Category: Film, TV & Radio

The Fourth Wall

The fourth wall, as you know, is the space which separates a performer from the audience; or, if you will, the conceptual barrier between a fictional work and its viewers or readers.

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Can you ever forgive me? sounds like the title of a Victorian novel. Of course I’m thinking of Can You Forgive Her? the first of Trollope’s Palliser series.

Company

I remember with nostalgia Elaine Stritch and Donald Sinden in Two’s Company on television in the late 1970s. She played a successful American author and he was her very British butler. The only other thing I remember is that she, in real life, lived in the Savoy.

Not The Favourite

Hatfield House stars in a sumptuous costume-comedy-drama coming to a screen near you (in the UK) soon. I saw a preview with Robert yesterday.

Going Solo

I saw Robert Vaughn (sic) in Twelve Angry Men in the West End in 2013. Also in the cast was Martin Shaw, of The Professionals fame,  who dined with me at the Ivy Club afterwards. We were guests of LAMDA, where he trained.

Nicky Haslam

Nicky Haslam has had a variety of bedfellows but none more surprising than General Sir John Hackett, GCB, CBE, DSO & bar, MC and Sir Max Hastings. His autobiography, Redeeming Features, lies between Hackett’s I was a Stranger and Hastings’s Did You Really Shoot the Television? on my biog/diary shelves.

Social Anthropology

I read Anthropology (and Psychology and English) at Durham. The origins of Man were hard to get a grip on and defeated me. However, I did enjoy Social Anthropology. It may have inspired trips in later years to the Middle East, Africa and the Caucasus.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

A new Coen brothers film is usually good news and this time they have turned their hand to a Western for the first time since True Grit in 2010.