The Real Naked Chef

Whilst cookery programmes presented by celebrity chefs are currently riding high in the TV ratings, one of Britain’s top cooks has launched a scathing attack on them. Speaking from the kitchen of his restaurant 'Hootchie Cootchie’s' in Mill Hill, Percy Lingham told us that he thought the current generation of TV chefs were 'pretentious pillocks' who have totally lost touch with real life. “They spend too much time affecting working-class accents and pretending to be ordinary geezers, when they are actually middle class ponces on a massive ego-trip, mincing around the kitchen saying ‘look how macho I am - this antique pepper mill is almost as big as my knob!’” he ranted. “That Jamie Oliver bloke is one of the worst - I mean, he calls himself the naked chef and never gets his kit off - tosser!” Lingham firmly believes that cookery should go back to basics. “Those kitchens they cook in, they’re just too clean, nothing like real kitchens - I blame the health and safety Nazis, they’ve made it all too sterile!” Lingham suspects that his outspoken criticisms have led to him being shunned by television producers. However, many will remember his only appearance on a celebrity edition of the popular Ready, Steady, Cook, where he quickly became drunk on cooking sherry. When he ran out of seasoning, he shocked his celebrity partner, some skinny blonde bint from Holby City, by urinating in the casserole. He then proceeded to stir the soup with his John Thomas after he had mislaid his ladle. “Luckily it wasn’t too hot, or I could have suffered some nasty blistering”, he recalls. Finally, he challenged the other guest chef, manic slaphead Ainsley Harriot, to get his banging stick out and see how fast he could 'whip up a fanny batter' on hostess Fern Britten. “Everybody goes on about what a whopper he’s got in his pants - personally I reckon he just shoves a cheese grater down there to impress the ladies! I noticed that he wouldn’t get it out when I gave him the chance!” At this point Lingham was ejected from the studio by security guards. Lingham has tried to put his cookery credo into practice at 'Hootchie Cootchie’s' - his kitchen is simple and down-to-earth, with cracked tiles and layers of grease. He eschews the use of modern disinfectants and kitchen cleaners, believing them to be environmentally harmful and “down right unnatural”. The unorthodox gourmet usually cooks in the nude, thereby avoiding any germs from being carried on his clothes. “A few people have complained about finding the odd stray pube in their lasagne but, like I tell them, its all good roughage.” There is nothing pretentious about the food Lingham prepares. “Too many of these celebrity chefs carry on as if they are creating a work of art. I’ve no time for that kind of bollocks”. Lingham is proud of the fact that his restaurant has been closed down by the Environmental Health Agency three times in the last six months - once after a mass outbreak of food poisoning. “They were puking and crapping all over the place!” he informed us. “I blame modern preservatives. That’s the first and last time I use’em.” Health Inspectors, however, believe that it may have had more to do with Lingham’s using his arse to crimp the pastry on a batch of steak and kidney pies.

