If present-day American politics is scripted by Hollywood – see my last post – who’s responsible for our British stage show? My guess would be Brian Rix (hon. MA, Hull University), if he were still alive; a great comic actor ever associated with the ‘Whitehall Farces’ (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_farce) – a glorious series of low comedies staged in the 1950s and ’60s at the Whitehall Theatre in London, in every one of which Rix’s trousers had to fall down at some point.

(If son Ben is reading this: do you remember being his pageboy at the honorary degree ceremony? The degree was given for his sterling work in support of mental health, rather than the trousers.)