Author Archives: Steve Higgins

Film Connections #8

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As regular readers will know, I am a great fan of classic cinema and I do love making these posts in which I try to tell a story by linking together various films, actors and directors. My last connections post ran a lateral course linking the film Pygmalion to Star Trek; The Motion Picture. This week I’ve worked out a very roundabout connection from Greta Garbo via Frederick March, James Mason, Alfred Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman, right back to Garbo again.

At first glance, Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman seem to belong to different emotional climates; Garbo, distant and enigmatic, Bergman, luminous and searching, her humanity worn closer to the surface. The threads run from the migration of talent across studios and continents and in the way both women, in very different ways, redefined what it meant to be a star of the cinema.

Greta Garbo was one of the first stars of the silver screen. She was born in Stockholm, Sweden on the 18th September 1905. She is best known for her beautiful but melancholy screen persona. In 1924 she was spotted in a Swedish film by Louis B Mayer the head of MGM and the following year he brought her over to Hollywood.

Greta Garbo

In 1930 she made the successful transition from silent pictures to the ‘talkies’ with her first sound picture Anna Christie which was promoted with the phrase ‘Garbo Talks!” The film was a great success and her career in the cinema continued until her last film in 1941, Two Faced Woman. She signed for various pictures afterwards but all the projects either never came to fruition or she dropped out for one reason or another. Billy Wilder asked her to star in Sunset Boulevard in 1949 but she declined.

In one of David Niven’s books, Bring on the Empty Horses, the author relates how he asked Garbo why she stopped making films and she thought for a moment and then replied “I had made enough faces”.

In 1935 Garbo starred in the screen version of Anna Karenina directed by Clarence Brown. Among her co-stars was Fredric March.

March began his career as an extra in silent movies. He made his stage debut in 1929 and not long afterwards signed a contract with Paramount Pictures. He made numerous films but in 1937 he played the part of drunken movie star Norman Maine in the film A Star is Born. Maine helps aspiring star Esther Blodgett, played by Janet Gaynor up the ladder to movie stardom. The film was shot in Technicolor and became one of the first colour films to be nominated for an Academy Award.

A Star is Born is a film that has been remade a number of times and all the remakes have been musicals, including the most recent one produced in 2018 which starred Lady Gaga. My favourite though was the 1954 version with James Mason and Judy Garland. Judy Garland plays the part of Esther Blodgett who is heard singing by the boozy Norman Maine, this time played by Mason. He takes her along to the studios and after introducing her singing voice to the studio boss, gets her a breakthrough role in a new film.

Esther, now known as Vicki Lester, becomes a big star and of course falls for Norman Maine. The two marry but will their marriage survive Maine’s alcoholism and failing career?

James Mason was born in Huddersfield in 1909. He became a stage actor and was later hugely successful in British films. In 1949 he moved to Hollywood and after the success of his starring role in the film The Desert Fox about German General Rommell, he was given a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox.

It was in 1954 that Mason was asked to be Judy Garland’s leading man in A Star is Born. Cary Grant had been offered the part but turned it down.

Both Cary Grant and James Mason starred in the 1959 picture North by Northwest directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Mason stars as a suave but ruthless secret agent who mistakes Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) for a man known as George Kaplan who Mason suspects is a government agent tailing him across the USA. As the film unfolds, we see that George Kaplan is actually a fake identity created as a decoy.

After a murder in which Thornhill is wrongly supposed to be the murderer, he escapes on board a train to Chicago where he meets Eve Kendall played by Eva Marie Saint who helps him get away.

North by Northwest is one of my personal favourite films. Apparently, Hitchcock had engaged screenwriter Ernest Lehman to work on a story adaption but he couldn’t work out what to do and offered to quit. Hitchcock replied that he enjoyed working with Lehman and that the two should just work out an entirely new story. North by Northwest was the result.

Cary Grant appeared in four of Hitchcock’s films. Suspicion (1941), To Catch a Thief (1955), North by Northwest (1959) and most importantly for this post, Notorious (1946).

I’m sure I’ve seen Notorious but it’s not a film I can really remember even though when I looked it up many people say it’s one of Hitchcock’s best ever films. Cary Grant plays a government agent who is on the trail of Nazi Claude Rains. Grant enlists the help of Ingrid Bergman who plays the daughter of a war criminal. Grant and Bergman fall for each other but Ingrid Bergman’s character has to seduce Nazi Alexander Sebastian played by Rains.

Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca

Ingrid Bergman came to Hollywood in 1939. She was invited by Hollywood producer David O Selznick to star in an English language remake of one of her earlier Swedish films Intermezzo. Bergman expected to be in Hollywood for this one film and then return to Sweden but the huge success of Intermezzo made her a star and more Hollywood films followed. Her husband and daughter came to Hollywood to join her and later they both applied for American citizenship.

Ingrid made a number of classic films in Hollywood including Casablanca, Spellbound and Notorious.

In 1949 she wrote to the Italian director Roberto Rossellini telling him how much she admired his films and expressing her wish to work with him. Rossellini cast her in Stromboli and she flew to Italy to begin work. While she was there, she fell for Rossellini and began an affair with him, becoming pregnant with his child.

This caused a huge scandal back in the USA. Bergman herself thought that because she had played a nun in The Bells of St Mary and a saint in Joan of Arc these roles seemed to make what she had done appear much worse. Ingrid went through a much publicised divorce and custody battle before marrying Rossellini in 1950.

Ingrid was born in August 1915 in Stockholm which brings us back full circle to Greta Garbo who was born ten years earlier also in Stockholm. Two wonderful actresses separated by only a decade.

(All pictures reproduced via creative commons.)

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Old Friends and School Memories

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This last week I met up with two of my old friends, both of whom I haven’t really seen for perhaps thirty years. Carl (names have been changed to protect the innocent) was a lad I first met at junior school. We met through a mutual school friend called Peter as Peter and Carl lived in the same avenue.

Carl’s brother Martin and I once shared a flat together in Didsbury. It was a rather nice place as I remember. It was small and I had the best bedroom because I think it was me who had paid the deposit or at least the bulk of it and it was right in the centre of Didsbury, a stone’s throw from numerous pubs, bars and takeaways.

