The traditional response to the defeat of a 'big team' by a 'little team' is to reprise the famous Norwegian commentary; Maggie Thatcher, Winston Churchill etc, your boys took one hell of a beating.
I was struck that this reaction was unusually absent from social media after the giant killing of Belgium by Wales. Wondering why it occurred to me that actually the old joke about the difficulty of naming 5 Belgians was true. The Norwegian commentary could not be done because noone could fill a tweet of 140 characters with a list of Belgians that people would have heard of.
Unable to resist a challenge, I decided overnight to give it it a go. After 8 hours extensive research here is my commentary-
"Georges Prosper Remi*, Tintin, Snowy**, Plastic Bertrand (sadly French), Stella Artois (counts as two), Jean Claude Juncker (nope, from Luxembourg), Jeanne-Claude Van Damme, the Belgian Prime Minister (err, they still do not have one), Marouane Fellaini (disallowed as was playing and therefore could not be one of 'your boys'), Hercule Poirot. Your Boys Took One Hell of a Beating."
Obviously 3 were fictional characters, and 2 were actually a beer but not a bad effort. See if you can do better.
*Herge
**Tintin's dog
The latest TV comedy to be turned into a film is Absolutely Fabulous. I never found 'AbFab' particularly funny. More over-acting than comedy but each to his own of course.
It did start me thinking about the other TV sitcoms turned into films. The first I ever saw was On The Buses, where Stan (Reg Varney), Blakey, Jack, the miserable bald bloke who drove a motor-bike sidecar and his plain (is that ok?) wife, Olive, et al decamped from the bus garage to a holiday camp. My memories are vague now but I think the highlight was Stan blowing up the chalet when he dropped a fag in the toilet, which for reasons I cannot now remember had recently had a load of paraffin emptied into it. Inevitably Blakey was singed and, wait for it, said "I'll get you Butler."
The film was pretty awful, but there again watching repeats of the original on ITV 4, reminded me that the TV series was terrible as well - and it proved that my mum was right about Stan and Jack's terrible table manners. Actually On The Buses was at its funniest in the take off by Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield.
Next was Porridge, and its film was pretty good. It can still make you laugh on a wet Sunday afternoon. The first Dad's Army was weak, nothing like as good as the peerless TV sit-com. At least though it was better than the truly awful film remake which came out earlier this year.
Monty Python was not my thing anyway, and I confess - shock, horror - I have never seen Life of Brian.
Are You Being Served still makes me smile, in an admittedly slightly dated politically incorrect way, and its feature film spin-off really (yes really) was not bad.
More recently the Inbetweeners films were rather good, although uncomfortable to watch with your teenage children.
Could it be that the Absolutely Fabulous film is better than the TV series? I have fond memories of Joanna Lumley from The New Avengers so might have to find out.
