Arundel Affair 14 Report

A14– The Winterfest Affair

(a.k.a. “Just back away slowly”∫)

by
©Ann Manwell

Pictures - choose from the drop down menu options below:

∫The caption contest (a picture from 'The Five Daughters’ Affair, with Illya, Napoleon and Sandy backing away from the Karate Killers)was won by Cat working undercover as Delyth,

Sandy “Christmas? In March?”
Napoleon “We see this type often. Just back away slowly.”

Christmas came early/late to Arundel this year. The Comfort Inn is well used to our ‘type’ by now and pulled out all the stops (not to mention Christmas decorations and crackers) for us this year.

First there was the Christmas tree

Then there was snow.

An innovative idea this year was music videos before each episode. I hope this becomes a tradition.
The episodes we saw were all chosen because they were winter/snow related – ‘Abominable Snowman’ was better than I remembered after the bit with the abominable snowman, of course. Some nice touches , including Mr Waverly on an elephant. Not sure why the men from U.N.C.L.E. decided to start their gong torture themselves. ’The Matterhorn Affair’ was a bit silly but included some of my favourite lines “I’m Illya”. “I don’t feel so good myself”. And ‘Adriatic Express’ did have a little bit of snow. Allegedly the beautician was based on Estee Lauder although I am sure the latter did not found THRUSH. My how we laughed at the poor woman who kept finding dead bodies in the train and at the idea that Juliet Mills was only 19. Maybe in black and white ……. And there was Illya talking about ‘bursting into flames’.

And there was lots of snow in ‘The Ravine’. I really enjoyed this although I can see why it did not get a wide cinema release. And I knew early on that it would end in tears.

The extra ‘David’ events this year were some interviews he had done – one was about ‘Lion in Winter’.
(The extra ‘Robert’ event was an episode of ‘The Sentinel’ in which RV played an actor whose show had been canned when he stood up for an employee who was being harassed. No winter or snow <g> but it was nice to see some of Robert’s later work.)

And then there were turkeys

Some of these were in the special meal the Comfort Inn put on for us. An excellent choice of food as always. But not all the turkeys were on the menu .‘'Jingle Bells' was truly awful but NOT as bad as 'Gorilla'. Promotion for Macey’s Department Store collided with soft hearted dictators, ’cute’ kids, miracle cures and multiple tugging of heart strings. In fact the most imaginative thing in the whole episode was turkeys rescuing Illya and Napoleon. Or perhaps it was Napoleon being told “You do look gay”.

Birds also intruded in the quiz. And THE bird also intruded – not least as the prize for the treasure hunt. Jac had put a lot of work into this. Not only had she made picture clues – they were also colour coded to relate to each word in the clue -which nobody noticed! Personally I could not guess all the letters and am not good at anagrams so I ended up missing that part out, and used logic to guess where the next clue was likely to be.
But Ruth used even more logic and found the Golden Thrush – nesting in the car park.

And crackers

Linda, her family and Andrzej were busy in the run up to A14 making U.N.C.L.E related crackers with appropriate decorations. And some parachutists as ‘gifts’.And the hotel also provided crackers – though the jokes weren’t so good. Cracking was also involved in the code in the quiz which never fails to confound. This year the code was to do with GFU episode titles. Not the first things that spring to mind.

And presents

This year we each brought an U.N.C.L.E related Christmas present., There was a lot of ingenuity shown – mugs, toy lorries, sticks of rock, CD of 60s music, a T shirt. As Santa was not available, presents were distributed by a mixture of ‘pass the parcel’ and rolling dice.

The raffle had some great prizes again, quite a lot of them NCIS related.

Part of Saturday night was spent throwing ideas around for Arundel 16 – we know a rough outline for A15 – which will be an incredible 15 years after the first one. Our ‘type’ is definitely getting to be known around Arundel – the taxi driver taking us to the station said “See you next year”. That has never happened before.