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Something which I hope will interest members. An interview with Nigel Bruce's daughter before her death, and extracts from his unpublished memoirs about his time with Basil Rathbone making the Sherlock Holmes movies and radio series. Sorry it is hard to read, do click on each page to enlarge. If any member on here has a contact within the Bruce family it would be interesting to know what became of the manuscript of this memoir. If at all possible it should be published. The only copy of Nigel Bruce's Unpublished Autobiography: Games, Gossip and Greasepaint, was with his daughter Mrs Pauline Page who lived near Oxford. She is now deceased. Nick Utechin interviewed Mrs Page who allowed him to publish extracts from the work in the Sherlock Holmes Journal, of which he is editor. The interview and extracts appeared in the Winter issue of 1998: Volume 19 Number 1. Mr Utechin kindly agreed to allow me to make the extracts more widely available. So you will find both the interview and extracts from the memoir here. https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/118245811686959745462/albums/5274797161382568433

I mentioned this post in "Moffat's "we've missed it" statement..." thread, but it doesn't really fit in over there, so I open a new Thread here. Here is the translation as promised. It's a bit sloppy and based on Google automatic translation, so don't expect too much from the style. The original Post from the Blog "Popcultural Animal" Gusts of Heart - or How to Recognize a Movie/book Strikes a Chord How do you recognize you are in love? I was told the best test is to listen to love songs. If all of them are suddenly about you - you are. Also in case of movies there are some criteria of estimating their popularity and meaning it has to it’s viewers. They are completely subjective, but they allow you to say if you (and the whole world with you) just fell in love with a work of art. Before we start to look at the “tests”, I have to say something: They are not suitable for telling good movie from a bad one or a valuable literature from a penny dreadful. The objective quality in those tests is secondary. It’s more about feelings. Another Place Test It seems the easiest and also the most important one. You have to answer the question, if while watching a movie or reading a book you were somewhere else. If you are surprised after leaving the theatre that you are in Warsaw in the evening and not during daytime in New York. Or when watching a series you are sure it rained yesterday only to realize it was in the show’s universe. Passing that immerse test is not (as already mentioned) a determinant of a good literature/film. But these works can carry our mind elsewhere, often providing an escape from reality. If the author can do this to you, you are - at least partially - satisfied Withdrawal Symptoms Test a test that focuses on serials and books but may also apply to really good (and long films). Do you feel a kind of emptiness in your heart when it’s over? That special kind of void resulting from the fact that something was going on around you, and you were a part of some other world and now it’s gone. Filling this void is difficult and some psychologists compares to the feeling that overcomes people in depression. Regardless of what they say - this kind of sadness is a kind of compliment. If the maker(s) were able to make us feel this way, it means that they created something, that was so important that now life seems a bit pointless. Fan Arts Test It’s not just about drawn of painted pictures, but about any activity you can see on the web. This test is simple - the more fan activities show really bad quality, the more popular is the object of them. It‘s just simple mathematics - the more popular the object, the more people are reading / watching, so more people get creative. And with more creative activity there is a chance that the outcomes might be fantastic (rarely) or crap (more often). It’s nothing to laugh about: If people without talent start to make fan art, the production was able to wake something in them - an urge to create. Which is a compliment. The more often we see badly drawn characters from a movie or show the more this movie / book / series have been successful. The sad thing - only the worst fan art makes it into media, as if showing beautiful works was beyond talk show makers’ abilities. (...) Shelf Test Do you want to have the movie on DVD (or another durable medium), series or a book on the shelf? Whch is a question about if you are ready to go back to the movie or the book. Which again does not mean that we are dealing with something technically good. In the case of books - really good books, it’s not about mere possession but a need to start re-reading at the moment you finished. This is a pretty good test of whether or not a product of really got to you. Dizziness Test With me, very few books, movies or TV series pass it. The product passes the test if we feel quite dizzy during and shrotly after watching/reading it. Why? Because we spend most of our time replaying scenes in our heads or create our own plots. It‘s a nice feeling but on the other hand, it’s frustrating because you are somewhere else with one foot and get irritated every time the real life interrupts. Synopsis Test A product passes the test if you feel you need to tell someone about the plot or best scenes. You start to be annoying to your surroundings and are willing to impose your impressions on anyone who would listen to you, trying to explain why that something you read or watched was so brilliant. Which is utterly frustrating, because no matter what, you are never able to explain what was so seducing. Moreover, the family starts to avoid you and friends are suddenly unavailable on facebook. Summarizing is strongly related to intrusive recommending a movie or book to all your friends. If it’s really bad - you want to go to any online forum you know and advertise your new discovery. Anger Test A test that’s completely irrational but perfectly able to show us how strongly we’ve got affected. It’s simple - you get angry when someone criticizes a given work. At the same time it‘s not about the situation when someone does not understand, or rants for rantings sake. It’s about a situation when someone just does not like a particular movie or book and we are not able to bear it. Of course, we all realize that it is irrational, but it’s difficult to distance yourself from your own attachment to a movie or book. When someone critisizes our beloved movie or book we feel as if that someone criticized us, our tastes and emotions. Want-More Test This test does not necessarily apply to everyone, but sometimes if a book, a movie or a series really moved something in you, you want to know more about the maker(s). It‘s not about interviews or Wikipedia pages, but about looking for their other books, films and TV series. And it‘s not just about to get to know the artist himself but to somehow extend the connection with something related to the initial work that moved us. Sometimes it helps to fill the void described earlier. Sometimes though, it’s difficult to distinguish the interest for new works from a newly born sympathy to the director or actor. Well, all those „tests“ are not good for defining an outstanding work in film or literature. It‘s a way to see if the movie or series found a way to your heart. Yours - or a larger community’s. This allows you to answer (sometimes very sincerely) whether or not you enjoyed the work, no matter what the critics (or even your inner critic) say about it. Sometimes I am surprised myself what passes this set of tests and what don’t. What‘s interesting - I consider the fact of having a mental cinema running whole day long, the most important of this tests. If a production is able to make me do this, I’m certain I’ve found something for myself, even if I were to write a very critical review. A production which won’t stay with me for a moment after the screening, no matter how technically efficient and good storytelling it is, ends on a list of subjectively worse movies.

I am watching this historical mini-series of 3 episodes - I've just finished the second - and it is quite good, though for the first half an hour or so I was wondering what the point of the story could be. Anyway, I will leave a short review once I've finished the final episode. Meanwhile, a useless piece of information: Cumberbatch interacts with a lovely woman in the second episode whom I knew I had seen somewhere before... Turns out that she, Joanna Page, stars opposite Freeman in 'Love Actually'