Mean Machine

[Rabeen]

This may have been covered when this movie first came out, but I watched the film on Sky last night and in one of the opening scenes in the Governors office there are clearly two Albion penants framed on the walls, any one know why, or the significance, there was certainly no reference to the Albion in the film....

Cheers

 

[Trigger]

Its Ralph Brown who is the guv, a lifelong Albion fan.

 

[Rabeen]

Brilliant, thanks Trigger.

Dave

 

[Charlies Shinpad]

I sat next to him at the Watford away game,and didnt realise it was him!!
I also heard that he didnt get paid for doing Mean Machine,and it took a while to get the money out of them,

So any budding Film stars out there!!

 

[BensGrandad]

What about 'the screw' with the white hair none other than Perry Digweed but I shouldn't think many on here would remember him

 

[coach03]

What, 'Diggers?' as we never called him?! He of the blond bouffant?

 

[Braders]

quality film btw got mean machine 7 on the back of the black away shirt

 

[Tom Bombadil]

For anyone who doesn't know Ralph Brown is a great character actor with a long and distinguished career.

After an early career in rep his first film work was in a series of comedies starring George Formby. Ralph's public school accent didn’t prevent him from playing a succession of Lancashire coalminers and his virtuosity on the jews harp led to a memorable duet with George in the seminal 1937 film Up Aunties Back Passage (Dir.M.Raven)

Ralph’s work didn’t go unnoticed and his big break through came on the 1942 Bing Crosby/Bob Hope film The Road to Morocco. Ralph’s part was only small (shifty arab no.3) but his notoriously right-wing views endeared him to the old fascist Hope and led to work on the further “Road” movies including Road to Zanzibar, Road to Utopia, Road to Hell, Road Island Red, Old Shoreham Road, A27 and of course the financially disastrous Road to Wembley.

Ralph worked regularly throughout the fifties, but is remembered during this period for his enthusiastic contributions to the house committee on un-American activities. While many actors of the time bravely stood up to the McCarthyite witch hunt Ralph was only too happy to shop any number of fellow professionals. Considering he thought the Daily Mail showed dangerous socialist leanings this is hardly surprising. Among the careers he cut short were those of the famous writing team of McKay and Blackman who didn’t work again until the early eighties when they broke into television. They are of course best known now for their work on the seminal soap opera’s Eldorado and The High Road.

Ralphs regular attendance at cross dressing parties thrown by J Edgar Hoover led him to meet Charlton Heston and a lifelong friendship developed bound together by their love of unnecessary firearms. Ralph almost became involved in a case that was a precursor to the current controversy of the Tony Martin case. Ralph’s Balham mansion had been repeatedly burgled so he set a trap hoping to catch the notorious Dollis Hill catburgler, Carlos “the pussy” Scovell. Unfortunately things didn’t go to plan and while Carlos escaped with a valuable collection of Edwardian erotica, Ralph succeed only in blowing off his left testicle with an antique duelling pistol.

The friendship with Heston led to work on Ben Hur, where he played Charltons chief muscle oiler, El Cid, a reprise of his shifty Arab character and a succession of 60’s films culminating in Planet of The Apes where his unusually hairy body meant three hours less a day in make up than the other actors leaving him with time to pursue his main hobby, trawling LA’s nightspots for underage rent boys

While regularly working with Chuck, Ralph was pursuing a parallel career in the Carry On movies. He never worked with Babs Windsor but did get to make melon squeezing jokes with Liz McAuliffe, Judith Burke, Ceri Rees and Clair Bradford actresses rarely seen fully clothed in the popular series. In fact one actress he worked with on Carry On Luggage, Lynn Muollo became his eighth wife. The half Danish half Italian actress was married to Ralph for a mere three hours after she discovered her new husband and his best man in flagrante in the registry office waiting room. However the story ended happily when she invested the divorce settlement in a salami factory in Leicester and is now the UK’s biggest supplier of processed horse and donkey meat products.

