# Now 82, Melly has lived a bohemian life, one not short of problems – she has struggled with alcoholism – and grief: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2023/02/15/now-82-melly-has-lived-a-bohemian-life-one-not-short-of-problems-she-has-struggled-with-alcoholism-and-grief-video-photos/
- Published: 2023-02-15T00:02:18+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**There is nothing new about polyamory, whatever eager millennials might tell you.
Anyone listening to last Sunday’s Private Passions on Radio 3 would have heard Diana
Melly talk about her open marriage in the 1960s and 1970s with the late musician
and bon viveur, George Melly.**

I think it’s fair to say that the enjoyment of their particular set-up was not necessarily
shared equally. “As so often happens,” presenter Michael Berkeley, dancing nimbly
through the thickets of sexual propriety, suggested, “one person dealt with this
more happily than the other.”

It’s perhaps not a conversation you’d expect on Radio 3 between arias from Puccini,
Mozart and Verdi. But the programme is called Private Passions, I suppose, and everyone
was really very grown up about it all.

“Is that a recipe you would advise people to follow – open marriages – or do you
think on the whole it is better to hope you find somebody you are in love with and
they’re in love with you?” Berkeley asked.

“I think that’s obviously better,” Melly said, “but because we all live so much 
longer now … If you get married at let’s say 24 and you live to 94 … that’s a very
long time. I do know some people who have stayed married like that. Not many.”

Now 82, Melly has lived a bohemian life, one not short of problems – she has struggled
with alcoholism – and grief. She has tragically lost two children, one to cancer
and one to a heroin overdose, and at the end of her husband’s life she had to nurse
him through dementia and lung cancer. But she beats on, falling in love with opera
in recent years and taking up ballroom dancing. That’s when she’s not reading the
ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus.

“He’s very, very good on friendship,” she suggested. “And what he says about sex
and love I think is quite interesting. He says the best you can hope for is that
it won’t do you any harm.”

![George Melly - Wikipedia](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/
1/11/George_Melly_1978.jpg/640px-George_Melly_1978.jpg)

Talking of the classics, over on Radio 4 on Thursday, actor Jade Anouka was using
the documentary Playing the Prince to make a pitch for playing the role of Hamlet.“
I don’t know if there have been any queer, black, female Hamlets and, if there have,
not from south-east London and not with my history,” she admitted.

Anouka spoke to actors who had played Shakespeare’s tragic hero – Samuel West, Adrian
Lester and Derek Jacobi – in this often fascinating exploration of one of the great
theatrical roles. Lester pointed out that if Hamlet was replaced by Othello the 
play would be a lot shorter.

“If you’d gone to Othello and said, ‘I am your father’s ghost and I was killed by
your uncle,’ the uncle would be dead within 10 minutes. End of play.”

Jacobi recalled once performing Hamlet at the Old Vic with Winston Churchill sitting
in the front row. “As I started he started saying it with me, which was a bit throwing.”
Did the veteran actor have any advice for others who might be playing the Dane? “
You’ve got to make sure your tights fit.”

Revelations on 5 Live Sport last Saturday. Describing their time with the Scotland
football squad, former Scotland players Alan Hutton and James McFadden told us that
going away with the international squad was always all about conspicuous consumption.
Three courses for lunch and dinner. “It was a disgrace,” Hutton admitted.

“I think we may have just discovered why Scotland may have struggled on the men’s
side of things in the international era for a little while,” presenter Mark Chapman
suggested, before asking who was the biggest eater. “Kris Boyd,” Hutton and McFadden
announced. Clipes.

Sherlock Holmes’s best-known novel is given a musical adaptation by composer Neil
Brand, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Mark Gatiss plays Holmes and Sanjeev
Bhaskar is Dr Watson.

![BBC Two - George Melly's Last Stand](https://i0.wp.com/ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/
ic/1200x675/p01gh860.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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