The Specialist

[Cerys]

No, not this, but this.  I remembered seeing it some time in the 'Eighties, and decided to track it down.  A lovely little film - about nineteen minutes long.  Enjoy!

[gib]

Loved that. Looked up Bernard afterwards to try to place the accent, knew it wasn't quite the rural Essex accent of the time but very similar. Anyway, wiki says Herts/Bucks, so not far out.

[Blumf]

Delightful.

The writer was American, so I suppose old Lem should have had an Illinois accent really.

In 1929, inspired by a carpenter named 'Lem Putt' from his hometown of Urbana, Sale wrote The Specialist, a play about an outhouse builder. Because copyright infringement was widespread in Vaudeville, Sale enlisted the aid of two newspapermen to adapt The Specialist into a book. This enjoyed great success, and Sale spent the next several months responding to fan mail.

[Cerys]

Yeah, the names of some of the farmers are a giveaway that the original work isn't British.

[jobotic]

My dad had a very old copy of this in his downstairs loo. I remember a bit about a family privvy with two large and two small holes all in a row, which I found amazingly bizarre as a child.

[Cerys]

The first one of those I ever encountered was part of a bridge in Cornwall when I was a kid.  That had about four holes, too, but they were all the same size.