"Welcome to British humour. What is wrong with us?! The rest of the world must think we're mental!"
—Jason Manford talking to a French audience member whilst presenting Sunday Night at the London Palladium
"I think the British have a sense of humor, especially about the macabre. I think a lot of people object to playing around with bodies and so forth. But actually I don't think it really matters, you know, and sometimes people can't help, especially certain types of English people, can't help but make a joke. Whether it's for their own relief or what. I remember at a fairground once outside London, there was a sideshow going on in a tent where a man was biting the heads from live rats, and there were two women, blousy sort of women at the back of the tent, watching this scene with fascination but with clenched teeth and horror. But one of them couldn't help make a joke, she had to call out, she said, "don't you want any bread with it?"
"He put a fresh sheet in and, after spending a few moments wishing he were doing something quite different, typed:
'Gregory: But this is really qutie farcical.'
"Like all the other lines of dialogue he had so far evolved, it struck him as not only in need of instant replacement, but as requiring a longish paragraph of negative stage direction in the faint hope of getting it said ordinarily, and not ordinarily in inverted commas, either. Experimentally, he typed:
'(Say this without raising your chin or opening your eyes wide or tilting your face or putting on that look of vague affront you use when you think you are "underlining the emergence of a new balance of forces in the scheme of the action" like the producer told you or letting your mind focus more than you can help on sentences like "Mr. Recktham managed to breathe some life into the wooden and conventional part of Gregory" or putting any more expression into it than as if you were reading aloud something you thought was pretty boring (and not as if you were doing an imitation of someone on a stage reading aloud something he thought was pretty boring, either) or hesitating before or after "quite" or saying "fusskle" instead of "farcical".)'
"Breathing heavily, Bowen now x-ed out his original line of dialogue and typed:
'Gregory: You're just pulling my leg.'"
