The opposite

The history of Hollywood – and a few other places – is strewn with forgotten heroes, but none have been quite as thoroughly strewn, or forgotten, as Igor.

This is strange indeed because if you so much as mention the name Igor to most people, they will immediately think of a goggle-eyed hunchback who opens large, iron-bound doors with an ominous creak and says something like “The master was expecting you” in a vaguely East European accent. Yes, everyone seems to remember Igor the character, yet few remember Igor the actor.

What makes this truly sad is that, in the course of a career that started way back in the 1920s, Igor portrayed a huge variety of leading and supporting actors ranging from an anonymous bit-part player in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to Bela Lugosi, to Marty Feldman and even, in a spectacular bit of type-casting, to Charles Bronson. And that is to name but the obvious few.

Charles Bronson

In fact, Igor has played a huge variety of roles including Bette Davis, Loretta Young, Orson Welles, Sylvester Stallone and, more recently, Keira Knightly and Hugh Grant. And yet no one even knows his last name.

I think you’ll agree that to play so many very different parts, calls for acting ability of the highest calibre. But who, in fact, was Igor? Who was this master of accent, idiom and - let’s be frank – disguise? Who was this man who was never honoured in his own right by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts or even the National Transylvanian Academy of Retired Igor Players?

Igor was born in obscurity to a family of low-paid goggle-eyed hunchbacks in the town of Weissenberg in 1907. His parents, Mr and Mrs Igor, worked as mouse-stuffers for the local taxidermist. It was hard, grinding work – particularly the legs – and there was rarely meat on the Igor’s table. Well, no meat that wasn’t ground mouse anyway. To relieve the burden on the family, little Igor ran away to join a company of travelling insurance brokers.

Summer in Transylvania

It was while selling third-party, fire and theft car insurance in the villages of Transylvania that Igor discovered a talent for acting. Light comedy appealed to him in particular and he joined a succession of local drama groups. It was while playing in a production of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (he played the fan) that he was spotted by the roving impresario and theatrical agent Leonid Brezhnev.

Broadway was soon to follow. Igor shone as a door-stop in Slapsie Maxie Comes to Town but finally got his big break playing a piano in The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly. In a review of the production, the New York Times said: “Ruby Keeler was a stand-out as the third chorus girl from the left but the true star of the production was Igor the piano. I particularly loved the moustache”.

Igor as a door-stop in Slapsie Maxie Comes to Town

The lure of Hollywood proved irresistible but playing a door-stop and a piano on Broadway was no immediate guarantee of success. Igor joined the thousands of wannabes queuing at Central Casting and kept hunch to back by checking that the users of public lavatory cubicles were still alive. Finally, in 1925, he got his first big break in a Mack Sennett comedy called Sneezing Beezers in which he played a goggle-eyed hunchback. After years of playing inanimate objects, this was a true breakthrough. Unfortunately these were still the years of silent movies so Igor’s one line, “The master was expecting you”, appeared in text with a scroll border and a few major chords from the pianist.

Small though his part was, Igor had caught the eye of directors and producers. Sneezing Beezers was followed by a number of Mack Sennett one-reelers. Soon his popularity was such that audiences would virtually ignore stars like Ben Turpin and Billy Bevan, waiting in anticipation for the goggle-eyed hunchback.

It was time for a makeover

By 1928, the days of the silent movies were over. Talkies became all the rage. Not that Igor noticed very much of this as he never went to the cinema. This was not because he feared the adulation of the public but more that he could never get into a position that allowed him to see the screen.

1931 saw the first real high-spot of his film career: Frankenstein. Unfortunately, these were definitely the days of type-casting and Igor was cast as a mad hunchback called Fritz. Determined to show the studios what he could do, he subsequently made Son of Frankenstein and The Ghost of Frankenstein, in which he expanded his repertoire by playing Bela Lugosi.

