Leo McKern: Bill Maguire
Photos
Quotes
-
Bill Maguire : No woman's irreplaceable, no matter how much you love her. There will be somebody else sooner or later. London's full of somebody else's.
-
Bill Maguire : [Maguire is on the phone to the editor after a pile of letters about nuclear tests is dumped on his desk] What am I supposed to do with these protest letters?
[pause]
Bill Maguire : Thank you very much but there are seventeen hundred of them.
-
Bill Maguire : They've shifted the tilt of the earth. The stupid, crazy, irresponsible bastards! They've finally done it.
-
Editor (Jeff) : I don't care a tinker's damn about this eclipse of the sun as such; the evening papers will cane it, it'll be dead by tomorrow morning. But what I do care about is why there was an eclipse of the sun ten days before it was due. Bill, this is your department.
Bill Maguire : I don't know why everybody regards me as Nostradamus. Your guess is as good as mine.
Editor (Jeff) : Yes, but I don't want guesses, I want facts. Try someone on top. Sir John Kelly...
Bill Maguire : Stenning got in to see Kelly.
Peter Stenning : He had twenty-eight armed guards around him.
Editor (Jeff) : Yes, but what did he say?
Peter Stenning : He wouldn't even say "Good night" in case it was taken as an official comment on the future of mankind.
-
[Bill asks Peter what is bothering him]
Bill Maguire : It's the kid, isn't it?
Peter Stenning : You ought to see the way they're bringing him up, Bill. It'll be the right prep school next. And then the right boarding school. And by the time they finish with him, he'll be a right bowler-hatted, who's-for-tennis, toffee-nosed gent, but he won't be MY son.
Bill Maguire : Oh, I don't know. That bad blood of yours is bound to come out.
-
[Scientist Sir John Kelly speaks to quell public fears on TV, watched by journalists in a pub:]
Sir John Kelly : When one considers the Moon is 240,000 miles away and the Sun ninety-three million, it is an extraordinary thing that astronomers can tell with such a degree of accuracy what their movements will be many years ahead.
Bill Maguire : Now, what does that mean?
Peter Stenning : It means he doesn't know what it's all about.
-
[Scientist Sir John Kelly speaks to quell public fears on TV, watched by the journalists in a pub]
Sir John Kelly : As I am sure most of you will know, a solar eclipse occurs as a result of the interposition of the Moon between the Earth and the Sun.
Bill Maguire : And that, children, is how the little bunny rabbit got his fluffy white tail.
-
Bill Maguire : [reading a newswire] There's a chap in Leeds says he can extract water from the atmosphere. Oh, as you were, he's been certified.
-
Peter Stenning : Well, Billy boy, they got me doing your homework. Five hundred words on sun-spots.
Bill Maguire : Have you seen the figures on some of these Earth tremors?
Peter Stenning : It's another planet trying to contact us.
[He picks up his empty coffee mug and speaks into it]
Peter Stenning : This is Earth. Are you receiving me? Are you receiving me? You are?
Peter Stenning : Well get knotted.
Peter Stenning : [He sets the mug down again]
-
Peter Stenning : I'm not up on my sci-fi. So, we're orbiting towards the sun, but how many billion light-years...
Bill Maguire : If that's true... I'd say there's about... four months.
Dick Sanderson : Before what?
Bill Maguire : Before there's a delightful smell in the universe of charcoaled mankind.
-
Bill Maguire : It's beautiful thing to watch a woman reform a man. All it took was for the Earth to catch fire.
