2 May 2020

By Tim Koch

Tim Koch is not serious.

We should all be practicing social distancing at present and I recently came across a way of doing this in an eight. In the forgettable 1983 film, ‘Bullshot’, a spoof set in the 1920s, gentleman-adventurer and square-jawed hero, Captain Hugh Crummond, is called on the save Britain from his arch-nemesis, Count Otto von Bruno. In the process, he wins the heart of the lovely Rosemary (‘Dash it all, if you weren’t a girl, you’d make a jolly fine chap!’).

However, as Crummond is about to set off on his derring-do, his manservant interjects: ‘But Sir, we’ve got the ‘enley regatta today…’ To this his master replies: ‘Dash it, you’re right… I’ll row a little faster’. Our hero is a member of the Thames Amateur Rowing Club and they are in the final against the London Sculling Club. Alas, Crummond’s crew has been struck by influenza, ‘every man jack of them’, so he ends up sculling an eight on his own from ‘2’ with his manservant some distance away in the cox’s seat: ‘Come on now, Sir’. Inevitably, Captain Crummond beats the exhausted full London crew in the last few strokes. Sadly, only the start of the trailer below shows this spiffing effort.