It’s been another cold and wet week and as usual I’ve tended to lie back on my couch and watch a lot of television and not just broadcast TV either. Lots of times when broadcast TV isn’t up to the job of entertaining me, I’m forced to crank up a recording and watch that. Just lately I’ve watched a couple of biopics, films about real people, so for this post I thought I’d continue that theme and look at films and TV shows where the actors have had to portray real people.
Barbara Windsor
One night last week I watched a documentary about the Carry On films. It was really interesting and was titled Secrets and Scandals. It showed a lot of previously unseen interviews in which the stars had a whinge about various things, in particular the fact that they didn’t get paid when the films were reshown time and time again on TV. The producers made a shed load of money but the stars were paid peanuts. One of those stars was Barbara Windsor and after I had watched the documentary, I remembered a TV film called Babs about Barbara’s life. It was made in a really interesting way and involved Barbara in later life, imagining that she was talking to her late father about various things that have happened to her. Events from her life are recreated in front of her and she turns and discusses the incidents with her dad.
Theatre director Joan Littlewood was really impressed by Babs and wanted her to play various parts for her but after working together for a short while, Barbara opted to play a part in Carry on Spying which set up her comedy persona for the rest of her life.
Barbara loved her dad but when he and her mother divorced, Barbara, as a small child, was asked to tell the courtroom about the times he had shouted and sworn and later her dad ignored her when leaving the court. Two actresses played Barbara, Honor Kneafsey in her younger days when she played in her first Carry On films and Samantha Spiro who interacts with her father throughout the film. It’s a really good film and it’s put together in a slightly unconventional way which really works.
I couldn’t find a clip on YouTube but the film can be seen on BBC iPlayer by clicking here.
Jimmy Saville
Another TV film I saw earlier in the year was The Reckoning in which Steve Coogan plays Jimmy Saville. It was another 4 part series which we had to stream and Coogan really seemed to me to capture the essence of Jimmy Saville.
I have to admit I always used to rather like Jimmy Saville. I liked his slightly comic presentations on Top of the Pops and his ‘now then, now then’ act. This film was different though and showed the dark side of Saville and the way he used his pretty considerable fame to abuse women and children and get away with it.
Stan Laurel
Steve Coogan also played Stan Laurel in the film Stan and Ollie, a film which looks at the later years of the famous comedy duo. John C Reilly played Oliver Hardy and the film shows the two when they embarked on a music hall tour of the UK in 1953. They were still hugely popular but the tour had a big impact on them, particularly Oliver Hardy. Coogan does have a look of Stan and the two actors played great parts and even recreated some of their comedy routines on stage.
Lee Harvey Oswald
In the film JFK, director Oliver Stone takes a look at the assassination of John F Kennedy. The alleged assassin was an oddball individual called Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald in the film is played by British actor Gary Oldman. Oswald was paraded to the press in Dallas on a few occasions after his capture and Oldman perfectly captures his look and speaking voice in the film. Stone apparently urged Oldman to do his own research and he met with Marina, Oswald’s widow and some of their Dallas acquaintances. Strangely, Oswald was interviewed on camera before the assassination talking about Marxism and Communism and the differences between the two. No doubt Gary Oldman watched these too.
Winston Churchill
Gary Oldman also played another historical person in Darkest Hour in which he plays Winston Churchill. A great deal of makeup went in to putting together Winston’s visual appearance and the film looks at the outbreak of World War II and Churchill’s ascent to the premiership. Oldman achieves an interesting approximation of Churchill’s overall look and speech and the film is excellent although whether deposed PM Neville Chamberlain had as strong a hold on the conservative party after Churchill had taken over as the film makes out, is open to question. Interestingly though, even though Churchill became the Prime Minister, Chamberlain retained the party leadership and apparently had thoughts of returning to 10 Downing St in later years. He died of cancer though in 1940.
Cary Grant
Archie is a wonderful four part series and Jason Isaacs plays an outstanding part. He doesn’t try to impersonate Cary but he did manage to create a look of the late star and he caught Grant’s voice and enunciation perfectly. Most of the series follows Cary in later life when he becomes involved with and later marries Dyan Cannon. Dyan was his fourth wife and she was the mother of his only child Jennifer and she and her mother co-produced the series which is definitely well worth watching.
Cary Grant retired from films in 1966, the year his daughter was born and he and Dyan Cannon divorced in 1968. Many tried to bring him out of retirement for various films including his favourite director Alfred Hitchcock but he declined. He must have wanted to keep on working though because he did accept a position on the board of Fabergé.
He died in 1986 aged 82 and left behind an estate reputedly worth around 80 million dollars. Archie is a well made and quite fascinating piece of TV. Look out for it, it’s well worth watching.
