and so anyway, me and Jesus were walking around the mall the other day, bemoaning, as you do, all the tinsel and streamers and baubles and flying reindeer displays and proliferating grottoes, our ears assailed by a cacophony of festive banalities by Elvis and Slade and Jona Lewie and Shakin’ Stevens and David Bowie/Bing Crosby and Band Aid and Wham and Chris Rea and the Pogues/Kirsty MacColl and the Wombles and Wizzard and Perry Como and Andy Williams and Mud and Boney M and Cliff Richard and the Pipes & Drums & Military Band of The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards and Mr Hankey booming out of different stores, and I turned to Jesus and asked him, ‘Of all the Xmas singles, which is your favourite?’
And, lo, Jesus, despairing, turned to me, and said: ‘Meretricious. Every one.’
(‘Oh, so Shakie it is.’)
Frustrated at repeatedly missing out on the chance to film one of Ballard’s novels, Stanley Baker optioned a number of his short stories through his production company Oakhurst Productions, including ‘Track 12’ (1958). Of the intended anthology picture, only one, the 22-minite ‘Track 12’, was completed, shot by Joseph Losey from a script by Harold Pinter, during a break in production on Accident (Losey 1967). 
Dirk Bogarde is chilling as the diffident biochemist, Sheringham, avenging his cuckolding by Baker’s robust Maxted. An unbilled Julie Christie was persuaded by Bogarde, who had worked with her on John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965), to provide the glimpsed fragments of Susan Sheringham’s face and body – and the overwhelming, screen-filling kissing lips of the film’s startling conclusion, an image that had a profound influence on David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983).
Broadcaster David Frost and his partner Hazel Adair, perhaps best known as the creator of the long-running soap opera Crossroads (1964–88), bought the rights to adapt The Drought aka The Burning World (1964) in the late 1960s.
In the late 1980s, the BBC began to spin off and divest parts of the organisation, laying the groundwork for establishing autonomous but wholly owned cash-cow subsidiaries. Central to this plan was the transformation of BBC Enterprises into BBC Worldwide. In order to monetise the BBC brand, production reoriented to programming that could be sold overseas. One outcome was the three-times-a-week upmarket soap El Dorado, set in a not-too-precisely futuristic gated community and exclusive resort town on the Mediterranean.
Thwarted in his attempt to produce and star in an adaptation of The Wind from Nowhere (1961), Stanley Baker optioned Ballard’s follow-up novel, The Drowned World (1962), before the ‘Seer of Shepperton’ had even completed a draft.
APJAC Productions hired Thompson to direct, then replaced him with John Guillermin, who insisted on relocating the story to New York. A week into shooting, Guillermin and Heston got into a now notorious on-set argument. Filming crashed to a halt. Jacobs backed his star over his director. Guillermin was fired, and Heston personally entreated Thompson to return to save the film.
Following the disastrous performance of Carry on England (Thomas 1976), pulled from cinemas after just three days, producer Peter Rogers decided the long-running series of tepid sex comedies needed a change of direction if it was to survive.
In January 1977, some nine months into a disastrous shoot, Francis Ford Coppola hired Ballard to script-doctor a key sequence and to help fashion the satisfactory dénouement that had thus far eluded John Milius, George Lucas and Coppola himself. Ensconced in the Philippines, Ballard eventually declared the de Marias rubber plantation sequence beyond salvaging. He was delighted when problems with the sound recording meant it was cut from the film, and in 2001 declined an invitation to see it restored at the Cannes premier of Apocalypse Now Redux.
Mark Bould 