"A Taste of Honey": The dinner jacket and tie incident

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A Taste of Honey: Cannes

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A Taste of Honey: The dinner jacket and tie incident

Walter Lassally Film-maker

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During the Blackpool sequence there happened what I called the dinner jacket and tie sequence, where it was getting late. Oh, that was right, that was not on the day we filmed in Blackpool. That... one evening, one late afternoon, we went to Blackpool quickly, because it's quite near Manchester, for... for a sort of location scout. And, when we had finished scouting we wanted to have dinner, but at that... that time in England, if you hadn't had your dinner by... by 6:30, you could starve to death because everything closed. You were lucky to get some fish and chips, if they were still open. Anyway, we went into this Grand Hotel and there was one last couple dining in the... in the dining room. They were... they were waiting to go home. The waiters were waiting to go home. And, we said, 'Look we're... you know, can we just have a quick meal, you know'. 'Oh, the kitchen's closed'. 'Just something, you know'. And then he wouldn't let me in the dinning room because I didn't have a... a jacket and tie, you see. So our production manager, who was actually a... a Lord, Lord Marley, but he went under a... under a straightforward name, Leigh Aman, Leigh Aman was his professional name, but he was actually Lord Marley, and he argued with the waiter and persuaded him to... oh, I had to borrow... yes, I had to borrow a tie, and they let me in... they let us in. And that led me to develop an idea, which I've always wanted to... sorry, one more time. And that led me to an idea which I always wanted to develop subsequently, it's a sketch for television or variety, where you have two people appear at the doorway of... of one of these swish restaurants, and one is dressed very smartly in a... in a turtle-neck sweater with a... with a silk scarf or something like that. And the other person is dressed in a... in a comical long comedian's check, very loud comedian's check jacket going down to his knee... below his knees, and some ridiculous over- overdone bow-tie, and, and of course, according to the rules, the... the smartly dressed elegant man is kept out and the comedian, because he is wearing a jacket and tie, has to be let in. That would form a nice... a nice basis for a... for a sketch.

Born in Germany, cinematographer Walter Lassally (1926-2017) was best known for his Oscar-winning work on 'Zorba the Greek'. He was greatly respected in the film industry for his ability to take the best of his work in one area and apply it to another, from mainstream to international art films to documentary. He was associated with the Free Cinema movement in the 1950s, and the British New Wave in the early 1960s. In 1987 he published his autobiography called 'Itinerant Cameraman'.

Title: "A Taste of Honey": The dinner jacket and tie incident

Listeners: Peter Bowen

Peter Bowen is a Canadian who came to Europe to study and never got round to heading back home. He did his undergraduate work at Carleton University (in Biology) in Ottawa, and then did graduate work at the University of Western Ontario (in Zoology). After completing his doctorate at Oxford (in the Department of Zoology), followed with a year of postdoc at the University of London, he moved to the University's newly-established Audio-Visual Centre (under the direction of Michael Clarke) where he spent four years in production (of primarily science programs) and began to teach film. In 1974 Bowden became Director of the new Audio-Visual Centre at the University of Warwick, which was then in the process of introducing film studies into the curriculum and where his interest in the academic study of film was promoted and encouraged by scholars such as Victor Perkins, Robin Wood, and Richard Dyer. In 1983, his partner and he moved to Greece, and the following year he began to teach for the University of Maryland (European Division), for which he has taught (and continues to teach) biology and film courses in Crete, Bosnia, and the Middle East.

Tags: dinner jacket, location, waiter, tie, sketch, smart, comedian

Duration: 2 minutes, 22 seconds

Date story recorded: June 2004

Date story went live: 24 January 2008