I came into contact with Jack and John after I felt that 100 years of cinema weren't being commemorated. I was very arrogant, and approached Bafta and said, "If you give me your building, I will give you a celebration." They laughed and said "Who are you going to get?" I told them I was going to approach Kenneth Branagh, Mike Figgis and others.They said, "You get them to do it and we'll help with the building." WEDNESDAY: Went to pick up the actor Julian Glover. The film is called The Dance of Shiva, and tells the unknown story of Indian troops in the First World War. Now they live on only in the fantasy world of the ultra-popular press.. MONDAY: I'm making a First World War film, and I arrived at an old school in Bushey to be greeted by John Box, the production designer for Lawrence of Arabia, Dr Zhivago and Oliver!, and Jack Cardiff, the cinematographer who won an Oscar for Black Narcissus. Pat Cash is playing a British gunner; my girlfriend manages him.
I don't know any man who wouldn't relish dressing up as a soldier But he's only going to be featured for a couple of seconds. I said to Ken, "Surprisingly, no, and I don't understand why." Kenneth said: "You've probably reached 25,000 feet so you've got beyond terror." It's very difficult not to relax around Ken TUESDAY: Internal hospital scenes today. Ken had phoned me on Sunday and said "Don't be shy if you feel I'm crap" Afterwards, someone asked if I was nervous. Then, Kenneth Branagh and Paul McGann called through the walkie-talkies I thought 'I've got to go for it'. Calling a Frenchman a Frog is neither more nor less offensive than calling him a Frenchy or an Italian an Eyetie. Such names were common enough in middle-class society before and after the Second World War.
The OED says froggy is a term of contempt for a Frenchman, from their frog-eating habits; but under frog we also read "A term of abuse applied to a man or a woman" (French or otherwise), though it gives no examples later than the 17th century, when it applied to Jesuits and Dutchmen.Anyway, I doubt whether the Daily Star is worried about word origins. The theory puts "Yid" among the milder insults, but in practice it's one of the rudest And the history of "Frog" is not so simple. "Krauts" for Germans (also "Limeys" for Brits, because our sailors sucked limes) comes in this category, and so, one would think, does "Frogs". But it doesn't work like that. In between come the names that have to do with food, or what your true patriot calls foreign muck. He concluded that the editors' code didn't cover the case, which rather avoided the issue. Nicknames for foreigners come in various shades of offensiveness, and in theory the least offensive are those that pick on a familiar name like Paddy or Taff, or ape the language spoken, which makes Russians Russkies and the Chinese Chinks; while the worst are the merely abusive ones like "Wop", which seems to have come from the Italian for a ruffian, or possibly from the Latin for a no-good, and "Hun", an archetype for barbarism. The question arose again last week when Lord Wakeham, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, ruled on the Daily Star headline "Frogs need a good kicking".
