Top 5 unexploited film sequels to Brief Encounter

It seems odd to me that no one has adequately exploited the popularity of Brief Encounter by making a sequel. Or, indeed, several sequels, preferably along the lines of the Die Hard franchise, viz:

Brief Encounter 2: Briefer Encounter
Dr Alec Harvey returns from Johannesburg for a conference on respiratory diseases among miners, but only meets Laura Jesson for a few seconds while changing trains on his way to the Winter Gardens in Blackpool.

Brief Encounter with a Vengeance
Fred Jesson discovers the truth about his wife’s clandestine cinema visits with Dr Alec Harvey and contrives to restore his pride by poisoning a scone destined for Harvey, who is due to visit the railway station tea shop on his return journey from Blackpool. The assassination attempt is foiled, however, when Dolly Messiter, the chatterbox who interrupted Harvey and Mrs Jesson’s farewell at the end of the first film, intercepts the lethal scone and dies noisily, pulling the tablecloth to the floor and upsetting a dish of Banbury cakes. 

Brief Encounter 4.0: Live Free or Encounter Briefly
(directed by Joel Schumacher)
Dr Alec Harvey, who has been suspended from the medical profession after the shock of Dolly Messiter’s death caused him to seek solace at the bottom of a whisky bottle, learns from autopsy reports that her demise was no accident. He returns to the station to confront Fred Jesson, but is met instead by Jesson’s hired goons, who force him to take refuge behind the counter in the station cafe during a 15-minute shoot-out sequence. Harvey overcomes Jesson’s thugs, defeats Jesson in hand-to-hand combat armed only with a stethoscope and episiotomy scissors, and rescues Laura Jesson from certain death by untying her from the railway tracks just before the delayed arrival of the 4.15pm to Crewe.

Brief Encounter Begins
A reboot of the franchise, in which Dr Alec Harvey emerges as a character stricken with guilt over his inability, as a child, to cure his twin brother’s conjunctivitis. To atone for his failure, he frequents station cafes in a tireless quest to remove coal dust from passengers’ eyes. He begins to find solace after rescuing Laura Jesson from certain blindness in one eye, but his happiness is thwarted by the return of his brother, whose bitterness over his condition has caused him to reinvent himself as the villainous Partially-Sighted Man. Harvey emerges victorious from their fight to the death (after Partially-Sighted Man gets coal dust in his other eye and stumbles into the coke furnace aboard the Penzance Express) but alienates Mrs Jesson, who realises that Harvey’s mission to save sight is more important than their relationship.

Brief Encounter Actually
Richard Curtis reimagines Brief Encounter as a five-act rom-com in which Dr Alec Harvey (Hugh Grant) and Laura Jesson (Keira Knightley) overcome their awkward social situation and get married after Fred Jesson (Bill Nighy) confesses his deep-seated passion for Dolly Messiter (Emma Thompson), who is equally smitten. Beryl Walters (Renee Zellweger), the cafe assistant, dies, but the solemnity of her funeral is broken when Albert Godby (Rowan Atkinson), the ticket inspector, uses the occasion to consumate his relationship with Myrtle Bagot (Martine McCutcheon), the longstanding object of his flirtatious banter. All six lovers are married in a joint ceremony in the station cafe at Christmas, during which it snows.

Top 5 superior song lyrics to woop, woop

“Woop, woop,” is, according to the rapper KRS-One, the sound of the police.

Is it, though? I’ve heard the police, and it was definitely more: “Mee-maw, mee-maw.”

Now I think about it, that was probably the police car rather than the police themselves. I suggest to KRS-One, if that’s his real name, that he revise his song to one of the following:

1. Would you mind breathing into this bag, sir? That’s the sound of the police.

2. ‘Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello, that’s the sound of the police.

3. We are appealing for witnesses to come forward, that’s the sound of the police.

4. A 32-year-old man is helping us with our inquiries, that’s the sound of the police.

5. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something that you later rely on in court, that’s the sound of the police.

When I was on my gap year in Indiah…

Nauseating, isn’t it? Anecdotes about India are almost as boring as anecdotes about scuba diving (“There were all these… fish”) or anecdotes about surfing (“The wave was like, woah, and I was like, dude”).

