Though hardly some neglected masterpiece, it's a good example of the kind of solid, professional operas that were routinely produced by capable composers for the opera-mad public of the time.
The world's shortest boxer at 4ft 10in, who died two days after his friend and hero, was the darling of the country's sports-mad public – a crossover figure whose charm and ebullience endeared him to the white suburbs almost as much as in his home crowd in Soweto.
So if your politics-mad public affairs team (or public affairs consultancy) is insisting that canvassing 4,000 candidates this spring is a good use of thousands – or in some cases tens of thousands – of pounds of donor cash, you have a few days left to think again.
Australia is one national team that can serve as a useful point of comparison for the US: football there, as here, struggles for exposure amid a crowded field of more popular domestic sports; the pool of top-class talent is similarly shallow, and the expectations of a sports-mad public similarly outsized.
They wept, milked the jubilation and basked in the warmth of their adoring, football-mad public.
Ten years on, the Harper communications shop was run like a two-bit student union with a power-mad public relations undergrad at the helm.
The trouble is, even in the mad world of public finances, we can't all be sellers, and there are likely to be casualties.
Because just as I was fervently hoping some charity-minded media overlord would cut Loh a check for her kid's tuition, she experiences a kind of democracy-mad, public-citizenship epiphany, and unlike so many of her KCRW-listening, "Inconvenient Truth -viewing peers, she acTruth -viewinger child to a Los Angeles peersc sheool.
Meanwhile, clips of Frankie Boyle, Jay Leno and even the genial Graham Norton joking about Winehouse's deterioration serve as a stark reminder that going mad in public makes one the equivalent of a modern-day Bedlam inmate – fair game for ridicule by the chattering classes.
If I made her mad in public she would have no problem insulting me, in front of both strangers and friends.
