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James the Butler and that tigerskin
DrinkEuropeFilm and TVFoodHumorMediaObscure interestsrecipesTV in general

Dinner for One

by Diane Duane

A peculiar thing happens in a number of European countries, mostly (but not all) German-speaking, on or around New Year’s Eve. The TV stations begin showing the same brief comedy sketch again and again. What’s truly unusual about this is that the sketch is in English — recorded nearly 50 years ago in front of a German audience — and has since become a cult classic. For a surprising number of German-speaking people, the words “Same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?” are not only the English-language phrase they know best, but are held in the same kind of humorous context as the phrases “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” or “It is an ex-parrot!”

The sketch “Dinner for One” — the German name of the sketch translates as “The 90th Birthday” — doesn’t really have anything to do with New Year’s (though one “virtually present” character does say “Happy New Year” at one point, which may be the source of the confusion). It tells the story of a birthday party. Miss Sophie (played by actress May Warden, who later appeared on Doctor Who and in A Clockwork Orange) is 90, and the table is set for herself and her four friends: Sir Toby, Admiral von Schneider, Mr. Pommeroy, and Mr. Winterbottom. Unfortunately time has taken its inevitable toll, and of the five of them, only Miss Sophie is still alive.

Assisting at dinner is James, Miss Sophie’s butler (played by veteran British comedian Freddie Frinton). It falls to him not only to serve dinner, but to impersonate the four missing dinner guests for a lady who may or may not be entirely clear that they’re no longer among the living. As part of the act, James has to drink their traditional toasts to Miss Sophie — all of them — and becomes progressively more sloshed and goofy as dinner progresses. But he just keeps soldiering on — serving dinner and “channeling” the four missing guests, while also locked in silent battle with the tigerskin that lies in wait for him every time he makes another circuit of the table.

The sketch is a tremendous showcase of Freddie Frinton’s complete mastery of comic timing, and for a long time we were forced to simply describe it at one remove to people who hadn’t been in a country where and when it was being aired. But time has moved along, taking “Dinner for One” with it into the new century, and the whole business is now happily viewable on YouTube — both in its original black and white, and in a newer colorized version.

I prefer the black and white version, and the link to that is here. It’s also embedded below. (Note that the original German version starts with a gentle intro by a German-speaking host, who explains what’s forthcoming to those who haven’t seen it before, and more or less reassures the audience that it’s okay to find this poor dotty old lady a bit amusing. If you prefer to skip the intro, advance the video to about the 2min:25sec stage.)

A holiday tradition has built up around “Dinner for One” in the German-speaking countries of central Europe, and elsewhere too (in Scandinavia, the Baltics, and as far afield as New Zealand). On New Year’s eve it shows on practically every TV network, public or private, in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Some of them show it several times back to back. (At least one of the channels within the last few years showed it for 24 hours straight… quite a run for an eleven-minute short.) It also appears in dubs in many regional European dialects, and even in Latin.

All this loving attention has won “Dinner for One” the uncontested title as the single most rerun piece of standalone television on Earth. People stage drinking games around it; they hold dinner parties based on the one that James serves to Miss Sophie; they hunt down the best recipes for “the fowl” and that “North Sea haddock”; they enthusiastically debate the choice of the wines that go with each course. The skit’s fandom includes millions of people across all walks of life who have nothing in common except this one remarkable piece of comedy, to which they return year after year — most of them swearing that a New Year’s without it is simply unthinkable.

The aspect of this phenomenon that remains truly bizarre is that though “Dinner for One” was filmed in the UK, it’s never been aired there except in one seconds-long excerpt on that most excellent of quiz shows QI, and is almost completely unknown to British people. Every now and then it pops up on the British radar due to very occasional coverage in the UK press, like this 2002 article in the Guardian and this one in 2004: but then it vanishes again. The BBC seems uninterested in airing it: they apparently don’t think it’s funny. (And they have no answer whatsoever for why the Germans, who most British people apparently seem to think have no sense of humor, find the “Dinner for One” skit hilarious and will recite it to each other, in English [whether they understand the English or not] as if it was a Monty Python skit.)

