I saw The Rocky Horror Show at a theatre in the King’s Road (possibly The Royal Court) in the 1970s and was taken by surprise when the audience were mostly in costume and participated in the show – I remember lots of rice being chucked in a wedding scene.
I’m too old for that sort of thing now but I’ll willingly dress up for a screening of The Pallisers. The Ps is the mother of all boxed sets – running time a bit more than twenty-two hours. Last night I asked friends for supper in the garden and the loan of the Ps was the dividend. If I may digress, I had planned to give them the tonno e fagioli I had made (actually cousin C did the work) for an opera picnic in Essex on Thursday evening (opera, Essex an oxymoron ?) And I would have, if I hadn’t eaten most of it on Friday. Instead I cooked lamb cutlets, sourced from HG Walter, with runner beans and a salad of butter beans and cannellini beans. For pudding I served black pudding with apple sauce, followed by blue cheese and crusty baguette, (Oxford comma?) and apple crumble ice cream.
There are many poncey restaurants with tasting menus inferior to mine and very costly. To keep digressing, the New York restaurant (155 West 51st) in Lunch with the FT this weekend was at a p (poncey, not Palliser) restaurant with a three course menu for $120 or a tasting menu at around $300 (per diner) that is really $445 after taxes, tips and a glass of wine. I was once pursued out onto the street (sorry, sidewalk) in Manhattan because I had not tipped “the captain” at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side.
I will introduce you to the Pallisers another day. It has a huge and starry cast; I’ve only, briefly, met three of them. As a taster, the script is by Simon Raven and the producer is Martin Lisemore. Martin Lisemore had BBC written through him like a stick of Brighton Rock. It is sad but ironic that he was killed in a car crash in 1977 while shooting Murder Most English. If all goes to plan I will go to Transylvania next year – not sure about the dress code.