"When the wind is easterly, I know a drama queen from a ham."
Hamlet: Kenneth Brannagh's four-hour extravaganza on Channel 4 last night.
Oh, what a noble piece of work is Brannagh. So passionate in misery yet so subdued in scripted places most unexpected. Well voiced in egocentric close-ups and distilled in raw emotion that, often times, call for his colleagues to don their running shoes and hurtle, as though in distemper, across the elaborate Pinewood sets behind his manic, writhing frame. Oh what bawdy, overtly zealous buffoons are Blessed, Dench, Williams, Attenborough, Crystal, Jacobi and Gielgud. So lacking in graces moderate. So void of control in the face of Oscars.
Now is the winter of too much content. A trifle long or to be edited? Aye, that was the question Brannagh ignored. Whether it was nobler in his producer's eye to suffer the audience leaving in droves or, by sticking rigorously to the original script, bear tedium and oppose them.
Alas poor Lemmon, I knew him well. Many a time and oft I watched his merry jest, he merely content to play the fool, and yet, in this his finest hour as he strutted his last upon the Danish stage, he appeared not to understand the very meaning of his words and failed to inflect with appropriate timing.
Fie! Lord Heston, with thine gun-law, thou was the corniest of them all. Your extravagant posturing and organ-pipe teeth had all the substance but not the wit to carry this terminable tale.
Come! Let us speak of this no more. Let us away to compare Australian soaps against The Bill and hope this petty play, this septic ham-fest, its mere actors forgetful of their worth transformed instead into archetypes of excess, shall not resurface from the twilight hours for many another year yet.
Jack Straw announced today (presumably to allay growing unease about the inevitable conflict) that Britain's chances of going to war against Iraq were actually 40 to 60 against. Exactly how he arrived at this figure nobody's certain. Did one of his senior civil servants work out the mathematical functioning of Saddam's brain? Or has he been reading his copy of Old Moore's Almanac again mistakenly believing it to be a memo from Uncle Tony? Whatever the case, the figures are obviously contrived and, quite frankly, the news programmes shouldn't be wasting their time reporting such bollocks.