Howard Hughes
The Aviator was a film released in 2004 starring Leonardo Di Caprio as the billionaire Howard Hughes. Looking at Wikipedia, the film had an extensive development background with other film makers vying with each other to produce biopics about Hughes. This film however finally came together with Martin Scorsese directing and with a screenplay by John Logan. Hughes famously suffered from OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and in Hughes the disease manifested itself in a fear of germs and an obsession with cleanliness. Apparently Di Caprio did a huge amount of research on OCD and the film shows how Hughes went from an eccentric millionaire film maker and pilot to someone who finally retreated into reclusive madness.
I enjoyed The Aviator although a better film about Hughes was probably a mini series based on a book by Hughes’ former business manager, Noah Dietrich. The TV mini series was called Howard, The Amazing Mr Hughes and starred Tommy Lee Jones as the famous billionaire. I’ve always thought that Jones’ portrayal was much more convincing than Di Caprio’s but I did enjoy both versions.
An interesting element in the TV show was a recreation of an incident in 1972 when Hughes appeared by telephone live on air, to speak with four journalists he personally knew, in order to denounce fake ‘diaries’ which had been published by author Clifford Irving. On the TV mini series the actual journalists played themselves.
Brian Clough
I’m not a great football fan but not long ago I picked up a DVD from the charity shop. It was The Damned United starring Michael Sheen as the 70s football manager Brian Clough. Clough was famous in the UK in the 1970s and was to be seen regularly on various TV shows and all the top impressionists of the day, people like Mike Yarwood, all did a version of Clough. The film follows Clough as he takes over Leeds United from outgoing manager Don Revie. He denounces the team as unsporting because of their brutal and physical style of play and promises a new start for the team. However, only 44 days later Clough was sacked as manager. Despite not being a football fan, the film recreates the 1970s very well and Sheen’s performance as Clough was an outstanding approximation of the real Clough. Various people sued the production company due to a number of factual errors in the film but as a non-football fan I found the film very convincing and hugely entertaining.
I could go on with many other films. James Stewart for instance played both Glenn Miller and Charles Lindbergh although the end result in both cases was someone who looked and talked just like James Stewart usually does. The same could be said for James Cagney who played George M Cohan in the film Yankee Doodle Dandy. Neither actor even tried to impersonate the real person although Stewart did wear spectacles to play Miller. Anyway, I’ll save those examples for another post.
Have a good weekend and thanks for looking in.
As usual I’ve been stressing about to what to write about in my next blog post. It’s a great feeling to have an idea, create a post, polish it, make some graphics and add pictures and a video and then to see it finally published but then I start thinking about next week. What can I write about next?
It turns out that Tucci, currently living in London, is a bit of a food buff and amateur chef and he was in the studio to cook some food and talk about his latest book What I Ate in A Year. Wow I thought and as I looked up, a picture of a flashing light bulb appeared above my head with a sign saying ‘new blog post idea!’
A must for us on a Monday night is a visit to the Ego restaurant in Lytham. They have a special Monday offer which includes two courses for a much cheaper than usual price and also £10 off a bottle of wine. We used to have the sharing board for starters but this week I plumped for the cheesy mushrooms and Liz had the scallops. For the main course I’ll sometimes go for a steak or if I’m not madly hungry I might go for something a little smaller. On our last visit I decided to go for the beef bourguignon and Liz went for a dish off the new menu, lamb kleftico, served in a rather odd way in the paper package in which it was cooked.
battered fish and two side orders for which we usually get a tub of peas and a tub of curry. I’m not a great lover of fish but I do like my battered cod or hake. Another bonus is that our local chippy delivers so all I have to do is get the teapot warmed up while we wait for our food.
Thursday is our quiz night and we tend to eat out before going down to the pub for the quiz. This week we went down to Spagó in Lytham who have yet another special offer running on Thursdays. (Noticed a trend at all in this dining out saga?) The Spagó deal is two courses for £12.95 or three for £17.95. The only drawback here is that the wine is a little dear so I sometimes drive down and we’ll just have one glass of wine each and a large jug of water. The menu changes every week and the last time we visited I had the cauliflower soup with garlic and pesto and a main course of lamb stew with mash and carrots. The portions are a little small but perfect if you are not in the mood for a huge meal. The service is pretty good and so I have plenty of time to drop Liz off at the quiz and to park the car up somewhere for the night so I can walk down and pick it up in the morning and enjoy a few beers at the quiz.
Sometimes Liz and I will stay at home on a Friday but not so long ago we met up with some friends and went to Olivers, a small place in St Annes that serves pizza and pasta. My favourite dish there is a sharing board which consists of the chef’s home made bread, olive oil, mayonnaise, parma ham, salami, cheese, olives and we always substitute the potatas bravas with a tomato and onion salad.
Colin Chapman.
