Archives for April 2022

At the end of the second season M*A*S*H episode “Radar’s Report,” Gary Burghoff paints a smile on Radar O’Reilly’s face as only he can do.

Six years earlier, Burghoff had perfected the art of the small hopeful smile while playing one of the most wholesome characters on Broadway: Charlie Brown.

“Gary Burghoff, who plays Charlie, has that perfect knack of starting a tiny, hopeful little smile only to have it fade into self-dismay after some nasty crack from Lucy,” reported The Janesville Daily Gazette in 1967.

That year, many theater critics declared Burghoff a “good man” for gripping audiences with such good-natured material as Peanuts.

Burghoff’s version of Charlie Brown smashed Hollywood stage records, selling out every show and shocking everyone by selling $87,000 in advance ticket sales.

Nobody could’ve predicted the success, but winning life with a small smile has remained Burghoff’s style.

Burghoff is one of those enigmas, someone who seems to be talented at everything he tries. There’s seemingly nothing this multifaceted man cannot do.

Before Broadway, he was touring all the major nightclubs as the drummer holding down a celebrated jazz trio. After Broadway, he portrayed Radar in both the movie MASH and then the TV show M*A*S*H, leading Burghoff to soon win an Emmy for his talent as an actor.

Although it was a huge shock when Burghoff left M*A*S*H in its eighth season, Burghoff had discovered that he no longer wished to continue doing anything that wasn’t what he truly wished to be doing. And he felt he’d done all he could with Radar’s character.

He decided to leave behind his famous character, mostly because he truly felt that by putting off the other things he wanted to do beyond Radar, he was literally putting off living his own life.

So, he left M*A*S*H, and he went home to live near his family in Connecticut, where he took up painting.

In this craft, he excelled again, selling paintings of animals in each state that had come back from being endangered. The paintings would sell for as much as $25,000, and when he made limited edition prints, those would fetch anywhere from $200 to $800 a pop.

During this time, Burghoff also raised his kids and made more music, composing more than 100 songs and winning recording industry awards for three of his best tunes.

As a painter, he caught just as many eyes for his work, and he told The Palladium Item in 1999 that his goal in painting wildlife was to show the world that setbacks were temporary and comebacks were real.

“I am hoping to make the statement we can overcome,” Burghoff said.

Burghoff could surely relate to this, as an actor who used to dream of winning an Academy Award, but who later decided his family life was more important to him than celebrity or critical acclaim.

Dreams change, and Burghoff knew it just took adjusting to follow the heart’s new desire to ensure he continued living his life to the fullest.

But that didn’t mean Burghoff was done with acting for good.

“When I turned 50, the phone stopped ringing,” Burghoff told The Leader-Telegram in 2003. “How do you cast a 50-year-old Radar? Now slowly they’re beginning to say, ‘Gary Burghoff has surpassed Radar. We know that he has a range. Let’s cast him in character roles.'”

Burghoff continued acting through the mid-1990s, with one final appearance in a 2010 movie where he played a local pastor who inspires a man who is down on his luck.

It’s a fitting final role for Burghoff if it ends up being his last, because the man was seemingly made of inspiration and refused to let luck factor into his life — pushing himself to become a talented painter, musician, and actor, as well as a devoted family man.

He seemingly was too busy living life to the fullest to ever view one thing ending as anything but something else beginning.

In 1968, Burghoff imparted to The Los Angeles Citizen News a bit of wisdom that shows from the start of his acting career, he had already decided to make the best of whatever might come, practically embodying the small hopeful smile he charmed us with so often onstage and onscreen.

“We can’t all get a Valentine every day, but we learn to accept it as we learn to accept all phases of life — the good and the bad,” Burghoff said. “Happiness is two kinds of ice cream.”

Weeknights at 6 PM

April Fool everyone, it’s actually 2015, the coalition is still in Government and none of this terrible shit actually happened, it was all just an elaborate prank.

A debilitating week for Treasury-based luxury casualwear influencer Rishi Sunak. He used to seem invincible; now he’s the pocket Samson who’s just taken a massive haircut courtesy of his wife. I know Rishi wants to be prime minister and stuff, but it’s increasingly difficult to imagine how the mega-rich chancellor would persuade ordinary British people to do difficult things. Mate – you can’t even persuade your own wife to pay you tax.

