Launder and Gilliat's screenplay for the Hitchcock version just sparkles (and they invented Charters and Caldicott wholesale, so I'd love them even if that was all they'd done to White's novel; Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne are an inspired double act, so much so that they reprised C and C, or characters as near them…

And bow ties.

Everyone's conveniently forgotten about the 1979 version of The Lady Vanishes with Cybill Shepherd and Elliott Gould in the roles originally played by Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave. Think about that for a minute.

Me too. I think we're in the minority, though.

Nicholas Campbell would've been great. Met him once at a Vancouver Canucks hockey game; really nice guy.

This seems as good a place as any to say how much I'm looking forward to An Adventure in Space and Time. The few bits I've seen (there's a poor video of the trailer shown at Comic Con doing the rounds) indicate that David Bradley is spot-on as Hartnell, and everyone else looks and sounds good (as much as you can tell;…

This sounds like something M.R. James would've turned into a ghost story, if he hadn't been dead since 1936. 'Casting the Reigns', perhaps, or 'The Two Directors'.

Love 'Sailing to Philadelphia'. As far as Newcastle songs go, @avclub-615e85318c18d18b6901b69196261c5e:disqus , I also love Knopfler's 'Why Aye Man' (and Jimmy Naill's 'Big River'). Which is kind of odd, as I live in Canada and have never been to  Newcastle. Had a friend in England who spoke with a thick Geordie…

Well, when we moved from England to Canada (back to Canada, in my case), and my husband got interested in (ice) hockey, he began following the Vancouver Canucks. I figure that being a Wolves supporter is excellent training for following the Canucks: the same sense of creeping disappointment year after year, the annual…

As any fule kno.

Yes, that bit in the Hilter sketch became much funnier after I lived in England for a few years and realized people did have those conversations about best driving routes, accompanied by an encyclopedic knowledge of the designations of all the roads involved. Bill Bryson nails it in hilarious fashion in the first…

Plus it neatly skewers the convention, in many Golden Age mystery novels, of the watertight alibi based on train schedules which is later proved by the detective not to be so watertight after all.

Doesn't Idle's emcee throw in a line, in the live version, about the 'non-Capitalist lounge suite' as Marx goes for the big prize?

Mr. E.V. Lambert of 'Homeleigh', The Burrows, Oswestry, has presented us with a poser. We do not know which bush he is behind, but we can soon find out.

The way he mangles 'chrysanthemums' kills me every time.

"There’s a fart joke in the courtroom sequence. Trying to remember if
that’s the first fart joke in the show’s run. It’s fine; I’m not a huge
fan of the form, but they don’t linger on it."

My husband has been a Wolverhampton Wanderers fan for years. Now that the Wolves are languishing in what used to be the Third Division, I daren't let him watch this episode ("Wolverhampton won the FA Cup in 1949"), as the reminder of past glories might be too much for him.

It took my British husband a little while to realize that 'fanny packs' in North America weren't what he thought they were.

It was TVO that got me into great movies when I was 10 and living in Ontario, when I caught Elwy Yost's show. The Cosgrove Hall Wind in the Willows was shown here in B.C. on the Knowledge Network (very similar to TVO as far as programming goes), and I caught it there in the 1980s, so it must have been doing the rounds…

Only if Vincent Price can voice Rattigan again.