The Green Man (1956)

Colin Gordon: Reginald Willoughby-Cruft

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Quotes 

• [Reginald Willoughby-Cruft is a pompous BBC radio announcer. He has discovered vacuum-cleaner salesman William Blake in various compromising situations with his fiancée] 

  Reginald Willoughby-Cruft : [to William Blake]  By heaven! I'd thrash the life out of you... if I didn't have to read the nine-o'clock news.

• Ann Vincent : He wasn't the real Mr. Bostock, of course, because the real Mr. Bostock would be Mrs. Bostock's husband, if she had one alive. Which naturally, we don't know because we've never met her. But she might have. In which case, there would be two of them, but only one real one.

  Reginald Willoughby-Cruft : I really can't bring myself to ask you to say that all over again, Ann.

• Radio Announcer : This is the BBC Home Service. "Five Minutes of Free Verse".

  William Blake : We can do without that.

  Radio Announcer : Here is Reginald Willoughby-Cruft who will read a group of poems by Milton Boyle entitled "Vicious Cycle."

  Reginald Willoughby-Cruft : "Her beauty has a kind of ugliness, a strangulated loveliness, compressing the jugular of my sensitivity as ivy tourniquets trunk of tree turning the arboreal royalty into beanpole servitors. Burying the berries in a fruitless operation so that the name of her - Ann... Ann... Asininely monosyllabic. The mere label she goes by. Yet pulsing with a drum beat. Ann - Ann - Ann - Ann!" Ann, I can't go on. Listen to me, wherever you are. You can go to your blasted vacuum cleaner. I'm through. Through, through, through, through...

  Radio Announcer : We must apologise to listeners for a slight technical hitch. And that brings us to the end of broadcasting for tonight. Goodnight, everybody. Goodnight.