This is a situation that probably won’t change any time in the near future. But “Dinner for One” itself is worth spreading around for its gentle awesomeness. Meanwhile, over at EuropeanCuisines.com, we’ve posted recipes / articles on the four courses:

NDR now has a whole page devoted to the story of “Dinner for One” and its stars, here.

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AnimationHumorMediaObscure interestsWriting

Coming December 3-4: "The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank"

by Diane Duane

It started with this tweet from @DonSpeirs:

“@wilw @dduane fan project for #Kimvention2012 – What do you think the 6 Tasks of Snowman Hank were? #kimpossible #snowmanhank”

…All I can say is… it got me thinking. Too many people know that I love the Kim Possible series dearly, for a number of reasons including the relative smoothness with which the characters grow and change. And then the tweet reminded me of the Christmas episode, which is… quirky. (And which I particularly love for its meta qualities.)

So I’ve posted over here what an animation writer who was in a hurry (and possibly a few drinks gone in pre-Christmas cheer) might have turned in to a tolerant story editor at some 80’s network as the first-draft outline for “The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank.” (I more or less imagine the story editor as being Art Nadel, that prince among producers, who gave many a new animation writer his or her leg-up into the industry in the Eighties.)

(ETA: sorry for the delay in this, folks: I wound up wrestling with a cold over the last few days, and it slowed things up.)

Here’s the original Kim Possible episode, so that everyone has a referent for the peculiarities to follow.

 

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Current eventsHobbyhorses and General RantingMedia

He Whom I'm Getting Tired Of Seeing Named

by Diane Duane

 

…Not Voldemort, of course. I harbor a certain sneaking affection for a villain who manages to get so much done without a nose, and who has exploited for his benefit a folkloric trope* that the Lone Power (and many another otherworldly archvillain) has used before him: of being one who shouldn’t be named, because the naming either draws the attention of the named, or lends them power.**

Today, though, I’m talking about the man who has just now wrought so much straightforward evil in Norway. Even someone good with words would correctly find themselves struggling to find anything that would come even close to conveying the pain being suffered right now by the relatives of all the people killed by the bomb in Oslo or hunted down and shot on that little island — or any vocabulary sufficient to express the anguish that the survivors are going through right now. Many of them are waking up from surgery for multiple gunshot wounds inflicted on them by someone who purposely chose rounds that would do the most damage — and every one of them, as was reported by a Norwegian surgeon I just saw interviewed, is desperately trying to get to grips with what’s happened to them as soon as they regain consciousness: asking about friends, trying to understand what the hell just happened.  I feel as much for my medical and nursing colleagues there as for their patients. This is a terrible time for all of them.

The most annoying part of all this for me — I say nothing of the tragic results of what seems to be a very well-integrated delusional system constructed over the guts of a decade — is that the man is going to get at least some of what he wants: notoriety. “This is the beginning of the propaganda phase,” he wrote. Nor will it have been all about “saving Europe”, despite his protestations. Implicit in his manifesto, implicit in the part where he says (I paraphrase) that sixty years from now “we’ll all be seen as heroes” — is that he expects to be and looks forward to being famous because of what he’s done.

God, I wish that could be stopped.

I know that we’re in the modern media age, and that — as Peter just said, wandering through the room and glancing in disdain at a passing TV image of the guy in his fancy made-up Knights Templar “uniform” all covered with braid and ribbons for awards that don’t exist —  “It’s too late now: the genie is out of the bottle.” Agreed, of course. But still…

A little earlier, I saw one of the Sky news people, one who normally might have known better, interviewing one of the survivors, a remarkably put-together and well-spoken young gentleman, and trying to draw him out on “how he felt about the attacker”. The young gent, who had visibly been struggling with his emotions while trying to answer the interviewer’s questions, became vehement for just that moment: “I don’t want to think about him,” he said (I’m paraphrasing here as closely as I can). “I wish people wouldn’t be spending so much time thinking about him, talking about him: we should be talking about the people he’s hurt and killed.” The newsreader promptly and wisely went off in another direction with the interview, sounding a bit at a loss (and also sounding, to his credit, a little embarrassed at the rebuke).

