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Smashing Time would be the 'Tush' film.
And later...
hi to all,
I'm trying to compile a list of sixties films featuring the revolving restaurant at the top of the post office tower in london. I then want to get all the films.
Could anyone please give me anyh titles.I would be very grateful indeed.
I've an idea that a Rita Tushingham film might have shown a party scene there but I'm not sure.
Thanks in advance
Smashing Time would be the 'Tush' film.
And later...
From wiki:
- Large portions of the 1966 Doctor Who serial The War Machines were set in the tower.
- In the 1967 film Smashing Time it appeared to spin out of control and short-circuit the whole of London's power supply.
- The Tower is featured in Stanley Donen's 1967 film Bedazzled as a vantage point from which Peter Cook, playing Satan, launches various forms of mischief.
- The tower is featured in the most famous scene in The Goodies when it is toppled over by Twinkle the Giant Kitten in the episode Kitten Kong.
- In Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta the tower is headquarters for both the "Eye", and the "Ear", the visual and audio surveillance divisions of the government. The tower is destroyed through sabotage. It's also featured in the film adaptation although it is not destroyed. It is renamed BTN Tower in the film.
- The tower is destroyed in the James Herbert novel The Fog by a Boeing 747 whose captain has been driven mad by fog.
- The tower appears abandoned and covered in pleurococcus in a BBC TV adaption of The Day of the Triffids.
- The design of the starship HMS Camden Lock from the BBC 2 science fiction sitcom Hyperdrive is based on the tower.
- In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry is spotted flying over the tower in a Ford Anglia with his friend, Ron Weasley.
- It appears on the cover of, and figures in, Saturday by Ian McEwan.
- Frank Muir's short story "The law is not concerned with trifles" is set in the tower's revolving restaurant.
- Rowan Atkinson in Not the Nine O'Clock News plays a Frenchman who claims that the Post Office Tower was not a communications tower but a London phallus.
- In The Bourne Ultimatum movie, there is a helicopter's view shot of the tower building for a brief period of time to show the location.
- In Season 4 of ReBoot, a tower closely resembling the BT tower is seen in the first episode as a control tower being able to open the system of Mainframe to the net.
- In Patrick Keiller's film London (1992) the narrator claims the tower is a monument to the love affair between Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, who lived nearby.
There's an episode of the TV series "The Adventurer" which seems to have a scene filmed inside the revolving restaurant (this would have been filmed in 1971 ?).
I think the episode is called "It's only a beautiful picture".
I think it was also featured in the 1965 musical Three Hats for Lisa.
Did the one in Liverpool ever make it to a movie?
Originally Posted by clw666
CLW, might we know the reasons for your singular interest? It must be something unusual, surely, or perhaps you just happened to work there. I took a girlfriend for dinner there once, when it had two stars in the Egon Ronay guide.
Hi
It is definately featutred in the 1960s musical Three Hats for Lisa.
Joe Brown and Sid James go there to visit Sid's brother-in-law, as portrayed by Steptoe's Wilfrid Brambell.
I remember going up there on a visit to London as a youngster.
In "The New Avengers" episode Sleeper, Steed and Gambit use the tower as a vantage point.
This Web site is well worth a visit - lots of interesting stuff about The Tower
There's also Sebastian, brilliant british film, made in 1967/8 with Dirk Bogarde and Susannah York sharing a scene up in the revolving restaurant at the Post Office Tower.
also see the LOOK AT LIFE DVD collection 'Swinging London' for a short film on the PO Tower....
AdrianTurner
My reason for wanting to know is that I thought it rather epitomised a facet of the Swinging Sixties (or should in say Spinning Sixties ha ha.) I was too young to visit under my own steam and always regretted it. Later on I managed to get a private visit through some BT engineers but obviously it wasn't the same.
I suppose it just provides a focal point for Sixties/ early Seventies locations. I'm planning to visit Bracknell to see the tower block featured in I Start Counting, and I'm lucky enough to live near Marion Park which apprears in Blow Up.
I have just bought a worldwide guide to movie locations but really my focus is iconic Sixties films and their London landmarks
Cheers
Claire
Thanks for that, Claire. I always fancied visiting Maryon Park but never got there.
It was a good example of and symbol for Harold Wilson's "White heat of technology" (he opened it) and the optimism of the time when huge advances were being made quite quickly and where it was though that just about anything was possible.
Steve
Except it never worked properlyso far as I remember it.............
It worked very well as a revolving restaurant from when it opened in 1961 - until the IRA bomb in 1971 when it was thought better to close it because it was such an obvious target and would be difficult to evacuate safely.Except it never worked properlyso far as I remember it.............
It's still in use as a communications centre.
Steve
I remember turning up with my parents on a rare trip to London to go up the tower only to find it had been 'closed to the public until further notice' - 1971! doesn't time fly.
It always struck me that there was no will to re-open the tower to the public - perhaps there was fundamental flaw with the concept of the Tower as a tourist attraction.
Yes, it's not in the most salubrious part of town
Steve
Quite right.
The Sixties
I was evidently confusing it with the Scouse version:
The tower is simply awful. When it was first built, a revolving restaurant was put at the top. However, it was so expensive for those days that nobody could afford to go and it closed shortly afterwards.
My Liverpool wonders and blunders with Roger McGough - Building
although to be fair, that sounds as if it worked okay so far as the engineering went.
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