Just out of interest, what British TV do you like? There's a strong sense over here that our TV is now lagging far behind Danish and American stuff. We have nothing that comes close to Mad Men, Borgen, etc.

The Daily Heil.

You should try listening to the news in Britain - just about every TV star, comedian, and entertainer from the '70s is being arrested on sex offences.

@avclub-536c0f36edda1f72ae067b42894dbe96:disqus I'd read this somewhere too. He did much the same with the actor playing Micheal in Mean Streets. Went out of his way to piss him off for the whole shoot, so their big scene together would be more explosive. It works fine, as it does with Jerry.

Dismaying. I'm dismayed.

The King of Comedy was a big step along this way too, I think. Particularly the agonising scene where Rupert and Rita turn up uninvited at Jerry's house.

Doesn't Pete end up throwing the album sleeve out of his office door in a fit of pique? Nothing to do with the material, though, from what I remember.

Dudley Moore told Alan Bennett that comedy was like music - there's a beat, and the longer you leave the punchline to the end of that beat, the funnier your timing is.

As long as he doesn't kick a dog to death, I can live with that.

While Star Wars was the first film I loved, I'd pretty much fallen out of love with it by the time I was 14, so it can't qualify as the longest-loved.
It'll have to be Jaws, then. I must've been 9 or 10 when it was shown on British TV in the early 80s, and we talked about nothing else at school for the following three…

McCartney has always reminded me of Charles Dickens. Both have an occasionally realistic, wintry eye (Eleanor Rigby), but allow themselves to be swamped by sentiment a lot of the time - not as a commercial strategy, just because that's how they see the world, or England. And they're unstoppable producers of stuff,…

The moneylenders in the temple? And Courtney Taylor-Taylor.

There's always a bloke in the pub who knows a bloke who knows a bloke who knows Ray Winstone.

with you.

The King Of Comedy minor? Is that because, visually, it's one of his least electrifying? I would say it was one of his more prescient films, as disturbing in its way as Taxi Driver. And as a director of actors, this is one of his triumphs, surely?

Liked for the brilliant use of the semi-colon.

So would LA Woman, surely to God?

I want to go there and do that.

Isn't it also Barry Manilow's real name? Shameful that I carry this info around in my skull, but there it is.

Big Country were my favourite band, as a teenager in the 80s. Strange to see them mentioned here beyond the couple of mentions I've made. Fields Of Fire still gets me going like few other songs.
I quite liked the Alarm too (Mike Peters, I think?), but don't really want to think about this version of them. All too…