Browsing HuffPo, I came across this recently written article by Glenn Close entitled Mental Illness: The Stigma of Silence. She writes about aspects of some of her most notorious characters with great clarity and knowledge. Better yet, she recommends the work of Kay Redfield Jamison, whose memoir An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness is up there with William Styron’s Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness and Andrew Solomon’s longer The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (whose shorter piece in The New Yorker prior to the publication of was read by Naomi Watts when preparing for her devastating performance in David Lynch’s masterpiece, Mulholland Drive).

But the good news? No Philip Roth! Hey, I enjoyed Goodbye, Columbus well enough, but I shed no tears that his explorations into the minds of the youthful male sexual beast, the middle-aged male sexual beast and the elderly male sexual beast were overlooked. (And don’t even get me started on fellow short-odds jockey, Joyce Carol Oates.)

So I raise a glass of schnapps to Herta! Prost!

His prose is so pared down that to give depth to his descriptions, he has to slot in tired adjective after tired adjective to the “scene setting” description that dutifully appear at the start and end of each episode. The dialogue is heavy and inane. The protagonist and his several Caucasian sexual interests are a dull lot. But O’Loughlin posits them as heroic. They nearly all have a kind of freckled, Nordic boyishness, and ability to withstand the horrors of massacre, be it in Serbia or Rwanda whilst providing maternal sympathy. His male quirky journalistic rivals seem like underdone versions of the harebrained characters in Roald Dahl’s Going Solo who have cheerily lost their marbles, but this charm does not flourish into anything resembling actual people. The African public servants and militia are unsurprisingly inscrutable and serve the purpose of getting in the way of getting a the goods behind the makings of a good story. Similarly, several incidences of intrigue, for instance a gradual psychotic episode and scene involving the disposal of a body are flat, and lack the ebb and flow and climax required for real drama.

In the delightful Major and the Minor he was used to reasonable effect as the most annoying kind of man a poor working girl like Ginger could have the misfortune to service. Sadly Mr Benchley has transferred this attitudinal style to many of the aforementioned One Reel Wonders. Comics who laugh at their jokes whilst corpsing or having a hysterical giggling fit are one thing. But an actor who uses hearty chuckling at his puns as part of his routine whilst playing pompous bumbling fellows, is just annoying, no matter how brainy the actor playing this character may be in real life.

So, recently, lest I broke out in hives when the episode concerning newts turns out to be on again, upon realising a One Reel Wonder was imminent, I investigated whether a Sex and the City rerun or the tail end of a Monk/House/Numbers-inspired drama or some information on the Weather Channel was on, in order to pass the minutes in a more entertaining fashion.

Happily, it was the second.   On another station I watched Lie To Me in awe as the amazonian Jennifer Beals, as the ex-wife Tim Roth, stood at least one head over him as they indulged in some hostile flirting. This duo brought with them many memories from my childhood – Jennifer’s iconic off-the-shoulder tee, Tim Roth rivaling Gary Oldman as the eccentric Englishman of my tweenage affections… I was so taken with this duo, far more so than Mr Benchley, that I missed the opening 4 minutes of The Mask of Fu Manchu.

*shakes fist at the heavens*
Damn you, Benchley!

David Malouf