Louis Barfe
Jolly Good Fun
Bounder! The Biography of Terry-Thomas
By Graham McCann
Aurum 291pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Alastair Sim: The Star of Scrooge and the Belles of St Trinian's
By Mark Simpson
The History Press 256pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
In the heyday of the British film industry, Terry-Thomas and Alastair Sim made respectable careers playing people who weren’t respectable. They played characters who were ‘not quite gentlemen’, but in different ways: Terry-Thomas was the embodiment of the player or bounder, while Sim depicted seedy, shabby, failed or faded gentility better than almost anyone else. The near-contemporaries coincided on screen on several occasions, so the appearance of this brace of biographies is serendipitous.
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