Margaret Rutherford

VE Day: What was making us laugh 75 years ago?

A look back at the comedy on air in June 1945.

Review: Stanley - A Man Of Variety

Deliberately disconcerting, Stanley - Man Of Variety is also frustrating and unsatisfying, each scene a curious little sketch on its own, but amounting to very little.

Get your cockles warming with this Ealing comedy, in which the inhabitants of Pimlico discover an obscure 15th-century charter that makes their manor part of Burgundy. So, in austere postwar London, Stanley Holloway and his neighbours come over all bourgeois, instituting petty little rules, such as customs controls on the tube line. A vintage delight, with none more sparkly than Margaret Rutherford's excitable history professor.

Can Passport to Pimlico predict post-Brexit Britain?

In wake of the historic vote to leave the EU, can we look to the 1949 film for a hint at what's to come?

Noël Coward apparently fell out with director David Lean over this film adaptation of his 1941 play, but it's hard to see why. It retains all the wit of the original, and Rex Harrison and Margaret Rutherford give great performances. Harrison plays a novelist whose dead first wife is accidentally summoned by a medium (Rutherford) in a seance.

Perhaps the most Ealing-ish of the Ealing comedies, celebrating the cosy sense of wartime togetherness recaptured when the inhabitants of Pimlico - discovering their hereditary independence from Britain - set up a restriction-free (but soon beleaguered and ration-hit) state. It's a brilliant idea whose satirical possibilities are never really explored. The film is nevertheless carried along on a wave of zany inventiveness (hit by sanctions, the 'Burgundians' promptly respond by having customs officers patrol the tube trains passing through their territory), while an amiable cast does well by TEB Clarke's genial script (especially Margaret Rutherford as the history don).