Keith Waterhouse has joined the campaign – first reported here ten months ago – to persuade the BBC to lift its ban on re-broadcasting what many believe to be the best film ever made about British journalists.
According to Ephraim Hardcastle in Thursday’s Daily Mail, Waterhouse thinks the time is right to dust off and show again The Great Paper Chase.
Based on Anthony Delano’s book Slip-Up, it tells the story of how Daily Express journalist Colin Mackenzie tracked down great train robber Ronnie Biggs in Rio de Janeiro, how his paper lost the scoop, and how Scotland Yard detective Jack Slipper then failed to bring Biggs to justice.
Waterhouse, who provided the screenplay for the 1988 TV movie, told Hardcastle: ‘With Slipper now dead and Ronnie due out in the summer it would be good if the BBC were to show it again.”
Last August, Axegrinder reported that producer Graham Benson was urging the Beeb to lift its ban.
It’s probably just as well Hardcastle didn’t ask his former Mail colleague Colin Mackenzie for his views. ‘The film made me out to be a complete twit,’he told Axegrinder recently.
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