“In Britain, any book about a gull or a duck, no matter how stumbling or inane, is an automatic bestseller.” – Alan Whicker, Death In The Morning, BBC 1964
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Do you have the text of that whole intro.? It was genius…
Alex : Sadly not. I scribbled down that one sentence on the spur of the moment. I think it’s the choice of words that is so wonderful… gull, stumbling. And Whicker’s delivery, of course.
Presumably he was talking about that mystical feel-good children’s novel “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”? That explains the seagull… but what of the duck?
Mr Wellington : Alan Whicker’s documentary predates “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” by six years, so one can only presume that author Richard Bach was inspired by the great man.
I suppose it’s possible that Bach might have set about writing his novel about transcendental sea-fowl after watching this documentary. It’s what I want to believe.
But I fear that by proposing such an idea I may be following the kind of demented faux-logic practiced by ufologists, holistic-healers and other purveyors of nonsense. I will not sully this site with the preposterous and irrational.
According to the Wikipedia, Mr. Bach is an American and therefore unlikely to have been watching BBC Tv that morning in 1964. I suspect that Mr. Whicker is referring to some utterly unrelated best-seller books about ducks and seagulls.
More research is needed.