Is there anyone else who doesn't get "Withnail"?

The texts have been flying between Plymouth and London as various members of my family express increduality about the Sunday Times giving away a DVD of "Withnail & I", (along the lines "would anyone want it?") and, I notice today, devoting the front page of the Culture section to "A Messy Masterpiece".

You see, we have all tried to watch - and like - Withnail but we couldn't last beyond 30 minutes. Pretentious old tosh was the general conclusion.

It's not that we don't have a sense of humour. Your middle class lip may now curl when I share with you that we love Monty Python, "Clockwise," "Carry on Camping," "Mrs Doubtfire" and "The Great St Trinians Bank Robbery". The intellectuals among you are probably now sneering about obvious humour and low brow taste. That's as maybe (to quote Python). I take a more robust view which is that Withnail has somehow reached cult status, not because it is bad, (which is irony, and a good thing) but because it's one of those "emperor's new clothes" situations ("ENC").

Thanks to ENC, many movements, genres, artists and writers with only slight talent and frankly boring films have been elevated beyond their feeble status because it makes people feel good to think they "get" something that someone else doesn't.

I have a whole list of what I define as ENC:
1) Goat's cheese
2) Banksy
3) Malcolm Gladwell
4) Martin Amis
5) David Starkey
6) U2
7) Withnail & I
8) Green & Blacks
9) "The Bloomsbury set"
10) Myleene Klass
11) Ralph Lauren
12) Beth Ditto
13) Peaches Geldof
14) Cirque du Soleil

What do you think? Can I expect to see some stout rebuttals and defending of Withnail?

Some random thoughts and not a lorry in sight

Britain's answer to Paris Hilton, Peaches Geldof, has just embarked on her first marriage. I say "first" because I know with doom laden certainty that this sudden Las Vegas coupling isn't for keeps. It seems to be some sort of promotional push for her new husband's band. Ironic, seeing as in an interview recently in one of the "quality" papers she lamented the way she is always being compared to her mother. This after she was rushed to hospital after an alleged drugs overdose.

It seems Peaches cannot exist without the oxygen of press coverage, mostly negative. She seems doomed to travel on the roller coaster of Z list celebritydom and to live out one failed marriage after the next.

Wrong? Hope she proves me wrong. But somehow I doubt it.

Meanwhile the city where I was born, Plymouth, has been in a lather of excitement thanks to 14 year old sychronised diver Tom Daley. (My brother Robert was apoplectic at the Radio Times crediting Portsmouth for this prodigy - a most unfortunate error, given that bloody Portsmouth has been preferred over Devonport and the dockyard there is now doomed to closure).
Unusually for a 14 year old, Tom is confident and lucid, and quickly became over-hyped by the press both in the UK and in China. The fact that his 26 year old diving partner then criticised him when they came bottom didn't surprise me in the least. The poor guy was barely mentioned in the run-up to the Olympics, even though it takes two to do synchronised diving. He was bound to be secretly seething, and by the next Olympics will probably be over the hill.

Let's hope Tom comes good in the individual diving event near the end of the Olympics. Otherwise four words "Eddie The Eagle Edwards" spring to mind.