batman

Thanks mate, you should see the one where I take on the 'Custer - bashers'.

Bats.

There are 31 excellent quizzes to bamboozle you on the Quiz Page. Just click on the 'Quick Links' icon and scroll down!

Steve Crook

The Wizard of Oz (1939) - much better than the 1925 version
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) - better than previous versions

Steve

Nick Dando

I feel that Münchausen from 1943 and Baron Prásil from 1961 are better than Terry Gilliam's efforts. Although both of these films are very political, they have more style and imagination than Terry's film, and he borrows very heavily from the German version. It's quite extraordinary how they could achieve such a film at that point in the war. The special effects are actually special, even if you can see the strings!
I find that Eric Idle and Robin Williams are both extremely irritating and highly distracting.

Nick

DB7

The real St Trinian's
FIONA MacGREGOR

THEY may cry in girlish unison: "It wasn't us, Miss!", but the high-spirited, high-kicking young ladies captured in the faded photograph tell a tale which suggests the real belles of St Trinian's weren't as far removed from their naughty, fictional counterparts as they'd like to make out.

It's more than 60 years since these Scottish schoolgirls put away their tweed coats and panama hats for the last time. The lacrosse sticks with which they battled for school glory now lie abandoned in dusty attics.
Click to learn more...

But with a new St Trinian's film made (and heavily promoted at this year's Cannes film festival) - starring Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Russell Brand and the members of Girls Aloud - former pupils of the real St Trinnean's are still bemused at the notoriety the school has maintained.

St Trinnean's (the proper name of this Edinburgh school for girls, as well as boys up to the age of ten), was established in Palmerston Road in the Grange, Edinburgh, in 1922 by Miss Catherine Fraser Lee.

A minister's daughter and spinster with a passionate attachment to Scotland's Celtic past, Fraser Lee gave her institution the Gaelic name for St Ninian, as well as the Gaelic motto "Solus agus Sonas", meaning "light and joy".

Its teaching methods were based on the Dalton system of education, in which pupils were largely responsible for their own progress. Neither were the rules and regulations established by staff, but instead set out by a Senate made up of senior students who also decided what punishment, if any, would be meted to unruly fellow pupils.

These progressive methods, some of which bordered on the bizarre, such as the term pupils had to eat their meals backwards starting with pudding and ending with soup, led to St Trinnean's acquiring a reputation as "the school where they do what they like".

As the school expanded, the headmistress sought new premises, and in 1925 moved to St Leonard's House in what is now Pollock Halls, part of Edinburgh University. On the outbreak of war, in September 1939, the school was evacuated to Gala House in Galashiels and it was shortly afterwards that St Trinnean's and its girls first came to the attention of artist Ronald Searle who, as a young wartime soldier, had been sent north with the Royal Engineers to be stationed at Kircudbright.

It was there, in 1941, that he met the Johnston family of Edinburgh, including their two teenage daughters, Cecile and Pat, who had moved there after war broke out. The two girls were pupils at St Trinnean's, where their mother taught art.

In the mid-1980s Cecilé (now understood to be suffering from Alzheimer's) recollected: "One evening in 1941 there appeared at our door two soldiers, who had been sent from the Town Hall to be entertained. That was the beginning of a long and constant friendship which I have valued enormously. They were called Ron (Ronald Searle) and Matt.

"Ron was gentle, shy, modest and humorous and totally dedicated to art. He drew and drew and talked art all the time. He was not a very good soldier. He forgot to go on duty on time, he failed to salute when dreaming of his next drawing - he was even known to go left when the whole 287th Company went right, because he was watching clouds in the sky...

"He sailed away in 1941. I am sure he left broken hearts behind."

They have kept it to themselves, but according to those who knew Cecilé as a schoolgirl, hers was the broken heart from which Searle sailed away. "She rather loved him," as one old friend recently confided, while refusing to say any more on the matter, even after all this time.

When Cecilé first met the assured, sharp-dressing Searle, a 21-year-old soldier from Cambridge who shared her love of art, he must have seemed a romantic figure. His impact on the young teenage girl - thought to have been 15 or 16 when she met Searle - could still be heard in her description of him, more than 40 years later.

But a heartbroken girl was not Searle's only legacy. Cecilé had inspired a very special creation: Searle's first cartoon of the "belles" of St Trinian's, which he had drawn to amuse his young admirer, would redefine for ever the image of the British schoolgirl.

