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Monday 25 June 2007

A little bit of actual magic


My wife, as regular readers (or people who, y'know, actually know me) will know, works for the British Film Institute where she toils away watching dvd's all day and drinking tea (she actually works really hard, but in-jokes need care and attention or they die)
Anyway. The other day an envelope finds it way to her desk address thus:

Ken Russell
Film Director
London

And then, in tiny handwriting right at the bottom:

Please get this to him.

Clearly someone has been so moved by one of Ken's films that they have felt that aching need - as I think we all have felt at one time or another - so somehow reach out to the creator of a work and say "Thank you".

When I was a kid it would have been Valerie Landsburg who played Doris from "Fame" and was really important to me (Strangely in later years I did actually meet her and we hit it off quite stylishly). With the advent of the internet it became a little more possible to reach someone. I once found an email address for the great and wonderful actor Bruce Campbell and wrote to him, not expecting a reply, but was astonished to recieve a reply, and another and another. We had quite the little email relationship until he clearly realised that you shouldn't talk to nutjob fans on the internet.

But the writer of the letter that landed on Lesley's desk didn't, it seems, know about the internet, so just got an envelope and wrote the facts they knew on it: His name. His job. He lives in London. And please get it to him.

The magic part is, that it will get to him. The Bfi do, of course, have contact details for him, (There's even a Ken Russell season in the works soon), so it's just a case of sending it on. Thanks to, I guess, the post office who thought "Film director? London? the Bfi'll know.."

It'll get there. The writer will have made contact and said "Thank you".

Magic.

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