Excerpts From A Cluttered Mind #3
Gonna be some sweet sounds going down on the Nightbitch.
Just a normal, happy family from a lovely family film (see below for further details) welcoming you to this week’s Excerpts From A Cluttered Mind, which this week also includes an excellent Walter Tevis novel, an Interesting Fact about a classic BBC TV play, and Six Degrees to Kevin Rowland, frontman with Dexys Midnight Runners.
An Interesting Fact About “Abigail’s Party”
Mike Leigh’s BBC Play For Today from 1977, Abigail’s Party, is fondly remembered by everyone who saw it and stands up today as a high-quality sitcom that skewers a number of familiar British (stereo?)types of the era.
If you’ve seen it you will remember the sullen Tony (far right), introduced to the other guests with a cheery “Tony used to be a footballer for Crystal Palace.”
I’ve always loved this line, especially since Palace have been my team ever since I was four years old and I had them foisted upon me by my Dad (thanks Dad!).
And it turns out that the actor who played Tony used to be a footballer. Yes, for Crystal Palace.
The actors in the original production of Mike Leigh’s play at the Hampstead Theatre, which included Alison Steadman and Janine Duvitski, were responsible for filling out their characters’ background, an important part of Leigh’s method.
So John Salthouse included his experience of having been on Palace’s books as a teenager, under his real name John Lewis.
He was good, too. Good enough to be capped by England Schoolboys at 17. But a fractured ankle, mis-diagnosed as a sprain, did for his football ambitions. After he tried to play with the fractured ankle, the further damage was so severe that his fledgling career was ended when he was 19.
However, if the football had worked out for him it is doubtful that his career in television and films would ever have taken off.
He went on to play DI Galloway in The Bill for three years, appeared in An American Werewolf In London and The Spy Who Loved Me, and later wrote Hero To Zero for the BBC and Sky’s Dream Team.
So if that was me, and I was offered the choice at age 17of a football career (not that well paid back then) with Palace or a more lucrative showbiz career, which would I have plumped for?
I know what the sensible answer to that is. I also know what my answer is.
The same as that of any teenage football fan. The chance to play for the team you support, even if it only turns out to be once, beats literally everything else.
Although I would probably be deeply regretting it now.
This Week I Have Been Mostly…
Reading…
The Color Of Money by Walter Tevis
Between 1959 and 1984 Walter Tevis wrote six novels including The Hustler, The Color Of Money, The Man Who Fell To Earth and The Queen’s Gambit, which were made into very well received films or Netflix series between 1961 and 2020.
While The Hustler mostly follows the book very closely, the sequel The Color Of Money (directed by Martin Scorsese) bears very little resemblance to the excellent book, with no characters in common apart from Paul Newman’s reprisal of his Fast Eddie role.
I have limited interest in the movie. Alone among my fellow film-fan friends, I am not the world’s greatest Scorsese fan. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, I know…
For a start the sequel contains no characters at all from the original, with the exception of Paul Newman’s reprisal of his Fast Eddie character. Co-star Tom Cruise’s character is completely invented for the film.
The book is excellent though, beginning with Minnesota Fats and Fast Eddie reliving their glory years by playing exhibition matches on the nostalgia circuit.
If you’ve seen the film I would definitely recommend the book to see how Walter Tevis, the actual creator of the characters intended their story to conclude.
Watching…
Nightbitch (2024) - dir. Marielle Heller (Disney+)
This film is an absolute joy.
Based on the book (always a good start, obviously!) by Rachel Yoder and written and directed by Marielle Heller, with a stellar, understated central performance from the wonderfult Amy Adams, Nightbitch is like nothing I have ever seen.
The central trio of performers are, tellingly, credited as “Mother” (Adams), “Husband” - not “Father”, note - (Scoot McNairy) and “Son” (played by twins Arleigh and Emmet Snowden).
A promising artist puts her career on hold in order to look after her two-year-old son, with her husband frequently away on work trips. Resenting the isolation, she begins to experience strange physical and behavioural changes, allied to flashbacks about her (late?) mother and her own upbringing in a sheltered Mennonite society.
I’m keeping this deliberately vague because I really don’t want to spoil what happens. Suffice to say it wasn’t what I was expecting, and to leave you to watch it yourself, if you haven’t already done so.
