Do I Lack Cultural Credibility?
















Watching Channel 4 news last night and the feature on the new Superman movie made me realise I hadn't actually seen any of the previous Christopher Reeve films in their entirety. Bits and pieces yes, the bit where he makes the world spin backwards to save Lois in Superman 2, I think, is the only scene I can remember.

This made me think about other films I haven't seen, I've not seen a minute of ET, or a single frame of any of the Star Wars films, nor a note of The Sound Of Music, I've avoided Harry Potter, missed all the Rocky's except the first, ditto all the Jaws films except the first (I attended the World Premiere for that) and The Full Monty may well have been about that bloke who saw off Rommel as far as I'm concerned.

It's a different story with Kurosawa, Leone, Kieslowski, Rohmer, Godard, Truffaut, Eisenstein, Tarantino, to drop a few names - I've seen the lot, every minute. Woody Allen's oeuvre (up to Broadway Danny Rose) I can recite the scripts verbatim, ditto Python and Seinfeld. I've seen all The Office and The Simpsons several times over.

I only watched one episode of Fools and Horses (the one with them dressed as Batman and Robin), I thought Little Britain was an hours worth of material stretched out into six hours of television, I never bought into the whole Victor Meldrew thing and this despite the fact that it was filmed behind the house Janis grew-up in and where my mother in law lives in Hampshire.

And sport. I've never been to a Speedway meeting, despite having a World Champion as a client and living opposite a British champion as a kid. I've not watched a tennis match all the way through since Bjron Borg retired, if Swimming is longer than 50 metres I check the WR/OR time shown on the screen and channel hop until I think there might be a finish, I can't watch a Rugby Union international all the way through if Australia or New Zealand aren't involved and the last time I watched a Great Britain rugby league match Eddie Waring was still alive.

I don't feel I've missed out, I'm reminded of the John Peel story when he had an argument with Tony Blackburn in the sixties. JP was playing Captain Beefheart and TB said it was rubbish and that people would still be listening to The Supremes in fifty years time whilst Beefheart would be forgotten. I think they were both right and I know that whilst hundreds of thousands of people will be queuing to see the new Superman a few dozen of us will be in a dark room somewhere enjoying a film from the old country (probably without subtitles).