Fever Dreams

Perhaps I should rename this blog 'Flu Diary', as the fall-out from the weekend's bout of the evil virus continues. If nothing else, my masterplan yesterday of drinking a pint and a half of beer before going to bed seems to have worked. You see, I'm convinced that they key to beating 'flu is to 'break the fever' and, whilst I'd woken up bathed in sweat a few times over the weekend, I'd just ended up feeling dehydrated and full of flu. I therefore reasoned that if I could avoid the the dehydration, I'd have a better chance of breaking the fever - hence the idea of taking on additional liquids to sweat out overnight. (You understand that I have no scientific evidence whatsoever to support any of these beliefs). Anyway, it seemed to work as I woke up several times smothered in sweat last night, but come morning I felt neither dehydrated nor as full of flu as before. Indeed, the main symptom I had left was an aching ribcage and raw throat as a result of all the coughing I'd done. A situation which reduced my voice to a croak.

But getting to the point, sort of, during the course of last night I experience some truly weird fever dreams. Waking up tangled in sweat-soaked sheets with strange memories of being Canada, (yes that's right, I dreamt I was Canada), and having been involved in some kind of tectonic shifting around, is not an experience I want to repeat. (And why Canada? I've never been there in my life or have any connection with the land of the maple leaf). That said, on Sunday afternoon when the 'flu was at its worst and I was lying on my sofa aimlessly flicking through the TV channels, I might have been forgiven for thinking that I was in the grip of a particularly delirious fever dream as stumbled across one of those episodes of Murder, She Wrote supposedly set in the UK, (you know, the one's where Angela Lansbury pretends to be Jessica Fletcher's English cousin, for which she bizarrely, bearing in mind she's a Brit, affects a bad mockney accent). I have a profound love for episodes of 1970s and 1980s US TV series which combine some judiciously deployed stock footage (a routemaster bus to denote we're in London, for instance), a sprinkling of ex-pat actors, (serial Dr Watson impersonator Bernard Fox being a great favourite), and sunny California locations pretending to be in rural England. (Of course, years later, Mike Myers would successfully spoof these conventions in Austin Powers films).

This episode was particularly demented, featuring Anthony Newley as a Scotland Yard Inspector, Richard Johnson (presumably in between Italian 'video nasties' - scarily, he once had a career: he could have been James Bond), as the victim and that girl from Frasier. Whilst the stock footage was actually quite well-matched, the studio interiors, especially the pubs, looked like something left over from a 1930s horror movie. Which they probably were. Best of all was Newley's office, which appeared simply to be a quick redress of the office occupied by DA's or Sheriff's in regular episodes. Far too grand for a mere Inspector! But they got the usual two things wrong - light levels and telephones. Trust me, even on the brightest, hottest Summer's days, the sunshine in the UK is never as bright as it appears in California. Moreover, back in the days when all phones had rotary dials and there was only one ring tone for a landline - a bell - British and US phones used distinctly different chimes, something rarely reflected in US TV shows and films. But hey, they were made primarily for a US audience who, in the 1970s, were unlikely to have visited the UK, (unless doing military service). And when all is said and done, UK films and TV programmes that tried to recreate a US setting in the UK at this time were equally hilarious. Indeed, in this respect I'd enthusiastically recommend the 1959 science fiction horror movie First Man Into Space - its attempt to recreate New Mexico in Surrey is astounding. Unfortunately, the US distributors apparently didn't bother watching it, as they seemed to assume it had been shot on location and premiered the film in Albuquerque. It wasn't well received.