Thanks very much  – yes, that’s absolutely fine, though I won’t hold you to this in the likely event of more interesting material becoming available! Will send you contact details separately.

Coming from someone whose ‘Day By Day’ guide must be the ultimate in showbiz scholarship, your comments are much appreciated. Once again, the material assembled on this site (and the vigilance / dedication of its contributors) is surely the envy of museum curators and university archivists everywhere ...  ‘a veritable cornucopia of Crosby curiosities’ as the great man himself might have put it!

First of all, a big-thank-you to Richard for getting in touch and his extremely kind ‘welcome’ to the club. I was the fortunate contestant who won the BBC ‘Mastermind’ heat on February 10th 2012 with Bing as my specialist subject, as mentioned elsewhere on the forum. I have been truly overwhelmed by the vast compendium of material which has been assembled on this site, besides which my own knowledge pales into total insignificance! A real labour of love and surely the ultimate source of information. I actually checked in here several times during my (brief) period of research and preparation for the quiz when I needed to verify some obscure or disputed fact.

Having been asked for a bit of an ‘intro’ to my interest in the greatest popular singer of the twentieth century, here goes ... sorry if it’s a bit of an ‘essay’. The habits of an erstwhile English teacher die hard!

British TV in the 1970s – only three channels, and invariably (Sunday afternoons on BBC2) a black-and-white film, often shown as part of a series – the Fred Astaire /Ginger Rogers musicals were the catalyst for a fascination with 1930s Hollywood. Irving Berlin famously preferred Astaire as an interpreter of his songs, but easy to transfer one’s loyalty to Bing. The combination of romantic glamour, easy-going insouciance and masculine banter makes it easy to understand how Bing’s demographic was so broad for so many years. (I’m sure the Crosby-Hope-Lamour triangle provides ample material for many academic theses, but the girls always gave as good as they got when they were allowed into the act!) And Bing was still around in my teenage years, continuing to make recordings; ‘That’s What Life Is All About’ (however homespun) a gentle antidote to the self-proclamation of ‘My Way’.

I was lucky enough to go up to Oxford in 1977; while half the student population were marching against Thatcherism, the ‘Brideshead revival’ was also in full swing, harking back to a