Last week, after the first part of my reading of A Christmas Carol, Mark Steyn Club member Rede Batcheller wrote with a request:
Next, if you dare, Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales. TYVM!!!!
Well, I love that tale, Rede, but I'm not sure my Welsh vowels are totally reliable. So we have something even better for you to kick off this Christmas weekend - an authentic Welsh lady, the great Siân Phillips, who, during her own childhood Christmases, actually worked with Dylan Thomas - as we discuss below. Click to watch:
Among the benefits of Mark Steyn Club membership is that you can enjoy our TV content in any medium you desire: video, audio or text. So, if you'd rather experience Siân and Dylan Thomas in audio only, please log-in here.
You can find more non-visual content from The Mark Steyn Show over in our Audio & Transcripts department. And, if you'd like to hear more from Siân, she recreates her Tony-nominated performance of "See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have" on our Frank Loesser centenary special, available here.
My acting skills are considerably below Siân's, but, if you've yet to hear my take on Charles Dickens this Christmas, you can find that here. There'll be more video entertainment this Christmas Eve with a special live-performance edition of our Song of the Week.
Tales for Our Time, Song of the Week and much of our other content are made possible through the support of members of The Mark Steyn Club. We launched The Mark Steyn Club earlier this summer, and on this first clubland Christmas I'm immensely heartened by all those viewers and listeners and readers across the globe - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Surrey to the Solomon Islands - who've signed up to be a part of it. Oh, and if you're still holiday shopping at this late hour, don't forget our limited-time Christmas Gift Membership, which includes your choice of a handsome hardback or CD set personally autographed by me to your loved one. The book or albums won't arrive till after Boxing Day now, but all the other delights of membership can be electronically delivered to your friends and family on Christmas morning. More details here.
Patrick Halligan
That was lovely, warm, beautiful. I always delight in 'older' people's interviews and conversation, if you can forgive my saying so, because they tend more often than not to have a charm and depth and texture totally absent from younger people. There's a class and grace that simply does not exist the younger you go. Thanks for this, for many reasons.