This gave Igor an idea. He set to work reinventing himself. While many stars of the 1930s were indulging in wild parties fuelled by alcohol and cocaine, Igor could usually be found working out at the local gym and hammering his hunch with a wooden mallet. He solved the problem of his goggle eyes by simply sucking his cheeks in, which was so successful that he landed the part of Katherine Hepburn in Morning Glory, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actress.

Katherine Hepburn

We can fast-forward over the years that follow. Suffice to say that many of our favourite actors were, in fact, Igor. His versatility was astounding. Here are just a few examples: Humphrey Bogart and a reprise of Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen, Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot, Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, R2D2 in Star Wars, Hugh Grant in Five Weddings and a Funeral, Gollum in Lord of the Rings, Johnny Depp and Keira Knightly in Pirates of the Caribbean…

Sadly, Igor passed away on September 17th 1840. In spite of winning an enormous number of awards for his work, his oeuvre has never been appreciated in its own right. It is time to redress this balance.

Mind you, a lot of actors will be out of work.

Igor and his mother relaxing in the sauna

There will be many of you who are unfamiliar with the word “unboxing” and to tell you the truth I was too until recently.

You must admit, it’s a slightly unusual word.

You might conceivably be forgiven for thinking that it refers to one of the many burgeoning alternative sports. You know, the sort of thing that gets relegated to late at night on the Xtreme Sports Channel. This time involving a man wearing shorts and gloves who gets up from the canvas following a countdown from 10 to 1 and then hits another guy in the fist with his chin. A bit like untennis and the untriplejump. But then with blood.

And that's a straight belly to the fist from McManus!

You would be wrong.

It could also refer to the practice of going shopping and refusing to get things wrapped. “No I’ll take it unboxed please. And while you’re about it, I’ll have some unboxed pastrami and a couple of unboxed bagels.”

Wrong again.

Unboxing is the increasingly popular practice of taking things out of boxes. Notably on YouTube. Naturally, the objects that are unboxed do not include pastrami or bagels but are usually some piece of soon-to-be-obsolescent hardware that the unboxer can’t wait to get his hands on. Although he can certainly wait long enough to set up a high-definition video camera and film the whole business.

To leave you in no doubt about what I mean, here’s an example:

I’m sure you didn’t watch that until the bitter end, and that’s unfortunate as it gets really exciting in the last 5 minutes. But don’t think that this video is in any way unique. The only thing that’s unusual about this one is its length – a full 25 minutes of monotone commentary on something very few people could care less about.

Which brings us to the point of why anyone in his or her right mind would want to make a video about taking something out of a box and then post said video on YouTube. After all, although I’ve seen much worse footage on YouTube, in terms of sheer boredom value the unboxing video positively streaks ahead of the opposition. But why do it? I’ve thought long and hard about it and the only conclusion that I can come to is that this is the last resort of people who desperately want to post something on YouTube but have no idea what.

Nothing ever happens in their lives. There are no hilarious and possibly fatal accidents involving children or pets. No UFOs hovering over the back yard. No idiot riding a shopping trolley into a canal. Not even a gang of international terrorists kidnapping their grandmothers. At least none when the video camera is handy.

Nothing not happening nohow.

It’s not even that many of the unboxers seem particularly enthusiastic about unboxing. Some of them even claim to not know what is in the box in the first place, which is fairly difficult to believe when you consider that they bought it, and paid the transport costs. No, they stumble along in their boring monotones, sometimes exclaiming “well, will you look at that” with all the excitement of an archbishop commentating on a chess marathon.

I’ve also noticed that many of the presenters of unboxing videos tend to be a bit disrespectful to the contents of the box. Accessories are tossed casually aside one by one with words like “And we have a hard drive and a standard USB cable” as if they don’t really matter at all. And in fact they don’t. The product is nothing; the unboxing experience is everything.

Mind you, in terms of production costs, unboxing videos tend to be very cheap entertainment indeed. Props usually consist of a table and a knife, although scissors have been used on occasions. Script writing too tends to take a low priority. There’s a lot of ad-libbing in the style of “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much foam padding” or, more prosaically, “So let’s see what we have in the box” or, more bizarrely, “Let’s do the smell test”.