India gappers have become an archetype: floppy-haired students with collarless shirts who “found themselves” by going to a Third World country, eating Europeanised food that the locals would never touch, and travelling along a route so well-worn by budget travellers that you can almost see the rut from space. 

It is tempting, then, to dismiss the gap year to India as a contrived, boil-in-the-bag experience that non-gappers can emulate by going to Ealing and chugging a packet of laxatives.

Lots of people do dismiss it in this way, but they all have one thing in common. They didn’t go. They are armchair critics attempting to mollify their envy by pretending it isn’t enviable.

I did go, and I can tell you this: it was wonderful. I don’t mean “wonderful” as a euphemism for good. It filled me with wonder, and still does, more than a decade on.  The critics are wrong for about a thousand reasons, but here are the top five:

1. There is nothing sanitised about India. Tourism, rife as it is, has had little impact even on those towns tramped by a million Lonely Planet pilgrims. This is a world where laundry is beaten on rocks, men will shout through your train window at 4am to try to sell you tea, and mothers cling the outside of buses after passing their babies through the windows to be cared for by strangers.

2. Poverty is inescapable. Its scale and intensity means that even the most blithe tourist will have to adapt his or her world view to cope with the shock. It makes Western poverty, with its social security safety nets and health provision, seem like a Swiss finishing school.

3. Westerners are outsiders. They will be stared at and hustled, not through animosity but because of an assumption that they have money to burn. Not only is it exhausting, but for white middle-class gappers it is probably the first time they will have been on the sharp end of racist prejudices.

4. Kindness to strangers is endemic and profoundly touching.

5. It isn’t home. Gap years coincide with teenagers learning to deal with the world without their parents, and being in a country far from home only enhances that experience.

None of this is meant to suggest that India is the ultimate gap destination. Any country resistant to western influences will have the same impact. My point is that India is no theme park or pre-packaged experience. People who spend six months there on a gap year do have insights that people who spend that time at home do not.

But yes, the anti-gappers have a point. Those who have been must learn to shut up about it. I shall not mention it again.

Top 5 platitudes from Gordon Brown’s speech

Gordon Brown’s speech to his flock at the Labour Party Conference today reminded me of the usefulness of the Hoggart Test, the yardstick often applied by Simon Hoggart to platitudinous rhetoric: you can tell whether something is worth saying by examining whether the opposite is absurd.

The following examples from GB’s speech are not taken out of context; they were soundbites that were punctuated with rounds of applause. Could any elected politician get away with the opposite of these statements, as suggested in italics?

“I know the difference between right and wrong.”
I have no sense of morality.

“On the side of hard-working families is the only place I’ve wanted to be.”
Someone has to stand up for slovenly singletons.

“In all times we will put people first.”
Flamingos first, then people.

“We will be the party of law and order.”
We aim to build a society that bears a closer resemblance to the Wild West frontier.

“We will be the party of the family.”
We wish to tear apart basic social units*.

Most long political speeches fail the Hoggart test at some point, and it should be noted that GB’s speech was by no means devoid of significant announcements, but the question still stands: why do we tolerate this kind of bunk from our leaders? It’s a conference speech, not an episode of The West Wing. The people in the auditorium may have been flag-saluting automotons (I know from personal experience that delegates at these events are not independent thinkers) but viewers outside the auditorium aren’t.

*Even Margaret Thatcher, in her famous claim that “there is no such thing as society”, acknowledged the role of families.

Top 5 worst pay-off lines (give or take three)

You can imagine the pain. I recorded Cliffhanger by mistake last night. You needn’t feel sorry for me, mind. I was actually trying to record Die Hard 2. (It was rescheduled because some oversensitive baboon at ITV thought that it would be inappropriate to screen a film about things blowing up at airports at a time when things are blowing up at airports. Ludicrous. The only person anywhere near death is the gimp who set himself alight. I ask you. These guys are the Benny Hills of terror.)

Anyhow, there was one positive outcome: I was able to listen to the worst pay-off line ever spoken during a hero vs villain finale. As Sylvester Stallone dispatches the actor from Third Rock from the Sun by throwing him inside a helicopter poised to fall into a ravine, he shouts: “Remember, shithead, keep your arms and legs in the vehicle at all times.”

