Danskcolin: Saturday February 10th 2024

Don't you just hate it when you're halfway through watching a movie, feeling completely absorbed in the story-line and suddenly there's an unexpected interruption, and you're wondering "What's going to happen next?"

Older people among my readers will remember the famous TV first showing of "Kickboxer" in the UK some twenty years ago, which practically the whole country was watching, you know, the performance that became interrupted halfway through? It caused a major upset, didn't it, according to the local Onion News, as well as a dangerous power surge when millions of viewers got up to make a cup of tea using their electric kettles?

WORCESTER — “Kickboxer”, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, will resume after a brief pause, ITV sources reported several seconds ago. "“Kickboxer”, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, will continue in a moment," an unidentified network source said.

According to the anonymous male source, the interruption to the Kickboxer broadcast will be brief. The representative for ITV asked that all persons watching Kickboxer, the 1989 action movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, "[remain] tuned to ITV." The interruption is believed to be affecting not just viewers in Worcestershire, but ITV viewers nationwide.

"[Van Damme's character] Kurt Sloan had just seen his brother, a U.S. kickboxing champion, suffer a brutal beating at the hands of the sadistic Tong Po," Worcester-area ITV viewer Charles Burnley said. "Van Damme's brother was paralyzed, but Tong Po was remorseless—in fact, he was almost gloating. But before anything else big happened, the movie was interrupted."

Burnley said the disruption, which followed a freeze-frame of Van Damme's bloody and shame-ridden face, did not worry him. Bell End viewer Garret Corbin, standing in front of his open refrigerator and pouring himself a glass of grape juice, is one of tens of thousands of viewers awaiting the movie's return. "If the movie continues, I think Van Damme's character will take vengeance on Tong Po—provided he can find someone to train him," Corbin said, basing his hypothesis on two weeks of ITV pronouncements that "Jean-Claude Van Damme is… Kickboxer".

Corbin said he believes that Kickboxer, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, "will come back on any minute now. If I'm going to take their word for it that Van Damme will assume the title role," Corbin said, "then I might as well take their claim that Kickboxer will continue at face value. I'll have to see, though," Corbin added, fumbling with a bag of crisps.

Robert Thompson, director of the Centre for the Study of Popular Television at Worcester University, said that, during this or a future interruption, viewers are likely to hear an announcement concerning ITV programming scheduled for later in the day.

Lois and I remember that traumatic evening like it was yesterday, but somehow we "got through it" and "moved on" I remember that too. But did YOU?

I wonder.....!

flashback to us in 2004, determined to

"pick up the pieces" and "move on"

Well, that was an interruption only lasting a few minutes, and yet it created national headlines, not just local ones. What would YOU feel like if you were watching a film at a crucial moment, and were faced with an unexpected interruption of 12 hours or more?

That was the trauma our 10-year-old twin grandchildren Lily and Jessica went through last night, as our viewing of "Annie - the Musical" (2014 version) was interrupted by a call of "time for bed we'll watch the rest of the film tomorrow" from the twins' sensible mother, our daughter Sarah.

flashback to last night: our twin granddaughters

Lily and Jessica, already in their pyjamas,

with new "best buddy beanie boo" Bobby,

excited at the prospect of seeing Annie (2014 version)

09:00 Well, that was last night, and now it's Saturday morning, and Lois and Sarah want to take the twins out to Upton-on-Severn to see the famous 13th century "Pepper Pot" tower, the local town museum and to let them let off steam at the town's lavishly appointed children's playground.

a view of Upton-upon-Severn, seen here from the river,

with its 13th century "Pepper Pot" tower in the background

It's quite a historical town, because soldiers from both the Parliamentary Army and the King's Army, not necessarily at the same time, caroused here at the White Lion Inn, shortly before the Battle of Worcester (1651), during the English Civil War.

the White Lion Hotel in Upton-upon-Severn

as it looks today

Also, one of the earliest novel-writers in the English language, Henry Fielding knew the inn well, and in his ground-breaking novel "Tom Jones" (1749), the eponymous hero Tom does a lot of bouncing on one of the beds here with his latest "squeeze".

a clip from "Tom Jones" the movie (1976), showing

the start of a steamy scene set in a bedroom

of the White Lion Inn, Upton-upon-Severn

10:00 As the morning proceeds, however, I quickly notice that the twins are strangely reluctant to make a move, however, which isn't like them. And I can see they won't be happy till they see the rest of the Annie film they've watched half of last night, so like good parents and grandparents, we let them have their way. Awwwwwww !!!!!

I should declare a personal interest here, at this point.

