Here we are in March and the schedule is hotting up. As of yesterday, we have three episodes in the can queued for editing and many more on the itinerary.
Yesterday I recorded with Andrew Nette for the third time and it’s always a pleasure Andrew, particularly when you tell me it’s a balmy evening down under whilst drinking an iced Tullamore Dew and I’m sitting there freezing my knackers off drinking lempsip on a grey, miserable and wind-swept Bradford morning.
Anyway, minor grumbles aside it was a great conversation as always and we went off down various rabbit holes, as is de rigueur for Breakfast in the Ruins. One, in particular, was around the English character actor Percy Herbert, who will be a well-known and instantly recognisable face to anyone of my ilk as he appeared in around 90 films over the post-war period up until his death at the age of 72 in 1991.
Sometimes it takes such an observation to kick off a brief investigation into folk like Percy and he had a staggeringly eventful life. He served in WW2, was injured in the Far East, and ended up in Singapore’s Alexandra Hospital, the scene of the notorious 1942 massacre of doctors, nurses and patients by the invading Japanese Imperial Army. Subsequently, along with just a handful of other survivors, he was sent to Changi POW camp and over the remainder of the war was put to work on the Burma Railway, where not only would he work on the Bridge Over the River Kwai, but post-war be cast in the film and pull dual-duty serving as consultant to director David Lean.
Later he would go on to feature in Carry On films, dozens of other war movies (including a personal favourite of mine – Too Late the Hero – if you haven’t seen it it’s a great example of the very rare selection of acerbic and deeply cynical war movies that focus upon the British army in the Far East in WW2*, albeit it’s a US-produced Robert Aldrich flick) and even genre flicks like One Million Years B.C.
And, naturally, he rocked up in The Wild Geese alongside Richard Burton, Roger Moore, Richard Harris and a busload of other British war cinema bit-part stalwarts…
What a fucking dude!
He has now made it onto my fantasy casting list. I gave this some considerable thought and I’ve settled on von Villach, chief lieutenant to Count Brass. His final appearance was in the 1987 film The Love Child alongside a young Peter Capaldi who, incidentally, would make a pretty great Bowgentle.
In podcast news, the first of those three queued-up pods will be appearing in a week or so and we’ll be back with Elric as Loz and I complete our reading of The Weird of the White Wolf, which we started way back in episode one with The Dreaming City.
But first, Phil and I have the small matter of decamping to Great Yarmouth for our annual nerd-in Sci-Fi Weekender where we generally just hoot it up staying in a trailer for a long weekend talking to comic artists, drinking over-priced beer and forcing down our free VIP Jagermeister. I’ll probably post another report from that very trailer so stay tuned…
*See also The Long and the Short and the Tall
Breakfast in the Ruins 