Where was I? Oh, yes. Films. It is hard to believe that my parents’ generation would walk into a cinema when it suited them, without paying any attention to what film it was that they were going to see. Indeed they weren’t even concerned whether the film had just started, or was halfway through, or was in the middle of the final chase sequence. They would just happily settle into their seats with their sweets and cigarettes and start trying to decipher the plot, and who was the villain, and why everybody was in Hamburg, and then the film would end, and they would sit patiently through the advertisements and newsreels, eat an ice cream, and then the film would begin again, and they would finally discover who everyone was, and why they had all gone to Hamburg, and at exactly the moment when they’d understood what the hell was going on, and could now enjoy the denouement, they’d all shout, “Oh! This is where we came in!”— and leave. How are you supposed to write for an audience like that? The great farce-writer Ben Travers once told me that in the ’30s, posh “country people” would invariably arrive in their seats at the back of the stalls about twenty minutes late (to show that they were not bound by the trivial conventions of the proletariat) and that he therefore always added a brief summary of the plot at that point, so the toffs could get up to speed. But Ben at least knew roughly when they’d be arriving. Did the “Oh! This is where we came in!” brigade ever consider why they liked watching a movie in the wrong order? Well, not my parents, anyway.
Cleese, John. So, Anyway…