I'm quite keen for Lois, Sarah and the twins to get going and drive over to Upton. I need to have some peace and quiet in the house to work on my so-called "presentation" to the local U3A "History of English" group, which is coming up fast - only six days away now - YIKES !!!!! And I need to use the computer in the room Sarah sleeps in, so I've just got to be patient.

the twins won't be happy till they've seen the end of

Annie (2014 version). Awwwwwwww!!!!!!

11:30 Eventually everybody leaves and I get the chance to work on my so-called "talk". My subject, broadly speaking is encapsulated by the following challenging question I intend to put to my fellow U3A group-members: "If George III came back to life and was speaking to me, for example, which of us would have the most trouble understanding what the other one was saying?".

George III, seen here "eyeing up" his mortal enemy,

"Johnny Frenchman"

This title: "If George III came back to life....etc", is just a catchy way of getting my notoriously lazy and vague fellow-group-members to concentrate for once, and not to just "nod off" during my presentation, which will be on zoom, the official subject being "Changes in the English language over the last 250 years".

It'll come as no surprise to you if I tell you that, over the past 250 years, the biggest influence on the English we speak today in the UK has come from the US, and this influence is so pervasive that most Brits have absolutely no idea what new words and phrases were originally American, and which weren't.

The writer of the book I'm reading, Barbara Strang, compares this situation with that of 10th century England, when the eastern half the country became the Danelaw, a separate jurisdiction ruled over by the Danes. There was substantial word-sharing between the two languages Anglo-Saxon and Danish, languages that were in any case closely related, and also mutually intelligible.

There is plenty of evidence that when Viking adventurers spoke of their travels at the court of King Alfred, they spoke without interpreters. And to this day, philologists have trouble identifying the source of many of our words, words that could either be from Danish or from the original Anglo-Saxon.

Most Brits would be astonished, for example, to be told that words and phrases as familiar as "business-man", "crook" (meaning criminal), "overcoat" and many hundreds of other words were originally US imports.

Strang includes in her book this guide issued to American GIs stationed in the UK during World War II, and it's remarkable how most of the so-called "British" phrases would be completely unknown now to the average Brit today, because they've been completely superseded by the American equivalent. Strang marks with an obelisk American equivalents that, from her own memory, were already in widespread use in the UK even before the war ended in 1945.

See this extract from Strang's book, with US expressions on the left, and what were the weird UK equivalents back in those crazy, far-off days of the 1940's.

What a crazy language we speak !!!!!

But I think we still say a minority of the things in the right-hand column: "ladders" in stockings for example, that's one that's persisted.

a typical "ladder" in a pair of stockings or tights

What madness !!!!!

14:00 Lois, Sarah and the twins come back from their expedition to a very soggy Upton-upon-Severn. They had to go "the back way" again, coming from our house here in Malvern, because the Hanley Road is closed outside the Warner's supermarket due to flooding - again !!!!

These are some of Lois's pictures:

What utter utter utter utter madness !!!!!

17:00 In view of the "Annie-mania" that's gripped this household this weekend, it's perhaps no surprise that the twins now want to watch "the version of Annie that mum used to watch", back in the 1980's, that is. What madness !!!! [That's enough madness for today! - Ed]

I set it up on my laptop for them, because YouTube are asking for £2.99 before they'll screen it for us.

I'm more than happy to pay out the £2.99 because the twins are absolutely entranced again by this older film, and also I know it ends with a song that tells you all you need to know about living your life, so it's a bargain at that price, to put it mildly!

And there you have it - that's life in a nutshell isn't it - and a life-lesson cheap at the price, at just £2.99, no question!

19:00 We end the day with a pencil-and-paper game that in mine and Lois's youth was called "Consequences", where players create some random story-lines.

Each player writes down the name of a random person, then folds the paper so you can't see what they've written. Then each player passes his or her piece of paper to the person on his/her left and this time everybody writes about e.g. "where the person went to", and then folds the paper up and passes it round again, till eventually you get a set of crazy random stories that usually make everybody laugh.

an evening game of "Consequences"

Sounds complicated, I know, but tremendous fun at the same time isn't it!

21:00 Sarah and the twins go to bed, but Lois and I stay up till 10pm, watching something on TV - videos of "one-hit-wonders" performing live at the BBC.

They talk about "indlible hits", but tonight Lois and I find we don't remember a lot of these - but then we are 77, you know! [You've told us that - like - a billion times! - Ed]

We didn't remember, at first, this "doozy" from Chrissy Amphlett of the Australian group Divynils, entitled "I Touch Myself".

But maybe it's a song best forgotten, in retrospect. Let me know YOUR views haha!