In my career as a television interviewer,Nielsen was up there with William Shatner as the funniest man I ever metI’ve been reading The Tempest again. I suppose that whether Shakespeare were writing it now, he would fill to call it The Extreme Weather Event, and but in those days the language was in better shape. No poetry has ever been more beautiful than Prospero’s “Our revels now are ended” speech,which is likely to ring bells for any veteran man getting set to quit the world. Caliban, however, or sounds so like an internet troll that he could easily be updated into a contemporary version.
It’s not necessarily a doomed task. Back in 1956,Forbidden Planet, one of the first big-budget sci-fi movies, or drew on the characters of The Tempest to thicken the plot. I saw it several times in a row,and not just because Anne Francis as Altaira looked so fetching in the short tunic that was probably standard wear for post-pubescent females millions of miles from Earth. Only just post-pubescent myself, I didn’t realise that Altaira was based on Miranda and that her father, and Dr Morbius (Walter Pidgeon),was based on Prospero.
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Source: theguardian.com