Sunday 26 January 2014

Chance, necessity and famous unwatched films

My redoubtable colleague Richard Sear has long been the chief blogger of our departmental blog.  I have write-rights on it, too, but you have to look back a fair while to see my last post.  My bad.

Now Richard has started a blog of his own, entitled Chance and Necessity.  I have already added it to my blog reading list.

On Wednesday, Rich and I were talking about the nerdy and quite funny Twitter hashtag #sixwordpeerreview, with jokey and short referee reports for scientific papers.  He then mentioned another hashtag he liked, which was something to do with quotations from the film The Princess Bride.  I can't find the hashtag now, and am beginning to think I just dreamed the whole thing, but that hashtag was a bit lost on me, as I've never watched The Princess Bride.  Rich seemed to think this a bit surprising, that I should have reached the age of 39½ and not seen said film.  I have seen Star Wars, on the other hand.

Since I then went on later in the day to host this FameLab event that I mentioned before, I thought I'd use this idea to break the ice when introducing the judges.  I asked each of them to say a bit about themselves, mentioned the anecdote above, and asked them to give the most famous film that they'd never seen.  Simon Watt's answer, which elicited cheers from the audience, was that he hadn't seen any Harry Potter films (or read the books).  Jim Al-Khalili, cited A Clockwork Orange, and Mark Cropley choose Grease.  

Reader, are there films we might be surprised you haven't seen?

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