A jumped up pantry boy who never knew his place

I never liked Laurence Olivier, ever since I saw him blacked up for Othello and then overacting his little heart out in the Marathon Man. But he did describe Michael Caine as a 'jumped up pantry boy who never knew his place' in the film Sleuth which led to its inclusion by the sainted Smiths in the song This Charming Man. And I love Morrissey to bits.
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Channel 4 are about to show a dramatisation of William Boyd's Any Human Heart, one of the few writers of fiction I quite like and it's a decent tale so should be a bit of a laugh. But why do so many middle aged male writers (Boyd, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie for example) insist on writing about middle aged male characters who get to have sex with young, nubile women? Because they can, is the obvious answer. Boyd does it in Any Human Heart. The wrinkly Logan Mountstuart manages to boink someone half his age in the book. But has it always been thus? Some say this has only been a particularly prevalent feature of literature written by men of a certain age since the invention of Viagra although movies have often portrayed pensioners pulling much younger women (Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, they've all done it).
Isn't there some kind of simple formula to tell if a girl is too young for a man where you halve his age and add seven and if she is still younger than that, then it's wrong? That's 30 for me then. I wonder how old Joan Holloway/Harris is in Mad Men?
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When it comes to reality TV I'll join the queue bemoaning the barbarians at the gate. X Factor is cruel and Big Brother became a freak show.
But I can't write off a whole genre and we all have our guilty pleasures (no, I don't mean the PVC nurse's uniform) and in my case it's a little of Come Dine With Me as long as it's not the celebrity specials, and I'm A Celebrity...
 There's something rather curious about so-called celebrities who don't recognise each other as being celebrities, while we also have no idea who some of them are. It varies with age. My generation look at it and say 'bloody hell, that's Britt Ekland' remembering the phone sex scene in Get Carter. Others say 'Britt who' but get excited by Santa Asbo or whatever his name is.
 I find the whole thing quite good fun and, in a way, it retains that social experiment aspect that Big Brother had before the weirdoes realised they were weirdoes. It's like men who wear cartoon ties to be 'wacky' without realising they are the least wacky people in the room or saying 'I'm mad, I am' when they're wankers rather than bonkers.
 Incidentally, I'm A Celebrity was invented by a group of people including my old work buddy Brent Baker who was with me at both the Recorder and The Sun before going to the ill fated London Daily News and then ITV. I think he got something like £50 for coming up with the idea. I didn't always enjoy life on local papers but the Recorder wasn't half a good breeding ground for talent.
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Christopher Hitchens does not believe in God, thinks the invasion of Iraq was right and is the brother of Peter 'Bonkers' Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday. They fell out as teenagers over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia...as you do. He now has cancer and may not survive though there's a bloody good interview with him in the arty farty section (I think it's called Book) of the Guardian today.
Personally - and I accept this is purely my opinion - people like Hitchens are proof that you don't have to agree with someone to like them.
If that was the case, I wouldn't have any friends and most of my family would disown me. And I bet the same goes for you out there.
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My eldest has received offers of a university place at Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham so far. As she's doing physics and former pop singer Brian Cox teaches the course at Manchester, I can guess which one she prefers. She is still waiting to hear back from two more places, so things can only get better.
Boom boom....love Solly