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The whole landscape—beach and headland and sea and rock—quavered in front of my eyes like a stage backcloth.

All this against a backcloth of an uncertain world, the growing threats of terrorism, economic inequality, how to meet the defence budget and how to pay the heating bills for global warming.

"Long gone are the days when pantomime is a tatty backcloth, a funny little band and people coming on doing sketch comedy," he says.

But for many, a backcloth of declining supply levels is also expected to propel zinc prices skywards in the near future.

Promotion ambitions were merely the backcloth to this fixture, though.