But before I get accused of being a sexist by … hang on, let me get my lorgnette … James Cleverly, we’d better have a recap of developing events, which now include a US green card controversy. Initially believed to be watching his political oxidisation on Pacific time, the chancellor is in fact on these shores. I hear Lynton Crosby has banned Easter getaways, meaning Sunak will have to unwind in one of his houses in this country, as opposed to the high-end Santa Monica apartment he owns in a complex that includes a pet spa.

Anyway, he has granted a hotly defensive exclusive interview to the Sun, which runs under the apoplectic banner LAY OFF MY MISSUS. And I think you’ll agree that headline truly captures the way Rishi Sunak speaks. This, quite simply, is a guy who is as at-home screaming a warning out of a van window as he is indulging in a desultory browse of Mr Porter’s fine knits, his cursor hovering briefly over a £495 smoke-blue James Perse cashmere hoodie before the window is closed in listless pique. There are some injustices even a knitwear purchase can’t alleviate. Even so, I think the headline could have been punchier. I’d have gone with PAY TAX? IN THIS ECONOMY?!

As for the meat of the interview, I hugely enjoyed the implication that the £30,000 annual flat fee required for Akshata Murty to retain her non-dom status is the typical foreign national experience in this country. As Rishi explains of Murty’s completely legal arrangements: “That is how the system works for people like her who are international who have moved here.” (Great to hear that at least one part of any of the UK system works. “The system works” is really not a phrase you’re hearing a lot right now.) Very enjoyable, too, to read the furious commentary about Murty on MailOnline and in the Daily Mail, whose proprietor Lord Rothermere inherited his own non-dom status from his father. Again: the system works.

And listen, what’s not to love about this latest episode of Sunak’s fish-out-of-water comedy? Recent outings have seen the rarefied protagonist’s hilarious interactions with the ordinary world. The one where he goes to the petrol station and fills up someone else’s car, then tries to scan his card on the barcode reader. The one where he fails to do anything meaningful in his mini-budget to alleviate the cost of living crisis for the poorest households, then promptly gives an interview in which he trills: “We all have different breads in my house.” The one where he scans the popular press and comes up with the perfect person to self-pityingly compare himself to in a manner that in no way caused his spads to kick a hole in the wall. As Sunak explained: “Both Will Smith and me, having our wives attacked …” Come on! It’s a funny show!

Moving on to the villain trying to sabotage him, their precise identity remains a mystery. Where are all the mean stories about Sunak coming from? Not quite sure we need to activate Nancy Drew on this puzzle – Sunak’s naked manoeuvring, coupled with his vanishing act every time an unfavourable partygate story broke for Boris Johnson, suggests at least the dim possibility that his aggressor may be known to him. My own fan theory, however, is that this is a show where Sunak plays both protagonist and antagonist. Or to put it another way, he is his own worst enemy.

The current stories are not a “smear”, as he claims, but the totally predictable consequence of his family’s financial arrangements, which he should have seen coming a mile off. It may be perfectly legal, but it is obviously – obviously! – a giant piss-take if the chancellor’s own wife has non-dom status.

Apologies for returning to an achingly familiar furrow for this column over the years, but it really doesn’t have to be this way. The Hong Kong tax code, often cited as the most efficient and avoidance-proof in the world, is around 350 pages. The ever-expanding UK tax code is the world’s longest, currently running to more than 22,000 pages, having increased vastly in size under both Labour and Conservative governments. Unsurprisingly, it amounts to a charter for myriad types of avoidance. Tell you who should do something about this, just like all his recent predecessors should have but didn’t: Rishi Sunak.

Instead, he prefers to spend his days saying no to pleas to alleviate hardship, which seems to exist in a universe beyond his comprehension. Hard to pick a low point, but I’ll go with the time he turned down the request from the hugely respected educational recovery tsar Kevan Collins for £15bn in pandemic catch-up funding for children. Sunak would only fork out £1.4bn, which isn’t even twice what he spent buying people free burgers with “eat out to help out”. Collins resigned in despair. It emerged that an internal presentation had shown Sunak and others in Downing Street how failure to invest £15bn now in this failed generation of children would result in the state paying upwards of £160bn down the line in welfare and criminal justice. And still Sunak said no, presumably on the basis that that would all be someone else’s problem in the future. As David Cameron reportedly said to his aides before his post-referendum resignation: “Why should I do all the hard shit?”

