This week: A legendary football coach, a master of the harmonica, and the producer whose idea led to Blind Date
FORMER Liverpool captain, coach and caretaker manager Ronnie Moran, who has died aged 83, will be remembered as a legendary figure of football.
Moran only managed the club on a caretaker basis, but his 49-year service on the playing and backroom staff coincided with the Reds' most successful period in their history.
He may not have taken charge of a team who won the first division title or the European Cup, but his influence was present throughout.
Moran was the training ground 'sergeant major' his managers and players learned to both fear and respect. There are numerous stories about his methods, all players remembering his famous training ground bark' and his snippets of wisdom which kept a host of trophy-winning players at the peak of their game.
Moran made 379 appearances for the club between 1952 and 1968, including a spell as captain, winning two league titles and the FA Cup, but arguably played a bigger a role as part of Bill Shankly's famous Boot Room, also working under Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan, Kenny Dalglish, Graeme Souness and Roy Evans.
He was twice called upon to become caretaker manager: once after Dalglish's resignation in 1991 and when Souness was recovering from his triple by-pass heart surgery in 1992, before finally retiring in 1998.
Even then he could not tear himself away from the club and he remained a regular visitor to Anfield and was a familiar face at the club's Melwood training ground during his daily jog - and then walk when he got older - around the field.
MUSICIAN James Cotton, who has died aged 81, was a Grammy Award-winning blues harmonica master whose full-throated sound backed such blues legends as Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson II and Howlin' Wolf.
Born in Tunica, Mississippi, the youngest of nine children, Cotton learned the harmonica from his mother and started performing professionally when he was just nine years old. After his parents died, he met the harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson, who took him under his wind and made him a member of his touring group.
From 1954, Cotton began playing with Muddy Waters and backed him in his landmark album At Newport. He then went solo in the 1960s and released about 30 albums, including his 1996 Grammy Award-winning Deep In The Blues. His most recent album, Cotton Mouth Man in 2013, was nominated for a Grammy.
TELEVISION producer Chuck Barris, who has died aged 87, was the man responsible for the American show The Dating Game which inspired a British version, Blind Date, presented by Cilla Black.
In addition to being a game show creator, producer and host, Barris was also was a best-selling author and had success in the music world. He wrote the 1962 hit record Palisades Park, which was recorded by Freddy Cannon.
The Dating Game and Blind Date involved a young woman or man questioning three men or women hidden from view, to determine which would be the best date.
Celebrities and future celebrities who appeared as contestants on the American show included Michael Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Martin and Farrah Fawcett. At one point Barris was supplying the television networks with 27 hours of entertainment a week, mostly in five-days-a-week daytime game shows.
The grinning, curly-haired Barris also became a familiar face as creator and host of The Gong Show, which aired from 1976 to 1980. The programme featured performers who had peculiar talents and, often, no talent at all. When the latter appeared on the show, Barris would strike an oversized gong.
In another extraordinary twist to his career, Barris claimed in his autobiography, Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, that he had been a CIA assassin. The book - and the 2002 film based on it, directed by George Clooney - were widely dismissed by disbelievers.
"It sounds like he has been standing too close to the gong all those years," said CIA spokesman Tom Crispell. "Chuck Barris has never been employed by the CIA and the allegation that he was a hired assassin is absurd."
Born in Philadelphia in 1929, Charles Barris was left destitute, along with his sister and their mother, when his dentist father died of a stroke.
After graduating from the Drexel Institute of Technology in 1953, he took a series of jobs, including book salesman and fight promoter.
After being dropped from a low-level job at NBC, he found work at ABC, where he persuaded his bosses to let him open a Hollywood office, from which he launched his game-show empire.
Barris's first marriage to Lynn Levy ended in divorce. Their daughter, Della, died of a drug overdose in 1998. He married his third wife, Mary, in 2000.
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