While BBC news programmes warn of a red weather alert (danger to life) in London and the south east, the BBC Weather app is more sanguine.
Storm Eunice, at least in London, looks like The Mouse That Roared, the title of a 1955 novel by Leonard Wibberley. It was turned into a film in 1959 in which Peter Sellers played three parts, probably inspiring Stanley Kubrick to cast him in multiple roles in Dr Strangelove five years later. The supporting cast was good: Jean Seberg, William Hartnell, David Kossoff, Leo McKern, et al.
I had never heard of Leonard Wibberley until this morning when I got an email from MB telling me the first film he saw in a cinema was with his mother in Belfast: a sequel, The Mouse on the Moon (1963). There were three more Mouse books, all Cold War satires. Wibberley’s theme is topical as Ukraine’s comedian turned President tries to resist Russian expansionist aggression.
I never saw Mary Poppins – I had a crush on Dick Van Dyke – and was fobbed off with My Fair Lady by my mother; quite a long and boring film for a ten year-old who had already seen Robin Hood at prep school.