I am not conscious of watching television for anything other than the news for at least two weeks. Then I was tempted, and blew a lovely sunny afternoon glued to my iPad.
I turned it on to watch the lunchtime news. Wrong time, so I looked at the list of tv programmes and spotted that The Apartment was about to start. I haven’t watched it for decades but still remember Jack Lemmon draining spaghetti using a tennis racket. I watched the first five minutes – and of course I was hooked.
Ostensibly a lighthearted romantic comedy featuring Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine, it is also a poignant critique of big corporations, turning all their employees into helpless cogs in the machine, and Lemmon’s amiable innocent salesman is refreshingly different from the usual larger than life heroes of the time.
I’m a Jack Lemmon fan, so of course I could not resist watching this through to the end. Worse still, it was followed by Some Like It Hot, so of course I could not tear myself away from my iPad. If only my contorted mechanism for watching UK TV allowed me to record programmes – I would so much prefer to have watched them at leisure over several evenings.
I still laugh at the last sequence of Some Like It Hot, with its final line “Nobody’s perfect”. I had forgotten that the Apartment gave us: “That’s the way it crumbles. Cookie-wise.”