His humorous yet affectionate drawings provoked by Cecilé's tales of her schooldays, first appeared in the popular magazine Lilliput, before going on to feature in a series of five comic books, the first of which appeared in 1948, and later inspired the four St Trinian's films (made between 1954 and 1966).

Searle still fondly referred to "our Cecilé" more than four decades later, when he wrote a letter to the organisers of a 1985 St Trinnean's reunion: "It was in January 1941... that the name 'St Trinnean's' first rang in my ears and I'm afraid that it all goes to show what can happen to an innocent and unsuspecting boy of 21, far from home, lost in the fleshpots of Kircudbright, when he is invited in for a slice of haggis, a steaming cup of Glenlivet and [underlined] allowed to hold the daughters of an Edinburgh family, who were pupils at St Trinnean's, to boot.

"I won't embarrass our Cecilé (one of those daughters) any further, except to say that the kindness, generosity and hospitality that the Miles Johnston family gave to a young soldier then, will always remain for me as a representative of everything that is best of Scotland of the Frazer[sic] Lee-St Trinnean's spirit."

Searle insists, however, there was - at least on his part - definitely no romance.

Apologising that "there wasn't a bit of Barbara Cartland" to the story, Searle told The Scotsman this week in a handwritten letter: "This... daughter of the marvellous Johnston family, and her sister Pat, were the victims of a bit of fun by a 20-year-old budding artist. There was only one [St Trinian's] drawing and it was made to pull the legs of those two Edinburgh-evacuated pupils. By chance it was published, quite unexpectedly."

Cecilé's memories may have faded, but the St Trinnean's spirit lives on in some of her old schoolmates. Dr Joan Campbell, a former head girl, is now 84. At home in East Lothian, sifting through old photographs and journals from her school days, she recalls that time with genuine happiness: "I was at school in 1928 when I was five and three-quarters, and I left when I was 17 and a half - it was the only school I was ever at. We were the first school not to have a navy blue uniform."

Inspired by Fraser Lee's memories of her childhood holidays on Iona, the St Trinnean's uniform consisted instead of a "coat [made of] Harris crotal tweed, a saxe-blue tunic and tussore silk blouse.

"We had blue tunics, and blue knickers with a pocket in them," laughs Dr Campbell, "all done by Jenners."

The uniform was not the only connection with that great Edinburgh retail institution. Various children of the Kennedy family, which then owned the store, sent their children to St Trinnean's. As did the Danish Consul and various other members of the city's establishment: Campbell herself comes from an old family of Edinburgh lawyers.

Despite its eccentric reputation, the school drew a well-to-do clientele and, although its teaching methods were unusual, many of its girls went on to great things.

Jean Wallace - the first woman to pass the final examination of the society of Accountants in Edinburgh with distinction - was a St Trinnean's girl.

Others, such as Campbell, would go on to distinguish themselves in medicine or law.

It's an impressive record for a school where the girls "did what they liked", which poses the question: what was so special about St Trinnean's?

It certainly wasn't a high-pressure learning environment. Writing in the early 1960s, former pupil Alison Darling recalled: "The day before the Highers, day-girls were forbidden to take any school books home with them, but were told to go to a theatre or concert to refresh their minds."

Fraser-Lee was a great believer in the power of the great outdoors - not always to the delight of her girls. Darling remembered the headmistress's fondness for a then-fashionable form of exercise called Dalcroze Eurhythmics, in which the girls "danced around pretending to be a puff of smoke" and other such things.

Inside lessons were no more regular. "We were taught, not A, B, C, but ah, bi, ci," recalls Campbell. It may be noted that this phonetic system of learning to read is now being promoted again by many 21st-century educationalists in Scotland.

"It wasn't a very good school for education, but [Fraser Lee] was a very nice woman and took a great interest in all her pupils. She was more interested in the ones who didn't have brains," says Campbell.

She insists that most girls were well behaved, despite Searle's interpretations and the recollections recorded by Fraser Lee in her small memoir, The Real St Trinnean's.

This described a number of amusing incidents, including one where certain pupils were caught using pepper to produce sneezing fits in their classmates.

"We were no more naughty than any other school," says Campbell.

