Crumblin' Mumbles
Apr. 20th, 2022 10:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
boccaderlupoI dreamed we were watching a scene from a British TV show from the '70s-'80s called "Crumblin' Mumbles." (To my knowledge, no such show exists in the waking world.) It had a kind of Benny Hill vibe, with lots of slapstick and pratfalls. The main character, one Mumbles, looked a bit like the Christopher Lloyd character from "Back to the Future." The show consisted mainly of brazzing horns and things falling on Mumbles, and passersby reacting with horror.
Long after the demise of this show, they apparently decided to do some kind of retrospective on it, in the early '90s, in Madison Square Garden. The wife and I were there, as she likes British things. They had assembled what was effectively a four-story, tiered layer cake of English woodlands in the middle of the Garden, where one could proceed up and down to different layers by way of stairs.
The idea was that said character, Mumbles, was to appear and waltz through the woodlands, with various bad things happening to him along the way, and we could observe in real time. Mumbles himself had aged considerably, and his movements were not what they once were.
Then all of a sudden he plunged through from the fourth floor to the third. Trees and debris rained down around him. We didn't know whether this was part of the act, or a bona fide precursor to structural collapse. People laughed nervously. Mumbles got up, brushed himself off, and continued, but now other characters on the various layers began to fall through, and the set become unglued, falling apart at the seams. There was a tremendous crash as the structure collapsed in on itself entirely.
To our surprise, Mumbles pushed a log off himself and stood up, taking a bow. We clapped and cheered.
Long after the demise of this show, they apparently decided to do some kind of retrospective on it, in the early '90s, in Madison Square Garden. The wife and I were there, as she likes British things. They had assembled what was effectively a four-story, tiered layer cake of English woodlands in the middle of the Garden, where one could proceed up and down to different layers by way of stairs.
The idea was that said character, Mumbles, was to appear and waltz through the woodlands, with various bad things happening to him along the way, and we could observe in real time. Mumbles himself had aged considerably, and his movements were not what they once were.
Then all of a sudden he plunged through from the fourth floor to the third. Trees and debris rained down around him. We didn't know whether this was part of the act, or a bona fide precursor to structural collapse. People laughed nervously. Mumbles got up, brushed himself off, and continued, but now other characters on the various layers began to fall through, and the set become unglued, falling apart at the seams. There was a tremendous crash as the structure collapsed in on itself entirely.
To our surprise, Mumbles pushed a log off himself and stood up, taking a bow. We clapped and cheered.
