The Mucky Duck

This week Michael Whiner pays a visit to The Mucky Duck, the multi-award winning restaurant owned and run by Heston Charltonthal. The menu leans towards the exotic, with snail soup, frog's legs in eggs and deep-fried swan among the house specialities. Heston's unusual approach to cuisine has lead to him being the first chef in history to win 200 Michelin stars and acres of positive restaurant column inches.

However, much of that will be lost on Michael, who has film piracy and the death of the British film industry on his mind. As usual, he is already in full flow...

 "...I'm not stuck on the snail soup, you know. It has a cloying quality and the texture tends to cling to the back on the throat somewhat. All in all it's a bit like eating, er snails actually.

I couldn't help but laugh out loud earlier in the week when it was revealed that Hollywood has lost billions of dollars as a result of film pirates - much more than had previously been thought. Predictably, the studios are up in arms. After all, many of their executives are down to their last two ridiculously expensive drop-top sports cars. There is a tremendous irony at the heart of all this controversy, if you examine the figures carefully.

You see it turns out that the age group that is most likely to pirate a film just happens to be between 16 to 24 years old. Now guess what the target audience for the average Hollywood film just happed to be? Ah, you're ahead of me. Yes, it turns that tinsel town has been aiming virtually all of its output at the one group of people who'll happily make pirate copies of their DVDs for their friends. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot! If only they'd just stuck to making movies that old farts like me can enjoy. What's that saying about reaping what you sow?

I've never tasted swan before and frankly after this experience I'm pretty glad about that. It tastes like duck on steroids.

The British film industry is dead. Or dying at any rate. Just ask Jonathan Ross. The world-renowned film expert said earlier this week that the state of film funding in this country is shocking and that without Bond or Harry Potter we'd be "dead in the water". At last, something on which we can agree. Although seeing as the latest Bond movie is currently shooting in the Bahamas perhaps the end is closer then he thinks.

There are some ideas that are just so bad that you can't even begin to work out how somebody thought that they were a good idea. The Millennium Dome, for example or Dale Winton's Pets Win Prizes. But surely the news that a new Carry On film is in production must rank as one of the worst in recent times. Did none of the backers see Carry on Columbus? A film so bad you'd swear that the Film Council must have funded it! And just who have they got to replace top comic actors like Kenneth Williams and Sid James? Step forward Shane Ritchie and Vinnie Jones.

I fear Jonathan Ross may be right."

Cheers,

Michael