And why should Rishi Sunak do it either? Why shouldn’t his wife tick the box and keep paying her 30 grand a year to stay out of things? Why shouldn’t statements of fact be denounced as smears? All sorts of things are optional if ordinary people would only realise it. Let them eat different breads.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Kim Kardashian has revealed she called her ex Kanye West in tears after discovering that their son Saint, six, had seen an ad about ‘unreleased footage’ from the infamous sex tape she made with her ex Ray J.

In a clip from the upcoming premiere episode of The Kardashians, the reality star, 41, admits that she would have ‘died inside’ had her son been old enough to understand the context of the joke.  

The premiere episode of the show documents the moment that six-year-old Saint ran up to his mother to show her a pop-up ad touting alleged unseen footage from her sex tape, which appeared on his tablet while he was playing an online game. 

An emotional Kim is then seen talking to her lawyers about the sex tape, telling them that she will ‘sue’ over any unreleased footage and ‘burn’ anyone who is involved in re-releasing the tape ‘to the ground’, while admitting she ‘can’t go through this again’, according to the LA Times. 

‘I don’t want it to be copied. I have four kids. I can’t go through this again,’ she says. ‘This was like 20 years ago. I’m not going to go through this again. I know the right attorneys this time. I know exactly what to do this time… I have all the time, all the money, and all of the resources to burn them all to the ground.’ 

However, the reality star adds that she is ‘99.9 per cent sure’ no other footage from the sex tape actually exists.  

Dramatic: Kim Kardashian has revealed she called her ex Kanye West in tears after discovering their son Saint saw a joke about ‘unreleased footage’ from her sex tape with ex Ray J

Tough time: Speaking in the upcoming episode of The Kardashians, the reality star admits she’d have ‘died inside’ if her son had been any older and understood the context of the joke

During an on-camera interview from the premiere episode, which will be released on Thursday, Kim once again opened up about her horror at Saint seeing the pop-up ad, which featured an oft-memed image of her crying. 

In the scenes Kim explains her son Saint was saw the ad while he played Roadblox on his iPad, an online game which allows users to play and chat to one another.

She reveals he was sent a ‘super inappropriate’ message that hinted at ‘unreleased footage’ from her sex tape with Ray J, along with photo of her crying face.

‘The last thing I want as a mother is for my past to be brought up 20 years later,’ Kim says. ‘It’s real embarrassing s**t. I need to deal with it, and will deal with it.’ 

Later footage then shows Kim calling her ex Kanye in tears, telling him: ‘I almost died when Saint thought it was funny,’ noting her son was too young to understand the context of the ad.

Kim adds she would have ‘died inside’ if her son was ‘a little bit older and old enough to read.’

The mother-of-four has previously detailed how she ‘dreads’ one of her children coming across the leaked tape. 

Candid: In the show Kim also discusses co-parenting her four children with ex Kanye: They share daughters North, eight, and Chicago, four, and sons Saint and Psalm, two 

Since splitting in February 2021, Kim and Kanye have been co-parenting their four children, North, eight, Saint, Chicago, four, and Psalm, two, and the star goes onto detail the challenges of managing childcare with the rapper. 

It comes after it was previously reported Kim had sought help from her lawyers to help block Ray J from ‘leaking raunchy recordings.’

Her ecstasy-fueled sexploits from her 22nd birthday in Cabo San Lucas in 2002 with her ex were famously released by Vivid Entertainment in a 41-minute DVD titled Kim Kardashian, Superstar in 2007.

‘Kim knows that Ray J made other tapes of them together. Some of the footage will be incredibly intimate,’ a source told The Sun on Sunday.