…Yesterday at least the murderer didn’t get the platform he wanted, his arraignment being held in camera, sans any uniforms, and the judge apparently giving the man’s desire to explain himself the absolute minimum shrift. Of course, the guy will now console himself with the thought of the trial to come, where his platform will be exposed to the world in all its squalid detail for entirely too long. If there is justice, he will be locked up for way longer than he would have thought possible. (This is already looking likely, as apparently the charge of “crimes against humanity” is being considered, and no way they’re going to put him away for just 20-30 years for that. )

Yet wouldn’t it be wonderful if he could get the absolute minimum of attention as the trial goes forward? Yes, yes, I know the more sensational press will insist on playing it for maximum effect. But in some other  world… we could invoke Herostratus’s Law, and hear as little about this guy’s forthcoming attempted grandstanding as possible.

Never heard of Herostratus? Isn’t that wonderful? That was how it was supposed to work. …Unfortunately one source broke the reporting boycott: otherwise nobody would know.

Herostratus was a glory hound who lived in the fourth century BC. Apparently not being famous really annoyed him, and so on July 21, 356 BC, he did something horrific. He sneaked into the great and beautiful Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, in what is now Turkey — one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world — and set the place on fire. The building was almost completely destroyed. When the authorities got hold of Herostratus and asked him what on Earth had possessed him, he replied that he’d taken this action specifically so that he would be remembered forever.

On hearing this, the government did two things. They executed him immediately, and then — with an eye to frustrating his desire — they made speaking his name or writing about him a capital offense.

This was surprisingly effective for some time. Unfortunately there’s always somebody who decides to thumb his nose at the Establishment. In this case it was the controversial historian Theopompos, a writer with a gift for sucking up to the powerful (most famously Alexander the Great) and accused by his contemporaries of being a scandalmonger way more interested in his own personal fame than the rights and wrongs of the history he was supposed to be reporting. Theopompos apparently reckoned that he was out of reach of the Ephesians, and spilled the beans in his Hellenics. The main result of this was to associate Herostratus’s name with a single concept: the commission of dreadful crimes for the sake of notoriety.

Anyway: this is a world a long ways in time away from that one, and obviously no such thing will happen to the man now sitting in solitary. In the meantime, the coming days are going to be painful enough as more of the details of the dead and the suffering living come out. But, whatever the media may do,  no one will be hearing that one’s name from me. Now or ever.

 

*I think it’s probably here in the A500’s somewhere. Sorry I can’t link directly to it, as the Stith-Thompson Motif Index is one of the storyteller’s great friends.

**…It has to be said, though, that the Lone One — should he and Voldemort ever have met, say over dinner — would have been capable of dealing with Voldy between the amuses-bouches and the appetizer, and then would probably have asked to see the wine list one more time.

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Jonathan Swift, Dean of Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin
Current eventsHobbyhorses and General RantingMediaNewsWriters

Whatever would the Dean say…

by Diane Duane

…about what’s going on at the moment*. I mean of course the Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, Jonathan Swift — that perfect raconteur, columnist, satirist without peer, and celebrated man of letters of his busy century. He would, I bet, have serious words to say about the last week’s news. Maybe the political establishment of That Other Island should count itself lucky that the man himself is a long time now very much elsewhere — the part of him that mattered ideally being (as it says on the stone in the Cathedral ) “where savage indignation can no longer tear at his heart.”

…What brought on this tangent of thought is that Peter has been reading Mistress Masham’s Repose (surprising me a little that this was just happening now: he’d long since read most everything else T.H. White has written, I’d have thought).

