But first: When I promised, last week, to write about something light, and fluffy, “perhaps a piece on different ways of threading laces in shoes.”, I thought I was joking. Yet, a quick google reveals that lace-threading is indeed a thing. If you want to jazz up your footwear, see whether any of the 24 (count them!) lacing methods illustrated in this video speak to you. I certainly plan to be adding some of these to my repertoire!

In the end, I decided instead to write on the duck test, which I want to turn on its head. The classic duck test states: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. Fulfilling the three conditions is probably sufficient. I want to ask whether fulfilling the three conditions is also necessary.

In other words, can you be a duck if you don’t look like one, or if you don’t swim like one, or if you don’t quack like one? I’m not asking this literally, you understand. I can easily imagine a duck with one leg, or laryngitis, or even a decoy duck disguised by its fellows as a 12-bore shotgun. That would still indubitably be a duck…

Editor’s Note: I’m starting to feel the real subject of this week’s post drifting inexorably away. Time, I think, to call a spade a spade.

Bernice and I watched, last week, a gentle film called Stan and Ollie. If you haven’t seen the film, I’d be grateful if you’d spare two minutes and twenty-three seconds of your life to watch the official trailer, because it will give you a context for what I’m talking about.

In a nutshell, Stan and Ollie focusses principally on the relationship between Laurel and Hardy during a theatre tour of Britain that they undertook at the end of their professional careers in the early 1950s. We both came away from the film asking the inevitable question: ‘How accurate was that? Is that what really happened?’

Having thought about this question a little more over the last few days, I have come to the conclusion that this is actually three questions; there are basically three areas in which a film such as this can be accurate.

The first area is cultural background. Much of the film is set in England in 1953, and the filmmakers have taken great pains (as they usually do these days) to recreate the period. Of course, there will inevitably be some armchair expert on the period who watches the entire film in slow motion, checking every frame for accuracy, and who then delights in commenting online. You know the kind of thing:

‘At 16 minutes and 23 seconds, we see an Austin A40 Somerset drive past a newsagents shop. The Somerset clearly has two-tone bodywork, indicating that it is one of the limited edition of 500 saloons that Austin produced in 1953. The sandwich board outside the newsagents displays a headline: STALIN DIES! This places the date as Friday, 6 March, 1953, two days after Stalin’s death and a day after Russia released the news of his death to the rest of the world. However, the limited edition Somerset only went on sale on Monday 6 April, 1953. This egregious error completely ruined the film for me! Do film studios no longer employ anyone to check the accuracy of what they portray on screen?’

Watching an accurately recreated cultural background is usually great fun for anyone who lived through the period in question. ‘We had a radio exactly like that!’ ‘Remember buying butter from a large block?’ It is, of course, much less important for anyone who didn’t live through the period. It is also something that sometimes gets noticed only when a blatant error is committed.

A second level of authenticity is the accuracy of portrayal of real people. In this respect, Stan and Ollie is an incredible accomplishment. In a prosthetic body suit and with three hours in the make-up department every morning, John C Reilly takes on the form of Oliver Hardy. With more modest prosthetics and make-up, Steve Coogan does the same for Stan Laurel.

Vocally, and in their body movements and mannerisms, both actors bring the comedy duo to life with uncanny accuracy, while seeming entirely natural. They are even able to recreate on camera classic Laurel and Hardy routines and dances.

So, the film spares no effort of time and attention to detail in bringing these two comedy giants to life and placing them in a world where every detail rings true. And yet…and yet….Having gone to all that trouble, having ensured complete authenticity, the film then tells a story that distorts the truth (or at least the truth as presented in the published account of their career together, written by someone who was very close to both of them).

Let me give you a brief rundown of some of the liberties the film takes with the truth (spoiler alert). Three successful tours of Britain are condensed into one tour that begins very unsuccessfully. Hardy’s heart attack is moved to the end of the tour, whereas in reality it cut short the third tour after its opening night. Their wives accompanied them on their tours, whereas in the film they only join them at the end. Laurel’s wife at the time was a quiet personality; in the film, her character is swapped for that of one of his earlier wives, who was very strident.

Furthermore, the Robin Hood film that, in Stan and Ollie, they believe they are about to make in England, and that is basically the reason why they are embarking on a theatre tour of Britain at this point, was merely an idea at an earlier point that never reached the stage where they expected it to be made.

The film builds to a major argument between San and Ollie, who, in real life, never argued. Their personal relationship is altogether close and affectionate throughout the film, whereas in real life their relationship was much cooler and more professional. In the film, Laurel, after Hardy’s announcement that he is retiring after his heart attack, is persuaded to continue the tour with another comic. (In the end, he backs down as the curtain is about to rise on their first appearance together.) This is a fabrication. Laurel refused categorically to even consider appearing with anyone else.

And so on and so on. So, my question is: Is this in fact a film about Laurel and Hardy? It looks like the historical period, and they move and sound like Stan and Ollie, but if they don’t quack like the historical characters did, then is it a duck?

Actually, I think there’s another way to phrase this question. Would it have been better to make a film about a fictional double act. Why call them Laurel and Hardy? Why ‘burden’ a touching story of an onscreen and offscreen partnership with the added weight of mimicry of Laurel and Hardy?

I am reminded of the story of Peter Schaeffer writing Equus. While Schaeffer was being driven by a friend through the Suffolk countryside, the friend pointed out a riding stables and told Schaeffer that it had been in the news recently when a teenage stable-boy blinded twenty-six horses there, seemingly without cause. This story fascinated Schaeffer, but what is interesting is what he didn’t do with it. He made no attempt to research the story or attempt to find out what lay behind it.

Instead, with no knowledge of the incident beyond that one simple fact, he set himself the dramatic goal of creating ”a mental world in which the deed could be made comprehensible”, as he later explained. The result, Equus, is a beautiful, thrilling, profound play that probably shares none of its plot with the actual facts, apart from the criminal act itself, and that exists independent of anything that actually happened.

Would it not have made sense for the makers of Stan and Ollie to behave more like Schaeffer? If it is the relationship between the two men that interests them – and it clearly is – and if they are going to treat real events with contempt, then why burden themselves with anchoring the film in actual real people. It is not as though Laurel and Hardy have historical importance, as Shakespeare’s characters in his history plays (for example) have, so that his plots are an attempt to reshape history as an expression of loyalty to the Tudors.

Of course, the price that would be paid in this case is that we would be deprived of a very talented recreation of the comedy duo, a dazzling double performance. It is also true that much of what the writers and director can assume we know of Laurel and Hardy need only be very hastily sketched; the film can very quickly move to the twilight of their careers, where its interest is focussed.

At the same time, if the characters had been fictional, we would also have been spared a fairly ruthless and, from what I have read, unjustified character assassination of the theatrical impresario Bernard Delfont, who certainly comes off as the almost Victorian melodrama villain of Stan and Ollie. (Hal Roach doesn’t fare much better!) If I were a descendant of Delfont, I think I would want to sue.

So, bottom line, I am grateful to the makers of Stan and Ollie for giving us a little piece of movie magic. At the same time, I’m not sure that the kneejerk disclaimer that the film is based on real events, but that certain incidents and characters have been changed for dramatic purposes, really cuts it. When the portrayals are this accurate, they add, for us, an authenticity to the events that persuades us unconsciously, at least while we are watching, to forget the disclaimer and take the story at face value.

Now here’s someone not prepared to rest on his laurels… or his hardys. When I told Raphael how much my readers enjoyed his performance on the bell three weeks ago, he readily agreed to play an encore.