Martin seemed to have a lot of health problems when he was younger. Once, many years ago, I used to work nights and when I came home one morning, Martin’s three alarm clocks went off in succession, each placed further away from his bed so he would have to get up to switch them off. I went to bed and was soon asleep. I woke up at about 3pm and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. As I sat down in the lounge to drink it, Martin staggered in having just got out of bed. “What time is it?” he asked.

We laughed about that in the pub the other day. I and others used to pull his leg about being lazy and being a hypochondriac but as it turned out, Martin had MS; multiple sclerosis, not an easy disease to spot even now.

Carl was the best man at my wedding and I was his best man when he married. We lost regular contact over the years especially when I moved out of Manchester to Merseyside. Anyway, it was good to meet up again and after a while the three of us slipped pretty easily into the old comfortable camaraderie we used to have.

We filled each other in about marriages, divorces and new partners. About jobs and retirements as well as about old friends and acquaintances.

We talked a lot about our schooldays. We all went to the same school and way back then, my two top subjects were English language and art. In fact, now I think of it, I was the toast of the art class. People loved my paintings and drawings and I loved art. Our art teacher was a guy called Mr Markland. He wasn’t a man with a great affinity for people. In fact he was a rather cool customer but I always liked him and got on well with him. Martin though hated the guy.

Another teacher, probably the most disliked teacher in the school was Mr Ashton, the metalwork teacher. He had a rather bad habit of getting very angry at his students and throwing whatever was handy at them. As this was the metalwork class, that would be something metal and heavy. Many a time a hammer or a chunk of metal flew past my head towards some offending pupil. What would have happened had he hit someone, well I don’t know. Maybe he had a good aim and was choosing to deliberately miss students. Of course, that was an age free of the health and safety restraints that we currently endure. We all had our Mr Ashton stories to tell.

Mr Markland was a superb artist. I remember one day sketching something. I think we had to produce some kind of large human figure. I had chosen a cowboy for some reason and Mr Markland took my pencil and started to make some gentle curves on the paper. He held the pencil not like someone would hold a pencil to write but in the way someone would hold a paintbrush, holding it lightly at the top and making these confident curves on the paper.  After a few moments the shape of the cowboy became apparent; the waistcoat, the bandana tied around the neck, the gun belt at an angle, the hat and so on. I have always wished I could draw like that.

One day there came the moment when we had to choose. Choose which subjects we wanted to study and to take forward to O level or beyond. When I look back now my thinking then was just, well, bonkers!

My number one love in those days was motor racing and I harboured some kind of distant idea of working in motor sport, of perhaps even being a racing driver. Problem number 1: we had no family car and my dad couldn’t drive so any idea of doing what Jensen Button and his dad later did in Karts went out of the window. Anyway, that’s why I chose metalwork because I thought I could become a mechanic, get work with some motor sporting garage and maybe break into motorsport like that. The thing was that when we came to choose our subjects it wasn’t just ‘I want to study this’ and ‘I want to study that’, it was a case of this OR that. Chemistry or biology for instance, you couldn’t do both. I wasn’t happy and it had come to a straight choice of metalwork or art. Foolishly, metalwork won. After all, a metalwork O level would help me get a job whereas an art O level, well, what could that do for me? (What a fool I was!)

One day I met Mr Markland in the corridor and he stopped me and said “Steve, you’re going the wrong way. We’ve moved to the new art room on the first floor.”

It was then I had to tell him. “Mr Markland, I’m going to the metalwork class.”

“Metalwork?”

“Yes. I’m in the metalwork class.” Clearly, he didn’t understand. “I chose metalwork.”

Mr Markland looked as though he had been slapped in the face by a wet kipper. “You chose metalwork instead of art?”

“Yes,” I said meekly.

Mr Markland thought for a moment and then said, “I see,” and walked on. He never spoke to me again.

It would be nice to record that I excelled in metalwork, left school and became a mechanic for a formula one team. The fact is I hated metalwork although the hated Mr Ashton became a much nicer teacher now that he knew (well, thought he knew) that I actually liked his class. After many years of hard graft, I produced a metal bolt that was rather stiff. I thought I could attach it to the back door but when it was screwed to the door it proved rather difficult to open. One day my mum told my dad, “Get that bloody bolt off that door. I can’t get the door open in a morning!”

I gave up the idea of working in a formula one team. Instead, I had a new vocation. I would become a journalist. I went to my careers teacher, Mr Sherrif and told him.

“So how are you going to do that then?” he said.

Wasn’t he the one who was supposed to tell me what to do?

“I’m not sure,” I answered.

“Ever thought of going to the Manchester Evening News?”

Now, that’s more like it. “That’s a good idea,” I said.

“Only they don’t take trainees.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, I’ve got just the thing for you.”

Mr Sherrif rummaged around on his desk, produced various papers, flicked through a notebook and dialled a number. After some idle chit chat he seemed to be arranging an appointment, I could hear my name mentioned and something about ‘nine thirty’ tomorrow. Of course, he’s onto the Evening News. He’s got me a job interview and to think people say Mr Sherrif is rubbish and all he ever does is get people interviews at Barclays Bank!

“There you are,” said Mr Sherrif when he put down the phone. He scribbled something on a slip of paper.

“Tomorrow at nine thirty. You know where Barclays bank is don’t you?”

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More Film Connections (Part 7)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Usually in these Film Connections posts, I tell a sort of circular story starting with an actor or director and then find a link to another film or personality and then another until I work back to whoever I started with. This week I decided to be a little more lateral and try and link Pygmalion, the 1938 film to the first Star Trek film from 1979. I like to be different now and again but not only that (confession alert) I struggled to find a link back to Pygmalion. (Actually I did find a very tenuous link and I’m not sure as I write this that I’m going to share it but we’ll see how things go).

Pygmalion

Pygmalion is a famous play by George Bernard Shaw which was made into a film in 1938 with a script adapted by Shaw himself. Leslie Howard starred in the film as Professor Higgins. Higgins is a linguist who boasts that he can make Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower seller, into a lady. Doolittle was played by Wendy Hiller.

Professor Henry Higgins actually makes a bet that he can take Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower seller with a seriously strong accent, and pass her off as a refined lady just by teaching her how to speak “properly”. What starts as a kind of experiment turns into a full-on transformation, with Eliza learning manners, speech, and confidence, but she also begins to question how she’s being treated. Is she a person or just Higgins’ project? Things get tense after her big high-society debut goes off without a hitch, because suddenly the question isn’t whether she can fit in, but where she actually belongs and whether Higgins deserves any credit (or forgiveness) at all. It’s witty, a bit biting and surprisingly emotional under all the clever dialogue.