After the war Searle, who would go on to become one of the greatest cartoonists of his generation, wrote to Cecilé about the horrors he had experienced in a prisoner of war camp in Burma, where he was starved, beaten with a pick-axe almost to the point of death, and had his right hand crushed to try and stop him drawing. He was, thankfully, left-handed.

"I am afraid," he wrote. "I am a different Ronald [from] that one in 1941."

St Trinnean's itself closed in September 1946, after Fraser Lee's retirement. In the 1950s and 60s, when the St Trinian's films starring Alistair Sim, Hermione Baddeley and Joyce Grenfell were released and the fanbase grew, the former headmistress kept in touch with her Old Friends, as former pupils were known, their children and grandchildren. In 1962 she finally published her little book, The Real St Trinnean's.

Two years later, on 28 April 1964, Fraser-Lee passed away, her legacy a generation of happily-educated young women and - for good or ill - perhaps the most famous girls' school in the world.
BACK TO SCHOOL

CAN the forthcoming new version of St Trinian's, starring - among a vast and stellar cast, Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Russell Brand, Stephen Fry and Girls Aloud - hope to match the anarchic hilarity of the original films?

The four early St Trinian's outings remain among the most enduring British screen comedies, appealing to anyone tickled by the notion of badly behaved schoolgirls kicking against the establishment.

Inspired by Ronald Searle's cartoons, The Belles of St Trinian's (1954); Blue Murder at St Trinian's (1957); The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery (1966); and The Pure Hell of St Trinian's (1960), were co-scripted by Sidney Gilliatt and Frank Launder (who also directed).

The schoolgirls here fell into two categories: the Fourth Form were practically feral - aggressive oiks in grubby gymslips, school ties askew and knotted hair exploding through their wrecked straw boaters. The Sixth Formers were a different prospect: heavily mascara'd minxes in high heels and short tunics that exposed their fishnet stocking-tops. All were clearly beyond control.

Contrast the glorious, politically incorrect plots of their day - kidnapped heiresses, hijacked trains, nobbled racehorses, under-age blackmailers and arsonists - with the so-called rebels of the 2007 version.

Talulah Riley plays a schoolgirl in the updated movie, St Trinian's, which finished shooting at London's Ealing Studios last month, and has boasted of the "drugs, sex, tattoos and piercings" featured - but as director Oliver Parker admits, "in the early films the girls were puffing away on cigarettes, and of course you can't show that now".

The notion of this 21st-century remake came from the British actor Rupert Everett, who in it takes on the dual role of hapless headmistress Millicent Fritton and her bookmaker brother Clarence, both brilliantly played by a tombstone-faced Alastair Sim in the original.

"You should never really try and take on a role that has been played to the hilt," Everett admits, "there is very little chance that you can do better."

In 1954, the disinterested school staff and other adults were also played by leading comedy actors. Joyce Grenfell appeared as a drippy police constable, herself an overgrown clumsy schoolgirl, and the young George Cole shone as Flash Harry, a treacherous spiv conspiring to exploit as many people as possible for his own fiscal gain.

For all its subversiveness, the 1950s world of St Trinian's was somehow innocent.

In the end, characters were rendered harmless simply by staying within the boundaries of stereotype. Nothing dark or unpredictable was allowed to invade in those more innocent times.

Director Oliver Parker has warned that the new film will "shock some people". But not those of us who still laugh at the chain-smoking, liquor-drinking children in the originals, I suspect.

DB7

Rupert Everett - bare

Blonde, curvaceous, Camilla-like… Yes, Rupert Everett is back. The new headmistress of St Trinian's tells Justine Picardie about his latest scars and scrapes - and why he's not (quite) the diva he used to be.

It is six o'clock on a weekday morning, and I am sitting on Rupert Everett's elegant white sofa in his equally elegant wood-panelled drawing room in Bloomsbury while he prepares himself for a day of filming his latest role, as Miss Fritton, the headmistress of St Trinian's. Rupert is reading a book by the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti and quotes me selected extracts. 'What is life?' he says, to which I look blank, feeling somewhat unprepared to discuss spiritual matters this early in the day. 'Not all the things that we go through,' he continues, still quoting the guru, 'power, position, prestige, fame, or no fame… that's not life; that's part of our mishandling of life.'

