Instead, he took Alice to tea-shops and museums and once, unsuccessfully, to a motorway café. There, he failed to allow for her fastidiousness at seeing food for every possible meal lined up democratically behind the counter. The sight of a steak and kidney pudding at four o’clock quite wrecked Alice’s chances of appreciating a cupcake.
And any English comic novelist of the last centr wold be ver pleased with the final line
He also hadn't masturbated, he realized, since the days when people thought about it as 'masturbation': that cool, frowning medico-biblical word. There'd been other words around, no doubt, but 'masturbation' was what it always felt like. Masturbation, fornication, defecation: serious words from his childhood, representing activities to be pondered before being indulged in. Nowadays it was all wanking and fucking and shitting, and no one thought twice about any of them. Well, he used shitting himself; a bit, privately. Jack, of course, talked about wanking quite casually, and fucking as well. Graham was still a little tentative about both usages. ' Wanking ', after all, was such a quiet, domestic, guiltless sort of word: it made it sound like a home craft.
Much of Before She Met Me ( Julian Barnes 1983 ) is very funny
Here an overly-precise attention to semantics and the changing of social attitudes in which this characer feels slightly left behind captures an era between David Nobbs and Amis:
Stalin - twinkly capriciously evil grandfather; great scene destroying loyal friend David Kelly's socialist faith
Beria - a cross between Peter Lorre’s M and Seinfeld’s George Costanza
A few running gags abt Chinese and Americans like Milligan at his TV weakest, like artificial stuffing
Did yuo ever see Red Monarch - 1983 black comic film written by Charles Wood about Stalin, with David Suchet as Beria? Sometimes just slightly broad vignettes, but many jokes very similar to Death of Stalin - even to using non-Russian, non-RP accents
How odd - I know Keen played Putin in a play about Boris Berezovsky, which is the role he plays here. A strange position to be able to compare your own earlier performance to the lead's. No offence meant to Law who has really proved himself over the last 10-15 years.
The circumlocutions, the polysyllabic words were pathetic. They breathed a tense need for the preservation of an immaculate ego, they smelt of paranoia, fear of retribution, a desire to be thought well of by all men, even strangers. But men like that, he thought, cannot be reassured, their deep-seated belief in their own worthlessness is too great and too long-established…for self-confidence ever to be implanted in them.
The last 10-15 years of conservative writing has delivered some terrible straining prose, habits of style now institutionalised in Grokipedia.
A drive-by shooting of an explanation from Ruth Rendell in "A Demon in My View":
Local NYC TV stations needing to fill their hours means I'm the rare person who's seen (40 years ago during bouts of early teenage insomnia) Arkin in both Simon (1980) and The Magician of Lublin (1979)
Was "Simon" good? Too long ago to say - but it was sure as hell....Something
Semi-aimless 70s character comedies as crime romps, hangouts, and road movies:
Slither (1973) - James Caan, Peter Boyle, Sally Kellerman, Louise Lasser
Steelyard Blues (1973) - Donald Sutherland, Jane Fonda, Peter Boyle, Howard Hesseman
Just Me and You (1978) - Louise Lasser, Charles Grodin
almost parallels Miss Marple films – investigation of mysteries in apparently postcard-idyllic sunshiny villages
JF's increasing alienation and paranoia re villagers' insular familiarity ala The Prisoner
Kay Walsh's cynical worldly confidante revealed as Bond villain equiv
In this kind of vein Nicholas Ray's Born to Be Bad (1950)
I assume you've seen her Hitchcock films and "Letter from an Unknown Woman"
It's in the Rebecca mould.
Rex H is v. good choice for "Is my charming romantic husband actually planning to kill me?
Day is v. good at vibrating with fear, and some of the sequences deserve the adjective Hitchcockian.
Film4 seemed to think 11am on a Thursday was a good time for broadcasts.
Digging up my ancient film notes.
Midnight Lace 1960
Past me thought that she was still good value as a supporting character-friend in this Doris Day-Rex Harrison gothic thriller in a Ross Hunter version of chi-chi London.
Libeled Lady (1936) - Jean Harlow, William Powell, Myrna Loy, and Spencer Tracy.
Myrna Loy has little angry superior moues and a sharp little tongue.
Though my strongest memory is of William Powell's extended slapstick failure to fish in a river like an old Disney Goofy short feature.
Pre-Fawlty Towers, (a rather blurry) Andrew Sachs, John Cleese and Bernard Cribbins demonstrate How Not to Exhibit Yourself
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vApF...
Lockwood's in Night Train to Munich - much of the cast and production team of The Lady Vanishes reuniting for similar fun thrills under Carol Reed rather than Hichcock.
Have you seen Mason and Lockwood in The Man in Grey (1943) ?