Interesting fact #1: Wendy Hiller speaks a controversial line in the film – “not bloody likely” making her the first person to swear in a British film. It’s a controversy that’s almost laughable today considering the language used in modern films. Have you ever wondered who the first person to use the F word in a British film was? (Answer at the end of the post).

Interesting fact #2: The film was edited by future director David Lean.

My Fair Lady

The musical version of Pygmalion was created by Alan Jay Learner and Frederick Lowe. They worked for a long time on the musical, even while trying to get permission from GB Shaw’s estate for the musical rights to the play. Eventually they succeeded and the production opened on Broadway after a four week try out in Philadelphia. Rex Harrison played Higgins with newcomer Julie Andrews as Eliza. The play used many scenes written by Shaw especially for the 1938 film version. When Jack Warner acquired the rights to the film, he decided he wanted a famous name to play the part of Eliza and Julie Andrews was dropped in favour of Audrey Hepburn. Audrey played a good part but personally, I’ve always thought it was a tragedy that audiences never got to see and hear Julie Andrews in such a wonderful role.

Interesting fact #3: Hepburn’s singing voice was dubbed for the film by Marni Nixon.

The Sound of Music

The Sound of Music was based on the stage musical version with music by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. The story was based on the real-life story of the Von Trapp family singers which was originally written in book form by Maria Von Trapp. Maria was a nun who takes a job as a governess with the Von Trapp family and later falls for their widowed father, Captain Von Trapp.

In the film version Christopher Plummer played the part of the captain and Julie Andrews starred as Maria. It was Julie’s second film after her film debut in Mary Poppins in 1964. The screenplay was written by Ernest Lehman and he particularly wanted Robert Wise to direct. At first William Wyler was assigned to direct but when he wanted a delay to complete another film, Lehman was able to get Wise to join the film. He and Lehman worked closely together to bring the story to the screen.

Personally, I’m not a great fan of musicals but I’ve always loved this film, in fact I watched it only the other day to prepare for this post. The songs are really wonderful and the story of the family and their later escape from the Nazis in Austria is really well told. Julie Andrews plays a great part but then so do all the actors including Christopher Plummer. I’ve heard both of them in interviews making a little fun of the film but I’m sure they must have been proud of it really. Four weeks after its release, the film became the number one box office hit in the USA. According to Wikipedia, by November 1966 The Sound of Music was the highest grossing film in history up to that time.

Interesting fact #4: Marni Nixon, the woman who dubbed Audrey Hepburn’s singing in My Fair Lady plays the part of a nun in The Sound of Music.

Star Trek

The director of The Sound of Music was Robert Wise who, like David Lean, was originally a film editor before turning his hand to film direction. In fact, he was an editor on that great film classic Citizen Kane. Another film he directed, one radically different to The Sound of Music, was Star Trek; The Motion Picture.

Star Trek was a TV series that lasted three seasons from 1966 to 1969 before its cancellation. It had a huge fan base and producer Gene Roddenberry tried to get the series resurrected. A cinema version was planned for the mid 70s but this was cancelled in favour of a new TV series to be known as Star Trek Phase Two. After the huge success of Star Wars, Paramount decided to change tack again and focus on a film. The basis for the film was apparently the pilot episode of the planned TV series, expanded for a cinematic film. The resulting film was good and I have always enjoyed it but it moves along at a very slow pace and does not have that something that made the TV shows tick over so well. The crew from the original show are gradually introduced. Kirk is given command of the enterprise once again, Doctor McCoy refuses to have his atoms scrambled in the transporter, Mr Scott once again takes over control of the engines and Mr Spock leaves the planet Vulcan to have his science officer status renewed. I can sum up the story by quoting Admiral Kirk; “Scotty, an object of unbelievable size is heading towards earth. Enterprise is the only starship in the area. Ready or not, she launches in 12 hours!” Or something like that.

Interesting fact #5: William Shatner who played Captain James T Kirk was great friends with Christopher Plummer and the two appeared together in Star Trek VI in which Plummer played a one-eyed Klingon general. I’ve always thought it was the absolute worst of the Trek films but having said that, it apparently won an award for the best science fiction film of the year.

Linking back to Pygmalion

If you do a search on Google for a possible link to Star Trek, the results come up for an episode of Star Trek Voyager (episode 22, season 5, Someone to Watch Over Me) in which the Doctor (the holographic Doctor who is not a real person but a computer program) decides to nurture Seven of Nine in the ways of human relations and love. Seven, in case you have never watched Voyager, is actually Annika Hansen who was captured by the Borg as a young girl and assimilated into the Borg Collective. (The Borg are an alien race by the way). Now the Voyager crew have freed Seven from the Borg, she’s not very good at person-to-person general relationships (neither would you if you had been trapped in the Borg Collective for years) so the Doctor becomes a sort of Professor Higgins to Seven’s Eliza.

That’s such a thin link back to Pygmalion I might as well not have mentioned it!

Just to finish with, I wondered earlier about the first person to use the ‘F’ word in a British film. According to Google, it was Marianne Faithful in that unforgettable (sarcasm alert) 1967 film ‘I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Isname’ directed by Michael Winner.

1967? I wasn’t expecting that!

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5 British Rom-Coms

Posted on by Steve Higgins

My original idea for this post was to write about 90s British films but then I realised some of those 90’s films were actually from the 2000’s. I then changed tack to a blog about films written by Richard Curtis but that meant cutting out a few films that I really wanted to include. Then I thought what about films with Hugh Grant? Great but although many of the films below feature Hugh, I’ve got a personal favourite in which he doesn’t star. That of course has led to the final incarnation of this post, 5 British Rom-Coms.

4 Weddings and a Funeral 1994

I’ve always rather loved this film. In a way I tend to think of it as a sort of modern Ealing Comedy, or at least the sort of film that Ealing would be making were they still in business. The only difficulty in that respect is the rather liberal use of the ‘f’ word that the film can really do without. In the USA, or so I have read, the version screened over there has the ‘f’ word substituted by the slightly less alarming word bugger.

The plot is pretty simple. It’s about a group of friends who only seem to meet regularly at weddings. At the first wedding Charles, played by Hugh Grant, meets Carrie and falls for her only to find she is about to return to the USA. Happily he meets her again at another wedding and, sadly for Charles, he meets her again at yet another wedding, this time one in which she is the bride.

