Paperboy by Christopher Fowler

Author:Christopher Fowler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409080138
Publisher: Transworld

19

Celluloid Relatives

I KNEW I was spending too much time at the pictures when the cinema manager started to greet me by my first name. I was so at home in the Odeon that I used to go out to the foyer snack bar in my socks. The ice-cream girl would say ‘Your usual, Chris?’ as she poked about in her tray for a Zoom! lolly.

Although I saw most of my relatives so rarely that I would have had trouble recognizing them in the street, I discovered through cinemas like the Odeon a group of people far more familiar to me. These were not other patrons, but the character actors who inhabited English films in the Sunday double bills. Every comedy of the fifties and sixties featured permutations of the same stalwarts, and I loved them all, because I could rely on them always to play the same parts.1

These included:

Irene Handl (charlady)

Anna Quayle (posh woman)

Lance Percival (dim nerd)

Sid James and Sydney Tafler (spivs)

Arthur Mullard (common stupid bloke running tea stall)

Margaret Rutherford (tweedy academic)

Joan Sims (jolly den mother)

Richard Wattis, Eric Barker and Thorley Walters (men from the Ministry)

Dick Emery (bookie)

Sylvia Syms (indignant girl in coffee bar)

Terry-Thomas (cad)

Peggy Mount (battleaxe)

Raymond Huntley (corrupt official)

Sabrina (busty cheesecake)

Cecil Parker (shyster)

John Slater and Harry Fowler (cheeky barrow boys)

David Lodge (copper)

Reginald Beckwith (official)

Leslie Phillips (ladies’ man)

Avis Bunnage and Hattie Jacques (matrons)

Miles Malleson (vicar)

Eleanor Summerfield (prim indignant lady)

Francis Matthews (wide-eyed innocent)

Felix Aylmer (wise priest)

Warren Mitchell (tailor)

Bernard Bresslaw (endearing thicko)

Joyce Grenfell (toothy hockey teacher)

Reg Varney (Brylcreemed oik)

Liz Fraser (indignant girl in tight sweater)

John Le Mesurier (bemused solicitor)

Alfie Bass (scruffy loafer)

Lionel Jeffries (prison warden)

Bernard Cribbins (removal man)

June Whitfield (shocked genteel lady)

Peter Jones (smarmy shop assistant)

Terence Alexander (wing commander)

Bernard Miles (bucolic fogie)

George Cole (endearingly inept crook)

Terence Longdon (posh airman)

Esma Cannon (dotty old dear)

Deryck Guyler (jobsworth)

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