I edit our local weekly newspaper when the regular editor takes holidays, and one of the jobs is to go to the police station once a week and get news for the police blotter. We're a pretty small town, so not much happens, and one week one of the police items was about a llama that had (apparently) escaped from a…

Yes, and while I admired it (it was especially fascinating to read the interplay between Dickens and Collins; theirs was certainly an interesting and complicated friendship), I thought it was wildly uneven. I'd hoped to love it the way I did The Terror (Arctic exploration is a topic I'm deeply interested in, and have…

Charles Dickens suffered from grave ill health during the last two or so years of his life; he had at least one stroke, and suffered from giddiness and paralysis which caused him to break off a series of public readings he had contracted to do (on some evenings he barely had enough energy to get off stage at the end).…

My dad was a Mountie for 20 years, and the only two police shows he liked, and thought were truthful to his own experience, were Hill Street Blues and Barney Miller.

Not the 'wrong' movie, exactly, because he was brilliant in Bridge on the River Kwai, but Alec Guinness should have won for playing eight members of the D'Ascoyne family in Kind Hearts and Coronets. I love his prissy vicar, showing Louis around the church: 'I always say that the west window has all the exuberance of…

Man, that's a gorgeous song; sad without being melancholic, beautiful violin and piano orchestration, and somehow managing to sound convincingly 'period' yet obviously contemporary at the same time.

Good points.

Tell her that I'm well and feeling fine, won't you?

Was just looking to see if anyone else had posted this before I did. Thanks! Agree completely.

'What's Up, Doc?' is one of my favourite Bugs Bunny cartoons. That scene in the park with the cameos from Cantor, Jolson, Crosby, and Benny cracks me up, especially when Elmer Fudd dismisses them with a 'They'll never amount to anything.'

My 17-year-old son loves W.C. Fields, and can do a pretty damn good impression of him; something no teenager has probably been able to do since about, oh, 1945.

Thanks! I was going to mention this, but forgot the title. Atkinson was very good (and it gave him a chance to indulge his passion for vintage cars).

I'd like to hear more, but I'm afraid there isn't time.

Was re-watching Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy the other day (because it's a brilliant film I never get tired of), and thought again 'Wow, is this movie ever deserving of a Best Ensemble Cast award.' Every single role, from top to bottom, big and small, is perfectly cast; and while there was almost no way the Academy was…

I suspect that Robert's anti-Catholic stance (regarding Tom) was more to do with the Irish-Anglo crisis than anything else. English Catholics had managed to carve out a separate peace for themselves, in the centuries after Henry VIII; but the Irish Catholic question was something entirely different, and English people…

I think Larry wins, although I may only be saying that because a) Miss Bunting had a defensible point and b) I really like Isobel, and think anyone who badmouths her is a tit.

That was part of my problem with the Miss Bunting/Lord Grantham interchanges. The essence of a gentleman, at that time, was that however much you might think - or know, because God has ordained all this stuff - that you were socially superior to someone else, you didn't show it, as that was (paradoxically) terribly…

Maybe Mary would have had a personal lady's maid when she wasn't married, because as the eldest daughter she was the one the family pinned its hopes on. I just think it odd that we've never seen (as far as I can recall) Edith having the services of a lady's maid.

Was she? I'd forgotten. I certainly don't recall her interacting on a one-to-one level with any of the daughters except Mary.

How many episodes before Daisy is standing on the table in the servants' dining-hall, calling 'Captain, my captain!' to Molesley?