The Thompsons on Roman Abramovich, Brookside, DVDs and Cilla Black

Saturday 02 September 2023
reading time: min, words

For our 20th birthday issue we asked Nottingham’s most opinionated greengrocers about events from back in 2003…

Thompsons (1)

Roman Abramovich buys Chelsea FC
We remember Ken Bates who sold it to him. He bought it for £1 and sold it for £140 million. He was an independent steel merchant and was always good at making money. He sold his steel works for more than that, too. You’d have to say the Abramovich era was very successful for them, but it didn’t end well, did it? Does Peter Osgood still play for Chelsea?

Brookside ends on Channel 4 after 21 years
Thank goodness for that. Brookside was the soap in Liverpool where they buried people under the patio, wasn’t it? We don’t really know anything about TV soaps. We can’t abide them, they are so boring!

Sales of DVDs overtake VHS for the first time
We don’t know what any of those things are. We can just about remember Betamax tapes which we had in school, but it’s all just fancy technology to us. Are DVDs the discs? We’ve got Where Eagles Dare on disc somewhere at home but we’ve never understood how we play it. I don’t think we’ve got the right cable.

Cilla Black quits Blind Date live on air
It was a good gig for her that, if we remember rightly she was the highest paid person on television for quite some time. We never watched it ourselves as it’s not the kind of show we like. But in the sixties she was an absolute superstar. We saw her at the Royal Concert Hall. She was a millionaire by the time she was twenty or 21. Her music career was much better than her TV career.  

We have a favour to ask

LeftLion is Nottingham’s meeting point for information about what’s going on in our city, from the established organisations to the grassroots. We want to keep what we do free to all to access, but increasingly we are relying on revenue from our readers to continue. Can you spare a few quid each month to support us?

Support LeftLion

Please note, we migrated all recently used accounts to the new site, but you will need to request a password reset

Sign in using

Or using your

Forgot password?

Register an account

Password must be at least 8 characters long, have 1 uppercase, 1 lowercase, 1 number and 1 special character.

Forgotten your password?

Reset your password?

Password must be at least 8 characters long, have 1 uppercase, 1 lowercase, 1 number and 1 special character.