Mistress Masham's Repose, Lions / Collins UK edition

It’s a proto-early-YA novel of a very perfect kind — based in a way on Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and purporting to explain some of the truths that the Dean was forced to hide when telling that story. Some of the book’s best parts revolve around White’s clear appreciation of the fact that Gulliver was never meant to be a children’s book — though like much older literature it’s been shoved off into that category, the way other sophisticated literature of earlier times often has been. (It was either Tolkien or Lewis, I forget which, who described this process as being like the way the grownups’ furniture gets exiled to the nursery or the children’s wing when it falls out of fashion.) And neither, when you come right down to it, is Masham’s intended just for kids. (No way they’d ever get all the jokes in there, for one thing.)

There’s one point in Mistress Masham’s Repose where the young girl Maria, who’s been working with the descendants of the unwillingly transported survivors of Lilliput, is talking to her friend the slightly dotty Professor about the silliness of some of the inhabitants of Laputa as described by Swift. “Look at the [scientist] who wanted to get sunbeams out of cucumbers!”

The Professor’s response is straightforward: “Why not? He was only a little before his time. What about cod liver oil and vitamins and all that? We will be getting sunbeams out of cucumbers before we know where we are.” And as Maria reacts to this, the Professor sits down and goes on:

“I think that Dr. Swift was a little foolish… to make fun of people just because they think. There are ninety thousand people in this world who do not think for every one who does, and those people hate the thinkers like poison. …You see, this world is run by ‘practical’ people: that is to say, by people who do not know how to think, have never had any education in thinking, and who do not wish to have it. They get on far better with lies, tub-thumping, swindling, vote-catching, murdering, and the rest of practical politics. So when a person who can think does come along, to tell them what they are doing wrong, or how to put it right, they have to invent some way of slinging mud at him, for fear of losing their power and being forced to do the right thing. So they always screech out with one accord that the advice of this thinker is ‘visionary’, ‘unpractical’, or ‘all right in theory’. Then, when they have discredited his piece of truth with the trick of words, they can settle down to blacken his character in other ways, at leisure, and they are safe to carry on with the wars and miseries which are the result of practical politics. I do not believe that a thinking man like Dr. Swift ought to have helped the practical politicians by poking fun at thinkers, even if he only meant to make fun of the silly ones. Time is revenging itself upon the Dean…”

And so it may be. In any case you could almost wish he was walking the streets of Dublin again and able to tell us — in that so-elegant and occasionally so-vicious prose of his — what he thought of the whole News of the World business, and a business culture in which tabloid employees — I can’t bring myself to characterize the people in question as “journalists” — happily blag their way into the voicemail boxes of grieving parents and kidnapped children for concrete evidence of their suffering that can be exploited to make money.

I wouldn’t be one for believing in mediums — I feel pretty strongly as a rule that the advice of the dead would not be much good to the living. But just this once, if the Powers that Be should authorize it from above, and some speaker-for-the-dead could get in touch with the immortal part of the man who wrote A Modest Proposal, and turn him loose in print on the politicians who have so long suffered one man and his love of money and power to run roughshod over the political process in the United Kingdom and the USA — boy, would that ever be a newspaper I’d buy.

*ETA:  Link leads to the Telegraph’s timeline of the UK phone hacking scandal of 2010-12. When this post was written in 2011, the action was seriously heating up, as the timeline will show.

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Film and TVMediaWriting

Cool news from some filming friends

by Diane Duane

Our friends and colleagues at Tandem Communications in Germany have just announced that they’re ready to go to principal photography on Ken Follett’s World Without End.

Tandem (predictably) did a spectacular job on Pillars of the Earth: their commitment to long-form event-TV storytelling (and their success at it) would certainly have been one of the factors assisting other newer long-form productions like Game of Thrones in getting off the ground.

Can’t wait to see how the sequel unfolds! In particular, John Pielmeier’s scripts are always a pleasure to read… looking forward to seeing how he handles the adaptation.

