Characters
- Ralph Filthy (Planer): Richie's showbiz agent. He is sleazy and sickly and has, to quote writer Elton, "the morals of a dog caught short on a croquet lawn" (a line he would re-use as the tag line for his 1989 novel Stark). Quote: "Boys. It's not often I get excited but right now I feel like I've been locked in an off-licence". His speech is peppered with Polari and he refers to Richie as "Daughter"; his lapel also features a blue rose, a symbol of a quest for the impossible.
- Gertrude "Richie" Rich (Mayall): a perennially "resting" (out of work) actor whose most prominent work to date includes links on TVS. Despite this, he considers himself a "veritable superstar" and has paranoid delusions about everyone he meets wanting to either cash in on his fame or assassinate him. Hence, he hires a bodyguard.
- Edward Didgeridoo Catflap (Edmondson): Richie's faithless minder; permanently drunk, disloyal, and violent. Occasionally, Catflap holds up the pretence of being the best friend of Richie, although this is usually for personal gain (Edmondson's character in Bottom, Eddie Hitler, is similar, but not identical).
Read more about this topic: Filthy Rich & Catflap
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—
which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
—Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)