Adolf and Me

Another gem from my private DVD collection - 'hilarious' Hitler 'comedy' Adolf and Me: A frantic madcap comedy in which a Nazi war criminal’s desperate attempts to avoid detection by, amongst others, US and Israeli agents, are continually hampered by a zombified Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering’s flatulent corpse and a deep freeze full of dead Nazis, this proved a massive hit in its native Mexico, but left the rest of the world slack-jawed with disbelief. Coming on like a jack-booted version of Arsenic and Old Lace, the film is essentially a vehicle for veteran local comic Pepe Arsole, whose performance as the notorious Nazi Dr Mengele - famed for his cruel experiments on concentration camp inmates- seems to consist entirely of double-takes and pratfalls as he tries to conceal the true nature of his exclusive Paraguyan private health clinic from visiting government health inspectors. He is joined in the cast by Juan Garbonza - once described as the Mexican Jerry Lewis, as damning an indictment of a career as you can get - who brings his flailing limbs and infantile persona to the part of Adolf Hitler. It seems that Mengele has been trying to thaw out a number of top Nazi leaders he has frozen in the cellar. However, his first attempt - the Fuhrer - has been less than successful and Adolf now staggers around Mengele’s Paraguyan clinic flailing his arms and shouting “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer!”, before regularly falling over. He also frequently gropes young women to comic effect. Anxious to retain his clinic’s certification, Mengele has to frantically cover up its real activities - including practising involuntary euthanasia on elderly wealthy patients and then extracting their gold teeth so as to finance his latest experiments and gassing and melting down the local Indian population to provide a supply of soap and candles for the clinic. Naturally, the whole situation is further complicated by the arrival of first CIA, then Mossad agents, seeking to bring the war criminal to justice, and Mengele is forced to try and keep them away from each other, the inspectors and the clinic’s furnaces and gas chambers. Inevitably, ‘hilarious’ scenes ensue, such as patients being smothered by orderlies just as Mengele brings the inspectors onto the ward, resulting in frantic mugging and double-takes from the mad Doctor as he hurriedly pushes them back out of the room. A comic ‘highlight’ finds one of the Mossad agents recognising a lampshade in the Doctor’s study as being his mother when he notices a familiar tattoo - he subsequently finds the rest of his family on the bookshelves binding a number of notorious Nazi texts (his fiancé is now Mein Kampf). When one of the female inspectors starts making amourous advances toward Mengele, he passes a befrocked Hermann Goering (who has arrived unannounced seeking a hiding place from the various Nazi hunters trailing him) off as his wife. Unfortunately, Goering quickly expires from a heart attack as he attempts to distract the Israeli agents with a seductive dance routine. For no discernible reason, Goering’s corpse proceeds to break wind loudly and violently at various inappropriate moments, so as to continually embarrass Mengele. However, the farting corpse turns out merely to be a convenient plot device to bring about the film’s denouement - one of the Isaeli agents strikes a match whilst investigating the strange noises coming from the wardrobe where the body eventually ends up, blowing the clinic to bits. Only Mengele, Hitler and the US agents survive. In a sidesplitting final twist it turns out that the CIA agents have been trying to locate Mengele so as to offer him a job as a ‘torture consultant’ - a beaming Mengele is last seen heading for the US arm in arm with Adolf! For many years believed lost (to the relief of film-lovers everywhere), this reprehensible film has now turned up on video. A great evening’s viewing if you like slapstick comedy featuring crude racist stereotypes (the Israeli agents are depicted as having hooked noses, etc., whilst one of the CIA agents is a 1930s ‘comic relief’-style Negro with rolling eyes, continually taking fright at the slightest thing), genocide, torture and murder.

A Match Made in Heaven?

Gable and Lombard, Bogart and Bacall, Sid James and Barbara Windsor - the list of celebrity couples is endless. Loved by the press, adored by the public,; there’s nothing like a celebrity romance to set the pulses racing. However, as Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant found, it can all so easily go wrong and turn into a nightmare. Whilst it took Hugh and Liz more than ten years to decide that their relationship was all wrong, some celebrity couplings are obviously a nightmare from the outset. Take sad middle-aged game show host and self-styled impressionist Les Dennis and gorgeous young blonde bint Amanda Holden. I mean, was anybody really surprised that she sought solace in the arms of Neil Morrissey rather than Russ Abbot’s one-time straight man? Its like Mel Gibson once said, there’s nothing more stomach churning than the sight of an attractive young woman being pawed by some sad old man, or words to that effect. Which brings us to Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones. Jesus! What a dirty old man he is - and I’m motivated solely by envy when I say that. So, the question we’re posing is this - what celebrity coupling would really churn your stomach? What if rotund Radio One DJ Chris Moyles was to get it on with ginger tosser Chris Evans? Would the thought of all those wobbling buttocks and red pubes going at it hammer and tongs have you heaving up your lunch? Or perhaps the notion of Sir Jimmy Saville and the Queen grappling on the back seat of a Royal Daimler might have you chucking your cookies? Perhaps former wrestler Sir Jimmy could try some of those submission holds which involve him sitting on her face? How about sleazy Hollywood legend Jack Nicholson playing tonsil hockey with Leonardo Di Caprio - would the thought of that make your passion wilt, eh? Maybe sex-siren Sharon Stone strapping on a dildo and making like a bull-dyke with Sandra Bullock? Arch scientologist and superstar fat-boy John Travolta giving American gigolo Richard Gere one up the Gary Glitter whilst wearing a condom made from pure gerbil fur? No doubt you have your own ideas, so drop us a line and let us know which celebrity coupling you definitely wouldn’t pay good money to see an under the counter video of. We won’t be awarding any prizes for the one which makes us honk till we hurt, but if we feel like it we might publish he top ten, somewhen - maybe.

