Michael Kidson’s gait is only too imitable; drop the right shoulder, stride purposefully, swing right arm vigorously.
If you don’t know Michael Kidson I will not repeat myself; read about him in this post. I am good at walking the Kidson way but now everything’s gone agley, as the Scottish poet, Burns, said so famously in To a Mouse:
“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”
There I am, doing a passable Kidson impersonation, albeit without hs props (shooting stick or golf club and spaniel), but now it looks like I’m doing the Julien Baptiste walk. R and I are seldom drawn to TV drama but we were fixated by The Missing which spun off Baptiste. Spin-offs often spawn something superior to the original. Remember Cheers and Frasier? I remember Budgie (starring the diminutive but pretty, Adam Faith) and spin-off, Charles Endell Esquire, played by Ian Cuthbertson. Warning: if English is not your first language you will have difficulty comprehending Charlie Endell’s Glaswegian accent.
I sampled an episode of Budgie on YouTube and remembered how bad the acting is. Also it promotes high moral values, something entirely absent in modern film and TV drama. Was there legislation in the UK about this? If so when did it end? I remember that the gorgeous film version of The Talented Mr Ripley, Plein Soleil, released in 1960 has Ripley arrested at the end so that it could be shown in the United States.
Anyway, R was out having a tennis dinner and I watched something superior to anything like that, The Trial of Ratko Mladic, a ninety minute documentary on BBC 4.
Victims call him the Butcher of Bosnia. Defenders say he protected the Serbs. With exclusive access to the prosecution and defense teams,
Watch it here if it is still available.