A Specialist School for the Arts
In September 2005 Selby High School introduced a new pastoral house system of four Houses to replace the Year Group system. Each of these houses contains a number of mixed age Form Groups, containing students from Y7 - 11
House Colours.
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The benefits of the house system are as follows:
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As Selby High School is now a specialist school for the performing and visual arts the house names have been selected from famous Yorkshire persons related to the arts.
Each House annually has nominated one boy and one girl House Captain and one boy and one girl Vice Captain.
Lesley Garrett was born in 1957 in Yorkshire. The English soprano, Lesley Garrett, CBE, is Britain’s most popular soprano, regularly appearing in both opera and in concert, on television and CD; she has won both critical acclaim and the affection of many fans and music lovers. As a recording artist, she has nine solo CD’s to her credit; Soprano in Red received the Gramophone Award for 'Best-selling Classical Artist of the Year', Diva! A Soprano At The Movies, Prima Donna, Simple Gifts, Soprano in Red, Soprano in Hollywood, and I Will Wait for You all received silver discs and A Soprano Inspired and Lesley Garrett both achieved gold discs. Traveling Light, released in November 2001 is Lesley's first album under her new exclusive recording agreement with EMI Classics. Lesley was also a featured artist on the platinum selling Perfect Day single released by the BBC in aid of Children in Need.
Lesley Garrett's own BBC2 television series 'The Lesley Garrett Show' continued in the autumn of 2001 featuring programs from Naples, Seville and New York with guest artists Marcello Alvarez, Ian Bostridge, Alison Moyet, Michael Ball, Maxim Vengerov and Joshua Bell. Previously titled 'Lesley Garrett…Tonight’ the series has previously featured guest artists as diverse as Renee Fleming and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Marti Pellow, Michel Legrand and Elaine Paige. Other television appearances have included the documentary ‘Jobs for the Girls’ (BBC1) with Linda Robson and Pauline Quirke, ‘Viva la Diva’ (BBC2), and ‘The Lily Savage Show’ (BBC1). Lesley was also the subject of a South Bank Show on LWT in 1998.
Lesley Garrett’s operatic career included early engagements at the Wexford Festival, Welsh National Opera, Opera North, and Glyndebourne Festival Opera before joining English National Opera in 1984. During her time with English National Opera (ENO), Lesley starred in many productions and won critical acclaim for her portrayals of both comic and serious roles. Most recently she returned to the Coliseum in the spring of 2001 for a revival of her acclaimed Rosina in Rossini’s Barber of Seville. She is now a member of the ENO's Board of Directors. Lesley made her Covent Garden debut with the Royal Opera's production of The Merry Widow.
Internationally Lesley Garrett has performed throughout Europe, the USA (most recently appearing with Jonathon Pryce at the Hollywood Bowl in performances of My Fair Lady), Australia, Russia, Brazil, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan and South Korea, where she sang Happy Birthday for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in the presence of the Queen during her State visit to the country
For Millennium Eve, Lesley Garrett sang opera and pop classics with Bryan Ferry, The Eurythmics and Mick Hucknall in the grounds of the Royal Observatory and National Maritime Museum in Greenwich to celebrate the arrival of the new century. In May 2000 her autobiography 'Notes from a Small Soprano' was published by Hodder and Stoughton. Later that month Lesley appeared at the first-ever Classical Brit Awards, a gala fundraising concert and musical celebration for Dame Elizabeth Taylor and performed the very last Abide With Me at the 2000 FA Cup Final (prior to the closure of Wembley Stadium) in aid of the NSPCC.