Beautiful stuff. I wanted to compile a top five worst pay-off lines, but I can only think of one other example bad enough to qualify: Vin Diesel, having fired a heat-seeking rocket at a villain puffing on a cigarette at the end of xXx: “I told you smoking would kill you.”

Submissions for the other three places in the top five would be most welcome.

Buddhism solved

Given that religions are essentially mysteries, it is odd that no one has attempted to solve them. It’s a bit much to ask me solve all of them in a morning, but I’ve just about got the patience to deal with Zen Buddhism. Here are the answers to five Buddhist koans. Tomorrow I deal with Islam (cue sense of humour failure and threats of death, etc).

1. “Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?”
Answer: a faint wafting.

2. “Without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born”
Answer:

3. “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the west?” Traditional answer: “The cypress tree in the courtyard.”
Answer: Wanderlust and idle curiosity. And don’t call me Bodhidharma. (The only person who calls me that is my mum when she’s angry.)

4. “What is Buddha?” Traditional answer: “Three pounds of flax.”
Answer: Three pounds of flax, and a man with a fondness for heavy linen trousers.

5. “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?”
Answer: No. Ask yourself, does Buddha does have dog nature? Hey, get off my leg.

Too many proverbs spoil the broth

How on earth am I supposed to memorise enough proverbs to lend myself an air of seasoned wisdom? There are simply too many. I suggest, therefore, a programme of proverb rationalisation that will neatly reduce their number without diminishing their pithy truthfulness, viz

1. A stitch in time waits for no man.

2. An early bird in the hand loves to hear himself sing.

3. You can take a horse to water, but don’t look him in the mouth in mid-stream.

4. An eye for an eye is no robbery.

5. Where there’s muck, there’s a sow’s ear.

Top 5 sectarian chants

The problem with sectarian chants at football matches is that they don’t make much effort to pinpoint the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. When Glasgow Rangers fans taunt Glasgow Celtic fans by singing “Have you had your chicken supper, Bobby Sands?” in reference to the death, 26 years ago, of the hunger-striking MP for Fermanagh & South Tyrone, they seem to have lost the idea altogether. Chanting about a political event in the early 1980s that was part of a distant and dormant conflict is no way to cheer on your team.

Here are five suggestions that put the schism back into the stands:

1. You’re not transubstantiating any more

2. The referee’s not infallible

3. You only make church sacraments when you’re winning

4. Hate the idea of women conducting the Eucharist, oh we hate the idea of women conducting the Eucharist

5. There’s only one apostolic succession (Yes, there’s only one apostolic succession etc)

Top 5 observations about Latvia

1. Nobody uses handbrakes.
2. More than one in four young women wears knee-length boots.
3. The only people who will ever talk to you on the street in Riga are foreigners. In my case, a German.
4. Trendy clubs have English names, such as Club Essential. Not-so-trendy clubs have English names, but put an extra “s” on the end of the noun (so that it can be declined into genative, dative etc) such as Clubs I Love You.
5. The nation’s relatively short existence (1918-1940 and 1990 onwards) means that there is a paucity of figureheads to put on currency. The one-lat coin has a fish and the 20-lat note has a tree.

Size matters

The National Trust and English Heritage have come up with a jolly wheeze that shows they’re down with the kids and up with technology. They’ve announced a plan to create the “biggest blog in history“. Marvellous. But hang on, what is the point? A blog is one of those things that does not improve with size. It’s like manufactuing the world’s biggest steam iron. A feat of engineering, certainly, but not much use for ironing shirts. What are the top five things that, while not intrinsically bad, are not better when bigger?

1. Noses. Rare is the rhinoplast who has been asked to give a patient the “largest nose you’ve got”.

2. Horses. Horses are wonderful creatures. They gallop, they whinny, they look good in nosebags. But Frankie Detorri never won the Gold Cup on a Suffolk punch.

3. Germany.

4. Post-It Notes. I’m not just looking round my desk. Well, I am, but it’s true. The world’s biggest Post-It Note would be rubbish. Even as a novelty door it would be a dreadful fire hazard.

5. Icebergs. Beautiful to look at and ideal for polar bears, but when Frederick Fleet, lookout on RMS Titanic, shouted “Iceberg right ahead!” he did not add: “Mind you, it’s a bit on the small side.”