Ralph has been married now a total of 28 times including three marriages to Elizabeth Taylor and eight to Zza Zza Gabor. This is doubly impressive as he is widely consider to be camper than Julian Clary and Graham Norton combined.

His next project was a hit single in conjunction with Peter Floyd the despised trad jazzer. The song “Travelling on the Other Bus” is surely the most bizarre record to reach number nine in the UK hit parade being as it is Ralph reading a passage from James Joyce’s Ulysses over Peter Floyds rendition of Strangers on the Shore, played on a kazoo. The follow up a duet with welsh tenor Aelred Wilkinson deservedly bombed and the planned album to be recorded with the Maxwell Cooter trio was subsequently shelved.

At the beginning of the seventies Ralph teamed up with the publicist Paul Camillin and at this point his career began to nosedive. Ralph hardly seemed to notice as he threw himself into two of his passions, drugs and sport. A keen follower of cricket his experiences led to a book “Bowling from the Pavilion End” jointly written with Ian Walker. But it was his love of football that was to be most important as he instructed his business partner Andy Hawes to purchase the Albion for him. However due to monumental incompetence from both Andy and Ralph. Brighton and Hove Albion weren’t bought, instead Ralph spent five eventful seasons as owner of Albion Rovers in the Scottish second division.

After selling his football club Ralph spent several years with his old school chum Major Peter Jackson, the famous polo player and catamite. Living with him and his numerous young male servants in the far east Ralph finally got to kill someone with his antique pistols during an evening game of shoot the fuzzywuzzy.

But the smell of the greasepaint was too strong and soon Ralph was off back to England where he revived his career in the film Withnail and I. This is a little known fact as this is rarely brought up when discussing Ralphs acting career.

Ralph’s career was soaring once again in the nineties when he appeared in number of British Gangster films By John Hawkins including The Guv’nor, The Slags, The Jellied Eel Boys, Pitbull , Rottweiler and Sense and Sensibilty and he continues to work regularly at the age of ninety-eight.

Ralph is a colossus if British acting, and has influenced everyone from Neil Burchill to Tim Colville. He is deeply loved by the public, just a few week ago a contestant on Master mind chose as his specialist subject the soliciting convictions of Ralph Brown 1943-1987 and indeed won his round (well done Drew)

He lives in Hove with long term partner Mike Curtis

Many thanks for the help in compiling this article go to Matthew James and Callum May, from whom most of the source material was compiled

 

[Gwylan]

LOL.

Best posting for ages.

It's Ralph to a T

 

[Wozza]

You think anyone can be arsed to read that Mike?

 

[Tom Bombadil]

Author not mentioned in article

 

[Pevenseagull]

a useful insight into the great, if somewhat louche, man

I never knew he was in Withnail and I

 

[Tom Bombadil]

For some reason it just never seems to be mentioned

 

[marvin]

a useful insight into the great, if somewhat louche, man

I never knew he was in Withnail and I

Played Danny (at least I think that was the name) in a very long wig in that over rated and boring film.

Played the same or similar character in Wayne's World (or Wayne's World 2 one of that lot)

Danny is the one who invented the Camberwell Carrot you know, and its a carrot cos it looks like a carrot and Camberwell cos that's where he was at the time. Or something like that from one of those absolutely awful nostalgia progs I love living the past or something like that.

 

[zefarelly]

and he had the voddoo doll in Withnail . . . .class

 

[Blackadder]

Watched the film last night. I noticed the seagulls frames straightaway. It's instinct.

I was going to post but thought "Best to run a search first" someone else is bound to have spotted it!

First Judge John Deeds, Now Mean Machine. what next?

 

[marvin]

Some bloke running around in a film about rugby in a Sanddtex Seagulls shirt!

(For those not in the know this is also Ralph and the film is up n under but everytime its on someone is bound to say "seagulls shirt in a film on BBC last night!")

 

[Blackadder]

I've seen "up n under" a few times and I have to confess missing the shirt

I always remember Samantha Janus in the shower though!

 

[Dropkick Turnip]

Buy Perry D's Autograph Here!