It's one day late, but a very happy 74th birthday to the wonderful British comedy actor Richard Briers. To celebrate, here's a clip from that hugely under-rated 1980s sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles, in which Briers played the neurotic, deeply insecure Martin Brice, stalwart of Mole Valley Valves. You couldn't imagine a character more different from the happy-go-lucky Tom Good, yet Briers played the role to perfection. Regular readers will know I'm no supporter of the honours system,
but if we are to have one, why do we give knighthoods to self-obsessed bores like Salman Rushdie, but ignore those like Richard Briers who have brought happiness to millions? Oh, sorry, I forgot. Rushdie, unlike Richard Briers, is a neocon pin-up boy.
Enjoy the clip.
8 comments:
Have you ever read a Salman Rushdie novel? If so, which one(s)?
I found 'Midnight's Children' to be unreadable, one of the few books that I've started but haven't finished. To paraphrase Blackadder, I'd rather French kiss a skunk that be forced to read Rushdie's show-off prose. Somerset Maugham he most certainly ain't.
But hey, the neocons love him, so let's give him a knighthood!
I adored Midnight's Children. Do you think the Booker Prize he got was because of the affection in which he is held by 'neocons'?
No, but I think his knighthood was!
I hate to derail yet another frothing conspiracy theory (which, as ever, is completely untroubled by such irritants as facts or evidence), but Rushdie's knighthood was explicitly for "services to literature", not for his political opinions.
And in his case, these services went well beyond his own writings - since the fatwa was declared, he's been an extremely high-profile supporter (often financially) of persecuted writers worldwide.
Given your own support for the persecuted (both genuine and alleged), I'm very surprised that you can't seem to grasp why this might be worthy of recognition.
Incidentally, Midnight's Children didn't just win the Booker Prize, it won the Booker of Bookers - a separate prize designed to celebrate what the judges thought was the best novel in the entire history of the Booker competition. But presumably that was part of a neocon conspiracy too?
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