I did a post on this subject a while ago and I thought it’s time for a follow up post. My original highlighted 8 screen portrayals but this time I thought I’d focus on just 5.
Glenn Miller
The Glenn Miller Story was a film that I first saw on TV back in the 1960’s. Sadly, as much as I loved it then, when I see it these days it is a little disappointing. James Stewart was far too old to play Glenn Miller, at least in my view.
June Alyson played Glenn’s wife and she elevated the use of the word ‘annoying’ to a new level with her constant beginning or ending of a phrase with ‘Honestly!’ I imagine the scriptwriter was fairly pleased with himself, coming up with a cute bit of business like that. Wrong! If I had been Glenn Miller and June Alyson my wife, I would have been sorely tempted to employ some appropriately placed Gaffer tape to remedy that situation.
One odd moment in the film comes when Glenn comes home from work and his wife takes him upstairs and says, ‘look what just arrived’ and guess what had arrived: two children who seemed to have arrived in time honoured fashion via the unseen stork. Of course, they may have been adopted, I really don’t know because it wasn’t really explained very well but it was a little bit like one of those moments in old episodes of Blue Peter, the children’s TV show, where Valerie Singleton or John Noakes would say, ‘and here’s one I made earlier!’
I must have mentioned in previous posts about how I used to have a cassette tape recorder and how many times I used to drag my poor brother into performing the skits and plays I used to write. One time we did a skit on the Glenn Miller story and there was me in my best American accent drawling, James Stewart style, ‘that sound, that certain sound, I need to find that certain sound and I’m gonna keep on looking till I find it.’ Throw in my brother blowing a fart down a cardboard tube and cue me as James Stewart: ‘That sound, that certain sound: That’s it! I’ve found it!’
I feel a little mean trashing a film I’ve always loved but it’s like a lot of things that I used to love years ago, they don’t always hold up when you see them again years later. James Stewart was, as I mentioned earlier, a little too old to play Miller and to be honest, Stewart just played Miller like he played every other character in every other film he was ever in.
The Glenn Miller Story pops up on TV every now and again and despite me not appreciating various elements of the film, I still love the music and it’s nice to see the guest stars in the film, people like Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa the fabulous drummer, bandleader Ben Pollack and the Modernaires, a vocal group who worked with Miller’s band as well as many others.
David Frost and Richard Nixon
In the film Frost/Nixon, Michael Sheen plays the part of David Frost and Frank Langella portrays Nixon. Sheen is perfect as Frost and Langella is pretty good too as Nixon. The film is about Nixon in his later years as he seeks to defend his legacy as President of the USA. Back then, Frost was a jet setting TV interviewer and personality and he sets up a deal to make a series of interviews with Nixon. Unable to find financial backing, Frost is forced to broker the deal with money from various backers and is worried that the project will fail financially.
Frost’s team are worried about something different; they feel that Frost is not serious enough to actually challenge Nixon about his actions as President and are concerned that the broadcasts will actually vindicate Nixon of any wrongdoing during Watergate.
In the final interview though, Frost manages to pressure Nixon into making the famous admission that he acted illegally when he famously says “when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal!”
I’ve always been fascinated by Nixon and Watergate and for me this was a wonderful film. I love the moment when Nixon, just as he and Frost are about to go on air, turns to Frost and asks “did you do any fornicating last night?”
Douglas Bader
Kenneth Moore played the part of World War II flying ace Douglas Bader in the film Reach For The Sky. Bader was a famous figure from the battle of Britain who rose to the rank of Group Captain despite losing both his legs in a flying accident in 1931.
His story was told in the 1956 film which was based on a biography of Bader by author Paul Brickhill.
The film is one of those that I first saw as a child and like The Glenn Miller Story, I’m not sure if it really works today. Moore plays a good part as Bader. As a young cadet he and his colleagues are told not to do low level aerobatics as it is too dangerous. Bader however disregards this after a passing remark from a civilian pilot. He takes off, gives the civilians something of a show but his wing tags the ground and his plane flips over and crashes. Doctors have no choice but to amputate his legs, one below the knee and one above.
The narrative then shows Bader’s determination to walk using his metal legs. Despite this however he is discharged from the RAF.
When the war breaks out though, the air force is desperate for pilots and Bader is able to return to the cockpit. Even so, he still displays something of a cavalier attitude, dumping his admin in a rubbish bin and once again performing low level flying, this time to convince his junior pilots that he knows how to fly.
