For sale: The Oxo Tower. Wld suit first-time buyer.

I do like watching a film somewhere where a line or a shot gets an entirely local reaction it wouldn't get anywhere else. The last good example was when I saw 'Shakespeare in Love' in Cambridge, and all the mildly high-brow literary in-jokes about John Webster or the dark lady were met with the ostentatious guffaws of English students anxious to prove to one another that they got the reference.

Well, there was another one yesterday. We went to see the new London-set Woody Allen film 'Match Point'. (Not perhaps the most subtle and nuanced work of his career. For instance, four people, three rich and one poor, are ordering in a restaurant. Rich Person 1 chooses 'Baked potato with truffles. Yum yum yum!' Rich persons 2 and 3 opt for 'the caviar'. Poor person goes for 'roast chicken'. Oh, I see. Because he's poor. Later on, this line is spoken: 'Perhaps it would be more fitting if I was to be apprehended.' Because that's how people in England talk, you know. I mean, you comprehend.)

Anyway, we saw this film at Angel, and easily the biggest laugh of the film came when the (admittedly very rich) newly-weds entered their enormous new flat, and the wife told the husband it had a lovely view. Cut to the view: a vast panorama of the Thames at Westminster, up to and including Big Ben. At which the audience, all of whom had presumably rented or bought flats in London, collectively wet itself laughing.