Now let’s all sit back and watch Rola invade Hungary again…    🙂

 

(Disclosure: yes, of course these are the people for whom I wrote The Lost Future. (The SyFy page is here.) On which I had a great time, and besides, who wouldn’t be proud to be associated with anything that gets Sean Bean running around the landscape in leather?…)

 

 

 

 

 

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AnimationComputer stuffGamesMediaOnline life

My Little Pony: Fighting is Magic

by Diane Duane

…Yeah, you heard that right. This is apparently a pre-alpha, meaning that everything about it may have already changed.

Nevertheless, I’m going to go off somewhere quietly now and clutch my head. DUELING PONIES. (There are even banjos in the background music.) (Disclosure: I keep a casual eye on Pony business, as I’ve worked with them in the past.)

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FeaturedHome lifeMediaRaetian TalesWriting

Today's cool thing: "A Wind from the South" coming to an audiobook near you!

by Diane Duane
 

I had an email from my NY agent about this late yesterday, and all the principals are agreed on the main details, so I don’t see any particular point in waiting for the paperwork before telling the world.

Apparently the good folks at Audible have been seeking out books to adapt to the audiobook format — whether they’re conventionally published or not. And they’re signing on to make an audiobook out of Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South. (With an option to also do the next volume in the series when written.)

This is super! I’m so buzzed.

For those of you who want to pick up a copy so you’ll be in a position to judge the results when the audiobook comes out, you can get the ebook from the DD.com Ebooks Direct store here (cheapest, no DRM, both ePub and Kindle / .mobi available); from Amazon (Kindle / .mobi only, a little more expensive but more convenient if you’ve already got your details stored there: btw, thanks for the nice reviews, folks…); or if you prefer, acquire a print “trade paperback” copy of the book from Lulu.com.

Whee! Thanks, Audible!

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Computer stuffEuropeMediaOnline life

Neu! Wortvogel.de style relaunch!

by Diane Duane

Our good friend Torsten Dewi has just launched a redesign / restyle on his popular German blog, Wortvogel.de, where he posts trenchant and intelligent film reviews, slices of local life, and episodes from his daily business as TV, film and media fan par excellence.

Torsten is a busy guy. He was instrumental in keeping me and Peter sane on The Ring (aka Der Ring des Nibelungs aka Sword of Xanten aka Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King);  he was instrumental in introducing Germany to the concept of the telenovela: he has done a heap of TV-movie work and magazine work, and he’s much in demand at conventions in Germany as one of those people who — though they’re friendly in the bar and chatty on the dais —  knows where the bodies are buried.

And he is a sterling person all around, so all of you who read German should stop over and have a look at Wortvogel.de, now that its already huge pile of content has been freshened up by the classy new look. So do run over and have a look.

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Current eventsEuropeFeaturedHistoryIrelandMediaTV in general

An afternoon at Trinity

by Diane Duane

Just another day in the great Long Room of Trinity’s famous library. Except for once it wasn’t being “borrowed” without credit by George Lucas.

Having earlier stopped in at Áras an Uachtaráin to be greeted by the President of Ireland, and having then laid a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin, Queen Elizabeth II went to Trinity College. She had a look at a facsimile of the Book of Kells, and then met with various folks associated with Trinity — including one Professor Doctor Sir Terry Pratchett, his stalwart assistant Rob Wilkins, and the erudite Colin Smythe, writer-publisher extraordinaire.

Flash video is embedded below. For those of you who have trouble accessing it through the embed, use this link to access/download the .mpg file directly. We’ll also have an iPhone friendly .mp4 file up later.

We have a few stills as well, but when installed on this page they broke the page formatting, so we’ve moved them here.

 

[flv:http://www.dianeduane.com/outofambit/media/Terry_Rob_Colin_And_The_Queen.flv 640 480]

 

 

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Current eventsIrelandMediaNewsPsychology / psychiatryreligion

Parousia delay (re-re-redux…)

by Diane Duane

I was going through Twitter this morning on the phone before getting out of bed, and suddenly started wondering what all the “rapture” stuff I was seeing was about.

