SCENE: THE DINOSAURS' BANQUETING HALL
TYRANNOSAURUS REX (for it is he): Bring me a freshly-killed velociraptor, bien bleu et avec beaucoup de frites!
KITCHEN STAFF: Dilly dilly!
T. REX: And we'll have that animalskin-brassiere-clad woman for afters. (ASIDE TO T. REGINA) How she got here I don't know, they're not due for 100 million years yet. Where's our little princess?
T. REGINA: Still in the meteor shower, darling.
...Und so weiter, und so weiter.
I do wonder whether the welter of fiction these days is making it almost impossible for us to appreciate how things really are and really were. Even film and TV drama about the 1960s and 1970s often has little to do with anything I recall from those times. The demand for narrative to wrap itself around the expectations of the modern audience is too strong.
JD comments:
ReplyDeleteYour post is apposite. When I started work at the age of 16 and entered the 'real world' I slowly began to understand that what I read in the papers and saw on TV bore no resemblance to anything I experienced in my social or working life.
For example; the film 'Get Carter' was complete nonsense. In the early sixties one of the Krays visited Newcastle supposedly looking for opportunities to expand their 'empire' The Police followed him everywhere and made it obvious they were following him. The local 'gangsters' did like wise and he went back to London, never to return. Kray's visit gets a mention here and I remember the incident very well - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-armed_bandit_murder
That's just one example and I could quote many others so the misrepresentation of the sixties and seventies is not new, it has been going on since the sixties and the seventies. But it is good to remind people that drama always reflects the writer's own prejudices.
In his last set of Discworld books, Pratchett discusses the existence of a substance called 'narrativium', which he explains as utterly necessary, since a good story explains things so much better than facts and science.
ReplyDeleteAlso, were you with us in 1970 when we bumped into Raquel Welch in Kyrenia?
And was the pommes frites comment from that old radio sketch about cooking a rhinoceros?
Welch: no, but I remember you said she had bad skin.
ReplyDeleteRhino - forgot. Actually thinking of a restaurant poster in the Paris Metro from 1985.