Blazing Saddles
dir. Mel Brooks (1974)
Brooks crafts a comedy layered with tasteless caricatures; over-the-top expectation gags; cringingly, affectedly b-grade acting (Gene Wilder proving the exception); brash, almost surreal anachronisms; and flights of lunacy that blast beyond the fourth wall. Uproarious in parts, baffling and indefensible in others.
I’m Free! The Complete Are You Being Served?
by Richard Webber with David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd (Orion, 1998)
A paean to the long-running sitcom, complete with actor profiles and episode summaries. There is nothing incisive about the text—any criticism of the programme is brushed over; nobody has anything bad to say—but the photos sprinkled throughout conjure gentle nostalgia.
There’s Trouble Brewing
by Nicholas Blake (Collins Crime Club, 1937)
audiobook read by Kris Dyer (Bolinda, 2016)
The mystery is skilfully put together. Nigel Strangeways has personality (especially as voiced in Dyer’s audiobook reading), yet never really stuns with his deductions. Meantimes, he adds a jarring, rather artificial note by soliloquising at length over possible interpretations of the evidence.
Rocky & Bullwinkle: Jet Fuel Formula
serialised in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, Season 1, Episodes 1-20 (ABC, 1959-1960)
A fast, freewheeling, self-aware cliffhanger serial told across 40 three-minute segments. Bullwinkle the endearingly dim-witted moose and his guileless squirrel pal Rocky battle an equally hapless pair of Cold War spies. Clever allusions and mile-a-minute wordplay underpin the cheap but punchy animation.
The Murder on the Links
by Agatha Christie (The Bodley Head, 1923)
audiobook read by Hugh Fraser (Lamplight, 2014)
Setting aside Hastings and his galling outbreak of instalove, this is a thoroughly enjoyable piece of detective fiction—lucidly told and ingenious, affording an excellent vehicle for Hercule Poirot. There are coincidences, of course, but of the less egregious kind. Misleading title.
The Clicking of Cuthbert
by P. G. Wodehouse (Herbert Jenkins, 1922)
audiobook read by Frederick Davidson (Blackstone, 1998)
Ten golfing short stories, diverting enough when taken individually but together not unlike hacking at the Lernaean Hydra with a niblick. Wodehouse evinces his usual way with words but, tongue-in-cheek fantasy historical tale ‘The Coming of Gowf’ notwithstanding, lacks for club selection.
Tintin: The Red Sea Sharks
by Hergé (Tintin Magazine, 1956-1958)
English Edition trans. Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper (Methuen, 1960)
A curious volume. Hergé oscillates between depicting Tintin in the early adventuring style, condemning the modern slave trade (perhaps the most serious theme in the entire Tintin canon), and revelling in a broad-cast comedy of slapstick. These threads remain disparate and unwoven.
Doctor Who: The Gunfighters
by Donald Cotton (Target, 1985); audiobook read by Shane Rimmer (BBC, 2013)
As daring an experiment as Cotton’s original script (and even more so in audiobook form with Rimmer’s total commitment to cowboy drawl). Superbly witty on a line-by-line level, and unlike so much of the Doctor Who canon the prose has independent merit.
Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic
by Terry Jones (Pan, 1997)
audiobook read by Bill Nighy (Pan, 2023)
Given only a three-week deadline, Jones produced a passable Adams pastiche. Starship Titanic has its moments but more often serves to highlight, through laboured contrast, the finesses that Adams himself sweated blood over in pulling off his particular brand of freewheeling facetiousness.
The Elephant Who Liked to Smash Small Cars
by Jean Merrill; ill. Ronni Solbert
(The New York Review Children’s Collection, 2015) [First published by Pantheon Books, 1967]
![Book cover: “The Elephant Who Liked to Smash Small Cars” by Jean Merrill; ill. Ronni Solbert (The New York Review Children’s Collection, 2015) [First published by Pantheon Books, 1967]](https://www.derelictspacesheep.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Merrill_Solbert_Elephant-Who-Liked-to-Smash-Small-Cars.jpg)
A simple, whimsical picture book that revels in its tale of comeuppance. The elephant, gleeful smasher of cars, changes his ways after receiving a taste of his own medicine. Solbert’s crayon illustrations evoke the spirit of preschool paintings or early computer games.