I, enthusiastic young pup that I was, was all “you were in Blake’s 7! And Brides of Dracula?!?” and she was all “Young man, I was in Henry V with dear, dear Larry” in her best Lady Bracknell voice.

Clambering out of that abyss of parentheses, Tom Baker (still my favourite Doctor) is great in The Golden Voyage. It must be just about his least hammed-up performance ever: he sticks to being properly sinister.

Definitely calls for someone to do a mashup of the 2 Sinbads.

(What? Somebody had to make this joke … or, maybe they didn’t, but I just did anyway!)

I find Said’s book useful in the classroom — esp. here in California, where I have never taught a single class without at least one Asian-American student, even while, as you say, things get done with it that really ought not to be. Along with Foucault, it’s good for alerting students to the constructed nature of many of their assumptions. But I look forward to hearing more about Irwin’s self-perceived rubbishing of Said and the Saidists.