'I Say!'

Born on this day in 1911 was Thomas Terry Hoar Stevens, who changed his name to Terry-Thomas and built a glittering career as a comic actor, playing the archetypal upper-class English cad or bounder. He was, like many actors of his time (e.g. Charles Hawtrey), his own creation, having entirely reinvented himself, name and all. Born to a lower-middle-class family – his father was a merchant at Smithfield meat market – he soon began the process of turning himself into 'Terry-Thomas', beginning by imitating all the posh actors and comedians he saw or heard, and adopting the dandyish style that he was to develop to a high, almost absurd pitch (Beau Brummel would not have approved of his excesses). After his parents had managed to send him to a minor public school for a few years, he made his debut in the world of work at Smithfield, dressed in a taupe double-breasted suit with carnation buttonhole, olive-green pork-pie hat and yellow gloves, and flourishing a long cigarette holder and silver-topped malacca cane. He did not last long at Smithfield, believe it or not, and was soon making his way in show business, becoming, by the Fifties, a star of the silver and the small screens, of cabaret and the comedy circuit.
  One of his stranger film roles was in the dire John Boulting version of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim. Terry-Thomas was wildly miscast as Bertrand Welch, the most odious and pretentious character in the novel. Amis notes in his memoirs that 'the hash he made of the part was so comic that the result was a large net gain'. The author took an immediate liking to T-T, whom he found to be just the same off-screen as on, and with whom, of course, he shared an avid interest in drinking and womanising. On an epic pub crawl in Edinburgh, they got on like a house on fire.
 And here's a curious footnote. In 1960, when T-T was playing the Liverpool Empire, a prized cigarette holder, decorated with 42 diamonds, disappeared from his changing room, much to his chagrin. The police investigated, and found 40 of the diamonds inside a roll of carpet in the home of a 20-year-old unemployed would-be comedian called James Joseph Tarbuck. Yes, that one – Jimmy Tarbuck (who pleaded guilty and was given two years' probation).