Lesley Garrett was awarded a CBE in the 2002 New Year's Honours List for Services to Music
David Hockney, born in 1937, is an English painter, printmaker, photographer and stage designer. Perhaps the most popular and versatile British artist of the 20th century, Hockney made apparent his facility as a draughtsman while studying at Bradford School of Art between 1953 and 1957, producing portraits and observations of his surroundings under the influence of the Euston Road School and of Stanley Spencer. From 1957 to 1959 he worked in hospitals as a conscientious objector to fulfill the requirements of national service. On beginning a three-year postgraduate course at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1959, he turned first to the discipline of drawing from life in two elaborate studies of a skeleton before working briefly in an abstract idiom inspired by the paintings of Alan Davie. Encouraged by a fellow student, R. B. Kitaj, Hockney soon sought ways of reintegrating a personal subject-matter into his art while remaining faithful to his newly acquired modernism.
Hockney's subsequent development was a continuation of his student work, which was initially regarded by critics as part of the wave of Pop art that emanated from the Royal College of Art, although a significant change in his approach occurred after his move to California at the end of 1963. Undoubtedly Hockney's popularity can be attributed not simply to his visual wit and panache but also to this appeal to our own escapist instincts.
On his arrival in California, Hockney changed from oil to acrylic paints, applying them as a smooth surface of flat and brilliant color that helped to emphasize the pre-eminence of the image. The anonymous, uninflected surface of works such as Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool also suggests the snapshot photographs on which they were partly based. The border of bare canvas surrounding the image reinforces this association, allowing Hockney to return to a more traditional conception of space while maintaining a modernist stance in the suggestion of a picture of a picture. By the end of the decade Hockney's anxieties about appearing modern had abated to the extent that he was able to pare away the devices and to allow his naturalistic rendering of the world to speak for itself. He was particularly successful in a series of double portraits of friends, for example Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970–71; London, Tate), later voted the most popular modern painting in the Tate Gallery.
While some of the paintings of this period appear stilted and lifeless in their reliance on photographic sources, Hockney excelled in his drawings from life, particularly in the pen-and-ink portraits executed in a restrained and elegant line. It is as a draughtsman and graphic artist that Hockney's reputation is most secure.
Hockney's work for the stage since 1975 brought out his essential inventiveness and helped free him of the ultimately stultifying constraints of his naturalistic mode. His most notable designs included productions at the Glyndebourne Opera Festival of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress in 1975 and of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte in 1978, and at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, of Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortilèges, as well as other French works in 1980 and a Stravinsky triple-bill in 1981. These were followed by other ambitious designs, for example for Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at the Los Angeles Music Center Opera in 1987, for Puccini's Turandot at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1992, and for Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1992. The example of Picasso, especially after his death in 1973, was also an important factor in Hockney's return to the stylistic gamesmanship that distinguished him as a student. His obsessiveness, energy and curiosity resulted in large bodies of work in different media, including the Paper Pools and other pulped paper works of 1978, as well as experiments with Polaroid and 35 mm photography: several hundred composite images in which he applied the multiple viewpoints of Cubist painting to a mechanical medium.
These experiments were part of a continuing fascination with technology that led him to produce ‘home made prints' on photocopiers in 1986 and later images conveyed by fax machine or devised on a computer. The photographs also directed his attention to theories on perspective in large panoramic paintings that combine direct observation with memory as a means of suggesting movement through space, for example A Visit with Christopher and Don, Santa Monica Canyon 1984, a painting on two canvases. His restless desire for innovation was vividly manifested in the series of Very New Paintings initiated in 1992, in which he gave almost abstract form to his experience of the Pacific coastline and the Santa Monica mountains as an intoxicating succession of plunging perspectives, dazzling views, brilliant light and intense color. Hockney's identification with Picasso, Matisse and other modern masters has been viewed with suspicion by those who think his motives cynical and self-promoting. Such an interpretation, however, seems foreign to an artist whose ambition was consistently to claim for his work a range and openness rare for his generation.
Date of birthJames Mason was a great English actor of British and American films. James mason was born in Yorkshire.
James Mason began as a stage actor after reading architecture at Cambridge, making his professional debut with a rep company in Croydon before being taken on by Tyrone Guthrie at the Old Vic in 1933 to play a useful range of roles.