He looks at me, expectantly, hoping for an intelligent response, but I am distracted by the green plastic cart of Shrek toys on the wooden parquet floor, a by-product, presumably, of his recent reprisal of the role of Prince Charming in Shrek 3. 'I wish you'd concentrate,' he says, irritably. 'Honestly, you're never going to learn to meditate, and it would do you so much good.' Then, possibly infuriated by my continuing inattention, Rupert snaps the book shut, and pulls another one down from the shelf, containing the original St Trinian's cartoons by Ronald Searle, showing a variety of gin-swigging, cigar-smoking schoolgirls, apparently hell-bent on wreaking havoc with their hockey sticks. 'St Trinian's - defender of anarchy,' he says, 'like me… Just remember, one man's terrorist is another woman's freedom fighter.' And with these somewhat conflicting thoughts for the day, we depart by car for the film set, a dilapidated mansion in Buckinghamshire.

I have known Rupert for several years now, and witnessed his various incarnations in a variety of locations, as he swoops around the world on a restless itinerary of his own devising, from Phnom Penh to Paris, Hollywood to Haiti, including a mysterious assignation involving voodoo parties and CIA operatives in Port-au-Prince ('all in the interests of research for my next book'). Despite his elusiveness, he is, for the most part, a kind and loyal friend, with just enough of a devilish streak to make him entertaining. But today, there is more than the usual whiff of danger in the air around him; today, he seems intent on shaking things up, as is his wont when bored or exasperated.

Things have already got off to a bit of a sticky start, after my failure to stay the night with him, as planned, in readiness for our early start this morning (my domestic responsibilities had scuppered this notion).

'Up close and personal - that's the way to do an interview,' he says. 'Mind you, the thing about stars is that we're all chillingly unsexy in bed.' Given that he only has one bed, I point out that he will have had a far more peaceful night's sleep than if I had been there with him, wide awake and rigid with tension on the edge of the mattress, but he disagrees entirely. 'I'm exhausted,' he says, 'and it's all your fault. I've been up since 4am, worrying you wouldn't arrive in time this morning.'
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Perhaps it is exhaustion, therefore, as much as solidarity with the spirit of St Trinian's, that explains why, on the way to the set, Rupert eats three Cadbury's Creme Eggs in between puffing a small roll-up.

'I wouldn't normally do this,' he says, inhaling chocolate and tobacco with equal alacrity, 'but I have to get into my schoolgirl frame of mind.' Then he flicks through the pages of Hello!, giving an acerbic commentary on the celebrities featured within. 'Look at that, another ghastly evening at the Met. Forget St Trinian's, I should really be the headmistress of a star academy. All these so-called style divas have such terrible dress sense.'

His voice becomes increasingly disapproving, his dark eyebrows raised ever higher, as he regards an assembly of female stars at a New York ball. 'I could give them a proper going over, and then put them back on the road. Ooh, look, Kate Moss's hands have become almost as grabby as Madonna's. Actually, they're all at it, clutching their handbags with knobbly claws, like it's stuffed full of cash. That will have to be one of the first week's lessons at school. How to hold your handbag without looking grasping.'

By the time we reach the location - a Home Counties gothic monstrosity, surrounded by fields awash with mud, through which crocodiles of little girls pick their way, dressed in St Trinian's uniforms - his demeanour is increasingly headmistressy; polite, yet with the potential to catch one out. He sweeps into his trailer, strips off his black tracksuit, revealing all six foot four of himself in naked glory, complete with rippling six-pack stomach, bulging pectorals and remarkably muscular torso. At 48, he is still handsome, but he nevertheless regards himself with more than a little discontent, and remarks, 'I'm thinking of having a pubic lift, and maybe a face lift, too, with some rather visible, neatly tailored scars, like the seams on a suit. Oscar Wilde said the tragedy of all women is that they turn into their mothers, and the tragedy of men is that they don't. Update: the tragedy is that everything droops.'

Then he wriggles into his Miss Fritton costume: a large quantity of pale pink undergarments, two enormous plastic breasts, and a floral and tweed outfit of the kind worn by royal ladies of a certain age. Once his make-up has been applied and his wig fitted, he looks uncannily like Camilla Parker Bowles, and reveals a similarly shapely pair of legs. Meanwhile, his make-up artist, Pat Hay, and hairstylist, Jamie Pritchard, who have been working with him for years, are slightly lemon-lipped, to which Rupert seems utterly oblivious. 'As a woman, he is 13 times more lethal than a man,' says Jamie, with a small sigh.

