Ah, dear Mort, it doesn't get easier, believe me!

                   "My memory unfurls its lengthy scroll before me -
                    I shudder, and I curse, but I do not efface the wistful lines."      PUSHKIN

I was still intrigued by Tommo's clues on a film adaptation, based on a short story by Graham Greene.  It stopped piddling down here, in York, so I went shopping and wandering round the shelves on auto-pilot, got fragmentary images of Dirk Bogarde - a rare TV appearance - in such a story, in the mid-80s.    The location was Nice and Bogarde lived near Grasse with his partner, Tony Forwood.     DB abhored TV but needed the money as Forwood was in the early stages of Parkinson's disease.    On returning home, I got John Coldstream's fine biography of Bogarde off the shelves.   He was committed to appear, in early 1986, in his own adaptation of Graham Greene's short story, 'May We Borrow Your Husband?'

     "It is easy to see why Dirk seized on Greene's story with such relish.  It is all about
     ambiguity, deception and jealously, with a pair of interior decorators 'borrowing' poor
     Poopy's bridegroom, and the novelist narrator, for his own motives, doing nothing
     to intervene.   Had the young man taken on a wife 'as a blind or as a last desperate throw
     for normality?'   Would everything have gone normally well, if some conjunction of the
     planets had not crossed their honeymoon with that hungry pair of hunters?'   In the fiction,
     Greene leaves the 'borrowing' largely to the imagination.  Dirk scripted a full-scale orgy,
     with shaven-headed leather boys in goggles, punks, topless girls, an obese Arab sprawled
     on a white sofa, another wearing hefty gold chains, an elderly man in yachting gear
     sporting heavy make-up and a long black wig, and 'lounging on arm of sofa a tall black man,
     immense height, naked but for cod-piece of cowrie shells, cuffs, high collar of same'....

     'No one here you'd take back to tea with Granny,' was Dirk's summary of the assembly
     he imagined into life.

In due course, the teleplay was given a well publicised 22.00 hrs transmission.   I'm now wondering whether an off-air video is now cluttering in the garage.   It must have been an expensive production, although I'd quite forgotten all about it until I sensed a connection between Bogarde and Greene in the uninviting Tesco shelves!

Quite agree IRF. Although I don't see The Prisoner in quite such a favourable light as I did when I was young, it still has quite a lot of nostalgic charm.

<looks forward to more bee-related adverts smiley>

ARGGHHHH. This is a terrible idea! No, no, no, NO! 

Indeed, indeed. Although, based on the few episodes I've seen, there's precious little charm going! The series still provides the village with its (possibly) biggest tourist draw.

I think Portmeirion missed a trick there. "Be chased by gigantic bouncing balls. Only £2 per escape attempt!"

Don't people write good stories any more? I'm sure they do.

# 56     Thanks, pw.     The John Buchan estate must be delighted at this news and it obviously remains an enduring story.   I still retain the sharp imagery of Hitchcock's original 1935 black and white version, particularly the climax at the London Palladium when the Memory Man is prompted to recite 'The 39 steps is a spy organisation...' as the villain (Godfrey Tearle) remains seated in a theatre Box - Hitch zooms in for a close-up on his missing finger.

Talking of the biter-bit, I almost ignored this thread with an an impatient, 'Oh, NO.   Not another posting about the beach at Portmerion!'    Last night, reading a biography of Alastair Sim - well, more hagiography perhaps -  I had to laugh when I read that Sim and his wife, joined Christopher Fry and wife at one of their favourite holiday destinations, the Welsh village of Portmerion.    That'll teach me not to be so stuffy!