gone to bed, but now I can’t find it. But anyway, I have a vivid memory of the image that I’ve put in the preview frame of the video player.

That sneaked peek was around 1967. I was a year or more into comic book collecting, making the transition from the lighter DC Comics to the heavier Marvel Comics. I loved the whole feeling of the opening minutes of Sunset Boulevard. I thought it was just like a comic book, with William Holden floating face down in the pool, narrating his own story from beyond the grave.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/SEP07/SunsetBlvd.flv 400 300]

Note: Petula Clark played Norma Desmond on Broadway in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical adaptation of Sunset Boulevard.

A regular comment writer on Petula Clark: Driven By Emotion was Davie, who has written to me with an explanation of the blog’s sudden disappearance.

The blogger was getting a lot of hate mail and abuse from some nutty people. However, the final straw came when a copy of the blog was put up with a slightly different title, and it contained an upload of Petula’s new album.

Making some obscure pieces of Pet’s enormous catalogue available was a fantastic service to her fans. The blogger would NEVER, however, have put out an entire album, and most definitely, not her latest one. That would be seen to interfere with Petula’s career.

Clearly the person with a grudge against this blog, albeit that he is a complete ass hole, can find his way round a computer.

Presumably our blogger was standing on someone’s toes, costing them money perhaps, and the saboteur, went to work to end it all.

The blogger knows who the culprit is.

It’s sad because we have lost a really good, interesting blog, created with love and attention to detail. I think all of us who enjoyed the blog would want to thank the blogger, for putting up with all the shit that they did… and hope that they will come back at some stage in the future.

Incidentally, this information was posted on the blog on Saturday. Then it closed down.

I’ve had the honour to meet Petula on quite a few occasions over the years. My impression of her is that she would HATE people who did this kind of thing.

But then, as the saboteur is almost certainly mentally deranged… why would he care about that?

Thanks very much for the information, Davie. I wish I hadn’t missed that last post on the blog. Yes, thanks go to the blogger and let’s hope for a return of the blog. I’ll carry on with my occasional Pet posts. By the way, Goodbye Mr. Chips with Pet is on Turner Classic Movies TODAY at 11 ET.