Pete 'n' Dud

I recently bought the DVD of 'Bedazzled' - the original film, not the remake with Liz Hurley. Obviously. Anyway, it's a very uneven but still highly entertaining effort. I'd forgotten how significant a role Eleanor Bron played - or rather, how many roles she played, bringing some much-needed thespian skills. Dudley Moore could act, Peter Cook quite obviously couldn't. Since he plays Satan aka George Spiggott this isn't such a severe handicap as it would be in later films ('Supergirl', anyone?) as the Devil is obviously not human. But it does produce some flat scenes, making the film seem like a series of TV sketches cobbled together. It is more than that, but only just. Still, some of the set pieces are very good - Drimble Wedge and the Vegetations surely anticipated today's bloody miserable art-school 'rockers'. And it's always nice to see leaping nuns. Pity we've lost so much of Pete 'n' Dud's very best work. Well done again, BBC. Wherever popular culture reached its zenith, there was the corporation, wiping the tapes.

Happy New Year!

Admittedly, I'm a day late, but I'm sincere, and if you can fake sincerity... etc.

So, what excitement looms for 2007? Here are some of my irrelevant and pointless predictions...

1. George W. Bush will be replaced by an actual lame duck. The dollar will rally strongly against the pound. Fewer people will shout at the TV as ducks are cute.
2. The Charleston will become the dance craze of the under thirties in Luxembourg. (There are four of them.)
3. Fewer species will be become extinct, but many will be seriously inconvenienced.
4. Hollywood will 're-imagine' every TV show I loved as a child and ruin it by making it a mindless marketing opportunity for toys and video games (this process has already begun).
5. David Tennant will continue to gurn and squawk his irritating way to ratings triumph in Doctor Who, and do very well without my patronage.
6. Battlestar Galactica (the last best hope of good sci-fi telly) will arrive on DVD very, very late in the year...
7. I might get round to reading some books. If I can remember what they are. I vaguely remember them being green-ish and sort of flappy.