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...from local guerrillas. Alternating farcical skits with wicked song parodies, Privates was a near perfect stage piece, and thus an unsuitable candidate for filming. Some of the songs are gone; the plot is attenuated and detoxified; and Director Michael Blakemore (who also staged the R.S.C. production) has encouraged Monty Python Alumnus John Cleese to exaggerate the role of the befuddled major into a cacophony of whinnies, grimaces and silly walks. Before being drafted for their latest tour, Nichols' Privates should have gone AWOL...
...year some 85 million of them were bought in the U.S. for about $900 million. This year (no sunnier than last) the market will grow by 25%, adding up to more than a billion dollars. Never before has there been such a phantasmagoria of shapes, sizes, colors and prices: python, polka-dotted and zebra frames, champagne, vermilion and espresso-colored lenses, asymmetric cat's-eyes and jewelry-bedizened sun helmets that cost thousands of dollars. If price is the object, the glittering Optica shop in Beverly Hills has a pair for $35,000. Foster Grant, the largest U.S. manufacturer...
...money jokes, and Act I occasionally betrays the strain. Random Star Trek and sportscasting segments come across more like The Groove Tube than pastiche; gags spliced in from other humorists without apparent reason--including Tom Lehrer's "Ave Maria, Gee it's good to see ya" and Monty Python's "No! No singing!"--seem like mere cribs...
...result is an engagingly slapdash combination of idiosyncratic British humor, melodramatic plotting and cut-rate special effects, something like Star Trek as conceived by Monty Python. Although Doctor Who is sometimes considered a children's show, 60% of its 8 million British viewers are over 16. Says Sydney Newman, the former BBC drama chief who dreamed up the series: "It was never intended to be simply a children's program, but something that would appeal to people who were in a childlike frame of mind...
...entry, Leacock's Gertrude the Governess: "It was a wild and stormy night on the West Coast of Scotland. This, however, is immaterial to the present story, as the scene is not laid in the West of Scotland." That kind of screwball is still pitched effectively by Monty Python, but it is not a sign of seniority. Virginia Woolf believed that Ring Lardner had "talents of a remarkable order." And so he had. But the episode from You Know Me Al leans hard on misspelling and false naiveté, favorite devices of the novice: "Florrie thinks...