Mason remained in the theatre becoming a prominent stage actor, meanwhile getting first small, then rapidly larger roles in "quota quickies", minor films made to accommodate laws mandating a certain percentage of films shown in Britain to be British-made. Mason's talent for playing protagonists of a decidedly hard-bitten or melancholy stripe brought him from these minor films to a position as one of Britain's major film stars of the Forties. When, late in that decade, he came to America, he played somewhat more glamorous or heroic roles than he had been accustomed to in Britain, but he remained a dynamic and intelligent force on the screen. His tendency to take any job offered led him to have many unworthy credits on his resume, but throughout his career he remained a respected and powerful figure in the industry. His mellifluous voice and an uncanny ability to suggest rampant emotion beneath a face of absolute calm made him a fascinating performer to watch. He died of a heart attack in 1984 at his home in Switzerland.
He entered films with 1935's newspaper thriller, Late Extra (d. Albert Parker), and, once his film career gathered momentum, he rarely appeared on the stage again, with a 1954 season at Stratford, Ontario, as exception. He owed his film start to the legendary American, UK-based agent, Al Parker, who 'discovered' him in 1935 and represented him till he, Parker, died, after which his widow, Margaret Johnston, took over the agency and Mason.
In the 1930s he made about a dozen mostly forgotten films, though given a chance to glower handsomely in, say, The Mill on the Floss (d. Tim Whelan, 1937), or to be the heroine's sensitive protector in Hatter's Castle (d. Lance Comfort, 1941).
t was when he took a riding crop to wicked Margaret Lockwood in The Man in Grey (d. Leslie Arliss, 1943) that he became Everywoman's favourite brute: he persecuted Phyllis Calvert in Fanny by Gaslight (d. Anthony Asquith, 1944); drove Dulcie Gray to drink and suicide in They Were Sisters (d. Arthur Crabtree, 1945); smashed his walking stick over Ann Todd's piano-playing fingers in The Seventh Veil (d. Compton Bennett, 1945); and, as a highwayman, fell in with The Wicked Lady (d. Leslie Arliss, 1945), Lockwood again.
These skilful studies in sexy sadism made him a huge box-office draw, though, when he played the character role of the retired draper in A Place of One's Own (d. Bernard Knowles, 1945), his subtlest work to date, the fans were less interested. Postwar, he gave, in Odd Man Out (d. Carol Reed, 1947), what may be his greatest performance, as a wounded gunman (IRA, though not named) pursued relentlessly through the night-time city to his inevitable end. This is work of tragic stature.
At this point, Mason embarked on the American phase of his stardom, attracting a lot of chauvinistic British criticism for doing so, and for a while the received wisdom was with the Picturegoer scribe who wrote (1950): "Certainly, James does not seem to be advancing his professional career in Hollywood". An auteurist decade later, his work for Max Ophuls in Caught (1948) and The Reckless Moment (1949) and Vincente Minnelli in Madame Bovary (1949) would be accorded new respect.
He did some fine work in Hollywood, including Rommel in The Desert Fox (US, d. Henry Hathaway, 1951), a troubled Brutus in Julius Caesar (US, d. Joseph L.Mankiewicz, 1953) and the tragically doomed Norman Maine in A Star Is Born (US, d. George Cukor, 1954), but it was as if he had turned his back on the easy stardom he had won in Britain in favour of becoming one of the world's best character actors.
He spent most of the 1950s in US films and would continue to live in America, making sorties to Britain. He was a miraculously cast Humbert in Kubrick's Lolita (1961), made witty sport of John Mills's up-from-the-ranks colonel in Tiara Tahiti (d. Ted Kotcheff, 1962), was compellingly vindictive in The Pumpkin Eater (d. Jack Clayton, 1964), humanised a bullying patriarch in Spring and Port Wine (d. Peter Hammond, 1969), gave significance to the clever, hothouse trash of Mandingo (US, d. Richard Fleischer, 1975), was a heart-breaking Cyril Sahib in the Merchant-Ivory masterpiece Autobiography of a Princess (1975), made sense of Dr Watson in Murder by Decree (UK/Canada, d. Bob Clark, 1978), and grieved one to watch as the decent, troubled landowner in his last British film, The Shooting Party (d. Alan Bridges, 1984). Anyone who makes over 100 films is inevitably going to be associated with some rubbish; Mason's achievement is, partly, that one wouldn't think of attributing the blame to him.
