how many candles does it take to light a secret lair

 

Flicking through the channels on the sexevision.

The news channels are all full of war and rumours of war.

It's bleak enough.

And lo!

What light through yonder window breaks!

Why it is a music channel showing a song from the 1980s version of The Phantom Of The Opera.

The video features Michael Crawford as the Phantom sweeping Sarah Brightman as the ingenue back to his evil lair.

The scene is quite quaint.

Michael Crawford became world famous for playing the Phantom of the Opera with menace and panache but he was famous in Britain and Ireland long before that in the 1970s, for playing in utterly non menacing non panachey style, a lovable bumbling cockney husband called Frank Spencer in a TV sitcom with the catchphrase: "Ummm Betty."

Betty his wife was played by Michele Dotrice.

Tonight I keep expecting the Phantom while manhandling Sarah Brightman down labyrinthine passageways to pause every now and then, and say: "Ummm Betty."

I think Andrew Lloyd Webber should have found a way to insert the line.

It would have crowned it.

For me anyway.

As for the ingenue Sarah Brightman, a one time pop star who, as her pop career faded, leapt sylph like from the chorus line of West End musicals to starring roles in Andrew Lloyd Webber productions through the simple process of marrying Andrew Lloyd Webber, I mean I don't want to cast no aspoyshuns, but she is no more an ingenue than I am.

She can play sensual sexy sylphs alright, in fact with gusto, but she cannot portray innocence no matter how much white diaphanous tulle they swathe her in.

In fact the Oxford English dictionary under its definition of 'pathos,' actually has a picture of Sarah Brightman in her white tulle chiffon ensemble, heroically trying to look like an unspoilt mountain flower as the Phantom spirits her away no doubt to his doom.

When the Phantom thunders maniacally: "Sing for me my angel," I would have loved if Sarah Brightman had stripped off the white diaphanous thing to reveal the famous spandex catsuit from her pop singing days and launched into a medley of her greatest hit, "I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper," which by the way is a good deal better song than any of the infernal tootling Andrew Lloyd Webber ever came up with for her to sing.

In spite of the glaring absence of spandex catsuits, it is still monumentally fascinating to watch the Phantom of the  Opera attempting to strike a fearful posture as he draws his favourite dim but sexy bim down his favourite dim but beautifully lit secret passage.

She is quite luminous, and a fine figure of a woman, all gotch eyed sensuality and pouty lips, but as I've said before not in this universe by any stretch of the imagination, capable of playing a vulnerable innocent.

She looks like she's just come from seducing Andrew Lloyd Webber, found it fine good sport, and is ready to seduce whoever else happens along, possibly for a bet with the other members of her ex pop group Hot Gossip.

In fact my concerns in the matter of the Phantom of the Opera kidnapping Sarah Brightman and taking her to his evil lair, would be entirely for the safety of the Phantom.

Any Phantoms of the Opera reading this would be well advised not to take strange girls back to their evil lairs unless they know precisely who they are.

The secret lair when Sarah and Michael get to it, tootling infernally all the way, is like the aforementioned secret passage, beautifully lit and indeed positively chock a block with candles.

Some high up. Some low down. Some in little alcoves. Some rising mysteriously out of the partially flooded  depths.

Marvellously atmospheric of course but I wonder how the phantom lit them all.

There is no mention anywhere in the production of the phantom having a servant to handle candle lighting duties while he's out stalking sylphs.

So he must have lit them himself.

He would have been risking doing a right number on himself scrambling over slippery boulders to get to the really high up ones.

And then where would we be!

And so I amuse myself on the night Indian army chiefs threatened to nuke Pakistan.