My bottom hurts………..thanks to one of the two most uncomfortable seats I have ever sat on. The first was a few years ago at my local cinema. Heidi had dragged me kicking and screaming to see Cold Mountain…………not the Brokeback version but the one with Jude Law.

The seat was so hard and my bottom had not suffered that much since it was beaten with an old slipper by my High School Headmaster who had discovered Sid Ruse and I putting superglue on the toilet seats.

As we were treated to yet another smoldering shot of Jude Law mincing his way through the swamps of North Carolina I spoke – not for the first time  – out of my bottom and the words were loud and clear “Bloody hell, get on with it .”

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Whenever an actor is asked to slip into a toga he sees it as an excuse to go all swivel-eyed and bonkers. When it comes to the Romans, no speech defect is too preposterous, no gait too far fetched.

We’ve had Derek Jacobi with his clubfoot and his stutter, and Malcolm McDowell helping himself to every bride, groom and farmyard animal in Rome. Oh, and let’s not forget the one with the funny mouth who stabbed Russell Crowe in Gladiator. ………can’t remember the actor’s name.

If you believed everything you’ve seen about Rome on the silver screen, you’d wonder how on earth they managed to find the lavatory in the morning. Let alone work out how the Turdus Maximus thingy might be flushed and be carried away in a sewer system the like of which the world had not seen before.

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