Plot
Ostensibly the plot is that of a book being written by Adolphus "Jim" Spriggs. Grytpype-Thynne blackmails Neddie with a 'compromising set of X-ray photographs'. Neddie decides to pawn himself at Henry Crun's pawnshop to pay for the photograph; however, he cannot leave the pawnshop safe until redeemed.
Neddie uses the ten pounds to redeem himself, but then has nothing to pay off his blackmailers with. Asking Wallace Greenslade the announcer (who has peeked ahead in the book) for help it is revealed that Major Bloodnok has the photographs for safekeeping.
Arriving at Bloodnok's, Neddie finds that the photographs are in a safe, and Bloodnok does not have the combination. At this point, the characters begin to alter the book with a typewriter, and everything they write comes true. Neddie forces Bloodnok to work by describing him working. Bloodnok retaliates by doing the same. Bluebottle is written in by the author to help them. He has some "silent explosive".
- Neddie : Can't anybody hear it explode?
- Bluebottle : Only idiots.
- Sound FX : Explosion!
- Bluebottle : Did you hear anything, Captain?
- Neddie (after a long pause) : No...
- Bluebottle : Good. 'Cuz only idiots can hear explosions like that.
- Eccles (running up) : Here! What was that big explosion!
- Neddie : So you heard it too?
- Bloodnok : No comment.
Going back into the room, they are surprised at gunpoint by Moriarty and Grytpype-Thynne, who had played a recording of an explosion "written in without the author's knowledge". Neddie disarms Moriarty by writing in an empty gun, but Grytpype quickly writes in an escape with the photographs in a speedboat traveling up the Amazon river. At that point Jim Spriggs, the author, appears and demands that they stop interfering with his book. Bloodnok sends him away by writing "...the author turned and left the room!"
Bluebottle, playing with the typewriter, imagines an attack by "Black Claw and his Chinese pirates", ruining their pursuit of the villains. Reaching the banks of the river, they encounter Henry Crun, who tells them "Someone gave Min a typewriter and here I am!" Appealing to the author, they get a happy ending written for them as Neddie marries his fiancée Gladys Minkwater.
- Schnorrer : I pronounce you, Neddie Seagoon, and you Gladys Minkwater, man and wife, and leave you to discover which is which!
But Bluebottle still has the typewriter. He writes that Gladys deserts Neddie for him. The show ends with Neddie shouting "Come back! You're too young for that!" and Bluebottle responding "That's what you think! Yee hee!"
Read more about this topic: Six Charlies In Search Of An Author
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
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“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)