The happiness of constant weddings is shattered by the death of one of Charles’ friends but this being a rom-com, things all work out in the end. Carrie is played by Andie McDowell and the supporting actors who appear at each wedding are all well known to fans of British film and TV.

Four Weddings and a Funeral is the movie that brought fame to writer Richard Curtis and actor Hugh Grant, as the announcer mentioned last time I saw this film on the television. Strangely, he didn’t mention Mike Newell, who directed the film. Funny how the credit from a successful film doesn’t always get spread equally around.

Notting Hill 1999

Written again by Richard Curtis and starring Hugh Grant, Grant this time plays William Thacker, the owner of a bookshop in London’s Notting Hill. One afternoon at the bookshop, Hollywood film star Anna Scott played by Julia Roberts comes into the shop to browse. Not long afterwards William accidentally walks into her and spills takeaway drinks all over her. He invites her back to his place just across the road where she cleans herself up.

On another occasion the two go out for a date but William’s oddball flatmate Spike played by Rhys Ifans, happens to mention the film star’s presence to his mates at the pub and the flat is soon swamped by reporters. Anna is not amused and the two fall out and seem to go their separate ways.

There is a really lovely sequence here in which William walks along the Portabello Road and the scene transforms into winter, then autumn and finally summer showing the passage of time in a really unique way. Later, the two manage to sort things out just before Anna leaves for the USA.

Over on Wikipedia it was interesting to find that according to a 2018 interview High Grant gave to GQ magazine, the idea came to Richard Curtis after one of his friends became involved with an unnamed ‘big star’. The film was shot on location in Notting Hill and the blue door to William Thacker’s place in the film was actually a property owned by Richard Curtis.

Julia Roberts was the producer’s only choice for Anna Scott although personally, just like Andie McDowell in 4 weddings, I’ve never found her remotely attractive.

The film won a Brit Award for its soundtrack.

Sliding Doors 1998

This was a film written and directed by Peter Howitt. Howitt is probably best known for playing the part of Joey Boswell in the TV comedy series Bread. This is a really super film which is about a girl, Helen Quilley, who gets fired from her PR job. Helen, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, heads off for home. She goes to the tube station but is only seconds too late and misses her train. The film then rewinds a few minutes and when it replays, Helen manages to catch the train. The film then sets off in two separate directions with two differing storylines. In one she arrives home to find her boyfriend in bed with another woman. In the second she arrives home later and the boyfriend manages to cover up his two timing activities.

The film was made in 1998 but still looks fresh and contemporary. The only jarring things -from a 2026 point of view- are people still smoking in pubs and offices filled with huge computer monitors. It’s a lovely film and one I tend to watch quite a lot on DVD.

Bridget Jones Diary 2001

This film was based on the book by Helen Fielding and had a script written by Fielding, Andrew Davies and once again, Richard Curtis. American actress Renee Zellweger played Bridget with a very impressive British accent with her love interests played by Hugh Grant and Colin Firth.

Bridget works in publicity for a publishing company. She is 32 and worried about her weight and confides all her worries as well as her fantasies to her diary. At her mother’s Christmas party, she meets barrister Mark Darcy, a neighbour from her childhood, who she finds arrogant and rude. At work she flirts a lot with her boss Daniel Cleaver played by Grant and begins an affair with him only to find that he is a serial cheater.

Who will Bridget end up with, the slimy but nice Daniel or the boring but nice Mark? One of the film’s highlights is a drunken street fight between Daniel and Mark which plays out pretty much how two upper/middle class twits would be expected to behave.

Three sequels were made to the film, the last one was Mad About the Boy in 2025 but personally, I think the original was the best.

About a Boy 2002

This is still a rom-com but considerably darker than the other films on this list. Hugh Grant plays someone slightly different to his usual film persona. Will Freeman is a young man in his 30s who lives a rather aimless life. He does not go out to work, instead he has ample funds because of regular royalties due from a popular tune which was written by his late father. His one aim in life is to meet women and he happens to come across a young mother and feels that young single parent females would be good for him because they are mostly on the lookout for a new man. To achieve this aim he joins a group for single parents where he is the only man and after spinning a yarn about being deserted by the mother of his only child, ‘Ned’, he feels warmed by the sympathy vote of the whole group and quickly gets involved with an attractive young mother called Suzie.

Through various circumstances, this leads him to meet Marcus, the son of one of Suzie’s friends and the two begin a friendship of sorts which begins to bring a new meaning to Will’s life.

Overall, the film is perhaps a little slow and rather dark in a way but still a great film based on a book by Nick Hornby.

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About Blogging

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s always nice to see my regular post published on a Saturday at 10am but almost as soon as it goes out into the world of the internet the first thing I think about is what shall I do next?

Well, the next step is to try and plug the post everywhere I can think of so this post goes out on Facebook, on X, on Instagram, on Threads and on Tumblr. I also add it on any relevant Facebook pages so for instance if it’s a sci-fi post I might link it to a sci-fi Facebook page or a sci-fi page on Reddit or any other relevant page. I also publish some of my posts over on Medium and again, link them back here to WordPress. Sometimes I even make a video version and share it over on my YouTube page.

Very few of these posts will work as a video but a couple that come to mind were a post about a letter to my younger self which translated well to a video except that the narration wasn’t really much good. (Must make a note; try remaking the video with a better narration). Another was a post about how to write poetry. The video version involved me just talking to the camera about the ways I write poetry.  To be honest I think the video version was better although looking at it again recently I do seem to rabbit on a bit.

On social media I’m always trying to bring in more readers to my blog page and so I try to add something other than just a link to my latest post. Lately I’ve been making these short 5 second videos that can be made pretty easily on Grok or most other AI image making sites. I usually use these on X or on Instagram but recently I thought I’d upload a few to YouTube. YouTube seem to be trying to get on the bandwagon created by Instagram and TikTok of very short videos that viewers can just scroll quickly through. On YouTube they are called ‘shorts’ and I’ve found that my shorts have actually been really successful, bringing in lots of viewers who will hopefully watch these quick videos and then click on my website to actually settle down and read more.