Normally when at home I don’t use US-based news sources much, finding them way too limited — mostly because of a tendency of such sources to ignore the rest of the planet unless it’s somehow impinging directly on the US to the point where it can’t be ignored any more. None of the outside-USA sources I follow have as yet had a word to say about anything rapture-oriented.

However, Google News soon made plain what I’d been missing (partly due to being caught up, among other work, in the final proofreading and corrections on the international edition of A Wizard Abroad) (thank you again, faithful proofers! You caught a whole pile of errors that I missed, and I’m doing your acknowledgment page this morning).

Anyway, my initial response was, “Oh good. At least they picked a date after my birthday.”

But as for the rest of it…  Plainly it’s parousia-discussion time again. (I can’t very well avoid the amusing irony, for today at least, that the word also can be used to mean “a state visit”.)

As is so often the case, C. S. Lewis dealt straightforwardly with this sort of phenomenon some time back. The full text of the essay “The World’s Last Night” is here, but this bit goes to the core of the matter — Lewis’s version of the question, “Don’t you people read your own docs?  And if you do, why do you accept one part of them and ditch another?”

We must admit at once that [the doctrine of the Second Coming] has, in the past, led Christians into very great follies. Apparently many people find it difficult to believe in this great event without trying to guess its date, or even without accepting as a certainty the date that any quack or hysteric offers them. To write a history of all these exploded predictions would need a book, and a sad, sordid, tragi-comical book it would be. One such prediction was circulating when St. Paul wrote his second letter to the Thessalonians. Someone had told them that “the Day” was “at hand.” This was apparently having the result which such predictions usually have: people were idling and playing the busybody. One of the most famous predictions was that of poor William Miller in 1843. Miller (whom I take to have been an honest fanatic) dated the Second Coming to the year, the day, and the very minute. A timely comet fostered the delusion. Thousands waited for the Lord at midnight on March 21st, and went home to a late breakfast on the 22nd followed by the jeers of a drunkard.

Clearly, no one wishes to say anything that will reawaken such mass hysteria. We must never speak to simple, excitable people about “the Day” without emphasizing again and again the utter impossibility of prediction. We must try to show them that that impossibility is an essential part of the doctrine. If you do not believe our Lord’s words, why do you believe in his return at all? And if you do believe them must you not put away from you, utterly and forever, any hope of dating that return? His teaching on the subject quite clearly consisted of three propositions, (i) That he will certainly return. (2) That we cannot possibly find out when. (3) And that therefore we must always be ready for him.

…Our Lord repeated this practical conclusion again and again; as if the promise of the Return had been made for the sake of this conclusion alone. Watch, watch, is the burden of his advice. I shall come like a thief. You will not, I most solemnly assure you you will not, see me approaching. If the householder had known at what time the burglar would arrive, he would have been ready for him. If the servant had known when his absent employer would come home, he would not have been found drunk in the kitchen. But they didn’t; nor will you.

…Of this folly George MacDonald has written well. “Do those,” he asks, “who say, Lo here or lo there are the signs of his coming, think to be too keen for him and spy his approach? When he tells them to watch lest he find them neglecting their work, they stare this way and that, and watch lest he should succeed in coming like a thief! Obedience is the one key of life.”

 

(sigh) It’s not that I can’t occasionally understand (like any other human being) the desire to be swiftly and painlessly snatched out of a painful and annoying world into a better one. Or to have the Creator of the Universe implicitly pat you on the back and say “You got it right: never mind the rest of them, they’ll get what’s coming to them.” But right now I just find myself feeling sorry in advance for the people who will wake up on the 22nd (if in fact they don’t sit up all night waiting for the event they are hoping will mean the end of the world) and who will start desperately making up new stories about how and why it didn’t happen. The word for this in psych is confabulation: it made me sad when I used to see it in my patients, and it’ll make me sad again on Saturday.

Anyway: back to work. Because (as Lewis says elsewhere in that essay) the important thing, should you by unlikely chance be around when the world ends, is to be at your post, doing your job the best you can.

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