Danskcolin: Wednesday October 20th 2021

Lois wake up feeling a bit flat today, because we were all geared up for welcoming our daughter Alison and her family for a few days starting Sunday, but they've had to cancel due to rising COVID infections at the schools that the girls, Josie (15) and Rosalind (13) go to in Haslemere, Surrey.

We comfort ourselves with a map I find on the internet, which suggests that we're nowhere near the danger areas of the country as far as over 60-year-olds are concerned, which is nice.

Apart from that, we try and give the day as "normal" a feel as possible, starting with a routine "nosy neighbour" operation from our bed, where we observe another delivery of building materials to our neighbour, the one with the mini-gym.

today's routine Michael Caine-style surveillance operation

two of Caine's textbook surveillance jobs, shown here for comparison purposes

11:00 We try and preserve the feeling of "normality" by going for a walk on the local football field and buying a so-called "Twix" chocolate bar, and splitting it between us. Yes, we're really pushing the boat out again today haha!

we "push the boat out" and splash out 65p on a Twix bar "to share" - yikes !!!!

One thing that's new - we get a slightly scary-looking official letter marked OHMS (On Her Majesty's Service), which turns out to be an invitation to take part in a project of taking regular throat-and-nose-swab COVID tests over a period of a few weeks. My first inclination is to say no, in case it makes me gag, but Lois persuades me that it "will turn out all right" - you get money for taking part in it, which is a nice thought.

after lunch we open our slightly scary "OHMS" letter from the Government

- an invitation to take part in a COVID test survey

15:00 We try to make the afternoon normal by going up for our nap and me giving Lois her twice-daily squirt of olive-oil in her left ear, in preparation for her ear appointment next week at Specsavers.

the target area - Lois's left ear (not shown)

but her right ear is similar to her other one.

And I seldom miss at this range!!!

I'm an 006 - Licensed to squirt haha!

the squirter in happier times: lying peacefully on our bedroom dressing-table

in a Danish eggcup, waiting patiently for squirt-time to come round again

The olive oil is slightly golden in colour so Lois calls me "The Man With The Golden Gun", which is thought-provoking.

an artist's impression of how a film based

on my squirting exploits might be publicised

But, overall, I have to say - what madness !!!!!

18:30 We have dinner, the two ready-meals kindly donated by our neighbour Bob yesterday.

Lois chooses the fish pie

I choose the salmon and asparagus gratin - yum yum!

flashback to yesterday: Lois showcases the two meals

after our neighbour Bob has dropped them round to us

19:30 A text comes in from Gill, my sister in Cambridge. Our "new" cousin, David, a 62-year-old online journalist, whom we discovered thanks to a DNA test, has been meeting more of his new-found relations.

Today, in Devon, he met his cousin Kate, daughter of Babs, who was the twin of David's mother Joan. Present also was Kate's brother Jonathan.

(left to right) Jonathan, David and my cousin Kate, pictured earlier today:

Jonathan and David were both born in 1959

flashback to 1959, the year David was born: (left to right)

my late sister Kathy (11), Kate (12), my late brother Steve (7),

and me (13) before my "growth spurt" took off -

pictured outside Babs' and Jim's home in Ifield, Sussex

Happy days !!!!!!

20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom.

I settle down on the couch and listen to the radio for a bit, an interesting programme in the series "What's Funny About...", in which the makers of comedy shows are interviewed about why they think their shows were successful. Tonight's programme features the 1970's sitcom "Fawlty Towers", and the interviewee is John Cleese.

Some interesting snippets emerge about the show.

Cleese claims he didn't make much money out of creating and staging the show, and he had to appear in TV commercials to tide himself over while production was going on - each episode took 6 weeks to create and stage. He made £6000 on the first season for about 42 weeks' work. And the BBC, for their part, spent minimal money on the show, resulting in wobbly sets and wobbly stage furniture - oh dear!

John Cleese (left) as hotel-owner Basil Fawlty,

with Andrew Sachs as Spanish waiter Manuel

Cleese and his then wife Connie Booth concentrated heavily on devising amusing plots before writing any of the dialogue, which was obviously a good idea. Cleese wrote the men's dialogue, but he left the women's lines to Connie. He said that both he, and the whole Python team in general, hadn't a clue about what "real women" would say, so that on Python they only wrote lines for women in drag, played by themselves - my god !!!

The Fawlty Towers shows were "script-heavy", and the lines had to be spoken at a fairly speedy rate. The Fawlty Towers scripts averaged 140 page, compared to the 30-minute sitcom average of 65 pages.

How much was the show appreciated outside the UK? Not so much, probably, is the verdict. A lot of the show's humour references the sensibilities of British social class anxieties. And for the filming of the second ever show, about the Irish cowboy builder, O'Reilly, the BBC had unwisely given 60 free tickets to a visiting delegation from Iceland TV, with the result that studio reaction was virtually silent or, at best, unenthusiastic for the whole recording - oh dear!

US TV networks launched three attempted remakes of the show, but all were unsuccessful. Cleese says tonight that in one of these, starring Bea Arthur, all Basil's lines were given to Sybil, which he says made a nonsense of the original idea of the show, and I can see his point.

Cleese chose Andrew Sachs to play Spanish waiter Manuel, but chose him only on the basis of his talent for comedy. It turned out that at the beginning Sachs had no idea about how to do a Spanish accent, and when Sachs started rehearsing his part, he "sounded like a bank manager", according to Cleese - my god! Sachs was eventually persuaded to take a course in "How To Speak With A Spanish Accent".