One of my shorts, a very short AI generated video shows a young woman roaring off on a motorbike with the words ‘NEW BLOG POST OUT NOW’ inscribed on the back of her leather jacket. Currently that video has 4.7 thousand viewers and my YouTube followers have begun to increase. I still need another 60 followers in order to actually make revenue from my videos but happily things seem to be moving in the right direction. A small group of my main videos have great viewing figures but until I hit the magic number of 500 followers, I make no money at all from YouTube.

It’s only fair to say that after publishing that last video on YouTube a little box appeared which said promote this video for only £10!  Ten pounds I thought? What’s ten pounds today? Two or three pints of lager in Wetherspoons? A CD album? Okay I thought, ten pounds, even a tightwad like me can live with that. Of course, that’s where the 4.7 thousand viewers came from, an advertisement. Even so, many of those watchers must have clicked onto my landing page and maybe even read a few posts. Did they go one step further and buy a copy of Timeline or Floating in Space? Well, maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. I’ll find out when a few royalties hit my bank account but until then I won’t be holding my breath. Nice to see that recently though my readership has been steadily expanding.

What I find really interesting is when a post from years ago suddenly gets a little attention. Why did that reader go for that particular post? Did he or she stumble upon it? Were they using a search engine and what were they searching for? Happily Google or Yahoo has directed them my way which is always nice to see.

The other day I was watching one of my favourite films Julie and Julia. It’s a film by Nora Ephron which is about a blogger called Julie Powell who decides she will make all 524 recipes from Julia Child’s cook book in 365 days. Julia was an American woman who learns cordon bleu cookery in France and writes a popular cookbook for American housewives. Obviously, things don’t all go smoothly for Julie the cook and blogger but she manages to get through a different recipe every day and in doing so gets some attention from the local press which boosts her blog even more and eventually enables her to become a published author.

It’s a great story in its own right but also for bloggers everywhere. Of course, they’d have a job making this website into a film unless they wanted endless shots of me, or someone playing the part of me, tapping away on my laptop writing blogs and short stories. Of course they could dramatize some of my stories. The Hollywood Meeting for instance in which a young writer goes to Hollywood to pitch one of his scripts to a producer might make a good film.

This is the point where I try to link a relevant feature film. Films about authors. That’s a tough one. There was Misery, a film based on a Stephen King book where an author is kidnapped and tortured but I don’t think I’m going to go there. Another film I remember seeing some years ago was called How to Murder Your Wife with Jack Lemmon. Jack plays Stanley Ford who authors a comic strip in a newspaper and acts out various situations which are then photographed. Jack’s character uses the photos to inspire his comic strip drawings. Look out for it if you see it on your TV schedules although it’s one of those films I haven’t seen for a long while on TV. When Stanley gets married, he takes many of his real life situations with his wife played by Virni Lisi and uses them in the comic strip. His comic strip character then decides to murder his wife but the wife, on seeing the strip, decides to walk out and people think Stanley has actually murdered her.

The comic strip art used in the film was by an artist called Mel Keefer who penned various comic strips in US newspapers and comics. That reminds me of another social media post I sometimes use below.

So in a world of short sharp TikTok and Instagram videos, can a blog post still work? Are there still people out there who want to read, who want to invest more than ten seconds on a post, who actually have an attention span, who can spend five to ten minutes reading something like this very post?

The answer is hopefully yes. There are even still people who want to buy and read books, after all, I certainly do.

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5 Crime Fighting Duos

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Crime Fighting Duos? What’s that about you might be thinking? Well I thought I’d write about TV investigative couples so let’s go back to the 1960s and start with one of my favourite TV pairings, Steed and Mrs Peel.

Steed and Emma

Steed and Emma featured in The Avengers, no, not the Marvel comic book heroes but the TV sci-fi/espionage series. John Steed and Emma Peel were two secret agents working for an unnamed agency in a very quirky version of 1960s England. The series was first broadcast in 1961 and starred Patrick Macnee and Ian Hendry. Macnee played the debonair John Steed and when Ian Hendry left after the first series, Steed became the focus of the show with his new assistant Cathy Gale played by Honor Blackman.

Honor Blackman became a TV star with her portrayal of Cathy Gale as a leather wearing judo expert. She and Macnee even recorded a hit single together called ‘Kinky Boots’ which became a minor hit.

When Honor left to become a Bond girl in the film Goldfinger the TV production had something of a makeover. The series was sold to the US TV network ABC and moved from videotape to 35mm film. A new character was added, Mrs Emma Peel. The producers chose actress Elizabeth Shepherd to play the part. Shepherd shot the pilot film episode and part of the next one, but the producers decided to drop her, feeling she was not right for the role. With a two-million-dollar deal with the US network ABC hanging in the balance, they began searching for a new Emma Peel and chose unknown actress Diana Rigg.

Diana Rigg was perfect for the new crime fighter/agent Mrs Peel and wowed TV audiences with her intelligence, her judo and karate skills, her avant-garde fashion sense and her witty banter with Steed.

Diana Rigg became famous as Mrs Peel and played the part until 1967 when, like Honor Blackman before her, she left the to become a Bond girl in ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’. Patrick Macnee continued to play the bowler hatted John Steed and Linda Thorson was recruited to star as Steed’s partner. The series was rebooted in the 1970s as The New Avengers starring Macnee with Joanna Lumley and Gareth Hunt as his new colleagues.

Steed and Mrs Peel are surely the most fondly remembered characters in the series. My favourite episode is one called The House That Jack Built which was about a mad inventor who is fired from a company run by Mrs Peel’s father. He builds an electronically operated house in which to trap and kill Mrs Peel. She eventually escapes just as Steed arrives to save her!

A film version was made with Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman in 1998 but it was a resounding flop.

Napoleon and Illya

Robert Vaughn and David McCallum played two secret agents working for UNCLE (the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement) who try to foil the evil organisation THRUSH. (What that stood for I’ve never known.) Vaughn starred as Napoleon Solo and McCallum played Russian born Illya Kuryakin. UNCLE headquarters was in New York, accessed through a fake dry-cleaning store. Inside UNCLE HQ was a very hi-tech environment with steel corridors and sliding doors.

Head of UNCLE was Mr Waverly played by Leo G Carroll who every week gave his two agents their assignments and off they went into the world, armed with an array of secret gadgets like explosives hidden in their shoes and a communicator built into a pen. ‘Open channel D’ was something regular viewers like me would hear every week as well as the wonderful theme music by Jerry Goldsmith.