The Ignorance of the Crowd

When I first started using the web, when I was young and naive, I foolishly thought that one of the wonderful things about it was the opportunity it afforded everyone to freely express their opinions. The days of being shouted down by morons who didn't like what you were saying, and weren't prepared to even give you a fair hearing, were a thing of the past. Sadly, the opposite seems to have happened. The web has evolved into a medium whereby everyone can shout down everyone else's opinion via social networking sites, blog comments, message boards and the like. Hate campaigns can be quickly mounted and their targets bullied off of the web. It's one of the reasons I don't allow comments on stories on The Sleaze and I make it as difficult as possible to comment here. I can do without the moronic bile which, all too often, passes for opinion on the web. All of which, in a roundabout way, brings me to the point of this post. To take a recent example of this mob mentality in action, just look at the furious online reaction to the campaign by recording artists to try and curb the illegal downloading of their work. You'd think that they had been calling for the murder of every first born child in Europe, such was the strength of the reaction, rather than simply expressing an opinion that the internet mob disagreed with. Not that any of their counter 'arguments' (if you can call them that), had any merit. They seemed simply to be whingeing about how outrageous it was that these wealthy an successful pop singers wanted to stop them from getting their work for free. Lily Allen, in particular, seemed to be the primary recipient of the venom. She'd made the unforgivable mistake of setting out a coherent and perfectly reasonable defence of her position on Twitter. Always a bad move to invoke reason and logic when dealing with baying mobs. It is the focus upon the relative wealth and success of the recording artists in this case which provides the key to the 'mob mentality'. In common with the majority of such outbreaks of public cyber-bullying, it isn't so much the opinions the targets are expressing, but the relative success (measured in wealth, in this case), of the targets. The reality is that most web users are essentially 'passive', in that they don't actually create any of the content they consume. Many of them, whilst willing to consume this content, seem to resent the fact that those who created it ultimately have ownership of it, and hate it when they exercise this ownership by expecting payment for their work. After all, how else can you explain such an extreme reaction? Why shouldn't artists expect to receive payment for something they have worked hard to create, particularly when it is their main source of income? The fact that they might already be wealthy, due to prior success in producing unique original content is irrelevant. It is a matter of principle, surely? Trying to claim that they are merely puppets of voracious, profit-hungry record companies is simply an attempt to evade the point. The record companies might, indeed, be over-pricing music so as to increase their profits, but not paying for ultimately hits the artists, who have no control over such things. But you don't have to be a famous recording artist to feel the wrath of the crowd. I have no doubt that the kind of vitriolic comments many of us have suffered on our own sites, or the ignorant bitching about our stories on message boards, is the result of this resentment against creativity harboured by the mob. Indeed, I'm sure that such reactions are an attempt by those responsible to exercise some kind of 'creative collaboration', thereby giving them some kind of spurious 'ownership' of your content. Just like the music artists, we frequently get our content ripped-off by other sites. Unlike the recording artists, we don't just suffer a potential loss of income here (from advertising, for instance), but also a complete loss of ownership, as the story often ends up without any accreditation at all, or sometimes even accredited to someone else! Damn it, I've even stumbled across people on message boards claiming to be me! I find the idea that anyone would think that they could gain some kind of credibility by pretending to be Doc Sleaze very perplexing! But, of course, it's the creative angle again - by claiming to be me, they can claim authorship of my work and believe that this, somehow, gives them kudos in certain circles. Sad bastards!

