THIS week four decades ago a glamorous icon of the era was in Swindon to play a mermaid.

Aimi MacDonald had been a celebrity since the late 1960s, when she was in a comedy programme called At Last the 1948 Show.

Her co-stars had included future Goodie Tim Brooke-Taylor, future Python team members Graham Chapman and John Cleese, and future solo comedy icon Marty Feldman.

It is best remembered these days for the first airing of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch.

By 1974, MacDonald was 34 and frequently appeared on television, in films and on stage.

She was in Swindon to play the title character in Miranda, a play about a mermaid who mesmerises a doctor. A film version starring Glynis Johns had been made in 1948.

Our reviewer said: “A packed first night house found the entertaining Miranda, a play about a mermaid with the lovely Aimi MacDonald in the title role, much to its liking.

“This mermaid, however, being well-educated, has heard about the bright lights of London, and she trades the life of her captive, an eminent doctor, for a trip to the big city.”

Fans for whom Miranda was not enough of a MacDonald fix had the option of heading to the ABC cinema, now the Savoy pub.

There they could see her alongside Diana Dors in a film called Keep it up Downstairs. The film, long since rightly forgotten, was a so-called sex comedy. The cast also included satirist William Rushton, former child star Jack Wild and glamorous Francoise Pascal, who would soon find fame in popular sitcom Mind your Language.

At the beginning of that week in 1976, the population of Toothill consisted of precisely one family – which was one more than had been living there the previous Friday. Markenfield was the first of the new streets to be inhabited.

“The first residents of Thamesdown’s Toothill Housing Estate have moved in,” we said.

“A block of five houses was opened at the weekend – the first to be completed at the proposed 24,000-home expansion project.

“Mr Stephen Smith and his wife June picked up their keys on Saturday and moved into their three-bedroomed house with two-year-old daughter Rachel.

“They moved to Toothill from Greenmeadow in Swindon after waiting on the Thamesdown housing list for three years. “’We were offered a house at Liden, Eldene or Toothill,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘We came out here and liked what we saw.’ “The Smiths are delighted with their new home. The borough council expects to open a further five or six houses a month at the estate and a community centre has already been started to help new tenants move in.”

The news from Toothill was cheery, but the same could not be said of a story about another council housing development.

We said: “High rise apartment blocks in Swindon’s Penhill area could be a major fire hazard, a meeting in the town heard last night. The council-owned flats have no extinguishers to deal with localised fire outbreaks and there has been no fire drill for tenants within the last five years.

“At a meeting of Gorse Hill Conservatives, Mr Nigel Hammond, the Tories Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Swindon, said the high-rise blocks amounted to “a potential major fire hazard.”

It’s worth remembering that barely a year earlier British people had queued to see blockbuster disaster film The Towering Inferno, in which a cast of stars including Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire and OJ Simpson had to deal with a burning skyscraper.

Admittedly the 11-storey Seagry Court in Swindon was hardly a skyscraper, but some of the people living there, especially the older ones, were worried.

Among them was a Mrs Gladys Jefferies, who said: “We have nothing at all, not a thing here. We haven’t got an earthly chance if there’s a fire here.” Over at another well-known Swindon building, the TA Centre in Church Place, a man called Keith Humphries had taken six months to put some emulsion on a single interior wall.

The man in question was an artist called Keith Humphries, and his work consisted of an exquisitely detailed mural.

The 22ft by 10ft work was inspired by the tale of one of his heroes, Roman military leader Horatius, whose defence of a bridge during a battle in the sixth century BC helped to save Rome.

Keith’s mural was commissioned after TA members saw some of his pen and ink sketches on display at the Arts Centre in Devizes Road.

The 33-year-old British Rail fitter told us: “It’s the first time I’ve tried any painting. I used to concentrate on pen and ink and charcoal sketches. But once I tried painting I found it very enjoyable.”

His mural survived into the 1990s, when it fell victim to alterations at the centre.