And, just in time for the game’s 25th anniversary this week, the real Bill Woodward, 73, has stepped forward.
The retired hair-salon owner, who lives less than a quarter of a mile from Invicta Plastic, which makes the game, admitted his starring role was an accident.”The advertising agency doing the picture backed on to my hairdressing salon and was run by someone I knew,” he explained. Mr Mastermind, the elusive figure who has featured on the box of the code-cracking board game for 25 years, has been tracked down after a nationwide hunt. On its existing channel next year Channel 4 will premier the movies it funded: Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Ken Loach’s Carla’s Song, as well as bought- in films like Quiz Show, Little Women and The Usual Suspects.This winter the channel will broadcast a new series of the cult comedy Father Ted, a new situation comedy about an deposed African dictator, called Exiled, and Kangaroo Palace, a drama about Australians living it up in London during the Sixties.New factual series planned for the winter include a history of Henry VIII written by controversialist historian Dr David Starkey.- Paul McCann, Media Correspondent. Mr Jackson also outlined plans for pounds 25m to be spent next year on creating a Channel 4-branded art-house movie channel that will broadcast on digital frequencies. Summer next year will also see the airing of a new Alan Bleasdale drama, Soft Sand, Blue Sea, about the lives of two Irish children, and Killer Net, a thriller about a deadly Internet game scripted by Lynda La Plante.Coming early in the year is the long-awaited four part dramatisation of the life of Oswald Mosley, written by Birds of a Feather writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran.

It has been described as My Friends in the North for feminists, and Carmen Callil, one time head of Virago, has been consulted on its storyline.Nardini, who played the hard-living lawyer Anna in BBC 2’s cult hit This Life, will play Layla, one of a group of four ambitious career women.Michael Jackson, Channel 4’s chief executive, told a meeting of advertising agencies in London yesterday that drama was his highest priority for the channel. The channel believes that by 1999 it will have an extra pounds 80m to spend on programmes.
Daniella Nardini will star in Big Women, an account of feminism as viewed from inside a fictional women’s publishing house based loosely on Virago. The channel’s increased budget, which is up 13 per cent on this year and is 90 per cent more than five years ago, comes from selling pounds 25m of extra advertising and sponsorship airtime during 1997, and pounds 25m returning to the channel as its controversial funding deal with ITV is scrapped. Because they are bio-degradable, suitable treatment would mean that within an hour they would break apart if anyone tries to lift them up. This advantage was pointed out to officials in Luanda by a UN official, Adrian Dunderdale, who had visited Mr Vosper’s factory while in the UK. The price, too, is competitive, the Cornish coffins cost $100 (pounds 61) each while the traditional ones being imported to Angola can be as much as $500..

Channel 4 has pounds 350m to spend on programmes for next year and will air dramas by Alan Bleasdale, Lynda La Plante, the writer of Prime Suspect, and a history of feminism by Fay Weldon, starring Daniella Nardini (above) who starred in This Life. Bereaved relatives, understandably, get upset.The cask-kits will counter this. But the Mexicans are at the moment sensitive about the business dealings of presidential relations. Raul Salinas, the brother of the previous President, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, is in prison on charges of murder and illegal enrichment.In Angola, debilitated by a long, bitter civil war, the government faces problems from grave robbers who dig up coffins to sell on the thriving black coffin market. President Ernesto Zedillo has taken a keen interest in the project.

One of his brothers heads one of the biggest government-backed funeral institutions in Mexico City, offering subsidised ceremonies to the disadvantaged.There is, of course, no suggestion of impropriety involving the Zedillo brothers, this is not “coffingate”. I saw how much better it would be it would be if the thing came in kit form. So we decided to produce it and also make it eco-friendly.”Mr Vosper’s firm is the only one making wooden flat-pack coffins – there are others that produce cardboard coffins but they are said to be of a “here’s one I made earlier” type.Mr Vosper is disappointed by lack of government backing, but accepts that such is the rocky path of creativity – recognition abroad, neglect at home In Mexico, the coffins may become a political hot potato. He recalled: “There was a man who bought a coffin off the shelf for his own funeral and loaded it into a Renault 5 But he was having difficulties. He was hoping to get some kind of government funding to help with the expansion, but he hoped in vain.Mr Vosper started making the cask-kits after seeing a programme on the French Roce’ Cleric supermarket chain. To cope with this sudden rise in demand Mr Vosper will need to take on at least 30 more workers, and increase the workspace of his St Ives firm from 1,500 square feet to 15,000 square feet.