I remember reading something about Bader years ago which was not complimentary at all so I decided to ask Google what the real Bader was like. The results that came back were not good. He clearly wasn’t anything like Kenneth Moore and many of his contemporaries found him abrasive and unpleasant and he was known to be harsh, particularly towards non officers.
I read once, and I think it was in racing driver Graham Hill’s autobiography, Hill tells the story of playing golf with Bader and just as Hill was about to take his shot, Bader started knocking his pipe on his metal legs!
He was however a courageous man and fought bravely for his country, in fact he was shot down and imprisoned in a POW camp which is shown at the end of Reach For the Sky.
Despite his disability Bader still managed various escapes and ended up finishing the war in Colditz Castle.
Winston Churchill
A while ago I stayed up late watching the film Darkest Hour which is about Winston Churchill and the beginning of his Prime Ministership in World War II. It paints a rather bleak picture of Winston’s premiership, with the Conservative party apparently holding back from supporting him and a growing clique actually wanting to replace him with Lord Halifax. When France fell to the Nazis, Halifax wanted to explore peace talks with Hitler which Churchill was violently opposed to. I’m not sure how true to life the film was and although I can imagine not everyone was 100% behind Churchill, I found some of this film a little hard to believe. There was a vote of no confidence in the Commons in 1942 although Churchill won this by a resounding 475 votes to 25. In the film, Conservatives still will not support Churchill in the Commons until outgoing premier Neville Chamberlain signalled them to do so by placing a white handkerchief on his knee. By then Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement were totally discredited so would he really have had such sway over his fellow MPs? I doubt it.
The film shows Churchill in various situations, in bed and in the bath, all the time dictating to his secretaries. We see him with his cigars and brandy, as well as in the House of Commons giving those famous speeches which united the country in those dark times. Gary Oldman played the part of Churchill and aided by some impressive make up he gave a really excellent performance.
I suppose actors playing the part of real people have a choice; either to try, to a certain extent, to impersonate the real person or like James Stewart and Kenneth Moore, just to represent the idea of the person in their own way. I like all the portrayals I talk about above but I think my favourite was Michael Sheen’s version of David Frost.
Do you have a favourite?
Tv programmes of course cost money, quite a lot of money in fact. Back in the 1990s when I was fresh from a video production course and hoping to actually get a job in the TV industry (I never did) I was told an hour of television costs £100,000. What it costs nowadays is anyone’s guess but then again, it’s so easy to make a TV show in 2026. One of my favourite programmes is Canal Boat Diaries, an entirely self-shot show which has graduated from YouTube onto the BBC and can be seen quite regularly on the U-Yesterday channel. Does that mean an hour of TV is worth more or less than that 90’s figure of £100,000?
We watched The Crown last year while staying in the Loire valley even though we don’t normally watch much TV on holiday. This year in Lanzarote, we spent many an evening watching Emily in Paris, another Netflix show. I’d found it by searching on the internet for good TV shows to watch on Netflix and Emily came up so we thought we’d give it a go.
Fry reveals his thoughts about homosexuality and his feelings, either obsession or lust over a boy at his school. Fry went to a public school which confusingly for our American readers is actually a private school. Actually, a private boarding school which eventually Fry was expelled from.
When I was a child I used to have, just like Stephen Fry, lots of daydreams and fantasies. One of them was that the school would be taken over by terrorists and that they would be methodically trying to find someone who was actually a secret agent. That secret agent of course would be me and after biding my time I would, just like Bruce Willis in the Die Hard films, sort out the terrorists one by one. My daydream would usually be shattered by one of the teachers asking me a question like ‘how many degrees in a right-angled triangle?’ and I would suddenly be brought down to earth and desperately try to answer before revealing the inevitable truth that I had not been paying attention.
I know I’ve written about this first book already but as it’s part of this month’s holiday read, I feel I have to talk about it once again. As I mentioned in a 
I sought this book out on the internet after reading Bennett’s The Lady in the Van which was a very enjoyable although short book. This volume is a collection of various essays and diaries by the author and it begins with the title essay, Untold Stories which is a series of observations mostly about his mother and father. He describes the life of his family in Yorkshire as he saw it evolve. It is perhaps a very ordinary story of a working class family and their fairly uneventful journey through life. It is very sharply observed and the author takes us through the lives of not only his parents but also of his two aunts as well as other family members. I found this section hugely interesting and with many parallels to my own life, especially when Bennett deals with his aging parents and he has to take them to numerous hospital appointments. His mother suffered with depression and was even hospitalised on a couple of occasions. Later in life she begins to suffer with dementia.
