The Monday List

A Matter Of The Great Escape From Stalug Luft 633 Squadron Is Missing

It's Bank Holiday weekend again, and that means most TV channels will be showing a classic war film. So here at Planet Sad Towers, we'll be plonked in front of the telly with a packet or six of Barbecue Beef Monster Munch, waiting to spot these particular characters:

A sadistic German camp commandant sporting a monocle
Someone on an upper bunk in the POW's quarters, playing a mournful tune on the harmonica
A spy parachuting behind enemy lines, dressed as a nun
A doomed airman whose burning plane is being talked down by a beautiful radio controller
Some shipwrecked seaman, clinging to a piece of flotsam in shark-infested waters
A pair of Land Girls, probably called Lil and Flo
Some children being evacuated from London, waiting on a railway station platform clutching cardboard suitcases and with their name on a label pinned to their coat
Steve McQueen, jumping over something on a huge, shiny motorbike just because he can
An American GI getting off with the local girls by giving them chocolate and nylons
The private who talks about the sweetheart he'll be going back to once the fighting ends, and is therefore a dead man walking
A couple of POWs walking around surreptitiously dispensing earth from the escape tunnel that's being dug in the compound
Donald Pleasance, trying to persuade everyone else he can see
The new recruit to the platoon, who will meet a nasty end before anyone has actually learned his name
Someone's pet Labrador with a name that's highly inappropriate name to modern ears
A couple of Japanese soldiers who haven't realised the war is over
Noel chuffing Coward