Willow (1988)

 "Ignore the bird. Follow the river,"

This is, let's be honest, a fantasy B movie script made to look like Hollywood fare by Ron Howard, a very conventional Hollywood director but ina good way. Yes, the evil Quene (a delightfully proto-Morgaine-ish Jean Marsh). Yes, the whole concept of an evil monarch destroying all babies because of a prophecy, let alone the narrative of a baby floating down the river, have potentially pretentious Biblical overtones.

This isn't a clever film. It isn't a great film. It's a highly polished B movie, where one may freely chortle at Warwick Davis' shifting accent even while conceding he's acrtually bloody good as a lead, outshining the disturbingly young pretty boy Val Kilmer who is merely adequate as a rogue turned hero. His arc works, though, from petty thief in a cage to lover to a princess. And the tempedtuous beginnings of their relationship are fun, as is much else.There;s a nice mix between straightforward adventure and comedy.

Jean Marsh is, as if it needed saying, the perfect baddie, chewing the scenery exactly to the right degree. It's good to see Billy Barty, a year after Masters of the Universe, as a cheerfully winging it wizard. The cast is, overall, a success. There's no CGI here;the special effects are real, eithet green screen or stop motion.

Yet it's hard not to see this film as a cheeky reworking of Lord of the Rings, and a cheeky little prompt to Peter Jackson in doing the real thing,

Catweazle: Season 1, Episode 12- The Wisdom of Solomon

 "My mum's cousin had a horse that looked like that once. We had to shoot it."

This penultimate episode of the series is the best we've had in a while. Patricia Hayes is splendidly awful as the vile Mrs Skinner, whom George has hired as a housekeeper along with her equally loathsome son Arthur who goes to school with Carrot (their uniforms have caps.which dates the episode just as much as the reference to ten bob), and threatens to ruin and expose everything. They are by far the modt effectively evil baddies we've had so far, and the theatrically passive-aggressive Mrs Skinner is a masterful creation.

Their nastiness makes their inevitable comeuppance at Catweazle's hands all the more enjoyable.

This all even leads to permanent changes- Castle Saburac is no longer available, while Catweazle has an idea, involving water. I somehow suspect he won't be arund much longer, and I'll be able to replace Catweazle with the second series of Sapphire & Steel...

A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

"Touch his dick and he's dead!"

I first saw this magnificent farce back when I hired out the video, which shows you how long ago it was. It not only stars but is written by John Cleese, and the figure behind Fawlty Towers certainly knows how to do a good farce.

Cleese is bloody good as Archie, of course, the (ahem) archetype of repressed, sexually stultified exemplar of a certain type of public school educated Englishman. Jamie Lee Curtis is also bloody good as the cynically feminine and deeply greedy Wanda with her foreign languages fetish. But truly outstanding are Kevin Kline as the psychopathic Otto and Michael Palin as the stuttering Ken, an extraordinary performance. All four give splendid comedy performances.

There are some laugh out loud moments-  I loved Archie’s apology to Otto- but it’s largely an intricate and character based farce, perfectly constructed. I’m not a fan of the farce in general but John Cleese is a master of the art.

Archie’s speech to Wanda about the stultifying embarrassment of being English is both funny and true, up to a point. I tend to think the stiff upper lip stereotype applies only to the public school educated, separated from their parents and put into a strange and repressed existence that I know mainly from popular culture; the English are fundamentally open, emotional, beer swilling north Europeans quite culturally close to the Scandinavians, Germans and Dutch, but something about that sense of very English embarrassment has permeated throughout our culture. Perhaps the upcoming horrors of Brexit will change that. Perhaps they won’t.

Be that as it may, this is a true comedy classic, and possibly the last creation of John Cleese to have true greatness.