Child's Play (Part Two)

Following his sacking by the BBC, for sexual misdemeanours whilst dressed as Mr Blobby, children's entertainer Bobby Wexler found himself forced to make a living playing bit parts in pantomimes. Still, his bizarre erotic fixations managed to threaten his career prospects. During a 1995 production of Jack and the Beanstalk in Scunthorpe, star Rod Hull caught Wexler in his dressing room, naked, using Hull’s famous emu puppet to masturbate with whilst he watched the Chuckle Brothers on a portable television. Judy Trimm, who was acting as Hull’s dresser that season, recalls that the popular children’s entertainer was furious. “He punched Bobby in the face”, she told us. “Unfortunately he was too late as Bobby had already ejaculated all over Emu’s face and neck. It was pretty disgusting - we had to put him through the wash three times to remove the stains.” Following this debacle, Wexler realised that finding work in the entertainment would be difficult. Consequently, he obtained a false identity and references and managed to land a job with the BBC again, this time playing a Tellytubbie. As before, he quickly took to borrowing the costume for his sex games. Suzy Merkin described how he liked to play explicit porn videos on the TV in the Telly tubbie costume whilst he wore it during sex. “That was the final straw,” she says. “The health risk from that TV playing whilst he bounced up and down on me was just too great - I told him to get treatment”. A scandal erupted when it was discovered that Wexler’s tummy TV was playing Dutch porn favourite Love Socket during a broadcast episode. Once more Wexler found himself unemployed. Possession of certain photographs involving an ITV executive and a stoat meant that Wexler quickly managed to land a new job, this time as a puppeteer on Sooty and Sweep. Virginia Futz, his girlfriend during this period, related how Wexler would bring the puppets home and wear them whilst fondling her breasts. “His piece de resistance was to get Sooty to wave his wand whilst shouting “Izzy Wizzy let’s get busy!” as his erection popped up. As he came he would squeak in the manner of Sooty rather than groaning”. Wexler managed to keep this job for over a year. However, in October 1998 he was arrested by Police for exposing himself to a group of children o n Clapham Common. He had apparently leapt out of bushes with Soo the panda on his erect penis. Following a three month custodial sentence and psychiatric counselling, Wexler started his own business as a children’s entertainer. He is currently back in Police custody following the Punch and Judy incident. Police are investigating several similar complaints.

