Something else I said over pints last night was that I thought "A Hard Day's Night" might be my favourite British film comedy. The tone of post-war "British Comedy" is characterised as defeated, lonely, annoyed, and either manic or morose - the tone of Hancock and Fawlty and Bottom and Peepshow - but the Beatles seemed every bit as comic and British to me despite their youth, success, wise-cracks and untrappability. Theirs was the tone of the Marx Brothers and the Ghostbsuters and Bugs Bunny and Eddie Murphy, and I wish more British Comedy remembered this was also an option, that for all the former's brilliant legacy you don't just have to moan. It was this kind of galvanising voice I wanted to give Gabbie Hayes when I was writing "Timespanner", and that's why London Hughes' appearance at the casting seemed such a Godsend. London is all of this, and it's depressingly unsurprising that she had to go all the way to America to finally get a show made. But wait, now I'm moaning.
Anyway, there's a superb documentary about the making of "A Hard Day's Night" called "You Can't Do That" hosted by Phil Collins - Oh, you think you could do a better job? - in which every single mind on the film seemed to be working as one, including of course that of its celebrated director Richard Lester, but also its far less celebrated writer Alun Owen, whose dialogue appears pretty much verbatim, and was a huge influence not only upon me but on the English language in general; it gave us the word "grotty" for starters. I also learnt from the documentary of the existence of this hastily improvised European trailer, filmed by Lester round the back of Twickenham Studios with whatever the boys could get their hands on, like something out of "Taskmaster":
Just a nice picture of London from her Instagram.
No comments:
Post a Comment