My First Rule of Thumb...

I am living and breathing Bugsy Malone at the moment. For the last 4 days I've been wandering around singing to myself and accidentally accosting people oon the street to ask if they have ever considered being a boxer. It's not an ideal situation... not many people are that keen on being boxers if they haven't already started and so they're just giving me odd looks and asking if I'm ok.

Personally, I would not like to be a boxer. But, I have decided that I would like to remake an awful lot of films with children and see what it does to the story line. I would dearly like to see Inception remade with the sort of dreams that children have instead of all those guns and spinning tops... far too creepy and deathy for my liking. What we need is a few narwhals turning spontaneously into unicorns before vomiting sour sweeties onto the floor. Much better!

I think Bugsy Malone is a cracking film... I've never seen the live version... and it seems to be one that I can't imagine being remade. There are too many really cool performances that sort of make the film/character to the point where you can't really see them being played by anyone else. Jodie Foster as Tallulah is a little piece of brilliance shoe horned into an awful lot of eyeliner and a slinky dress.

My desire to cram kids into plotlines is far from unique though... obviously the marketing execs got on to it with the toilet roll and the sweetie adverts. Personally, I am absolutely terrified of the little girl in the haribo advert - she is not nearly as cool as Fat Sam - but the concept is there... perhaps the world would be a much jollier place if we occasionally gave high powered jobs to small people so that we can laugh at them trying to be taken seriously. It oculd only be classed as child cruelty if we admitted that we all hate our jobs and considered the idea of giving them to a younger version of ourselves mean.

Perhaps we could just throw the concept of Thursday in the bin and make it "A Child Has Your Job Now" day...? And then on Thursdays all the pressure will go while we watch 2 foot people in suits filing pieces of paper and getting so stressed they need a cigarette. Magical! It would give us all something really great to talk about on Fridays, and children would learn to appreciate their childhoods a lot more because they've had a brief snapshot of what adulthood would be like.

Foolproof. Thank you Bugsy!