Is that really Dr Watson?
QUESTION Following the recent furore over the female Doctor Who, what other TV role reversals could there be?
This is known in the performing arts as the gender-flip. The practice is more common and older than you might think.
When the celebrated sarah Bernhardt played hamlet on stage in 1899, the British critic Max Beerbohm wrote: ‘The only compliment one can conscientiously pay her is that her hamlet was, from first to last, a truly grand dame.’
Today, gender-flipping is common in shakespeare. There have also been productions of Twelve Angry Women, instead of Twelve Angry Men, and also Twelve Angry Jurors, where the director can cast either gender.
in Gioachino Rossini’s Cinderella-inspired opera, La Cenerentola, the wicked stepmother is replaced by a wicked stepfather, Don Magnifico, and the fairy godmother becomes a male moral philosopher called Alidoro.
in film, the 1967 version of Bedazzled starred Peter Cook as the Devil, but the 2000 remake cast Elizabeth hurley in the role. in later Bond movies, 007’s boss, M, was played by a woman, Judi Dench.
The title character in the action film salt was originally Edward salt, and Tom Cruise was cast, but he dropped out. Angelina Jolie stepped in and the writers changed Edward to Evelyn.
in TV, the Battlestar Galactica remake gender- flipped starbuck, from Dirk Benedict to Katee sackoff, and Boomer from herbert Jefferson Jr to Grace Park.
Elementary, the U.s. remake of sherlock holmes, went half-way with Lucy Liu as Dr Joan Watson.
There’s a great episode of Red Dwarf called Parallel Universe where the crew meet the gender-flipped versions of themselves. Well, nearly all . . . The Cat, the ultimate narcissist, is looking forward to meeting the feminine version of himself. however, his opposite number is a male dog with no dress sense.
Joanne Moore, Nailsworth, Glos.
i’D LIKE to see Alex in Wonderland, Murder, he Wrote, Mr Marple, Xeno The Warrior Prince, John Eyre, sleeping hunk, The Golden Boys, The Wizards Of Eastwick, Dr Quinn, Medicine Man, Larry Croft, Tomb Raider, Romeo And Julian, Alan Of Green Gables, Phillip Longstocking, CatMan, The Black Widower, horace Nightingale, Marty Poppins, Ronnie And Clyde, Fungus The Bogeywoman, ivy The Engine, Gregory’s Boy, The League Of Gentlewomen, Mum’s Army, Dear Jane, Dinnermen and it Ain’t half hot, Dad.
Tina Blandford, Bakewell, Derbys.
QUESTION Which animal produces the most eggs in its lifetime?
THE sunfish ( Mola mola) is one of the ocean’s most bizarre animals. it is the heaviest bony fish in the sea, weighing up to one ton and growing to more than 14ft.
it is scale-less, with a thick, rubbery skin and irregular patches of tubercles over its body. Notably, adult ocean sunfish do not have a caudal fin or caudal peduncle. They instead have a clavus, which is a truncated tail, used more like a rudder than for propulsion.
Mola is Latin for ‘ millstone’ and is a good description of the sunfish’s shape. sunfish are found in water warmer than 10c (50f). They are known for their surface basking behaviour, in which the fish swims on its side, presenting its largest profile to the sun. This is thought to be a method of thermally recharging following dives into deeper, colder water.
Another remarkable feature of the sunfish is its spawning. Females release an estimated 300 million eggs into the water at a time. They are thought to be multiple spawners, possibly releasing billions of eggs each year. Large, mature sunfish have a solitary life in the open ocean where finding mates is a challenge, so producing lots of eggs in multiple spawnings increases the chances of fertilisation. Only a few eggs will develop into mature adults.
Their lifespan is unknown, but similar species can live for almost 100 years.
The record holder on land is thought to be the African driver ant ( Dorylus), which can produce three to four million eggs every 25 days. The lifespan of the queen is not known, but many ant species can live for a decade, so she could perhaps lay a billion eggs in a lifetime.
Karl Heller, Bangor, Caernarfonshire.
QUESTION Every Breath You Take is often used at weddings, yet it appears to be a song about a stalker. What other songs have been misconstrued?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, a famous example is the 1963 garage rock/ punk classic Louie, Louie, by the American group the Kingsmen, written in 1955 by Richard Berry.
The Kingsmen transformed Berry’s easy-going ballad into a raucous, single-take romp. The sound engineer had raised the studio’s only microphone several feet above singer Jack Ely’s head.
Then he placed Ely in the middle of his fellow musicians, in an effort to create a better live feel for the recording. The result, Ely later said, was that he had to stand on his toes, lean his head back and shout as loudly as he could to be heard over the drums and guitars. As a result, his vocals were muffled, blurred, slurred and subsequently misheard.
Parents contacted the FBI to complain there were hidden subversive messages to their teenage children, others claiming, bizarrely, that there were hidden codes to the USSR. The FBI wasted two years playing the record at different speeds trying to decipher the lyrics before deeming them unintelligible.
sales of the Kingsmen record were low until Boston DJ Arnie Ginsburg played it on his programme as ‘The Worst Record of the Week’ — which ironically ensured its lasting popularity.
Danny D’Arcy, Reading, Berks.
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