Author Archives: Adam Stone

For what feels like the umpteeth time we were drawn against one of the newly promoted teams for the first game of the season. We put out a strong side with our new signing Nunez on the bench.

It has to be said that we didn’t start the game strongly enough and that Fulham were up for it from the very first minutes. We had our chances and managed to rattle the bar with a shot from Luis Diaz but that was it. Fulham took their chances and were able to take the lead through Mitrovic with a well taken goal at the far post when Mitrovic rose above Trent to head the ball into the net.

Fulham defended well and it wasn’t until the second half and Nunez came onto the field of play when it looked like we would make out chances count. Nunez hit the equaliser after 64 minutes with his second clear cut chance since coming onto the pitch.

Fulham didn’t look like they were faltering and van Dijk clattered a fulham player in the box and a penalty was given. I am still not sure that it was a penalty but hey ho. Mitrovic scored the penalty with 18 minutes to go and we had to start again.

Carvalho came on not long afterwards and we pressed forward and were rewarded with an equaliser from The Egyptian King in the 80th minute.

Henderson rattled the bar again later with a good shot from distance but it wasn’t to be and the game ended in a stalemate, which was probably the fairest result given what happened during the match.

The Adventures of Sir Lancelot is a rather fun series about the exploits of the Knights of the Round Table, most notably Sir Lancelot of the lake, played by William Russell later to find fame as Ian Chesterton in Doctor Who.

There were 30 episodes made in total with almost half of them made in colour, and the other half in black and white, for the American market naturally and each episode was its own self contained story.

The stories varied from people coming from afar to Camelot asking for help of the renowned knights of the round table to help other kingdoms who are being besieged by rival kings; to rescue fair maidens who are being held against their will by nefarious types; to Lancelot deciding to help out when he sees wrong being done to others, which is for the majority of the time in the ye old England presented here.

Apart from Russell as Lancelot we had Bruce Seton and then Ronald Leigh-Hunt as King Arthur (Leigh Hunt after the first three episodes); Jane Hylton as Guinevere; Cyril Smith as Merlin; Robert Scroggins as Brian, Lancelot’s squire and David Morell as Sir Kay.

The guest cast throughout the series was interesting including Patrick McGoohan, Howard Pays, Jack May, Robert Hardy, Jerome Willis, Ballard Berkeley, Derren “Derry” Nesbitt, Wilfred Brambell,Maxine Audley, Zena Walker, Shirley Cooklin, John Horsley .

The show looked rather lavish when compared to other shows of the time with its surfeit of location filming and the sterling work of the designers in the studio.

Like Robin Hood it had a jaunty end credits theme tune, which gets stuck in your head for ages after you had seen the final episode.

Considering that it is now more than 65 years old and the majority of the cast and crew are long dead it is very watchable indeed.

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I have been watching the 1955-56 version of The Count of Monte Cristo starring George (father of Mickey) Dolenz which was a 39 episode series about the exploits of one Edmund Dantes, the self proclaimed Count of Monte Cristo of the famous Dumas novel, which was one of the swashbuckler series produced by ITC in the early days of ITV.

Each episode was approx 25 minutes long and each one was self contained. Dolenz was the only person to appear in all 39 episodes (but the wonderfully named Nick Cravat was also in the majority of them) and he was the focus of the series and he did a pretty good job of it I would say playing the nicest, most trustworthy and definitely the richest man in Europe.

12 episodes were filmed in Hollywood before they moved over to the UK for the remaining 27 episodes but there wasn’t much discernible difference between them other than that American actors were used in the US filmed episodes and British actors were used in the UK filmed episodes (some of them more and than once. in not dissimilar roles).

Rounding out the cast in the American episodes were Fortunio Bonanova as Carlo and Henry Corden as Mario friend’s of the Count who joined in with the exploits of the episodes. In the UK episodes we had Robert Cawdron as Rico who basically replaced Carlo and Mario for the the rest of the series.

Personally I preferred Rico out of the three of them but that might be because I was used to him as he appeared in more episodes than the previous two put together and was a good foil for Dolenz.

The episodes took the Count all over the Mediterranean from Luxembourg to Andorra; Albania to Greece sometimes being bought there by various friends of friends of the count, or people who had heard of him to solve plots that would see innocent people sent to Madame Guillotine for crimes that they did not commit from smuggling, assassination attempts on kings and princes, power mad conspirators, etc

I thoroughly enjoyed this series and would recommend it to anyone despite the fact that is it almost seventy years old, and that the plots are pretty much the same once you have watched a few of them, but they are highly diverting half hours of classic television, and you can play a fun game of spot the well known actor if you are a fan of classic British television.

I just recently watched Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, the most recent Quentin Tarantino film and I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have pretty much enjoyed all of the Tarantino films that I have seen to be honest and I always look forward to seeing his films for the first time.

The cast here is strong with Leonardo Di Caprio, Brad Pit, Margot Robbie in the major roles with support from the likes of Al Pacino, Bruce Dern, Damian Lewis, Nicholas Hammond.

Here Di Caprio and Pitt played fictional versions of major Hollywood starts and Robbie played the tragic figure of Sharon Tate. There was a mixture of fictional characters with real figures from the time such as Tate, Roman Polanski, Sam Wanamaker, Steve McQueen and Bruce Lee.

It was definitely a love story to Hollywood in the nineteen sixties and how fame is fleeting for people, in particular movie stars whose fame and popularity goes in and out of fashion; with them being box office stars one minute and then forgotten about a few years later.

I liked the way that they really made the tv program Bounty Law in the movie feel like an actual program from that era and putting Leonardo DiCaprio’s character into real tv series of the time really helped with that.

Like all Tarantino films there was a great soundtrack from the period. I also thought that it was a clever plot device setting it around the time of Manson family murders and having Leonardo Di Caprio’s character living next to the site of the murders, and it was also nice that the film wasn’t really about that either which would have been quite easy to have done, but I think was a more interesting film for that choice.