Sadly, Rupert's co-star, Colin Firth, who plays Geoffrey Thwaites, the Minister for Education, is not on set today, so I cannot quiz him on the progress of their on-screen affair, though I do sneak a look at the photographs that show the pair in bed together, engaged in a passionate kiss. This is their third film - they worked on The Importance of Being Earnest (with the same team behind St Trinian's, the directors Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson); but their relationship goes all the way back to Another Country, which made both of them famous nearly quarter of a century ago. If Rupert's new foreword to the latest paperback edition of his memoir is anything to go by, their friendship may have been slightly strained by his original account of the filming of Another Country (a fictionalised version of the schooldays of the British spy Guy Burgess, played by Rupert), in which he described Firth strumming his guitar between scenes, singing Left-wing protest songs: 'Colin Firth says he did not bring a guitar to the set of Another Country and that, even if he did, he never learnt to play Lemon Tree. Last week, on the set of St Trinian's, which we are filming as this tome goes to print, he went even further and categorically swore that he had never worn sandals (without socks, maybe). Reinvention is the celebrity spring clean.'

Rupert, however, declares that he and Firth - whom he has christened 'Frothy' - are getting on terribly well, 'especially now that we have finally been united as lovers. Although I think Colin took it a little bit too seriously - he wanted to do take after take of the snog scene. I suppose he's always been rather in love with me.' He pauses, and gazes at his female reflection in the dressing-room mirror. 'I'm much less of a diva now than I was in Another Country,' he says, as if trying to talk himself into good behaviour for the day ahead. 'In the end, it's pointless arguing with the director - we'd be here all night. And anyway, the director is in charge…'
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He looks morose, just for a few seconds, and murmurs to himself - or rather, to Miss Fritton - 'the game is up'. Then he glances at the photographs pinned around the mirror of the various supermodels, Hollywood starlets and pop singers appearing as St Trinian's alumni (Lily Cole, Mischa Barton and Girls Aloud, for starters). 'It's just as well I'm gay,' he says. 'If I was straight, I'd be a hopeless mad movie star who f---s everything that moves. That's what I'd be like - married to every single girl that I'd worked with, on wife number 10 by now, always being sued for divorce because I'd been caught with two chicks somewhere… Or I'd be like a rapper - three girls at the same time, coke, orgies, yachts. I would be a monster, actually. I'd have to be competitive on a lad level with all those other male movie stars. I'd probably be an alcoholic, too. Mind you, I'd have made a lot more money - 20 times more money, probably.' He sighs, adjusts his bosoms, pats his blonde wig, and heads out of the trailer to film his next scene. 'After this, I'm disappearing,' he says, over his shoulder to me.

Some weeks pass before we meet each other again. At one point, he calls me from Moscow, where he is on a UN charitable mission ('Do stop probing,' he says, when I ask why); a little afterwards, from the Swiss Alps ('I'm in need of a dose of fresh air'); and then from Berlin ('Don't ask'). Meanwhile, I am beginning to despair about writing this article, and I ring Colin Firth, who clarifies a number of points. 'The St Trinian's bed scene rather surprised me,' he says, in tones of mock-seriousness. 'Rupert turned into a giggling schoolboy. He was adamant that we shouldn't kiss; I was adamant that we should. But the chemistry was definitely there in the end.'

As for the disputed version of his youthful self in Another Country, he says, 'I never wore sandals or played a guitar. But I did bring a copy of the Guardian, so I suppose the essence of Rupert's version is sort of true. It was a grisly experience - he was so badly behaved, and had the most powerful bullying technique, which was that he shimmied onto the set, and everyone promptly fell in love with him, so it was awful to be subsequently excluded by him. One was very easily seduced by Rupert. And he was much more worldly than me - I thought I was sophisticated, until I met him. But I think we've grown towards each other now - I'm less earnest, he's more radical. And we do work well together. Or maybe we're stuck in some diabolical vortex, Rupert and I…' He laughs, and so do I, though I am beginning to wonder whether Rupert has in fact disappeared into a diabolical vortex of his own making, leaving the rest of us behind.


But eventually, he surfaces again, as always, and we meet for a drink in Claridge's. He has shaved most of his hair off, revealing some terrifying-looking scars on the back of his head; when I ask him what happened, he says, enigmatically, 'Scars from life's gay battlefield, darling.'

