Stiff competition

So, a funny thing happened on the way home from the screening: I bumped into Paul Whitehouse, who has a cameo in Burke and Hare, and congratulated him on an extremely convincing tumble he takes down two flights of stairs (it hits just the right note, somewhere between the pantomime and The Exorcist). He told me that only one flight was given to the stuntman, which must have made his 90-second cameo a painful one.

But the truth is, a cameo of any sort strikes an ominous note in a film: it’s nice that someone has been having fun, to be sure, but it doesn’t follow that fun for everyone is now guaranteed. To me, it rather resembles the inclusion of comic out-takes over the closing credits — desperate to wring a laugh from a parting audience, the filmmakers will try anything: ‘Wait, wait,’ they plead, ‘you can’t just up and leave! You haven’t seen the best bits!’ A cameo is too often an attempt to elicit proof of life from the deathless hush of an auditorium. If the sight of Michael Winner (I kid you not) can dig a chuckle from the audience, imagine what Ronnie Corbett in military uniform will do! (Here’s an odd thing: without his spectacles he’s like a shorn Samson.)

Most popular

Stephen Pollard

Labour’s grooming gangs position is contemptible

But, pardon me, I’ve got ahead of myself. Burke and Hare is a black comedy which tells the tale of two Irish Williams, Messrs Burke (Simon Pegg) and Hare (Andy Serkis), who live in 1820s’ Edinburgh and fall into lucrative business supplying their top local surgeon Dr Knox (Tom Wilkinson) with fresh cadavers for dissection in the presence of his live student audience. Stiff competition (to coin a phrase) between Knox and his rival Dr Monroe (Tim Curry) means that demand for bodies is fierce and to my surprise (but it’s a true story, so I had to believe it) the newly dead are in short supply in 1820s Edinburgh.