David McCallum had a big fan following especially with the ladies but Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo was my favourite.

Starsky and Hutch

I used to watch this show many years ago and to be honest, I liked it but I was never a firm fan. Starsky and Hutch were two California plain clothes cops played by Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul. They drove around Bay City, a fictional California town in a Ford Gran Torino in bright red with a white vector flash down the sides. Looking up the series on Wikipedia, I see that Paul Glaser actually hated the car, pointing out that a bright red car with a distinctive paint job was not the best idea for a pair of undercover cops. Oh well, the car was pretty popular with viewers and especially with a certain type of late seventies boy racers. (You know the type, young guys who painted or stuck white flashes on the sides of their souped up old bangers and tried to burn you off at traffic lights).

To sum up then, Starsky and Hutch is about two somewhat scruffy wisecracking cops, tearing around the city in a bright red car like they’ve got somewhere very important to be, even if half the time they’re just chasing some dodgy lead or getting into trouble. The whole vibe is full on ’70s; big collars and big flairs but then again, it was made in the mid 70s so you can’t get more 70s than that.

Starsky and Hutch was remade as a not particularly serious big screen film in 2004 starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. Glaser and Soul made a brief appearance at the end of the picture but I can’t help thinking the film might have worked out better if things were the other way round and Stiller and Wilson were the ones who only appeared at the end.

Randall and Hopkirk

Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) is one of those offbeat late 60s TV shows where the premise sounds completely ridiculous and yet somehow works perfectly: two private detectives, but one is a ghost. Marty Hopkirk gets run over and killed in episode one but returns as a ghost to help Jeff Randall solve his murder. After that, Marty decides to stay on and help out with other cases too. On one side you’ve got a fairly standard detective story unfolding, the next minute poor Jeff Randall is trying to explain clues that only he can see because his dead partner Marty Hopkirk is hovering nearby in an unmistakable white suit but invisible to anyone except Jeff. It’s quirky, a bit spooky, very tongue in cheek and exactly the sort of inventive television that the late sixties seemed to produce with effortless confidence.

In later years the show was rebooted with comedy duo Reeves and Mortimer. Personally, I’ve always found the 60s version starring Mike Pratt and Kenneth Cope with Annette Andre as Marty’s widow to be far superior.

Mulder and Scully

Mulder and Scully are the two FBI agents at the centre of the X Files, secret FBI files profiling unexplained and unsolved mysteries. Fox Mulder is convinced of the existence of the paranormal while Dana Scully is a practical scientist assigned to take a technical and analytic view of Mulder’s work.

The two argue and debate their way through various bizarre cases. One minute it’s some weird creature lurking in the woods, the next it’s shadowy government plots and secret labs. Somehow, despite all the paranoia and eerie moments, there’s a lot of dry humour and a really strong partnership between them that makes the whole thing strangely cosy to watch, even when the lights are off and the theme music is giving you goosebumps.

In my absolute favourite episode, the pair are monitoring a secret installation in area 51 and are confronted by government officers when a flying saucer flies overhead. When it passes over, it’s energy or radiation morphs Mulder’s mind into the mind of one of the area 51 staff and his mind into Mulder’s body. The other guy, the area 51 guy is quite happy at this incredible transformation. He and his wife are not getting on and suddenly finding himself in the body of a single man is clearly ok with him. Mulder on the other hand has to convince Scully that this incredible incident has actually happened.

The X Files was first shown in the late 1990’s and ran until 2002 spanning 9 seasons. The series returned in 2016 and then again in 2018. Plans are afoot, or so I have read, for another revival with new actors.

Remember, the truth is out there.

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5 Screen Portrayals of Real People

Posted on by Steve Higgins

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?

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Netflix and Me

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’m 69 years old and I come from a generation (the so-called baby boomers generation) that expects certain things. One of those is that for the most part, television is free. I say for the most part because of course one has to buy an actual TV set, set up an aerial and pay for a TV licence. Apart from those minor things TV is comparatively free.

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?

There was once a time when I could settle back and watch all the current F1 races live for free but sadly, those pesky money-making F1 managers combined forces with their like-minded TV producers and decided they could make a little extra dosh by setting up the Sky F1 Channel and charging people to watch live F1. No thanks. I’ll carry on putting up with the Channel Four highlights until I either get bored with F1 or win the lottery.

Perhaps it’s then a little mean of me to sit back and expect free television. Times move on and instead of the two or even three channels I remember from my youth, today we have hundreds of channels. Even so, there are many evenings when I scroll through my channel listings only to find nothing worth watching.

That brings me to Netflix. Not so long ago when Liz renewed her Sky package, some negotiation was involved and to sweeten the deal, Sky threw in a Netflix subscription. I have to say I haven’t looked at Netflix much but I always assumed it was just an ordinary channel like BBC1 for instance, in that there was a schedule and certain programmes were broadcast at certain times. Not so, Netflix is more like YouTube, you can watch programmes on demand but what to watch, that is the question.

Some time ago Liz wanted to watch The Crown which I can’t say I was really interested in at first but after a while I realised what a really excellent production it is. The actors are really good especially the portrayals of the Queen, Princess Margaret and Winston Churchill.

The younger Queen was played by Claire Foy and Princess Margaret by Vanessa Kirkby and Margaret’s situation as the Queen’s sister was explored in a few episodes. Her love affair with Peter Townsend was doomed because Townsend was a divorcee. The Queen was advised to ask Margaret to wait until she was 25 and then she could marry. When the time came the Queen’s advisors brought up more issues and then ultimately the two lovers had to separate which of course didn’t help the sisterly relationship between the Queen and Margaret.

Before watching The Crown, I had no idea of the background of Prince Phillip. I always assumed he was English and a member of some family which was eligible to marry into the royals. In actual fact he was Greek and aged only eighteen months old he and his family were exiled from their homeland which left him with a lifetime fear of revolution and anything that might threaten the royal family.

His and Charles’ school days at Gordonstoun was really well done especially the interplay and flashbacks between Philip’s and his son Charles’ time there. Philip apparently loved it but Charles hated it.

A real stand out story was the one about the retirement of Churchill which was cleverly linked to the famous, or infamous painting of a portrait of Churchill by Graham Sutherland. Churchill played by John Lithgow, was coming up to his 80th birthday and various people wanted him to retire but he was adamant that he would carry on. Churchill had various sittings for the painting and the two, both of whom were artists, tried to examine the other through their works. Churchill was hugely disappointed at the result and came to see at last, according to The Crown anyway, that the time had come for him to retire and hand over the leadership of the country to Anthony Eden. Everything was beautifully done.

