What a potty vampire film!
QUESTION Has the game of snooker ever formed the basis of a feature film? Snooker is the basis of one of the strangest British movies ever released, Billy The kid And The Green Baize Vampire (1985).
Billy The kid is a young, up-and-coming snooker player, clearly based on Jimmy White. His manager, T.o. (The one), a compulsive gambler, falls into debt with a psychopathic loan shark called the Wednesday Man, who offers to cancel T.o.’s debt if he can arrange a 17-frame grudge snooker match between Billy and reigning world champion Maxwell randall, known as The Green Baize Vampire, based on ray reardon.
Unbeknown to the players, the contract for the game states that the loser will never play professional snooker again. There are various double dealings and backstabbings along the way.
The film featured Phil Daniels, of Quadrophenia and Blur’s Parklife video fame, as Billy, and Alun Armstrong, of our Friends In The north and new Tricks, as the vampire. It was directed by maverick director Alan Clarke (Scum, Made In Britain, The Firm).
It really is an oddity, spanning several genres — musical (there are several hammy, Munsters-type organ-fests), Western, horror, Cockney gangster and sports. It was clearly trying to position itself as a cult movie and it’s impossible not to see pale shades of Tommy’s Technicolor operatics, Bugsy Malone’s high concept, the barminess of The rocky Horror Picture Show and the expressionistic grandstanding of The Wall.
While ultimately a failure, there are some nice touches — such as a scene in which the Wednesday Man and his heavies confront The one in a suitably snooker-esque triangle formation. one to watch late on a Saturday night.
James Trower, London E5.
QUESTION Why does Oklahoma have a ‘panhandle’ that prevents Texas from bordering Colorado and Kansas? THe oklahoma panhandle has its roots in 1845 when the republic of Texas was annexed to the United States of America, becoming the 28th State.
Texas’s annexation as a state that tolerated slavery caused tension in Washington, partially diffused by the Compromise of 1850, under which Texas ceded to the federal government territory to become non-slave- owning areas. To this end, Texas agreed not to extend its sovereignty over any territory north of 36 degrees, 30 seconds north.
This fixed the northern boundary of Texas’s north-pointing panhandle, despite the fact that, as an independent republic, Texas had claimed territory extending northwards right up through present day Colorado and into what is now Wyoming.
When kansas Territory was created in 1854, its southern boundary was set on the 37th parallel, as agreed in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which stipulated that all territory north of that line should be free of slavery.
This left a narrow strip 168 miles wide by 34½ miles deep between kansas Territory and the Texas panhandle. From 1850 until 1890, most government maps identified this strip of land as ‘Public Land’ or ‘Public Land Strip’ and most people knew it as ‘no Man’s Land’ or ‘The neutral Strip’.
In the summer months, the strip of land was home to nomadic Plains Indians, mostly Comanches, while countless traders with their caravans of freight wagons crossed the strip travelling between Missouri and Santa Fe. Military expeditions also used the route.
The strip was unsurveyed, and as a proper survey was a requirement of the 1862 Homestead Act, the land couldn’t be officially settled. Despite this, people flooded in, asserting squatters’ rights. They surveyed their own land and by September 1886 had organised a self-governing and self-policing jurisdiction, which they named the Cimarron Territory.
eventually, the U.S. government intervened unilaterally, attaching the strip to oklahoma Territory to ‘fill out’ the state in 1890. no Man’s Land became the Seventh County under the newly- organised oklahoma Territory.
The land was soon renamed Beaver County and Beaver City became the county seat. When oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory joined the Union in 1907 as the single state of oklahoma, Beaver County was divided into the present Beaver, Texas and Cimarron counties.
Simon Wren, Torquay, Devon.
QUESTION How did journalist Dan Hodges lose his eye? DAN HODGES is a former Labour Party official and son of actress Glenda Jackson, lately MP for Hampstead and kilburn. once communications director for Transport for London, Hodges is now a political commentator and columnist.
He suffered his injuries in a 1992 bar brawl near his home in Blackheath, Southeast London. It was described in the subsequent trial as: ‘A stupid argument over a beer-throwing incident. An 18-year- old man lashed out with a glass. It shattered and sliced Hodges’s eye in two.’
In her summing up, the judge told the defendant: ‘Mr Hodges lost an eye and is also permanently scarred and faces a further operation. He and his companions were a perfectly ordinary group of young people on an evening out. Indeed, no sentence I can pass can help that young man who has partially lost his sight.
‘You didn’t intend to cause such a dreadful injury, but as the jury has found you must have intended grievous bodily harm when you used a glass on his face.
‘Anybody of any age knows the dreadful danger of using glass as a weapon. This was a gratuitous act of violence in a public house — totally unnecessary.’
The defendant was sentenced to five years in a young offenders’ institution.
It is an incident that Hodges does not like to talk about, saying simply: ‘Very dull story. I was in a bar. There was a confrontation involving a friend. I attempted to act as peacemaker and did so as successfully as my Twitter rows.’
Kelly Evans, London SE13. QUESTION Is it possible for a lip-reading expert to detect a strong accent? FUrTHer to the earlier answer, while working as a training consultant in London, I undertook a training session in Preston, Lancashire.
one group member was deaf and used the services of a signer, but I was told he was also a proficient lip reader. I was asked if the student could sit at the front of the class so he could follow the session reading my lips.
After the session I asked him, through his signer, if he understood everything. When his signer burst into laughter I asked what the problem was. I was told that he couldn’t understand a word that the ‘bloody Southerner’ spoke.
Ted Harrison, Peterborough.
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