One of Those Weeks

I've had one of those weeks.  One that culminated in me spending most of today in bed, exhausted.  The positive side of this was that I slept through Rishi Sunak's visit to Crapchester.  But getting back to my week, apart from the fact that it has been freezing cold - even when I was inside with the heating turned up, I felt cold - I had car troubles that prevented me from getting to a medical appointment, (the cold had killed my battery, already weakened by a malfunctioning glow plug), I had to plough through a mountain of forms in relation to my work pension, before going down with a cold.  But hey, the car now has a new battery, (and new glow plugs at some time soon), my appointment has been rescheduled (I was on hold for half an hour just to tell the surgery that I couldn't make the original appointment), my pension forms sent off and the cold now on the wane after a day in bed.  All of the hassle, however, left me not feeling in the mood to make a proper post today.  So, here I am, moaning about my week instead.  I'm rounding out the week watching a seventies Italian crime film, (in English with Dutch sub-titles).  It's one of those Italian films that features various British and American actors, in order to give it international appeal.  James Mason, as a government official, is currently meeting a shifty looking Stephen Boyd, for instance,  I can only assume that this was another of those continental films that Mason made for money, on the assumption that nobody in the English-speaking world would ever see it.  For his part, Boyd was entering that late stage of his career where he didn't seem to care what he appeared in, so long as he got paid.

It has long been the case, of course, that prominent actors have done lucrative work for foreign markets that they probably wouldn't have done in their home countries for fear that it would undermine their credibility or artistic integrity.  TV adverts were once looked down on by 'legitimate' actors, but they did pay well, so US and UK actors would often go to Japan to film ads for local TV there, safe in the knowledge that they would never be shown in the US or Europe.  It was the same for those foreign language exploitation films: a good payday that few, if any, people would see back home - even if they had English language releases, they'd most likely by-pass most critics.  But then, along came home video with its insatiable need for material to release and these films started to turn up in video stores.  With the advent of the internet, all those foreign language TV commercials also started to become globally available. There was nowhere for the stars who made them to hide.  Their secrets were out.  By that time, though, times had changed and there was less snobbery in the acting profession - by the seventies even Lord Olivier was appearing in Harold Robbins adaptations.  TV work was no longer taboo for the upper echelons of the profession - even TV commercials.  Nowadays we have various Hollywood stars happily picking up pay cheques for UK TV ads for everything from insurance to Warburtons bread.  We indeed live in strange times when Arnold Schwarzenegger appears with animated meerkats to sell price comparison services and Robert de Niro sells bagels.