Still, he is slightly more forthcoming on the subject of his latest projects - he has written a film script with a friend about the last days of Oscar Wilde (a script which is, according to Firth, 'the best thing I've read in years - Wilde has been so neutered by china teacups and repertory companies, and Rupert has put the balls back into him'); and is now contemplating having a Romanov eagle tattooed across his head. 'Then I'm disappearing again, but for longer this time,' he says. 'A year, possibly.'

Suddenly, he looks rather like Lord Lucan - truly, someone should cast him in the role - and I tell him so.
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'Don't worry,' he says, 'I'm not planning on murdering anyone. Well, only my career…'

This is a rather astute piece of self-analysis, if partly tongue-in-cheek; for while he has proved adept at sustaining his career, despite coming out as gay in a profession that might have preferred to keep him as a heterosexual heart-throb, he is also more capable of subversion than any other famous actor I can think of, a talent that extends to subverting himself. It's what prevents him from taking himself too seriously - his likeable self-deprecation makes him the opposite of the stereotypical egocentric movie star - but his anarchic streak runs deeper than any St Trinian's schoolgirl. Perhaps not coincidentally, it surfaced while he was playing a schoolboy in the stage play of Another Country - a huge West End hit that pre-dated the film version - when he took to staging elaborate practical jokes to alleviate the boredom of matinees. 'I invented whole new sections of dialogue,' he writes in his memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. 'I appeared in wigs. I performed in French. What was I thinking?' One answer to that question might be that he was thinking - as always - of escape. Another Country was the height of theatrical triumph - at 21, he was feted by the critics and applauded by audiences - yet by the time he reached the fourth week of the run, 'It didn't matter that I was just starting out… I felt as though I had been in the business since Roman times… the dusty smell of the dressing room seemed like live burial… You stared at yourself glumly in the mirror. Only last month those naked light bulbs around the edge were the symbol of everything you loved. Now you wanted to take them out one by one and eat them.'

I suppose you might see his innate tendency to anarchy, irreverence and rebellion as being a reaction against the upper-class Catholic conventions of both his family and his education. The second son of an army major who later became a successful stockbroker, he was born in Norfolk in 1959, at his maternal grandparents' house, while his father was stationed abroad. Subsequent holidays were spent in Norfolk, where his grandfather - Admiral Sir Hector MacLean - was intent on teaching him to sail, while he was equally intent on escaping to the attic, or hiding in a huge Victorian wardrobe, behind his grandmother's mothballed ballgowns. At seven, Rupert was sent away to boarding school, as his brother Simon had been before him. His account of this - which he told me the first time we met - is heartbreaking: 'I remember packing my case, and being so excited the night before, because I had no idea what it was really going to be like. And then we were driving there, getting further away from home, and finally arriving, smelling the smell, seeing the other boys, still not quite understanding, and going up the staircase with the headmaster and the matron and my mum and dad. And matron said, "I'll take you to tea now." And my mum said, "We'll be going while you're at tea, so I'll say goodbye now." I said "Please, don't go, please"… and I went to tea and we had little white iced cakes with a cherry on top, and I was crying onto my cake."

But there was no escaping prep school, nor Ampleforth afterwards, a Catholic boarding school run by monks in north Yorkshire; at least not until he was 16, and 'three years into the five-year sentence of public school'. Having finally persuaded his parents to let him go to the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, he discovered, to his horror, that he found it almost as constrictive as Ampleforth. 'One wore tights and a jockstrap at Central instead of rugger socks and shorts,' he observes. 'Both places were institutions and had the bad breath of tradition, authority and class obsession.' After two unhappy years there, he was thrown out.

It would be unsurprising, therefore, if the experience of filming St Trinian's had not stirred up an odd mixture of emotions; and indeed, on the day I spent with him on set, he was talking about wanting to go back to writing another book, instead of pitching for his next acting job. 'I love being on my own and writing, rather than straining every nerve to be a team member, when inside all I want to do is to bite everyone's head off and eat them whole.' As he spoke, he glared at me, as if he was contemplating biting my head off, too.

Now, as St Trinian's is about to open, he seems restored to his usual cheerfulness. 'Darling,' he says, sympathetically, when we meet for another drink, 'it must be ghastly being a woman. I had no idea of the nightmare of wearing heels. They're so bad for the back. I'm definitely not wearing them for my next role.'