I picked this book up in a sale ages ago, in fact actually a few years ago. I think it was one of those offers like ‘buy two and get one free’. This was my free choice and as such it’s been lying around waiting to be read. It’s a collection from the author’s radio series ‘Letters from America’ which used to be broadcast many years ago on BBC Radio 4. I can’t say I’ve ever listened to the broadcast but I do remember watching a quite exceptional TV documentary series called ‘Alistair Cooke’s America’ which detailed the history of the USA.
This is not one of Forsyth’s thrillers but an autobiography and it was a really interesting read. Forsyth spoke many languages and he puts this down to learning them with local people. He studied French and German at school of course but then spent the summer holidays in France learning from a French family and then later did the same with a German family and even later with a family in Spain. His observations in France were really interesting. The French welcomed Forsyth as an English hitchhiker with the union flag on his backpack but later when travelling in what had been Vichy, France, he felt the English were not as popular.
Sometimes when I’ve had a swim and I’m lying on my lounger just drying off in the sun, I often think about my dad who died back in 2000. Not long ago I came across one of my brother’s photos. It was my dad in the back garden of our old house and he was dressed in a vest and shorts, reading the paper with his dog, a pedigree dachshund on his knee. He was not in a chair or a sun lounger but relaxing in a wheelbarrow, just how he did when he was at work and had finished his job.
As usual Liz and I have left behind cold and unpleasant England for the much warmer climes of Lanzarote. We’re renting a place that we first found two years ago but were unable to rent last year as it was fully booked. This time Liz got in early and so here we are for four weeks. The villa is very comfortable with a great outlook, sunny on the patio all day and it has a great pool and comfy outdoor couches.
Another modern classic. This film was directed by Peter Bogdanovich and is set in a small town in northern Texas in the early 1950s. The film has an ensemble cast but the two main characters are Sonny and Duane played by Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges. The two are teenagers and old friends and various things happen to them. They fall out over a girl called Jacy played by Cybill Shepherd. Ben Johnson plays ‘Sam the Lion’ who owns the bar and cinema in the town. Sam has a mentally disabled son who Sonny has befriended. Various things happen to the pair but towards the end of the film Duane enlists in the army and is due to leave town so the pair decide to visit the town cinema for the very last picture show as the cinema is about to close after Sam’s sudden death.
Like The Shining, this is another film based on a book by Stephen King. Tom Hanks plays the head of a death row section of an American penitentiary. One of the inmates is John Coffey, a huge black man who appears to have healing powers. He cures Tom Hanks’ bladder infection but the mood in death row is not good after sadistic Percy Wetmore joins the team and deliberately sabotages the execution of another inmate causing the prisoner to die in terrible agony. The warden’s wife is terminally ill and Hanks and his team wonder if John Coffey could cure her.
700 is quite a milestone, certainly for me anyway. I started writing my blog posts back in 2014 and I’m quite pleased to have got to this point. 700 hundred blog posts. Anyway, after all that and a quick recount later I see that this is actually blog 701. Last week was my 700th post and I didn’t realise. It’s a bit like missing my birthday or waking up on the 2nd of January and realising you’ve missed New Year’s Day.
have written about all kinds of things although I mainly stick to books, classic films, Formula One and me and my little life. Some of those posts I have worked quite hard on and I’ve written and rewritten them and researched and sometimes rewritten again. At other times I have found myself on a Friday staring at my laptop wondering what on earth can I write about and then, right at the last moment, I have either thought of something or remembered a post that was made up of various short elements and decided to take one of those elements and develop it into a new post.
I always jot down notes for blogs, especially those where I try to connect various classic films together so for instance I’ll start with a director or an actor, let’s say Noël Coward for example and then try to go through various films and link together different actors or personalities and eventually end up back with another Noël Coward production. The links on the right are a bit thin but Coward worked with director David Lean, Lean worked with Jack Hawkins on The Bridge on the River Kwai. When Hawkins contracted throat cancer later in life and was unable to speak, his voice was dubbed by Charles Gray. Gray played Blofeld in the Bond film Diamonds are Forever. Diamonds was written by Ian Fleming who was a friend and neighbour of Coward in Jamaica. 
By the time you are reading this, Christmas and New Year will all be over. We’ll be fed up of turkey and sprouts and thinking about taking down the Christmas decorations. So before Christmas becomes a distant memory here’s a quick look at 6 Christmas films that were all shown, with perhaps just one exception, over the last few weeks.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 