One take on MI5...
Adams, Ernest (eadams@ea.com)
Sun, 5 Apr 1998 14:18:26 -0700
There's a half-hour British sitcom called "The Thin Blue Line," starring
Rowan Atkinson as a uniformed police inspector with a motley crew of
officers in a (hopefully mythical) town called Gasforth. He plays
Inspector Fowler, the straight-arrow but rather nerdy head of the
uniformed branch at the station. In last night's episode (shown on
station KTEH, channel 54, San Jose), he confronts an admitted MI5 agent
who has just tried to seduce his girlfriend. This is a classic Rowan
Atkinson rant, you have to imagine his voice:
"Britain's elite? Ha! Throughout the Cold War you were run by the
KGB!... as a sort of gay, sexualist dating agency for grumpy alcoholics.
Burgess, Mclean, Philby, Blunt, the 5th man, the 6th man, the 8th man
from the left! If you told them the time of the last coach to Croyden
they'd have flogged it to Moscow for a bottle of scotch and a copy of
'Zipper'!"
eadams@ea.com