When I remind him that it wasn't so long ago that he said he didn't want another film part, he looks at me with genuine surprise. 'Don't be so ridiculous,' he says. 'I love acting. I came out of the womb looking for an agent.' He's right, of course; for Rupert Everett is a natural actor, and a born tease, as well.

DB7

Trinnies and trannies Why St Trinian’s was shockingly ahead of its time. By Bryony Gordon

Young girls in wildly inappropriate dress. Bullying and threats of violence. Drinking, smoking and gambling. No, this isn't teenagers behaving badly in 2007. It's the St Trinian's girls, as created by the cartoonist Ronald Searle in the 1940s.

Even the most anti-social of 21st-century teenage girls would have trouble surviving St Trinian's, whose pupils were described in 1950 as 'the most diabolical set of schoolgirls ever'. Listen, for example, to this extract from their school song: 'The battle's to the strongest/ Might is always right./ Trample on the weakest/ Glory in their plight.' Witness Searle's drawings, which are both devilishly naughty and fantastically twisted: girls lying dead after a team sport went wrong (lacrosse sticks were often used as weapons) or having been given deadly nightshade by a fellow pupil in a science lesson; buxom sixth formers smoking cigarettes in a provocative manner. And hear the words of St Trinian's head 'mistress', Miss Millicent Fritton: 'In other schools, girls are sent out quite unprepared into a merciless world, but when our girls leave here, it is the merciless world which has to be prepared.'

It's fictional, of course, though Searle, who spent three years in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp, based his rather sadistic cartoons on a Scottish school. Miss Catherine Fraser Lee, the head of St Trinnean's in Edinburgh, denied that her girls were ever as naughty as those that Searle had created. We shall never know, as it closed its doors in 1946, just as the story of St Trinian's was beginning.

Five hugely popular books were published before the first film, The Belles of St Trinian's, was made. The year was 1954 and its producers, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, worked with Searle to create a film that stayed true to its riotous roots. Alastair Sim took Rupert Everett's role of the headmistress in drag, while George Cole starred as Flash Harry, the shady conman who was often responsible for the troubles that befell the boarding school. Joyce Grenfell, Frankie Howerd and Sid James also starred over the next two decades.

In The Belles, the girls resort to illegal gambling to keep the school open; in Blue Murder at St Trinian's they cheat at an essay competition to win a trip to Italy; The Pure Hell of St Trinian's features arson and kidnap; and one probably does not need to explain what happens in The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery (right). All of them were great hits, though the attempt in 1980 to reprise the formula with The Wildcats of St Trinian's (starring Maureen Lipman and Sheila Hancock) is perhaps best forgotten (and indeed often is).

The 'little horrors' of St Trinian's were, at the time, pretty shocking to audiences. Girls had never behaved like boys before - at least not on screen - and to see murderous fourth formers wreaking havoc was quite something. Moreover, girls had never been seen acting like that with boys before. The sixth formers were as provocative and sexy as the fourth formers were violent, and were often seen disappearing behind bike sheds with members of the opposite sex, or hitching up their skirts to reveal the black tops of their stockings. If you wanted to know how school uniforms came to be seen as disturbingly sexy, you could do worse than look to St Trinian's.

It will be interesting to see how paranoid 21st-century audiences react to the new film, with its actresses spilling cleavage out of their school uniforms. Whatever their reaction, it would be fair to say that the dark drawings of Ronald Searle are as relevant today as they were 60 years ago.

julian_craster

silverwhistle

Looks not unlike one of my female relatives, actually.

"Trust me, I'm a doctor...!"

batman

Or maybe ...



... deliberate or coincidence?

Bats.

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Hackett

who was the actor that had a small part in Charlies Aunt, Roddy Llewellyn?

silverwhistle

Possibly, in as much she's fairly typical of a whole swathe of County ladies of a certain age.

But I was reminded of one of my older cousins, or (if you add glasses) my mother about 30 years ago.

"Trust me, I'm a doctor...!"

penfold

The Four Feathers; the 1939 version is the best, and I think it was the third or fourth....and The Thief of Bagdad from '40 is better than the Fairbanks original; but you have to prefer Disney's Jungle Book to Korda's....

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

batman

The Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon is far superior to the Ricardo Cortez version, although that one is pretty good!

Bats.