Juno and the Hancock

One of the playlets in the Hancock episode The Drama Festival is John Eastbourne's Look Back in Hunger, where Bill Kerr delivers a monologue about tea with the splendidly delivered mocking line '"Have a cup of tea, Jim."'

That's very Osborne, but the rest of the speech ('Tea, tea? Is that your answer to it all') is much more Sean O'Casey. 'Tay, tay, tay! You're always thinking of tay. If a man was dying, you'd try to make him swallow a cup of tay.'

The Power of Eel

As a child I was very fond of Arthur Ransome's books about polite 30s children exploring and sailing, even though I barely knew one end of a boat from the other.

I've been re-reading them lately. There's a later entry, Secret Water, which takes place on the salt-marshes in Essex, and has a climactic scene where they chant and dance around a 'human sacrifice' to the Great Eel.

I wonder if Robert Holmes read it as a kid, and it unconsciously influenced another story set in a marsh and involving a giant water creature. Incidentally the swamp scenes in Power of Kroll were filmed only 25 miles away from Hamford Water where the book is set.