Unboxing smell-testing equipment (here seen on dog).

More worrying to people with an ounce of sanity is that some unboxing videos have pretty high production standards. There’s a snappy intro with upbeat music. A presenter – typically a voice only – who achieves a certain degree of rapid-fire articulacy. There’s quite clearly a flourishing market out there for people who want to see objects removed from boxes.

And even more worrying is the fact that in today’s consumer society, the box is gaining in importance over its contents. Manufacturers wised up to this a long time ago - Apple, in particular, has become well-known for its elegant, stylish packaging. In fact, if you buy high-tech goods online, you’ll often see a photograph of the box along with one of the product. Does the box tell you any more about the product than what you’ve already read about it? No. But the box is still important. After all, when you’re actually using your tiny mobile phone, can anyone really see what brand it is? Of course not. The defining moment of ownership of a high-end device begins and ends with the box.

Fortunately I foresee a rosy future for the unboxing video. Splice them all together and play them back-to-back on the TV in your bedroom. A guaranteed cure for insomnia.

We all live in societies that are governed by rules. And, believe me, few societies are governed by quite so many rules as the one I live in. You see, Norwegians have wonderful laws – handmade, finely crafted, honed to perfection. People come from other countries to admire them and some of them even copy these laws when they get home. The Norwegian book of laws, cunningly disguised as a sex manual entitled Norges Lover, is a weighty yet erotically red-bound tome that is great for pressing flowers and using as a door-stop. And in fact that’s what most Norwegians seem to use it for as few of the laws that it contains seem to be observed on any regular or meaningful basis.

The Norwegian Karma Sutra.

But then, of course, that’s precisely what rules are for. They are there to be broken. If nobody ever broke the rules, there would be no point in having any. What is more, hundreds of thousands of lawyers across the world would be instantly out of business. And, believe me, there’s no one more likely to break the law than an out-of-work lawyer.

One should also bear in mind that lawyers are only the very visible tip of an immense legal iceberg that includes judges, justices of the peace, recorders, solicitors, actuaries, notaries, clerks of the court, ushers and, of course, policepersons. Ergo no laws equals mass unemployment. The Norwegians, being a sensible, well-adjusted people recognise this fact and make it their business to break every law in the sex manual.

Not that breaking the law is exactly difficult to do. Our modern society is now cluttered up with so many of them that breaking a few is no longer a question of existential choice – it’s an absolute inevitability.

Moses delivers the first traffic regulations.

Even the sweet, grey-haired, lovable granny so beloved of Disney films can hardly set her Zimmer frame over the threshold without immediately breaking a few rules. In fact, she’s probably more likely to do so than younger people, because she simply doesn’t know that the rules exist in the first place. However, as any out-of-work lawyer will tell you, ignorance of the law is not a defence.

You see, it’s all about social control. The thinking behind this, if there is any thinking, seems to be that the more we are controlled the easier society will function. There will be fewer disputes because there are rules in place to resolve these disputes. However, it doesn’t take a genius to see that the more rules there are, the more disputes there are likely to be.

Take a local by-law – which I’ve made up – against washing your car on a Sunday. You might well feel irritated if your neighbour washes his car every Sunday but you’re unlikely to do anything about it. After all, it’s a free country and if he wants to wash his car, there’s nothing to stop him. But pass a law forbidding people to wash their cars on Sundays and you’ve immediately got grounds for making a complaint. And not just any complain either but an official one that could lead to a sanction for the offending washer. And which will certainly lead to a bad relationship with your neighbour thereafter.

So the law has created a dispute instead of resolving one.

Young police cadets unwashing a car.

