Their act was seen by cinemagoers in several Pathe Pictorial shorts between 1935 and 1939.With the outbreak of the Second World War the super-fit Jack Watson became a physical training instructor in the Navy and appeared on the radio variety show Navy Mixture, displaying a flair for mimicking a range of accents. At war’s end he continued to do a solo act both in variety and on the radio. He made his feature film debut with a small role in Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951) but had his first prominent role in Michael Powell’s controversial thriller Peeping Tom (1960), playing the Chief Inspector investigating a series of brutal killings.In the horror film Konga (1961) he was again a police inspector and delivered the film’s most memorable line when, after receiving a phone call, he informs his assistants, “There’s a huge monster gorilla that’s constantly growing to outlandish proportions loose in the streets.” But his acting career really took off when later in 1961 he was cast in Coronation Street as Petty Officer Bill Gregory, who had an affair with Elsie Tanner (Pat Phoenix) which she broke off when she discovered he was married.His character was to appear sporadically in the series over the next 23 years. When he was 16, he was performing a double act on the variety stage with his father, playing a precocious teenager named Hubert Hubert. His mother, Barbara Hughes, was a Gaiety Girl and young Jack was introduced to the world of music halls at an early age. His father Vernon Watson was a comedian who, wanting a more distinctive name, had become Nosmo King after he noticed a “No Smoking” sign in a theatre corridor. “I prefer to think of myself as a dedicated human being.”
Watson was born in 1921 in Thorney, near Peterborough.
“I shall never be a great actor,” he once stated, but his imposing physical prescence – he was an outdoor sports fanatic in real life and represented England in springboard diving championships – and his commitment to a role, often that of a villain or a serviceman, were convincing enough to earn him the offer of a Hollywood contract, which he refused “The word `star’ does not mean a thing to me,” he said. Coronation Street viewers will remember him as the man who finally won Elsie Tanner for keeps, and on the screen he was notable for playing tough and gruff men of action in such films as The Wild Geese and The Sea Wolves. THE CAREER of the tall and rugged actor Jack Watson embraced the music hall, radio, television and films. The older generation will recall him as part of a music-hall double act with his father Nosmo King, or as a radio comic and monologuist on such shows as Navy Mixture and Take It From Here. Which is why our own most real fears of Doomsday are environmental. Pollution, over-population, agricultural exhaustion or greenhouse gases are our Four Horsemen.
That, of course, would have been a different book – less lurid, perhaps, but more frightening.. The interpretative conclusion that Weber might have provided after his catalogue of the bizarre is sadly lacking.In the end, all apocalyptic prophecies are attempts to interpret their times. Will Jesus’s radiance be too bright for the cameras, he wonders. Reagan’s secretary of the interior, James Watt, told Congress in 1981: “I don’t know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns.” But, although polls show that 53 per cent of adult Americans expect Christ’s Second Coming quite soon, this all descends into the banal – as with Pat Robertson’s plans on how the Last Days might be televised. Over the century which followed, the Church’s most eminent theologians began to talk about myth and metaphor, and emptied Christianity of much of its literalism.So Weber’s long and somewhat desultory catalogue of believers becomes less and less mainstream the nearer he gets to the present. He is reduced to Hare Krishnas and the Nation of Islam, and those who have become victims of their own eschatological certainty in Jonestown or Waco; in the Solar Temple, Heaven’s Gate or Aum Shinrikyo cults.He has a brief respite with the presidency of Ronald Reagan, which worked in the perspective of Apocalypse and Armageddon. The Second World War military hero Orde Wingate went to Palestine with the aim of helping biblical prophecies come true.The problem with Professor Weber’s thesis is that, after the Enlightenment, notions of Apocalypse began to seep out of educated consciousness.
