You may think that the final footnote to my last post was perhaps a little too disparaging. I have nothing much against Alan Rickman as an actor but his performances in film can border on the quite simply awful; like Jack Nicholson he appears to be able to play only one character, the audience's single-minded perception of Alan Rickman. His laughable performances as the villain in 'Die Hard' and 'Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves' surely gave new meaning to the phrase 'hamming it up'; William Shatner once said that the key to playing the tosh that was 'Star Trek' was to take it seriously. Even Rickman's portrayal of Snape in the Harry Potter movies doesn't avoid the sense of self mockery inherent in so many of his performances.
In case you want to hear what Marvin (the Paranoid Android) should sound like, here's a clip from the TV series which largely used the same actors as the radio series (Trillion and Ford Prefect are notable exceptions), including, as Marvin, Stephen Moore (perhaps best known for playing the hapless wireless engineer in 'A bridge too far' who cannot get the radios to transmit and thus contributed to the debacle that was 'Operation Market Garden'*):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4P3pvKmbsg
I was perusing the TV listings yesterday and I came upon a film which was being broadcast by the BBC, 'One of our dinosaurs is missing'. Starring Peter Ustinov, Derek Nimmo and Helen Hayes, it is a children's film about a twit of a British diplomat, Nimmo, who steals a microdot from the pre-Maoist Chinese, is pursued and ends up hiding the incriminating evidence of his 'theft' in a dinosaur skeleton which is then stolen by the Chinese; the day is saved, for the British at least, by a group of 'Mary Poppins' nannies led by Ms Hayes. Silly, childish Disney fare of the 'Herbie rides again' ilk. However, the film is based on an adult comedy novel, 'The great dinosaur robbery' which was notable, if memory serves, for twisting Maoist epithets into 'The Great Leap Downwards', in which the entire population of China jumps up at the same time and the resulting earthquake devastates the planet and 'The Great Leap Forwards' in which the entire Chinese nation jumps into the sea at the same time and the resulting tsunami swamps America.
The book, which is very funny and scarcely childish at all, was written by 'David Forrest', a pseudonym of journalists Robert Forrest-Wedd and David Eliades, which I came across via another of their books, 'After me, the deluge'** which I read sometime back in the early seventies. The book, a poke in the eye for organised religion, concerns a small village priest in France who receives a telephone call from God (in a call box/pay phone) telling him to build an ark because God is about to embark on another cleansing of the globe. The ensuing mayhem by the police, the Papacy and ultimately the French population, who converge on the village in huge traffic jams, are meant to be laughable but through it all, the priest's naive and blind faith are seen to be a real source of strength. At the very end of the novel, the ark built, most of the world incredulous and the population of France descending on the tiny village in their thousands, it starts to rain!
As is my wont, having been reminded of this and not having read the book since my late teens in about 1973, I sought it out on Amazon; out of print! However, that was not the worst of it. The book originally cost about £2.00 when first published in hardcover; it was not published in paperback as far as I know. Second-hand resellers now want between £115 and £215, depending on quality, for a copy; I am clearly in the wrong business.
One of my long-standing joys is second-hand bookstores; I could, and did, do, spend hours amongst the dust and paper mites looking for, not something of more value than the price written in pencil on the flyleaf, books that no-one thought it worth republishing after the initial run had been sold. I have copies of Jack Mavrogordato's 'A Hawk for the Bush', Bert's 'An approved treatise on hawks and hawking' (originally from 1619), R.Stevens' 'Laggard' (about the training of a Peregrine Falcon), Panofsky's monograph on Dürer and Raymond Ching's 'The Art of..." and a host of others from second-hand booksellers; did I get ripped off as 'After me, the deluge' would seem to suggest.
I am inclined to think that this might be a recent phenomenon, one in keeping with the Internet age. I well remember the most staggering second-hand bookstore in Inverness in the early '90s, which occupied the most massive of spaces; a church or so it seemed to me. The assistant was willing to break a set of 12 books, Bannnerman's 'The Birds of the British Isles', illustrations by one George (Old Man) Lodge, for one twelfth of the cost of the entire set; this at a time when it was almost impossible to get the entire set of twelve.
Perhaps, in the age of the Kindle and the iPad, books, real books no longer have any value and therefore their price diminishes; I was quoted £350-400 for 'Die Zeichnungen Albrecht Dürers' by Friedrich Winkler in the late '70s. I bought a copy a couple of years ago for £195. Perhaps those on Amazon are just ripping off the unwary. Wouldn't be the first time that the Internet has been used to gull the unwary.
I love my books, not only for the wisdom that they contain, but also for the signed flyleaves, personal, not at some 'book signing jaunt',the lavender pressed in between the pages of Donne; 'for your birthday, with much love'; these things can never be replaced by an iPad, a Kindle, a Cloud.
There's no doubt that a coincidence is a truly remarkable event. I was watching a compilation of blues music from televised BBC archives today when, amidst BB King, Buddy Guy, Son House, Freddie King, Tony McPhee et al, who should crop up about half way through? Stone the Crows with Maggie Bell and Les Harvey! (Please see previous post!)
* 'Operation Market Garden' was the airborne assault, involving 35,000 paratroops from the 82nd and 101st US Airborne and the British 1st Airborne and the Polish Brigade, against the German held bridges at Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem, the latter across the Rhine, which, if successful might have shortened the second world war by three or four months. An audacious plan, it was inevitably doomed to failure, as was any assault whether in the north through Holland by Montgomery or south through France by Patton, whether the bridge at Arnhem was captured or not, by the simple fact that the allies had no control over any deep water port; supplies were still coming in via the Normandy beaches and were grossly inadequate to one major assault let alone the two that should have been planned if Germany was going to be defeated by Christmas..
** A translation of 'Après moi, le deluge' , a quote often attributed to Louis XV of France but may have well have been spoken by Madame de Pompadour. It presages the French Revolution and may therefore, I think, be considered apocryphal.
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