‘She has told lawyers, “Over my dead body is this happening again.”‘ 

Scandal? It comes after it was previously reported Kim had sought help from her lawyers to help block Ray J from ‘leaking raunchy recordings’ 

XXX: The reality star’s ecstasy-fueled sexploits from her birthday in Cabo San Lucas in 2002 with her ex were famously released by Vivid Entertainment in 2007

It was unclear at the time if the threatening footage was part of the alleged second sex tape on a hard drive that Kim’s estranged third husband Kanye West claimed he bought from Ray J.

‘I went and got the laptop from Ray J myself,’ the 44-year-old rapper-designer said in a January 24 interview with Hollywood Unlocked.

‘I met this man at the airport, then got on a red-eye, came back [and] delivered it to her at 8 a.m. in the morning… She cried when she saw it. 

‘You know why she cried when she seen it on the laptop? Because it represents how much she’s been used. It represents how much people didn’t love her, and they just saw her as a commodity.’

Claims: A source told The Sun on Sunday: ‘She has told lawyers, ”Over my dead body is this happening again” (Kim is pictured on March 30)

The very next day, Kardashian denied there was an second sex tape.

‘After review, there was nothing sexual seen, only footage on the plane on the way to Mexico and footage at a club and restaurant on the same trip,’ her rep told People on January 25.

‘Kim remains firm in her belief that there is no new second tape that exists. After 20 years, she truly wishes to move on from this chapter with focus instead on the positive things she continues to do as a mother, entrepreneur and advocate for justice reform.’

The SKIMS CEO’s statement seemed to prompt the Mississippi-born R&B singer to tweet on January 26: ‘This needs to stop. I also have kids.’  

Plot thickens? It’s unclear if the threatening footage was part of the alleged second sex tape on a hard drive that Kanye claimed he bought from Ray J 

‘There was nothing sexual unseen’: The very next day, Kardashian denied there was an second sex tape (pictured on Sunday)

Controversy: The SKIMS CEO’s statement seemed to prompt the Mississippi-born R&B singer to tweet on January 26: ‘This needs to stop. I also have kids’

The latest drama over the sex tape came 10 months after Kim admitted Keeping Up with the Kardashians would not have been as successful had it not been for all that publicity.

‘Looking back, probably not,’ Kardashian told moderator Andy Cohen during the KUWTK 20th season reunion in June.

The E! Network reality series famously premiered in 2007 just seven months after Vivid purchased the 2002 tape from a ‘third party’ for $1M.

The aspiring attorney reportedly dropped her invasion of privacy lawsuit against Vivid and received a $5M settlement.

‘Looking back, probably not’: Last year Kim admitted Keeping Up with the Kardashians would not have been as successful had it not been for all that publicity around her sex tape

Kim was then asked what she’ll tell her children whenever they uncover their mother’s sex tape past, and she responded: ‘I haven’t had to as of yet.

‘And luckily I think that so many years have gone on and so many things have happened positively that it really erases that. It is something I have to live with for the rest of my life.’

In 2016, Ian Halperin accused the half-Armenian beauty and her momager Kris Jenner of ‘engineering the deal’ to ‘deliberately leak’ the sex tape for publicity.

‘When it comes to selling a sex tape, both parties need to sign off,’ Halperin wrote in his book Kardashian Dynasty.

‘It is clear that Vivid would not have announced plans to distribute Kim’s tape without a clear indication from the family that they would give the go-ahead once they had come to terms on a price.’

A rep for Kim told Page Six at the time: ‘All the assertions are false.’

Many point to Kardashian learning the reality TV ropes from former boss Paris Hilton, whose own Vivid Entertainment sex tape made her even more famous in 2004.

However, the 41-year-old hotel heiress’ Fox show The Simple Life premiered six months before her ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon signed off on releasing their 2001 on-camera tryst titled 1 Night in Paris.

Like Kardashian, Paris settled her lawsuit against Saloman, who also sued her for defamation, for a reported $400K.

Catch more of the Calabasas socialite and her famous family in the 40-episode reality TV spin-off The Kardashians premiering this Thursday on Hulu, Disney+ internationally, and Star+ in Latin America.

This week! Catch more of Kim and her famous family in the 40-episode reality TV spin-off The Kardashians premiering this Thursday on Hulu, Disney+ internationally, and Star+ in Latin America