Good lord.
I suspect I'm probably a decade older than you, so this is perilously close to saying you've never tried air. Blackadder was just...everwhere and so much for the people I knew.
Ah well, Sic transit and all that..
I'm pretty sure decades of viewers of "Blackadder the Third" have no idea that "Amy and Amiability" is spoofing this, even down to a brief James Mason impersonation.
Alastair Sim smiles at the camera, a pipe in one hand and the other holding a headhunter's long pole topped by a decorated skull
Stumbling across Celia Dale's earliest story, "The Scream" in "The Bystander" August 25, 1937, the issue also has this glorious photo of Alastair Sim in the play "The Gusher"
"More cock from Moorcock" - Martin Amis, back when he was The Observer's SF reviewer in the mid-70s
An Act of Murder (Michael Gordon, 1948) It’s Not Cricket (Roy Rich and Alfred Roome, 1949) The Late Edwina Black (aka The Obsessed, Maurice Elvey, 1951) Private Information (Fergus McDonell, 1951) Marilyn (aka Roadhouse Girl, Wolf Rilla, 1953) The Tell-Tale Heart (J.B. Williams, 1953) The Flying Scot (aka The Mailbag Robbery, Compton Bennett, 1957) Small Hotel (David MacDonald, 1957) The Man Who Liked Funerals (David Eady, 1959) Devil’s Bait (Peter Graham Scott, 1959) The Impersonator, (Alfred Shaughnessy 1960) Cash on Demand (Quentin Lawrence, 1961) Unearthly Stranger (John Krish, 1963) Tomorrow at Ten (Comfort, 1964) Smokescreen (Jim O’Connolly, 1964)
Glad "Smokescreen" pleased
Here's the list. I've see about half of them and bet you've seen quite a few too. Hoorah for youtube and Talking Pictures
For matching comic hysteria can I offer you the ascending agitated !!NOISES!! Cloris Leachman makes at 1:15:55
Maybe don’t play it too loud if you don’t want to stun every animal in a 2 mile radius
youtu.be/aPHoQlDMaK4?...
1980s Charles Stross says you and I are WRONG:
I disliked this book intensely. I used to be a Sheckley fan, but HUNTER/VICTIM has put me off him for good. This sickening farrago of evil prejudices and depersonalised nastiness is not worth reading. and I advise you to avoid it like the plague
Unfortunately I don't know.
I'm afraid TV archives and records of broadcast holdings are a foreign land to me.
Books, magazines, and paper archives I can find anything one could want.
A Sheckley adap “Murder Club” (1961) is important for UK TV SF. ARMCHAIR THEATRE producers Sydney Newman and Irene Shubik wanted to make a TV sf antho series. This trial episode with Richard Briers was well-received: amusing, thrilling, etc. OUT OF THIS WORLD, OUT OF THE UNKNOWN and DR WHO followed
It seemed so authentic to German viewers, all the ways it mimicked German Tv production and live shows using real TV personalities (ala Ghostwatch), many people thought they were watching a real new TV game show
Even better, 15-20 years later when sf trilogies were compulsory, Sheckley wrote 2 more books to make a 10th Victim trilogy.
That's superior recycling and marketing off a novelisation job.
Terrific copyright controversy over this.
In the early 80s Sheckley's friends pushed him to sue King over the book but he demurred.
But the producers of French and German movie adaptations of Sheckley stories in the 70s/80s sued the American film for infringement and they won!
Watch Smokescreen, 1964. It's nifty: part of the dying gasp of Brit B-movies, receiving a bit more funding in hope of making them viable.
Peter Vaughn is on amazing form as an insurance investigator. Some proper scenery, good supporting cast and story. A better world would have seen some sequels
Or was, as Adams explains: “Andrew has now left his wife, suddenly decided he’s gay and is now living with a man in Milton Keynes and has cheered up a lot. It’s curious.” So how does he feel about being immortalised as a robot? “He tells me he’s very annoyed about it but he makes sure that everybody else knows it’s him.”
screenshot of Andrew Marshall, wearing a trim leather jacket over a white t-shirt, and a trim moustache. The screenshot is from "Film 86" and not "Out on Tuesday"
#hhgg
Was Marvin the Paranoid Android in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy gay? Would he have been happier out of the closet?
Well, not quite…
But Douglas Adams did say Marvin was inspired by comedy writer Andrew Marshall’s worst sullen behaviour
and in a 2 Oct 1983 NME interview:
every 5-6 days I do various Bsky searches; one is always for Harlan Ellison, and you’ve always had some bit of discourse going.
So have the first and wholly unremembered version of Mefisto in Onyx.
From the 1985 Albacon programme book, I suspect it’s a goofball script treatment for Twilight Zone