Mad, Bad and Undercover

Britain's intelligence community has been rocked by a new scandal, after an inside source - known only as Deep Stomach - revealed that at least two senior members of the Ministry of Defence's Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) were certifiably insane, their bizarre antics threatening the nation's security. White bearded Adam Shaw joined the DIS after an illustrious career in the Royal Navy, during which he was accredited with sinking more ships than any other living officer - unfortunately all were sunk in peacetime and all belonged to the British Navy. In the DIS he quickly found himself in charge of analysing foreign defence. He soon became famous in the international intelligence community for his drinking exploits. However, he always maintained that his drinking never affected his work. Nonetheless, his projectile vomiting soon became a regular feature of departmental meetings and he once urinated out of a conference room window overlooking Whitehall during a bilateral intelligence meeting with the CIA. A drunken bar-room brawl with Boris Yeltsin during a 1999 visit to Russia proved the final straw, and Shaw found himself being pensioned off. Toby Clagg, a one time drinking partner of Shaw, was promoted from the scientific intelligence division of the DIS to be the organisation's Deputy Director. A research chemist by training, Clagg quickly became noted for rarely leaving his office. Eyebrows were raised when deliveries of scientific equipment and chemicals were made to the office, and the Fire Brigade was once called after a minor explosion. Finally, after several months our source, Deep Stomach, was summoned to Clagg’s office. Sitting in the midst of a plethora of scientific paraphernalia, Clagg revealed the amazing results of his research. “He told me that he had perfected an invisibility serum”, Deep Stomach confided to us. “As we spoke he injected himself with a clear liquid. ‘As you can see, I’m turning invisible. Once I remove my clothes no-one will be able to see me’, he said. With that he stripped off his clothes and ran out of the room, stark naked and totally visible.” The ‘invisible’ Clagg’s reign of terror was short-lived. He ran into the neighbouring office of DIS Director Admiral West - who was in conference with the Director of the CIA - and poured a decanter of water over West, shouting “Hah, see how amazed he is! He has no idea who did that - I’m invisible!”. He then proceeded to stand on one leg and break wind in the CIA Director’s face before fleeing the office. After molesting several female staff members with the cry, “The invisible groper strikes - you can’t catch me for sexual harassment!”, he headed for the main entrance, where he encountered the Defence Secretary arriving for a meeting. The naked Clagg ran up to him waving his knob and shouting “Tosspot!”. The Defence Secretary punched him in the face and security guards dragged him away as he screamed “You can’t do this, I’m invisible!”. According to Deep stomach, Clagg has not been seen since. “That’s real invisibility”, he commented.

Child's Play

A group of young children have been left traumatised following an extraordinary incident at a birthday party. When the mother of nine year old Jimmy Cole engaged thirty one year old Bobby Wexler as a children’s entertainer, little could she have imagined that the “entertainment” would involve a sexually explicit version of 'Punch and Judy'. Instead of simply beating his wife, in Wexler’s version Mr Punch indulged in a lengthy bondage session which involved the unfortunate Judy being chained up and whipped. “What he did with his truncheon was unspeakable”, Mrs Cole told us. She still cannot bring herself to describe the scenes involving Mr Punch’s dog and a crocodile. Had Mrs Cole been aware of Wexler’s sordid past, she would undoubtedly have hesitated before engaging his services. It transpires that Londoner Wexler has a history of sexual fixations involving popular children’s characters and has twice been dismissed by the BBC because of his unsavoury antics. Friends recall that Wexler’s unhealthy sexual fantasies dated back to childhood, when he boasted in the playground of regularly getting erections whilst watching Hector’s House. Indeed, he was once suspended from school after producing a comic strip featuring Hector the dog licking a naked Kiki the frog whilst Zsa Zsa the cat performed fellatio on him. After attending drama school Wexler secured a his first acting job with Thames Television. To his delight he was hired to portray Bungle the Bear in Rainbow for two weeks whilst the regular actor was on holiday. Whilst his on screen performance remained restrained, his contract was terminated after his extracurricular activities came to light. One evening, after filming had been wrapped up for the day, Wexler took two prostitutes back to the studio, insisting that they dress as Zippy and George. He than donned his Bungle costume and proceeded to indulge in a series of sex romps with them on the Rainbow set. Unfortunately they were disturbed by a security guard, who was shocked to find pink hippo George being taken from behind by Bungle the Bear, whilst Zippy performed a 'golden shower' over them both. Despite this setback to his career, Wexler succeeded in landing a new job - this time he was to don the famous Mr Blobby outfit on Noel’s House Party. Once again, he could not resist using the costume to indulge his depraved sexual fantasies, although this time he kept them out of the studio. His girlfriend of the time, Suzy Merkin, has told of how Wexler would wear the pink and yellow costume in the bedroom, regularly chasing her around the bed shouting “Blobby, blobby blobby!”, before jumping on her. “He couldn’t seem to get an erection unless he was pretending to be some kid’s TV character”, she recalls. “It was bizarre. Personally, I found it very difficult to perform properly with a man wearing a pink and yellow spotted rubber suit, but he just wouldn’t take it off. I’m amazed the BBC costume department never found the hole he cut in the crotch for his knob to stick through!” Disaster struck for Wexler when, after an argument with Merkin, he went on a drinking spree before a live broadcast of the House Party. Whilst his drunken gait and constant falling over during the programme could be mistaken as a normal performance for Mr Blobby, he overstepped the mark when he groped guest star Carol Vordeman’s breasts during the closing credits. In response Vorderman kneed him in the groin and the programme ended with the sight of Mr Blobby rolling around on the studio floor clutching his testicles and screaming “Oooh my bollocks - you’ve knackered them you bitch!” Needless to say, he was sacked.