A lot of the rules and regulations that govern our behaviour seem to aim at ridding our lives of minor annoyances. Typical of this is the “Do not walk on the grass” sign. The annoyance in this case is presumably the one experienced by the parks department who have to keep the grass looking nice. But why do they have to keep it looking nice? Since when was grass there to be looked at? Of all the vegetation that has been put to the service of parks and gardens, grass is certainly the most practical. It’s there to be walked on. Or played on. It’s not designed to be stared at.

It’s when it comes to traffic regulations that the rules get truly barmy. And then for really bad craziness, we have to look further afield than Norway. In San Francisco, elephants are allowed to walk down the street, provided they are on a leash, however it is forbidden to wipe your car with used underwear. In Denver, Colorado, it is prohibited to drive a black car on Sundays. But if you think it’s always the blacks that get a raw deal, in Minneapolis it’s forbidden to drive a red car down Lake Street. Tennessee very rightly forbids driving while asleep.

No leash, eh? Sorry but you're nicked, sunshine!

And just in case you thought that the United States has the monopoly on mad traffic laws, in Greece you can have your licence revoked for being unwashed or badly dressed. The Russians are a little more sensible: you can be as unwashed as you like but it’s illegal to drive a dirty car. In China, drivers who stop at pedestrian crossings risk a fine while the Turks take a rather opposite view of road safety that fits this blog completely: drivers must carry a hygienic body bag suitable for carrying a corpse weighing up to 120 kilos. Failure to do so will result in a fine and a possible 6-month jail sentence.

That's 6 months in a gulag but with 3 months off for a clean windscreen.

One of the most popular absurd general laws comes from my home country of Great Britain. It refers to the – admittedly small – possibility of a whale being washed up in London. In such an event, by law, the head belongs to the King and the tail to the Queen. I don’t suppose many of you have had first-hand experience of washed-up whales but, by all accounts, they tend to be ever so slightly niffy. In fact, they stink. And because they’re big, they stink big time. Now I’ve tried to think of some logical reason for this law but the only one I can come up with is either that nobody knew what to do with said cetacean and therefore called on the highest authority in the land to dispose of it, or that it’s some sort of veiled insult to the monarchy – and particularly to the Queen.

To conclude, I refer you all to my old pal Charles Dickens, who famously said the law is an ass. And you can take that any way you want.

Mention the phrase ‘defensive shopping’ to most people and those who have heard the expression before will probably think that it refers to not succumbing to temptation, impulse buying or sales pressure. In other words, defending yourself against spending too much.

This is a complete misuse of the term. It also suggests that we are all morons who can’t even take a tour around a supermarket without returning home with enough food to feed the population of a third-world country.

A shopping trolley on a diving holiday in Sharm-el-Sheikh

What I understand by ‘defensive shopping’ is returning home with exactly what you wanted to buy, in an acceptable time frame and without losing your sanity in the process.

On the face of it, this seems easy and occasionally it even is. However, my experience is that in the vast majority of cases you are likely to spend far too long in the shop, fail to get what you want and return home in a thoroughly bad mood. And why? Well, in some cases the shop itself definitely has something to do with it. Take my local supermarkets, for example. Almost without exception, they have a weird pricing policy. When it comes to ‘normal’, run-of-the-mill products, there’s no problem but it seems that whenever they stock anything out of the ordinary – like moose steak for example – there’s no price in sight. There’s no price on the meat and there’s no price on the shelf either. As there’s also no barcode reader, and you don’t want to wait for ages while an assistant contacts the moose department to find out the price, you have to resign yourself to a lamb chop instead. The moose might have been delicious but you’ll never know.

Moose steak. It really is. Scan it and see.

This is where defensive shopping comes in. There’s your moose steak, there’s the checkout. So relax. Just go ahead and put the moose in your basket. You see, the checkout does have a barcode reader. So when a price is displayed that you don’t want to pay, you just say “Good grief (or an expression of your choice) I’m not paying that much!” And you leave the moose to deteriorate at the checkout.
Of course the disadvantage of that is that you now have no dinner, but you will also know what to avoid buying next time.