The other thing about The Crown was, even the quick cutaway and establishing shots of cars driving up to the Palace or through London in the 50s and 60s, were expertly done. I’m sure there was an element of special effects involved especially in scenes of crowds in London but even so, everything looked so good.

Another episode dramatised was the broadcast made by the Duke of Windsor when he abdicated. The Duke flips in and out of various episodes. The Queen Mother detested him as he had forced the mantle of kingship onto her husband when he was ill-prepared for it. Prince Charles however, did strike up a sort of friendship with the Duke. I should imagine that a former King and a future one would have much in common although how much was fiction and how much was accurate, I don’t know.

I thoroughly enjoyed this splendid series which I’m sure everyone has watched ages ago but for me, a latecomer to Netflix, is very new.

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.

The series was created by producer Darren Star who was also the producer of Sex and the City and in some ways Emily in Paris is very similar to the early Sex and the City seasons. Emily was produced for the Paramount TV channel but made its way over to Netflix. It’s a light comedy show about a young girl, Emily, who is asked to move from Chicago to work in the Paris office of a marketing firm. The comedy comes about from highlighting the cultural differences between the USA and France and although the last season, season 5 was a little tame, the previous 4 seasons were excellent.

At the heart of the show is a love story. Emily falls for a young chef who has an apartment on the floor below her Paris flat. He falls for her too but he is engaged to another girl who befriends Emily. Later Emily gets involved with an British banker but then he falls for Emily’s other friend and then the chef’s girlfriend has a lesbian affair. See what I mean about Sex and the City?

According to Wikipedia, the show did get some criticism for stereotyping the French in general and Parisians in particular but for me I thought the depiction of the French was really quite good. Even though I speak only a little French, one of the things that is difficult for an Englishman in France is the speed at which the French speak. It’s not too bad in the Loire but especially noticeable in subtitled French films and TV shows.

What else have I watched on Netflix? Well, I did watch the film version of The Thursday Murder Club as I mentioned in another post a few weeks ago. Other than that, I haven’t watched much else. Netflix is a little overwhelming for me, I much prefer my TV in the old-fashioned way, regular broadcast times like they have on the traditional terrestrial channels.

Still, if Netflix is the TV of the future, I suppose I’d better get used to it!

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The World of AI Video

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I did a post some time ago called Manipulating the Image. It was all about photo manipulation and how they used to do it in the old days when cameras used film and not a memory card and how they do it today using artificial intelligence. Things have quickly moved on and now it is just as easy to make a short video with AI as it is to make an image.

My go to AI imaging site has until recently been nightcafe.com. Users can easily make images there as well as short video clips and you can even use an image as a starting point. Nightcafe requires a subscription for a small sum but also, if you use the site regularly, you can build up a raft of free credits with which to make even more images. I soon found that my image credits were soaring so as a fully paid-up member of Tightwads Anonymous I thought wait a minute, I might as well cancel my subscription as I don’t need it anymore as I have a shed load of free credits.

So, I cancelled my subscription and soon realised that I was now no longer a ‘pro’ user and as such no longer entitled to use the top AI models. I still had lots of credits but I could only use them on the less powerful models. Not only that, I could no longer make my images into videos.

You might be thinking that perhaps that wasn’t such a big deal for a writer. After all, a writer deals with words not pictures. Yes, that’s true but in the 21st century world of the internet, it’s images that bring people into your orbit. A Twitter or Facebook post with a picture or video will apparently get 120% more engagement than a plain old text post, so in order to bring people into the clutches of stevehigginslive.com, I need pictures or videos.

A lot of my posts over on Twitter are basically promotions for the blogs on this website. I try to produce an interesting image to pull in my readers and then add a message; things like Read A New Blog Post or something similar. Here is one of my first video clips made using AI.

I’ve always rather liked this image below, an inviting pub with the name on a sign: The Blog Post Inn.

Here’s the same image made into a video over on meta.ai.

Many years ago as a schoolboy, one of my favourite doodles was to draw a frogman swimming underwater with a big flow of bubbles rising up to the surface. I was probably inspired by the TV in the 1960s, things like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in which Admiral Nelson and Captain Crane took us on all sorts of underwater adventures in their submarine, Seaview. Anyway, that was probably the source of some more videos involving a scuba diver finding an underwater carving which says -wait for it- Read a New Blog Post!

I always enjoyed both Voyage and another undersea TV show Stingray. Stingray was one of Gerry Anderson’s puppet shows. It was about the WASPs; the World Aquanaut Security Patrol and their amazing submarine Stingray commanded by Captain Troy Tempest. No doubt inspired by the scenes of Stingray and Seaview I decided, and this brings us back to AI, to make some submarine images. Here are a few below.

The really annoying thing about making AI images and videos is that they rarely come out how you want them. If they do, then they always seem to go wildly wrong when I try to tweak them. How do you make an AI image in the first place you might be asking. Well, simply from a text instruction, for instance:

A wide-angle view from low down; a moon rocket launches from Cape Kennedy. As the rocket blasts off in a cloud of smoke and steam, we see the words stamped vertically on the rocket: “NEW BLOG POST ” .

It’s always good to add in a few descriptive terms like hyper realistic as well as some camera terms like wide angle lens and so on.

In my video editor I’ve quite a few saved templates so it was easy to slot in the rocket video, add some sound effects from my trusty sound effects CD and here’s the finished video.

There are some pretty good AI generators out there that are completely free. Meta is the company that owns Facebook and you can use their app meta.ai to make free images and videos. I tend to start with an image from elsewhere, perhaps create something on Nightcafe and then upload it to meta and ask it to animate the image. I’ve had some good results and also some frustrating ones. I made an image of a woman wearing sunglasses with a neon sign saying ‘read a new blog post’ reflected in her specs. I asked meta to create a video from the image in which the girl ‘lifts up the specs, winks at the camera and replaces the specs’. Simple? No not really. In one version the woman took the specs off but then they disappeared. In another, they took themselves off and in a third they went up and down by themselves. Would she drop the specs slightly, wink and then put them back on? No. In the best result, the girl takes off the specs but seems to wink both eyes!  Not exactly what I wanted.