You've Not Got Mail

My apologies for not bringing you yesterday's planned post. Or any post for that matter. This was due to circumstances beyond my control. Take my advice, no matter how crappy you think your broadband provider is, don't try switching to another one. It really is far too much hassle. This new provider uses a dedicated modem/router and, despite promising that it would be dispatched days before my switchover date, they didn't send it out until the day before the activation date they'd given me. All well and good, except that the carrier they used didn't deliver it. Oh, they claimed that their driver had made two visits, got nobody in so left a card. Except that they didn't. No cards and I was actually in at one of the times they'd claimed to have called. To make things worse, my old ISP cut me off yesterday evening, leaving me with no internet connection and no way to connect once the new ISP came on line. Consequently, I've already spent a large part of the day on the phone trying to get the router delivered. As you can tell, I finally succeeded. To be fair, the new router connected very quickly and required next to no set up, not even for the wireless network. What really got me about this whole fiasco was the fact that the carrier which so spectacularly failed to deliver the router on time is one of the private mail firms very keen to muscle in on the Post Office's monopoly. Indeed, they are doing their best to take full advantage of the current mail dispute to drum up business. Frankly, if this is the kind of service they provide, then God help us all! Whilst I've had my issues with the Post Office and their sometimes erratic deliveries to me, at least with them I know that I'll receive my mail more or less on time. Moreover, if I'm not in to receive a parcel, they do leave a card and I know that I can collect it within twenty four hours from the local sorting office, not face the prospect of travelling thirty odd miles to the nearest depot (as with the mail operator in question). A terrible warning for all those who believe that the private sector does it 'better'. Not in this case! Anyway, my late lunch break is drawing to a close. Normal posting will be resumed this evening!

Bigots That go Bump in the Night

Well, the dust has settled on Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time, leaving most of us wondering what the point of it all was. What did we learn, other than what we already knew, that Griffin is a bigot who can't put together a coherent argument and tries instead to crudely play the patriotism card, invoking images of Spitfires, plucky British Tommys fighting for freedom against those nasty foreigners and good old white working class communities being over run by (non-white) immigrants. Whilst I don't dispute the fact that as the BNP has elected representatives in the European Parliament (something the UK's electorate should be thoroughly ashamed of), the BBC has no choice but to allow them air time along with other political parties, I can't help but feel that a confrontational format like Question Time wasn't the best forum to feature them on. With just about everybody - the host, audience and other panel members - clearly hostile to Griffin, it simply allowed him to present himself as the victim, harassed by bullies. So what can we do to ensure the bigoted bastard is demonized by the public? Maybe someone could launch a Nick Griffin Halloween mask. Let's face it, if the sight of his evil face leering at you when you open the door to trick-or-treaters doesn't put the fear of God into you, then nothing will. You could carve pumpkins into the image of his head (the resemblance is already there), and stick them outside your house with candles in to try and frighten children. After all, fair's fair - for years now people have been dressing up as Abu Hamza and Osama bin Laden at Halloween, and Nick Griffin and his poisonous policies is surely as big a threat to civil society as either of those two? We need to turn Griffin into a bogey man to scare small children with - "Be good or the BNP man will come and throw you into a detention centre for illegal immigrants". Of course, there's always the danger that you'll get some idiots donning their Nick Griffin Halloween masks to try and terrorise their Muslim neighbours, knocking on the door and asking "Lynching or deportation?". But frankly, I think it is well worth the risk if we can restore Griffin and the BNP to their rightful place as unspeakable horrors that no sane person would want visited upon them.

