Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Hobbledehoys! Here’s your chance to bypass that dreadful “green beer” music playing at your local bar, and instead listen to some gorgeous compositions from a dozen-or-so Irish-inspired films, such The Grey Fox, The Quiet Man, Barry Lyndon, The Secret of Roan Inish, The Guard, and Calvary. And as the late night TV commercial would boast – “But, wait, there’s more!” – you’ll hear an offering from the One True 007, Sean Connery, who warbles a classic Disney movie tune that may leave you … ‘shaken. but not stirred.’
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Composers covered in this 2-hour broadcast include the classically-trained Irishmen Shaun Davey and Patrick Cassady, as well as more than a few pillars of Irish Trad, notably The Chieftains and Donal Lunny.
As well as the above, you’ll hear a few delightful jigs and reels that will leave even a St. Paddy’s Day cynic getting reely jiggy!
This special St. Patrick’s Day broadcast of “Picture This” is hosted by friend to The Hobbledehoy and fellow grey fox, Mr. Wayne Cresser.
Oliver Alvin Wilson, Steve Coogan and Dharmesh Patel in Dr Strangelove MANUEL HARLAN
By Clive Davis
The comedian plays all four main characters with aplomb, but this reboot at the Noël Coward theatre in London could have done with more creative flourishes
At the end, as we shuffled out of the auditorium, a wickedly funny Randy Newman song, Political Science, played over the speakers. The mischievous call to set the world free by dropping nukes made an ironic coda to Vera Lynn singing We’ll Meet Again.
It also made you wish the show’s co-adaptors, Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley, had applied a few more creative flourishes to what is, all in all, a stolid remake of the classic Stanley Kubrick Cold War satire.
Don’t get me wrong: this is still a decent star vehicle for Steve Coogan, who outdoes Peter Sellers by taking on four rather than three of the main characters. As well as portraying US president Merkin Muffley, RAF Group Captain Mandrake and the sinister title character, he straps himself into the cockpit of a B-52 bomber as Major Kong, the gung-ho pilot intent on carrying out the order to lay some megatons on the evil Russkies.
It’s a reboot that will appeal most of all to Coogan fans who aren’t familiar with the film, which celebrated its 60th birthday this year. If you do know the original, it’s fun to hear some of the slivers of extra dialogue added by Iannucci and Foley after scrolling through Kubrick’s notebooks and drafts.
All the same, set designer Hildegard Bechtler’s war room is never going to look as imposing as Ken Adam’s James Bond-like screen creation. And if the scale model of the B-52, flying high over a video backdrop, gives the second half of the show an undeniable kick, the rest of the production looks cramped in the confines of the Noël Coward.
Still, Coogan handles all the roles with aplomb. His Mandrake is a bumbler with more than a hint of King Charles, and he brings an aura of playful menace to Strangelove, who, in contrast to the film’s villain, is instantly plagued by robotic tics.
How is the star manoeuvred into his many costume changes? Iannucci and Foley — who is also the director — solve that problem by inserting time-killing ploys and a presidential stand-in. It’s all a little distracting.
While I’ve often complained that video imagery sometimes seems to be pushing flesh-and-blood actors aside in the West End, this is one venture where a little more hi-tech trickery would have been welcome.
Giles Terera gives us a breezy impersonation of General Buck Turgidson, the manic hawk who cheerfully runs the numbers on a nuclear holocaust. No one could ever improve on George C Scott’s original, but if you’ve never seen the movie you’ll still be impressed. ★★★☆☆
Herman’s Hermits’ pop hit “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” was originally sung by acclaimed actor Tom Courtenay in The Lads, a British TV play of 1963, and released as a single in the UK.
Most of us outside the UK are familiar only with Herman’s Hermits’ version, which rose to number one on the charts in May 1965.
Tom Courtenay 1962 on the set of ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’
Courtenay came to prominence as in actor in the early 1960s with a succession of films, including The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Billy Liar (1963), and Doctor Zhivago (1965). He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for the film adaptation of The Dresser (1983),
The song was written by another British actor, Trevor Peacock, who was also a song and screenwriter.
Thanks to Terence Davies’s distinctive filmmaking style,The Long Day Closes doesn’t quite feel like any other motion picture. This intensely moving, ethereal reverie on a brief happy period of the director’s often sad childhood in Liverpool during the fifties moves in and out of different moods and sensations, rather than laying out a straightforward narrative. His films may come across as stream-of-consciousness, but Davies actually meticulously sets up every shot and music cue in the first draft of his scripts. Often, his plans are ambitious, as is clear from the following magnificently realized scene. Set to Debbie Reynolds’s 1957 hit song ”Tammy,” it is a virtuosic cinematic symphony, composed of incredible high-angle shots of a movie theater, church, and schoolroom, graphically matched to express the importance of those three locations in Davies’s youth.
