Stephen Fry chides the grammar police

[eddvick]

Douglas Smith links to the following video from Stephen Fry animated by Matthew Rogers. It's been around a few years, but may be as new to you as to me.

Click to view

Fry was in Cold Comfort Farm, playing the pretentious, emotion-deaf poet Mybug. Stella Gibbons, who wrote the novel from which the movie was made, wrote 25 novels (plus four volumes of poetry).

Comments

[apostle_of_eris]

(Hmm. I'm deliberate in my choice of formal correctness or slack, vernacular irregularity in my speech as one way to indicate mood.)

[vgqn]

I adore Cold Comfort Farm but had heard that the sequel didn't live up to the original. Are there other books of Gibbons that you would recommend?

Delightful animation, thanks.

[eddvick]

This is the first of her works I've read besides Cold Comfort Farm.

Lynne Truss, the person who got Vintage to reprint Westwood, wrote its introduction, saying that this was the best of her other books. My impression is that even Westwood is not as excellent as Cold Comfort Farm; in places it frankly plods with a lot of exposition. The characters are well-defined and I'm enjoying the WWII London setting. It's a bit sad that Gibbons may have written her best work first.