"Kim Newman - The Serial Murders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Kim)

would pitch in on what he vaguely defined as "a research project." The students were on vac, so she was
available and had enthusiastically agreed to meet Richard at the ART offices.
He arrived first and waited in the company's reception area under a bank of photo-portraits of the company's
in-favour stars. Pride of place was given to a positively Queen Motherly, four-times-the-size-of-the-rest June
O'Dell. A workman was replacing a scowling young man with a grinning, quiffed comedian. Richard
considered the discarded picture.
"That's Donald Shale," said a woman who'd come in while he was pondering the brevity of fame in an age of
mass communications. "'Jockie Gigglewhites.' Written out and gone from our screens. Typecast as a
sadistic shrimp. Not good for long-term career prospects."
Richard turned to meet Professor Corri, then mentally rebuked himself for subscribing to a stereotype of
"women of a certain age" just as set in stone as anyone else's in "the dominant culture." Lady Dee called
Barbara Corri a "spinster," which might technically be true in that she was past forty and unmarried. It wasn't
the label Richard would have applied. He would have inclined to something like "stunner."
The professor's well-fit mustard and cream trouser suit emphasised her womanly shape. A double rope of
pearls circled her admirably swanlike neck. Her face was sculptured and cool, with symmetrical smile lines.
She raised Queen Bee sunglasses, using them as an alice band in her upswept auburn hair, and showed
amused, sparkling light-hazel eyes. Male students with little interest in "Approaches to British Television
Serial Drama" must sign up for her course just to sit at the front and watch her suit stretch tighter as she
stood on tiptoes to chalk up a reading list.
"I really must thank you, Mr. Jeperson," she said, shaking his hand with a good grip. She wore violet chamois
gloves. "I've been trying to get in here for ages. You obviously know the magic words which open up the
vaults."
She offered him her arm, a curiously old-fashioned gesture, and proposed, "Shall we delve?"
Having spent two weeks in a darkened room steeped with Barbara Corri's fragrance, Richard wished the
flickering twaddle on the screen hadn't been a distraction. However, without the waft of ylang-ylang and the
delicate susurrus of the professor's rapider breath during "high-emotion" moments, he'd have been driven to
gnaw off his own arm by June O'Dell's relentlessly strident Mavis, let alone the provincial stooges who came
and went as the fortunes of the family rose and fell and rose and fell again.
Bleeds seemed bereft of a middle class. The charactersтАФmost related by blood, marriage, or liaisonтАФwere
either disgustingly rich and vulgar or appallingly poor and noble, sometimes shifting from one end of the
socio-economic spectrum to the other within a few episodes. The show featured a strange meld of cartoonish
social stratification and fractured time-space continuum. The haves lived in the highly coloured present, where
floating walls were adorned with pop-art prints and dolly birds strutted in hot-from-Carnaby-Street fashions.
The have-nots were stuck in a black and white Depression of an earlier decade or evenтАФin the cobbles, fog,
and gaslight districtтАФa bygone century.
After each episode, the lights came up and Professor Corri added footnotes while the desk-sized videotape
player cooled down and an archivist rewound the magnetic tape and stowed the fanbelt-sized spool.
"'Brenda's Black Baby' is the big plotline of 1969 to '70," said the professor. "It divided the country, played out
over two whole years. It's something only a soap can do, tackle story in real time. We see Brenda's affair with
Kenny Boko, a jazz musician who works in one of Cousin Dodgy Morrie's nightclubs. She has to deal with a
voodoo curse placed by Mama Cartouche, Kenny's former girlfriend тАж"
For a moment, Richard was interested. Voodoo curses were in his usual line.
"тАж then Mavis finds out, and is set against the relationship, as in the episode we've just seen. For a short
time, Mavis becomes a pin-up for the National Front. They fight a Birmingham by-election using a Mavis
quote, 'No Daughter of Mine Would Marry a Bloody Darky.' Their vote goes up, and for the first time in that
constituency they don't lose their deposit. But, over the months, Mavis comes to accept the situation, and
delivers Baby Drum herself on Guy Fawkes Night, with fireworks in the background. The 'Birth of Drum'
episode was the first Barstows in colour. Sales of colour sets tripled in the weeks before the event."
"What happened to the baby? He's not in the recent shows we've seen."
"Lost in an Andean plane crash with Brenda, when Karen Finch, the actress, was written out overnight. She