Lotus produced other groundbreaking cars such as the Lotus 79 which dominated the 1978 championship. The car was the first ground effect car which used aerodynamics to produce a low pressure area under the car which literally sucked the car down to the track. Skirts were added to seal in the low pressure area but ground effect cars were later banned.
Barnard first worked in F1 for the McLaren team in the early 1970s then moved to the USA to work in US racing. He was recalled back to McLaren when the team was taken over by Ron Dennis and there he produced the first carbon fibre chassis in F1 which was built for the team by Hercules Aerospace in the USA. Other teams followed and today all F1 cars are built using carbon fibre.
Adrian Newey.
Once again my birthday has come round and I’m another year older. In some ways I don’t mind being 68, after all I’ve put the time in, the full 68 years. A few years ago I retired. Once upon a time I loved my job, I mean really loved it, so much so I hated to have time off but in the last few years I went the other way. I hated it and after a long spell of being at home because of Covid and also helping Liz who had just had a hip replacement and needed assistance for a while, I really wasn’t keen on going back. I used up all of my remaining holidays, looked at my financial situation and realised I could retire about 6 months early. So I did! Those 6 months before my state pension kicked in were a little tough financially but what the heck, I was glad to be finished with work.
The Columbo of the early series is an absent-minded quirky fellow although in later episodes, Peter Falk who plays the detective, seems to downplay that quirky element. The later episodes are still pretty good though and among various episodes on TV today was Any Old Port in a Storm with Donald Pleasance as the guest murderer. Pleasance plays Adrian Mancini, the part owner of a wine producing business. He is something of a wine snob and he has just been voted ‘man of the year’. That was the good news; the bad news is that his half brother is threatening to sell the business. That of course doesn’t go down well so Adrian in a fit of anger bumps him off. A whack on the head didn’t quite do the job so Adrian leaves him to suffocate in his wine cellar. Unfortunately, it happens to be a really hot day which eventually leads Columbo to the clue that bags the culprit.
The Bay of Pigs was a great disaster for Kennedy. He inherited the invasion plans from the Eisenhower administration in which Vice President Nixon was a prime mover. Nixon felt that an invasion would boost his chances in the election contest against Kennedy but the CIA seemed to be relying on the assassination of Castro to kick off the invasion but that planned murder, for whatever reason, never happened.
Ten Days to Destiny by John Costello
This book was the sequel to another book about Bill Clinton. The first one dealt with Clinton’s early life and his election to the presidency; this one takes us through his first four years as president. The author takes us through the years of the Clinton White House and documents the issues like Troopergate; when the former Governor Clinton’s State Troopers revealed the comings and goings of Bill’s various mistresses, as well as the disaster of his healthcare reform work which he entrusted to his wife Hillary. The public clearly weren’t keen on Clinton’s ‘co-president’ – his wife, and their healthcare proposals were rejected by Congress. The mid term elections were another disaster for Clinton and the Democrats and the book goes on to show how Clinton turned the final two years of his first term presidency around and was able to win a second term.
Encore Provence by Peter Mayle
Many have speculated about his true sexuality but it’s clear that Larry enjoyed being labelled as camp rather than gay. The main relationship in his life was with his sister who became a mother figure to him when his adoptive mother died. The two lived next door to each other for many years in later life.
As usual we have been travelling around the Loire. We really do love this area but the one annoying element is that in the Loire, the locals rarely venture out for an evening meal. Many times, Liz, the navigator in our travelling partnership, has spotted an excellent parking area not far from a highly rated restaurant and what do we find? The restaurant is closed.
Once again, Liz and I are travelling across France in our little motorhome, looking for restaurants to eat at and lakes to swim in. The weather hasn’t been great but at least it hasn’t been cold, although a little less cloud and a little more sun would have been nice.
The two spacecraft are of course made by different companies but even so I thought that this particular issue was addressed during the Apollo program. If you have ever seen the movie Apollo 13 you will know that a small explosion on the service module meant that the crew had to move into the lunar excursion vehicle in order to conserve power and oxygen in the command module.
Me, I’m only 42 but even I think about taking things easier, especially after that fall from my bike the other day. I do a lot of cycling. I do a short run every evening after work and at the weekends I take a good run over the cycle track through the local woods but this one occasion I decided to go out on a Wednesday, all because Paula my wife had gone out to some curry night and left me alone. Well, I cycled round the woodland track and a tree branch caught in the spokes of my wheel and tipped me right over onto the deck. I took a bit of a whack to the head and I’ve bruised my left thigh but other than that I’m ok. Good job I was wearing a helmet.
JJ the cat was a lady who liked to be boss of the catwalk. Any other local cat who dared to walk along the wall at the back of our property was soon either chased off or JJ would just plonk herself down in the other cat’s way and just dare him or her to come this way. Sometimes that led to a tense staring off competition which usually led to the other cat going home a different way.
Day 3
Letters from an Unknown Author! 