He married (1941-64) Pamela Kellino, journalist and semi-actress, and mother of one-time aspiring actress Portland Mason and producer Morgan Mason, and Australian actress Clarissa Kaye (1971, till his death).
Full name: Michael Edward Palin
Born: May 5, 1943
Father:
Mother: Mary
Siblings: Sister - Angela (b. 1934)
Spouse:Helen Gibbins (married 1966)
Children: Thomas and William (b. 1971) , Rachel (b. 1975)
Education: Shrewsbury; Brasenose College, Oxford
Michael Palin was born in Sheffield to the manager of a toilet paper factory and the daughter of the High Sheriff of Nottingham (as pythonesque as this sounds this is true). Palin spent his childhood living in Whitworth Road, Sheffield with his parents and his sister Angela (who is 8 years older than him).
Despite his meager earnings at the toilet paper factory, and later as an export manager at the steel company Edgar Allen and Co., Palin's father managed to provide Michael with a private school education, first at Birkdale preparatory school and then at Shrewsbury. It was at Birkdale that Palin's abilities for entertainment first appeared, with him taking the lead in many form plays. Later at Shrewsbury these talents receded. It may have been the new serious Palin that eventually led him to becoming vice head of house. It was also during his time here that Palin discovered The Goons, a radio series that was instrumental in shaping Monty Python.
(It is worth noting that although Shrewsbury is a small, obscure public school, it has produced many notable additions to the comedy world such as Willie Rushdon, Peter Cook, Richard Ingrams and Christopher Booker. Richard Ingrams later went on to be a cornerstone of the satirical publication "Private Eye".)
Michael Palin went to Brasenose College Oxford in 1962 to read History, where his passion for entertainment awakened (or shall we say reawakened). His first role whilst at Oxford was "Third Peasant" in the play Fuente Ovejuna by Lope de Vega (a play about 15th century peasants and about as fun as having wisdom teeth pulled without anaesthetic). In this particular staging however the stage machinery and lighting worked intermittently (as Terry Jones - who was in the audience, would later remark "it was the funniest play I'd ever seen").
At Oxford Palin teamed up with fellow student Robert Hewison and started writing and performing scripts under the name Seedy Entertainers - one of their first gigs being for the Oxford University Psychology Society at their Christmas Party. This contained a mix of satirical RAF briefings, television parodies and various water-related gags. In the second year the Palin-Hewison team was joined by Terry Jones and together this writing team produced material for the show Loitering Within Tent. This show contained a skit known as the Slapstick Sketch, which was later loaned to the Cambridge Footlights - of whom John Cleese and Graham Chapman were members. Perhaps this mixing of ideas was in part responsible for the birth of Monty Python.
The Palin-Hewison-Jones team continues writing, contributing to a show called Hang Down Your Head and Die, before their big break at the Edinburgh Festival in 1964 in the show Oxford Revue (it was also here that Palin first met Eric Idle). Although most of the material was by Palin and Hewison, the show was less satirical and more bizarre than most shows at the time - in fact it was more Python. It was after the show that Palin and Jones met David Frost who vowed "to get in touch".
In 1965 Palin graduated from Oxford with a 2:1 degree in modern history. From there he got a job in television, hosting the teenage pop show NOW! for Television Wales West (Jones meanwhile had got a place on a BBC directing course, and Hewison had left the team to get a proper job). Encouraged by Jones, Palin began to moonlight on other shows including The Ken Dodd Show, The Late Night Line Up, and The Illustrated Weekly Hudd. Between 1965 and 1967 Palin and Jones wrote for or performed in almost every light entertainment programme made by the BBC.