I will say this, though. Do give it a go at least until the end of the scene, about ten minutes in, with the mothers’ and toddlers’ story and song club at the local library.
That’s two “yourselfs” in quick succession, and I haven’t even been WATCHING the latest season of The Traitors (for health reasons, it does my blood pressure no good whatsoever).
Six Degrees Of Separation to Kevin Rowland
This week’s starting point is much-loved actor Miriam Margoyles, probably too potty-mouthed and outspoken to be an official “National Treasure” but me and the missus love her. She’s a superb actor, too, check her out for starters in Blackadder II and the 1996 Romeo And Juliet as the Nurse.
Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone (2000) - dir Chris Columbus
“Well, I’ve never seen a wand quite like that one, I must say!”
There is a school of thought in the rarefied world of “Six Degrees” afficionados that certain franchises, like Dr Who and Harry Potter should not be allowed in the game as it makes it too easy.
I never attended that particular school, though. And I do like a good wand gag, so…
Miriam Margoyles portrayed the great Professor Sprout in the first HP film, which also featured John Cleese as Nearly Headless Nick, the ghost who wasn’t allowed to join the Headless Hunt on a technicality.
Another connection between the two is that they both appeared in the 1962 Cambridge Footlights Review as students.
They have had their differences in recent years, with Margoyles referring to Cleese as “poisonous” and “irrelevant” while Cleese mis-spelt her name in a tweet as “Gargoyles”. Me, I love ‘em both. Nothing like a good online celebrity spat.
Fawlty Towers (1979)
Basil Fawlty (John Cleese) desperately trying to conceal his wife’s absence from Alice (Una Stubbs)
Una Stubbs, who played Alf Garnett’s long-suffering daugher Rita in Till Death Us Do Part pops up in the episode The Anniversary with Basil frantically trying to hide the fact that Sybil has left him on their anniversary because she thought he had forgotten, when in fact he had invited all their friends round for a surprise party.
Basil being Basil, he pretends Sybil is still there rather than ‘fess up, getting Polly to impersonate her. With hilarious results.
Summer Holiday (1963) - dir Peter Yates
I love a Cliff Richard musical, me, and this is one of his best.
Cliff plays Don, a bus mechanic for London Transport, who persuades his bosses to lend him and his mates a double-decker bus to take on holiday with them. He then persuades his workmates to work round the clock for a week, for free, to convert the bus into a huge caravan so they can drive across Europe.
These are only the second and third most unbelievable elements to the story, though. First place goes to Don and his buddies failing to recognise that the young lad they pick up hitch-hiking is in fact a GIRL! And the lads don’t notice for days!
Some cracking tunes including Summer Holiday itself, Bachelor Boy (which has quite a gay-adjacent dance routine btw), and The Next Time, and a ludicrous but fun chase plot make it 107 minutes very well spent.
“Living Doll” by Cliff Richard and The Young Ones (1986 single)
What IS it with the Richard brothers? Cliff is as youthful as his brother Keith and looks in better shape than everybody else in this photo despite being 10-15 years older.
BBC sitcom The Young Ones featured many references to Cliff Richard, from the theme song down. I say “references”, but I mean “pisstakes”.
Cliff didn’t seem to mind though, and was probably happy for the exposure. In 1986, as part of the BBC’s Comic Relief charity-fundrasing-a-thon, he joined the cast of the BBC sitcom The Young Ones to record a version of another of his hits, with all proceeds going to charity and the side-effect that nobody who heard this will ever be able to hear the original version without doing the voices on the words “Living Doll” and shouting “Get Down!”
Dexys Midnight Runners on “The Young Ones” (1982)
And we achieve our goal of Kevin Rowland (above) with an episode of The Young Ones. Every week, a cool band of the day was featured in a comedic setting.
Dexys were a shoo-in for being asked to be on the show since 1982 was the year of Come On Eileen, the success of which royally pissed off us hardcore fans, I can tell you.
In the episode “Bomb”, Mike got the band to set up in the toilet in the student’s scummy flat to play Jackie Wilson Said (I’m In Heaven When You Smile).
The footage of this is quite hard to find as I believe it is not on the DVD releases of the show for copyright reasons, but it can still be found in the depths of facebook here:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=968229990038748
Note in particular Steve Brennan, a direct descendant of George Bernard Shaw no less, playing violin while standing in the bath.
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