It's like being in a bloody war. No, wait, we ARE in a bloody war.

But I meant the way the prominent figures of British films have been keeling over this week. Paul Scofield is the latest one I'm aware of, and I feel like putting on LONDON or ROBINSON IN SPACE to hear his majestic voice again, and because those beautiful Patrick Keillor film-essays are the kind of thing I can drift through in a dreamy cloud of pleasure, bewildered when the film ends and I wake into sluggish reality.

Also today we heard of the decease of Brian Wilde, a fine character actor and comic turn, with a long long track record. Back in in 1957 he played Rand Hobart (no relation to Rose), the crazed devil-worshipping farmer in NIGHT OF THE DEMON for Jacques Tourneur, uttering the classic line "It's in the trees -- it's coming!" before his memorable self-defenestration (the line is repeated in Kate Bush's song The Hounds of Love, but revoiced by another actor).

Previous to that, Arthur C Clarke shuffled off, and my blog received about fifty hits from people typing in variations of the query "Arthur C Clarke pederast" due to a casual statement I made in an old Euphoria post. Oops.

The big shock was Anthony Minghella's too-early death. He wasn't a filmmaker whose work affected me particularly, but it was tragic to lose him so suddenly and so young. His latest film, THE NO 1. LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY, from a novel by Edinburgh writer Alexander McCall Smith, and photographed by Edinburgh-based ace cameraman Seamus McGarvey (the man with Nicole Kidman's nose on his mantelpiece, grisly souvenir from THE HOURS) airs on the BBC very shortly.

These are the WRONG PEOPLE. I'm basically opposed to the whole idea of death, though I admit it has its uses: it's important to know there's something out there worse than THE COTTAGE, for instance. But if we have to have a bunch of film industry deaths, why can't it be the people ahead of me in the queue for film funding? Not that I wish them any harm, but if SOMEBODY'S got to go...

(Explanatory note on the title of this post: in Scots vernacular, for some reason, "dead" means the same as "very" -- one might say, "That was dead good," or "He's dead nice-looking." Or, presumably, "He's dead dead.")