My Plans for the Week

The Saturday edition of The Times here in London comes with a magazine called The Knowledge, a collection of stories, reviews and listings of what is happening in entertainment in the capital. Last weekend’s issue, for example, carried an interview with Daryl Hannah claiming that she thinks she’s normal, a list of the Top 50 Live Gigs of All Time (Queen at Live Aid? Are they on drugs?) and a review of a new series about the sex life of Conan Doyle.

They also have a column called Star Choice, where a star outlines their plans for the week. The term ‘star’ is used in its very loosest sense. (This week it was the guy who plays Sean Tully in Coronation Street.) And without exception their plans involve watching an obscure play staged in an old East End ball-bearing factory, hiring a couple of foreign films from the local Blockbuster and attending the opening of an exhibition by an Eastern European Surrealist. I’m sure they have no intention of attending any of them and would love to see a follow up the next week titled ‘What I Actually Did.’ I suspect most would reply that they had a good lie-in and a fry-up down the local cafe.

In the spirit of such honesty I thought I’d share with you what I got up to on the weekend. Like Antony Cotton – you know, the guy who plays Sean Tully on Coronation Street – I had the best of intentions. If the police hadn’t started shooting people on the Tube I might have wandered into the National Portrait Gallery. Instead I veged in front of the Channel Four coverage of the 1st Test between Australia and England, went to the pub and then watched a couple of DVDs I picked up on the sale table at my local Woolworths – Our Man Flint and In Like Flint.

Sport, alcohol, and a bit of international intrigue. You can’t ask more of a weekend than that.

NB: If you haven’t seen the Flint movies, they are basically James Bond spoofs. A very skinny and very camp James Coburn plays a secret agent with extraordinary skills in the field and in the bedroom called Derek Flint. After watching both films it is obvious Mike Myers borrowed heavily from them for his Austin Powers’ movies. Not that he’s hiding it. Austin Powers name-checks In Like Flint in the first movie and the video phone in the Shaguar uses the same ring tone as the Presidential hotline in the Flint movies.