Abbott and Costello Meet Sherlock Holmes

Another gem from my DVD collection - this time it's Abbott and Costello's little seen 1956 movie in which they meet the world's greatest detective: Having finally laid to rest their classic horror monsters by pitching them against Abbott and Costello in a series of cheap B-movies between 1948 and 1955, Universal Pictures, desperate to prop up the dire duo’s film career, turned their attention to another of their best loved franchises - Sherlock Holmes. The studio had been ready to drop the pair after Bud Abbott was arrested by vice cops patrolling Sunset Strip. Abbott was dressed in a red evening gown and was offering himself to passing male motorists for $15 a time. Nonetheless, it was decided to give them one last chance. Despite assembling an interesting cast, the result is as desultory as every other Abbott and Costello vehicle. Basil Rathbone, by this time desperate for a lead in just about anything, once again dons the deerstalker as Holmes. However, his usual partner in crime, Nigel Bruce, is absent, having sensibly died in 1953, so as to avoid the ignominy of ending his career in a farrago like this. The role of Dr Watson is instead played by veteran character actor Alan Mowbray (who, somewhat confusingly, had played the villainous Colonel Moran in the 1946 Holmes film Terror By Night), who portrays him as a typically pompous Hollywood Englishman. Still, this interpretation is more bearable than Bruce’s interpretation of the character as an arsehead. The saddest sight in the movie is poor old Bela Lugosi, clearly on his last legs, as Professor Moriarty - looking as if he’d rather be on the rickety set of an Ed Wood Jr film than sharing the screen with Abbot and Costello (at least Wood’s films were funny). Lugosi had only recently come out of rehab following his celebrated formaldahyde-drinking exploits, and was so weak that he was unable to deliver his lines. Consequently, the script claims that Moriarty has lost the power of speech after seeing Inspector Lestrade in the bath, and can now communicate only in mime. Cue lots of wildly flailing arms and stumbling about on Lugosi’s part. Sadly, Lugosi relapsed during the shooting of the picture and drank the brake fluid from Costello’s car. Whilst the car subsequently crashed, Costello, unfortunately, was not seriously hurt. Filming was further disrupted when nude photographs of Lou Costello enjoying a bedroom romp with Francis the Talking Mule were published in Confidential magazine. However, the offending edition of the magazine was pulled from the shelves and all existing copies pulped after Lou Costello’s mobster brother Frank paid a visit to the editor. The film once again includes Abbott and Costello’s famous 'Who’s on first?' routine. Quite frankly, who cares? They performed this routine (admittedly mildly amusing the first time) in virtually every one of their films and every bloody episode of their TV series. In fact, the only thing Abbott and Costello Meet Sherlock Holmes is notable for is proving, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Abbott and Costello were undoubtedly the least talented and most irritating US comedy duo of the 1940s and 1950s - and there was some damn stiff competition!

Halloween 2009 at The Sleaze

As you might have noticed, The Sleaze's Halloween tradition of running vaguely supernatural/horror related stories throughout October is well underway this year. We kicked the month off with Ban the Mind Reader, of course, and most recently The Monster Makers made its long delayed appearance. I originally announced this latter story last Halloween, but it was replaced at the last minute by The Frighteners. Of course, last year's Halloween theme was disrupted by the need to publish several topical stories during October in an attempt to shore up traffic. This year, things are moving more smoothly and a third and final Halloween story is planned for this month. At the moment it has the tentative title of Frankenstein Meets the Pikeys, and should appear some when next week. After that, we're into November, for which I've got a plethora of story ideas. Doubtless, events in the 'real' world will throw up yet more ideas. So watch this space!