Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
Oh good heavens, I didn't realize the TVification was so old.
It's indeed old (as am I), but _so_ very good. The Ian Richardson antihero character Francis Ewan Urquhart gave 1990s Britain an ironic catchphrase in Urquhart's classic political hack's non-denial denial: 'You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment.' People of A Certain Age still guffaw when you quote it. A few years ago, when my wife and I took an ocean cruise from San Francisco to Sydney (where to my delight Russell Coker was then visiting, so we got to have fun together, for a few hours), all the way across the Pacific we _usually_ had dinner with the same urbane crowd of six other people, including a pair of British academics who were part of the ship's faculty. I repeatedly got points with my new British friends for not being obviously an ignorant savage, despite my citizenship and accent, and I delighted at occasionally poking them with unexpected knowledge of their country's affairs. (I've lived in Southwark, south side of London, and spent significant time in other places in the UK.) Once, the husband said something _for_ which Urquhart's famous evasion was an approriate response, so I puckishly said it, straight-faced. He looked startled, and said, 'Um, it's possibly a coincidence, but....' I gave a reproving look, and said 'George, I'm a big fan of the BBC production. Of _course_ I know where said phrase came from.' Random slightly disturbing factoid: Search the Web for any circa 1976 pictures of The Toddler, Donald John Trump. This was exactly when he was then 30 years old, and when I was in my final year of high school. As Russell can testify, the late 2010s Rick Moen looks extremely like that person, like I'm his brother, perhaps having been kept in suspended animation for some decades. For the record, I will turn 60 years of age this coming May, and I look _now_ almost exactly the way The Toddler did at half my age. I guess this is testimony to the benefits (on my part) of clean living and not snorting the family funds up my nose. But it's still disturbing as fsck. ;->