In 1966, Palin and Jones were recruited into the writing team of the Frost Report, joining a motley bunch of writers that included Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie (later part of The Goodies), Denis Norden (who later became well known with his out-take show "It'll Be Alright On The Night"), and certain individuals by the name of John Cleese, Eric Idle and Graham Chapman.
The Palin-Jones team, along with Eric Idle were installed as writers for the show Do Not Adjust Your Set - originally a children's show, but repeated in the evenings as the adult audience grew (now with animations by a Mr. T. Gilliam). Later the Palin-Jones team wrote the show The Complete and Utter History of Britain - although this particular project suffered rather bad reviews. Then in 1966, a producer Barry Took brought Palin together with 5 others to produce a series that was provisionally called Owl Stretching Time…
Palin's first post-Python foray into television was in the critically acclaimed series Ripping Yarns written by the Palin-Jones team. From there he went on to star as Dennis Cooper in the film Jabberwocky (a film by T. Gilliam) and then co-wrote and (briefly) starred in Time Bandits (also by Mr. Gilliam). Palin's next role was in the film The Missionary, in which Palin played a missionary who returns from Africa to run a refuge for "fallen women". It was this that showed that Palin was capable of being humorous rather than comic. This continues into his next project A Private Function by Alan Bennett.
Palin's next role finally gave him a break from his standard nice-guy role, when he played Jack Lint in Terry Gilliam's magnum opus Brazil (for those who haven't seen it, Jack Lint is a torturer working for a futuristic bureaucratic state, who inflicts pain while displaying the "nice guy" character we are so used to from Palin - the result being a chilling portrayal of a sociopath).
Perhaps Palin's biggest role outside of Monty Python came in A Fish Called Wanda(released in 1988), in which Palin played the animal loving assassin Ken Pile. Although criticised for making fun of those who stammer, Palin was able to meet this storm head on through the fact that his father had suffered from a stammer.
Other roles followed in East of Ipswich (a semi-autobiographical play penned by Palin) for BBC2, American Friends (also penned by Palin) and as the headmaster of a school for physically handicapped children who is targeted by political thugs in the critically acclaimed GBH by Alan Bleasdale.
In 1980, Palin contributed to the BBC's documentary series Great Railway Journeys of the World, taking a trip for Euston Station, London to the West of Scotland. The episode was the most popular in the series. It may have been this that in the late 1980's led to Palin being asked to appear in the travelogue series Around The World in 80 Days, Palin having the task of doing just that using only the forms of transport available to the character Phineas Fogg in Jules Verne's book of the same name (i.e. no aircraft). Palin accomplished this perfectly, taking everything from spending days in a dhow, to narrowly missing being on a train that was involved in a horrific crash in his stride. The success of 80 days led to the follow up series Pole to Pole in which, with the same conditions of the last series Palin had to get from the North to the South Pole along the 39th Parallel. Palin then went on to make even more travelogues - Full Circle where he traveled around the Pacific Rim, and Hemmingway Adventure where he followed in the footsteps of Earnest Hemmingway. As if this wasn't enough, Palin then traversed the formidable Sahara Desert (as chronicled in the BBC programme Sahara).
During his travels, Palin has taken a host of problems in his stride - from getting out of the USSR a mere 3 days before the revolution that finally overthrew communism, to emerging from the jungle to find out his wife has a brain tumour (luckily benign)
Palin's last television appearance was hosting the documentary The Ladies who loved Matisse, showing his little known love of art. Palin has also embarked on another journey, this time to the Himalayas (a trip that will be shown on the BBC in the autumn of 2003).
Palin was awarded a CBE in the New Years Honours list in 1999
Selby High School supports the Campaign for the Wearing of Seatbelts in memory of Neil Houliston, a former student, who died in a car accident whilst not wearing a seat belt, on Christmas Day 2005.