I was doing a bit of writing this evening and ended up at one point including the phrase ‘ee-ay-addio’ which had me wondering about its origins. Via Private Eye’s football reporter E I Addio, I ended up looking at football chants and then back to the nursery rhyme ‘The farmer in the dell’, where it comes from. The rhyme itself is alluded to in The Secret History by Donna Tartt (a book I love), and I’m pretty sure it’s referenced by Dennis Potter in The Singing Detective. It is also the source for the title of the book I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier. For some reason I’ve been thinking about Robert Cormier recently, even though I’ve not read any of his books since I was a teenager. I went looking for any surviving Cormier books and found a long-forgotten copy of the screenplay to Jules et Jim. 
That and After the First Death are stacked up as the next books to read. And back at my writing - it’s a story about a computer - I finished a second draft, did a word count and discovered I had written 6502 words. The very first computer I used was my brother’s KIM-1, basically a development kit for the 6502 processor, and my introduction to computer programming was 6502 assembly language.
Archive for the 'Dennis Potter' Category
Don’t get me wrong - the current episodes of Doctor Who (Human Nature) are just the best ever, and I think David Tennant is the best Doctor ever. But in Doctor Who Confidential over on BBC Three, David Tennant says that scarecrows are such an obvious idea that it’s odd they’ve not been used before for their spooky potential.
Well they have - take for example The Singing Detective by Dennis Potter. The screen-grab here is from episode three, in which the young Philip Marlowe sees a scarecrow from a train, waving at him in exactly the same way the scarecrow waved in part one of Human Nature. Hard to imagine they weren’t influenced by it.
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