A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode thirty-two — THE SCARECROW OF ROMNEY MARSH with Margaret H. Willison

On February 9, 1964, Ed Sullivan introduced a band from Liverpool, England formerly known as The Quarrymen to an estimated 73 million viewers of his primetime CBS variety show. And down the dial on NBC, the anthology series Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color drew an audience of something less than 73 million for the first installment of its three-part The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, an adaptation of Russell Thorndike and William Buchanan's novel Christopher Syn starring our man Patty McG as an 18th century man of the cloth* by day/masked-smuggler-by-night who helps the common people by... paying their taxes, we think? Using the funds he earns from smuggling brandy and tobacco. He also helps them elude the pressgangs who roam the marsh looking for reasonably able-bodied youngish men to abduct into King George III's Royal Navy.

*Specifically, a "fuckable vicar" in the estimation of our generously oversharing special guest Margaret H. "Hula Hoop" Willison, whose effervescent personality really ties the room together. (Dang. That's the wrong Coen Bros. reference.) 

The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh

Teleplay by Robert Westerby, from the novel Christopher Syn by Russell Thorndike and William Buchanan

Directed by James Neilson

Original airdates February 9, 16, and 23, 1964

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Red Notice" and What's Making Us Happy

Ryan Reynolds, Gal Gadot, and Dwayne Johnson pose their way through a greenscreened globetrotting caper. (Frank Masi/Netflix)

Red Notice! Linda Holmes, Margaret H. Willison, Ronald Young, Jr. and I watched it! Others will likely insist upon doing the same.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Enola Holmes"

Henry Cavill, Millie Bobbie Brown, and Sam Claflin as Sherlock, Enola, and Mycroft, respectively. (Netflix)

Wherein the alphabetical dream team of Klimek, Daisy Rosario, Glen Weldon, and Margaret H. Willison, LLP, breaks down Enola Holmes, the Millie Bobby Brown-shepherded Netflix movie adapted from Nancy Springer’s YA novels about Sherlock and Mycroft’s younger sister.

The only thing I have to add to what’s in the episode is that I wanted to smuggle in a second What’s Making Me Happy pick, one with resonances both to Sherlock Holmes and the Happy I cited, Stephen Baxter’s novel The Massacre of Mankind. It’s a new track from Elvis Costello called “Phonographic Memory,” a bizarre spoken-word account of an audience in some dark future listening to a speech mashed up from various recordings of the long-dead Orson Welles. “After the peace was negotiated, and the Internet switched off, knowledge returned to its medieval cloister,” Elvis intones over an open-tuned acoustic guitar.

The track, he has said is a digital B-side, so don’t look for it on Hey Clockface, the new album he’s dropping next month. In addition to creating the most famous adaptation of War of the Worlds — his Halloween 1938 Mercury Theatre radio play, ingeniously disguised as a series of news reports — Welles played Professor Moriarty in a 1954 radio adaptation of The Final Problem.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Skyscraper and What's Making Us Happy (which is, for me, Blindspotting)

Dwayne Johnson is no Tom Cruise, stuntwise.

I had a lovely time dissecting the laughably derivative, greenscreeny pleasures of Skyscraper with Pop Culture Happy Hour hosts Linda Holmes and Stephen Thompson and fellow friend-of-the-show Margaret H. Willison. This movie wants to be Die Hard, and it isn't even as good as Johnson's own Central Intelligence or Rampage.  It's maybe on par with San Andreas.

I get a plug in during the What's Making Us Happy segment for Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal's Blindspotting, one of the two or three strongest movies I've seen this year. Buy a ticket to Blindspotting and watch Skyscraper on a flight or something.