Ian Fleming’s story of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! the Magical Car
adapted by Al Perkins; ill. B Tobey (Collins and Harvill, 1969)
Lurking irresponsibly in the otherwise excellent Beginner Readers series, this gobsmacking tripe features a domestically lobotomised housewife and Fleming-modelled gung-ho husband. “Let’s blow up all this stuff,” said Jeremy. “That’s a fine idea,” said Mrs. Pott. “Then we can have our picnic.”
The Great Blueness and Other Predicaments
by Arnold Lobel (World’s Work, 1970)
One day during the Great Greyness a wizard invents colour. This fairy tale starts off with grey illustrations then makes memorable use of colours in explaining how the world (after several mishaps) came to be the bright, beautiful place that it is.
I, Claudius / The Epic that Never Was
dir. Josef von Sternberg (1936) / hosted by Dirk Bogarde (BBC, 1965)
Fittingly for a piece exploring why von Sternberg’s big screen adaptation of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius was never completed, the documentary itself has a rough, unfinished feel to it. Surviving footage reveals a lavish production. Charles Laughton mesmerises as the emperor Claudius.
Payback
dir. Brian Helgeland (1999)
Though somewhat sanitised for cinematic release (in story and character and most particularly its score), Payback remains a very watchable piece of revenge noir. Mel Gibson stars as Porter, a double-crossed gangster who goes up against the Outfit to recover his $70,000.
The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (Libretto)
by Peter Gabriel (1974)
Lyrically obscure, Genesis’ double LP concept album required explication; yet Gabriel’s sleeve notes (including perversely rhymed mood digressions) are themselves abstruse and only through resolute scrutiny reveal anything of the young Puerto Rican Rael’s surreal nightmare of discovery within New York City.
Tintin: Flight 714
by Hergé (Methuen, 1968) [first published in Tintin Magazine, 1966-1967]
More so than any of the twenty-one Tintin stories that preceded it, Flight 714 is divorced from a contemporary historical setting. Though seeking (supernatural) isolation, it retains Hergé’s boundless sense of adventure, his exquisite characterisation and his incomparable, most vividly depicted humour.
Leave it to Psmith
by P. G. Wodehouse (Herbert Jenkins, 1923)
Wodehouse set his stories in the dreamy, self-satirising world of betwixt-wars upper-crust England; yet it is perhaps the hint of modernity — in this instance the irreverent Psmith, unrepentantly shrugging off mores — that brings mirth beyond even the situational comedy so drolly related.
The Amazing Koalas
by Peter Campbell (Methuen Children’s Books, 1978)
Four mini-adventures starring good koala children Fred and Stanley (shirted) and their freewheeling friend Wiley (unshirted). The mayhem hits British suburbia like a stream of consciousness, pointlessly fun and memorably illustrated; a good book for beginner readers and their respectable koala parents.
Die Hard
dir. John McTiernan (1988)
If there’s such a thing as a mainstream cult classic, Die Hard fits the bill with its winning combination of Christmas miracle and base under siege action. Bruce Willis stars as a lone counter-insurgent within an occupied skyscraper. “Yippie ki yay,
Assassins from Tomorrow
by Peter Heath (Lancer, 1967)
Published four years after Kennedy’s assassination, this pulp novel takes what might have been an intriguing premise and treats it with sufficient blandness to turn slush rancid. What worked in Heath’s head leaves the reader no dignified option but to give up.