Ian Hendry

For the record, Michael Caine says in 'Get Carter':

"you're a big man, but you're out of shape. With me it's a full time job. Now behave yourself".

It's always misquoted by people like Jonathan Ross and Steve Wright and his cronies. If you are going to quote from the film, get it right.

I could never work out why he threw Alf Roberts off the roof, though.

Thinking about 'Get Carter' got me thinking about Ian Hendry and my tape of 'Tales From the Crypt'. My friend BP had mentioned this obscure, early 1970s horror compendium from the giants of such films, Amicus. He'd remembered seeing it in his youth and how particularly frightening one part of the film was which featured Ian Hendry.

In 'Tales from the Crypt', several actors who you would appear to find in such a film get lost whilst touring some caves. They come face to face with a sinister Ralph Richardson dressed as a monk who gleefully reveals to each of them their grisly fates. Amongst them are Joan Collins, Nigel Patrick and Ian Hendry.

Hendry's segment is called something like 'Reflections on Death' and is above average for such a film. He plays a man who decides to leave his family for his mistress, becomes involved in a car crash, walks away from the burning wreckage and returns to his former home to be greeted by screams of horror from his wife and children. He then visits his mistress, now blind, who tells him that he must be mistaken because her lover died in the crash. He glances down at a glass coffee table to see his burnt face...

It's genuinely creepy partly because Hendry plays the whole thing straight. The Amicus films also usually had modern settings, so we have modern flats with lifts instead of castles with staircases and this is also, somehow, unsettling.

The film was recently shown on a late-night slot and, thinking of BP, I taped it and gave him the cassette. I wrote 'Ian Hendry' on the box and this was all it took; he looked at the tape and looked at me like he had just seen the reflection of a ghoul in a glass coffee table. He thanked me, but somehow I knew that he would never watch it...