And then of course there are the large stores that are laid out in such a way that you have to walk for miles past every single product they sell in order to buy that one thing that you entered the store specifically to get. The worst culprit for this in my experience is IKEA. IKEA stores are designed by the same people who make those ‘escape from Castle Wolfstein’ computer games. Typically you enter the shop at the top floor, but the exit is on the ground floor. You want a bookshelf and indeed there are bookshelves on display wherever you look. Along with lots and lots of other things. So your first task is to locate the bookshelf that you saw in the catalogue or the Internet site without getting sidetracked in the bathroom department and without using one of those very large blue bags that can hold up to 100 small, dispensable gadgets. Then, having found your bookshelf, you now have to note the number and track it down in the warehouse section, which is on the ground floor via kitchen equipment, soft furnishings, candles, picture frames, lighting…. and is signposted by small blue signs in very unobvious places. You see the name of the game here is to keep you in the shop.

No need to panic. We have all day.

Shopping defensively at IKEA is a major challenge. But it can be done. You see, what most visitors don’t realise is that at IKEA it is actually possible to enter the shop on the ground floor. Obviously this isn’t very well signposted but have a look around and you’ll probably find an automatic sliding door that will let you straight into….well, not the warehouse as that would be too much to ask but pretty close to it anyway. Now armed with the product number that you got from the catalogue or website, you can track down the bookshelf and go straight to the checkout. (And don’t join the queue of morons at the regular checkout –go for self service and scan your own barcode). If you’re lucky and a fast walker, you can do IKEA in 10 minutes.

But the mention of IKEA brings me to the most terrifying force confronting defensive shoppers: other shoppers. IKEA is a great example of this. You see, IKEA wants to make visiting their shop a family event. You can park your kids in the children’s corner, spend hours meandering aimlessly around the shop and then finish off the (by now extremely expensive) visit with a meal of Swedish meatballs. Haven’t these sad people got anything better to do than spend an afternoon at IKEA? Like going to Sweden, for example. And worst of all are the families who don’t park their kids in the children’s corner but take them on an exciting tour of furniture and bathroom accessories. It’s bad enough having to negotiate your interminable way through a herd of browsing shoppers without an even bigger herd of screaming kids darting in front of you at every turn.

How did that parsley get in there?

Defensive shopping strategy: if you want something from IKEA, try to go there when everyone else is at work. Okay, it will mean taking time off but it’s worth it.

But IKEA is not alone in breeding the shopper from hell. Far, far worse is the local hypermarket on a Saturday afternoon, for ‘tis then that the dreaded shopping businessman makes his appearance. This man is a captain of industry and is used to giving orders and generally being in charge. Unfortunately he has been obliged to accompany his wife to buy the week’s groceries. That’s all you need: an over-inflated ego in charge of a shopping trolley. As a captain of industry, he has a God-given right to monopolise all of the space and be first to the special offers. If he knows where they are. Typically he doesn’t. In fact, he doesn’t know where anything is and tends to stare off vacantly into space looking vaguely angry.

Defensive strategy: either behave like a captain of industry who knows where everything is, or avoid the hypermarket on Saturday afternoons.

Hey look, honey! An egg!

And of course, there are the pensioners. Those sweet, elderly people with the killer instincts of a piranha giving up smoking. Very often, these are the same people who, understandably, refuse Meals On Wheels because they are independent and can look after themselves. However, this does not stop them from playing the Age Card when it comes to being first in line. They have mastered the art of the shopping trolley, holding it parallel to the shelf at arm’s length so no one else can get near. They painstakingly count out their small change at the checkout so that they match the bill exactly, while the rest of us wait. They stand in front of the milk shelf for hours on end, even though the choice is only full fat and skimmed.

Defensive strategy: either limp, in which case they will defer to someone less able than themselves, or pretend to be mad – old people can’t take that.

However, sadly, the best defensive shopping strategy appears to be to stay at home and order everything by the Internet.