3 posts tagged “quotations”

Here they are: viewers’ favourite Gene Hunt quotations from Life on Mars, according to an Auto Trader poll.

1. Don’t move, you’re surrounded by armed bastards! (28 per cent)
2. He’s got fingers in more pies than a leper on a cookery course. (22 per cent)
3. You’re as nervous as a very small nun at a penguin shoot. (15 per cent)
4. Anything happens to this motor, I’ll come round your houses and stamp on all your toys. Got it? Good kids. (9 per cent)
5. There will never be a woman Prime Minister as long as there’s a hole in my arse. (8 per cent)
6. (Sam to Gene) She’s as good a detective as anyone here. (Gene to Cartwright) Fair enough, see if you can detect me a nice pack of Garibaldis. (7 per cent)
7. Your son, Mrs Bathurst, was a cold-hearted killer and if there’s a hell, he’s going there to be poked up the arse with sharp fiery sticks forever and ever, Amen. (5 per cent)
8. Murderers do not play tennis. (3 per cent)
9. (Sam to Gene) How does your wife put up with you? (Gene) It must be my legendary prowess as a lover. (2 per cent)
10. You so much as belch out of line and I’ll have your scrotum on a barbed wire plate. (1 per cent)

   But where are: ‘What have you been eating? Pedigree Chum?’ and ‘You great, soft, sissy, girly, nancy, French, bender, Manchester United-supporting poof’?

Life on Mars meets Camberwick Green

4 comments

One reason we love Gene Hunt, as played by Philip Glenister, in Life on Mars is the stuff he gets away with saying on prime-time TV. The excuse: it’s set in 1973 and he’s a mean-bastard cop. The reality: probably a backlash against political correctness. Here’s something no 2007 character could ever say, especially as it makes fun of gays:

He is a bum bandit, a poof, fairy, a queer, a queen, fudge packer, uphill gardener, fruit picking sodomite.

Or when attacking Sam, also with the usual homophobic comments:

You great, soft, sissy, girly, nancy, French, bender, Man. United-supporting poof!

In fact, anything blue seems to get a laugh:

I’ve come at this from more angles than Linda Lovelace.

Or the use of brand names:

What have you been eating? Pedigree Chum?

Or just famous people:

Wouldn't Nixon notice a van parked outside the White House?

   Then, the other characters get their own back, like Sam:

Listen to me. I can just about handle you, driving like a pissed-up crackhead and treating women like beanbags, but I’m going to say this once and once only, Gene: stay out of Camberwick Green!

Or, in summarizing Gene Hunt:

An overweight, over the hill, tobacco-stained, borderline alcoholic homophobe with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding.

   But I still think Dirty Harry has the most politically incorrect line, despite Gene Hunt:

Harry hates everybody. Limeys, niks, hebs, fat dagos, niggers, honkies, chinks, you name it.

   And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the American version of Life on Mars has a chance.
   I will miss this show when it finishes on Tuesday night in the UK.

At the post office today:

‘I didn’t know you sold plastic surgery brochures. Then I realized it was a Hello! cover with Melanie Griffith.’

Removing Dennis Hopper’s name in an interview and replacing it with Jim Caviezel, in correcting an error:

‘If you have to replace Hopper, replace him with Jesus.’