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Nothing whatsoever to report so I thought I’d share some more Dagenham philosophy. Appearing on a 1965 New London Palladium Show, Messrs Cook and Moore discuss Kirk Douglas’s dimple, Jane Russell’s busty substances and the meaning of life…
Thanks to the excellent chap who originally uploaded this. I hope he doesn’t mind me airing it here.
Tags: comedy
If I felt motivated enough, I’d spend my Sundays raging against the pointlessness of Sundays. Maybe if I wasn’t such a frightful heathen the day would mean something to me, or it might offer respite if I had much going on during the rest of the week, but to me Sundays have always been terribly, crushingly dreary. So, to give some purpose to this most maddening of days, I shall be posting random stuff; basically, whatever takes my fancy. And yes, I know it’s Monday now but today felt like yesterday all over again. Well, more like Sunday²… oh, don’t get me started on Bank Holidays…
Today, as the populace is gripped and confused by the threat of another terribly scary pandemic, this time “swine flu”, I was looking at some of the old “coughs and sneezes spread diseases” posters that inspired the Hancock clip above. Check out some awesome design work among the selection I’ve gathered together below - even the grimmest of them are inventive and aesthetically pleasing. I particularly love the Chinese propaganda poster from the 50s, “Are You a Fifth Columnist?” and the first two “Trap the germs in your handkerchief” designs from WWII. Those that graphically display spittle spraying from mouths are particularly disgusting but undeniably effective, although I can’t help but think of the Brundlefly when I look at “Cover coughs, cover sneezes”. The final two are very recent: love the humour of the cartoon and the photography on the last poster turns sneezing into something almost beautiful. Get the sniffles just looking at it, don’t you?
Tags: comedy, design, random, sunday afternoon, tony hancock
Interviewer John Freeman, in his famous 1960 Face to Face interrogation, wasn’t the first to assume a certain comic genius’s true name was Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock. By then the real Anthony John, with all his flaws and eccentricities, had become inextricably ingrained in his fictional persona, as much as he tried to distance himself from it. He told Freeman: “It isn’t a character I play, that I put on and off like a coat. It is greatly a part of me and a part of everybody else that I see.”
Before the first radio Hancock’s Half Hour, on November 2nd 1954, Tony Hancock had become quite a regular on TV and radio, most notably as the tutor of ventriloquist’s dummy Archie Andrews in the last 26 episodes of Educating Archie, a radio comedy by Eric Sykes and Sid Colin. He was also well known from his stage appearances, in successful variety shows such as London Laughs and Talk of the Town, and in panto (which he despised). Inspired initially by the likes of Max Miller and Sid Field, he slowly developed his own distinctive style which, coupled with perfect timing and a degree of audience control and manipulation that was important to live performers, guaranteed that his audience laughed in all the right places. But, no matter how perfect the medium was for him, Hancock disliked working on the stage. He was terrified of it and was often physically sick before going on.
Tags: comedy, radio, tony hancock
“Hello, I’m a scary fruit fly!”
“You’ve evolved to keep the head of a fly, the ugly hands of a fly, but not the actual, useful wings?”
“No. Nobody said that evolution was infallible.”
This is wonderful. Please take a look.
(Original link to the silly people at the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre.)
Tags: comedy, doctor who, planet of the dead
You know those beastly fellows at The Ninth Circle of Hell and their repository of old Doctor Who fanzines? Well, they’ve taken it upon themselves to upload the first issue of Circus, my old fanzine, just so you modern kids, with your fancy iPoops and your indoor toilets, can cruelly mock its simple innocence and poke it with sticks. Have a look, it’s got words in it and everything, contributed by John Connors, Paul Farnsworth, Daniel O’Mahony, Keith Topping and more, but I beg you to be gentle.
Circus 1 (published December 1993) is available here. More will follow. Curse you, Ninth Circle of Hell!
Tags: comedy, doctor who, fanzines, robert holmes, science fiction, telefantasy, tony hancock
Notorious has the best of everything: thrills, suspense and intrigue, an exotic setting, a “very strange love affair” between Hitchcock’s two favourite stars, a clever and complex plot of jealousy and deception, and some of Hitch’s giddiest direction.
Ingrid Bergman is at her most elegant and luminous as Alicia Huberman, daughter of a Nazi spy who is convicted and commits suicide at the beginning of the film. She meets and has a turbulent affair with suave, frighteningly handsome American agent, Devlin (Cary Grant), and travels to Rio with him to smoke out a group of desperate Nazi criminals there, headed by a former lover, Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains). In another recurring favourite theme of Hitch’s, Sebastian is clinging in a love-hate relationship with his distrusting mother, who suspects Alicia and is horrified when her son asks Alicia to marry him. She agrees, partly it seems to spite Devlin and her strange, tempestuous relationship with him. Their plan, it transpires, involves uranium ore hidden in bottles in the wine cellar. Devlin discovers this after Alicia steals Sebastian’s cellar key, leading to one of the most brilliant shots of the film: It is a party at Sebastian’s house. The camera drifts from the top of a staircase way above from where Bergman is talking to Rains. Slowly and smoothly it closes in, down, down, until Bergman nervously holds her hand behind her back, and eventually the cellar key she holds there fills the screen. It’s similar to an equally effective shot in Hitchcock’s earlier Young and Innocent, where he sweeps over the heads of people at a dance to the band behind and into the twitching eyes of a murderer.
Tags: children's tv, comedy, films, hitchcock, laurel and hardy
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