Another site, perhaps more well known is Grok which you can find on the former Twitter site, X.

Another new dimension to AI is audio and on some AI sites you can get an audio model to read a short script. I tend to put various elements together, pictures, video and audio, edit them in the traditional way and add either sound effects or music. I particularly like an audio model I found of an American man with a deep baritone voice which I use on a lot of my promo videos or sometimes an American lady. On Grok, you can actually produce a video in which your video subjects can speak but they tend to rattle off the dialogue so quickly it isn’t natural, although after some experimentation you can add pauses in places but even so, it comes over as a little odd.

Here’s one in which I asked the AI model to say ‘wow’ and then matched up some audio of my American AI voice saying that same word.

Going back to that earlier idea of the girl with the glasses, I thought I’d try again without the wink. The girl was supposed to look over her specs, smile and put them back. In the resulting clip the girl did all that but seemed to be mouthing ‘Hi’. I went off to my audio program on Freepik and produced some new audio, fitted them together and this was the result.

Whether these little clips bring in any new readers I’m not sure. In fact, now I think about it, it might put readers off if they assume the entire site is AI produced, including the writing! Of course, that would save me toiling away over a hot laptap trying to think up new ideas for blog posts.

Even so, I have a lot of fun messing about with AI images and audio. I wonder if perhaps one day I could even make an entire film using AI generated visuals and audio. Things are happening so quickly in the world of AI I can image that happening in the very near future.

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Sun Lounger Thoughts: Stephen Fry, Highways and that Solitaire App

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Last week I finished reading the four books I had brought with me to read here in Lanzarote and so I scoured the bookshelf in our rented villa for something else to read. I came across Moab is my Washpot by Stephen Fry. It’s an autobiography of his life up till the age of 20 but it’s not in any way a conventional autobiography. It’s a sort of full throttle, stream of consciousness monologue which Fry kicks off in his second year of public school and proceeds to tell us a great deal about his thoughts and feelings, making numerous right and left turns along the way to discuss various issues and subjects that he decides to talk about. It’s very like a sort of confessional and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it was taken down verbatim (or perhaps tape recorded) during a session with his psychiatrist.

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.

I’ve no idea where the title comes from although Stephen does mention various exotic authors, none of whom I’ve ever heard of so perhaps the title comes from a quotation from some esoteric book that only university bookworms are familiar with. Sprinkled throughout the book though are numerous authors I have heard of as well as many references to popular films and TV shows, all of which made the book, in my mind anyway, very relatable.

A good one comes later in the book when he is arrested for theft and declines to give his name. One of the cops calls him Stephen and he replies ‘yes’ so the cops say ahh, you’re Stephen Fry then. He compares it to a scene in The Great Escape in which Gordon Jackson as an escaped POW pretends to be a French worker and gets caught out when a gestapo man says ‘good luck’ to him in English. Jackson replies -in English- ‘thank you’ and reveals himself instantly to be an escaper. That was one of my late brother’s favourite parts of the film and one he always used to quote to me.

Anyway, Fry’s book was a real no holes barred, full throttle read.

Over the years I’ve written quite a few of these sun lounger thoughts posts which are basically the kind of thoughts that have arisen in my mind while lying on a sun lounger.

Today I found myself, after a swim and relaxing on my lounger in the sun, thinking about my old job at the Highways Agency.

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.

When I worked at the Highways Agency, no two days would ever be the same. One day would bumble along and nothing much would happen and the next there would be crash after crash after crash.

Bad weather always plays a part in motorway crashes, the main reason being that your average driver whose journey from home to work normally takes 35 minutes, expects that same journey to take 35 minutes no matter what. Come the day when the network is covered by 3 inches of snow or a major downpour with various lanes closed due to flooding then that journey will not take 35 minutes and the average driver really cannot understand why.

If there is a major downpour many drivers tend to sensibly slow down. This slows the traffic movement down as a whole making journeys longer. Mr Average gets impatient, decides to speed up to 80 mph and either realises too late he is going to miss his junction, cuts in to his left and hits another car causing a crash on the inside lane (RTC in our Highways lingo) or possibly hits a puddle in the outside lane spins and causes a crash (Road Traffic Collision to use the full title) in lane 3.

On those summer days with perfect visibility things usually go reasonably well and that’s the time when the terrorist daydream would raise its ugly head. A team of terrorists take over the RCC (Regional Control Centre) and interrogate and torture people in order to find that ex secret agent (this is a subtle twist on the earlier daydream) who has retired from MI5 and joined the Highways Agency.

If I happened to be the radio dispatcher that day my assistant would usually nudge me and say Steve-debris incident or RTC.

The thing is, that daydream could easily have been avoided. Back in the early days when the RCC was brand spanking new, many dignitaries, councillors, police officers, firemen and other emergency services staff would be invited upstairs to a viewing area to look down on what was happening. Invariably this always happened on days when the network was calm and nothing out of the ordinary was going on, save for the odd breakdown here and there. The dignitaries used to look down and senior management would be horrified to find the dispatcher and his assistant playing solitaire on the screens.

Me at work in the Highways Control Room

Now this might have seemed a bad thing but back then we could float a solitaire game right on our command-and-control screens so if a job popped up, we would see it straight away because we were already looking at the correct screen. Anyway, management decided to delete solitaire from the system so then when things were quiet, we would either stare at the ceiling, talk to each other or, well that’s where the daydream came in.

The wall of the Highways control room (RCC) has various screens where we can highlight CCTV images of the incidents we are dealing with. In the centre is the TV screen usually set to Sky or BBC News. This being an operational control room the TV has no sound and it was sometimes quite amusing to watch the subtitles appear with the wrong word or sentence. Some of the best I’ve seen include MP Ed Miliband described as the Ed Miller Band and the BBC welcoming viewers to the Chinese New Year ‘of the whores’ rather than the Horse!

Later in life the RCC became the ROC (pronounced rock) actually the Regional Operations Centre. I’m not sure why that name change took place unless some nameless senior manager had found that his solitaire app had been deleted and unable to play a card game decided that it might be a good idea to rename the control room. As it happened, the Highways Agency was renamed Highways England and later National Highways meaning a great deal of taxpayer’s money had to be spent on new signage: on our premises, on letterheads and repainting our vehicles as well as rehashing all our uniforms.

Yep, they really shouldn’t have deleted that solitaire app!

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