{"id":1646,"date":"2008-05-03T23:13:21","date_gmt":"2008-05-03T22:13:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/?p=1646"},"modified":"2008-05-03T23:13:21","modified_gmt":"2008-05-03T22:13:21","slug":"telly-savalas-looks-at-birmingham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/2008\/05\/03\/telly-savalas-looks-at-birmingham\/","title":{"rendered":"Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in the 1970s Telly Savalas<\/strong><\/a> (best known for playing Kojak<\/a>) recorded a series of short films that extolled the virtues of UK cities like Birmingham<\/a>, Aberdeen<\/a> and Portsmouth<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I recently came across a Radio 4<\/a> show (via the excellent Speechification<\/a>) about these bizarre and unintentionally hilarious films.<\/p>\n

Check out Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham, England<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

Known as ‘quota quickies’, they were a product of the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927<\/a> which meant that short films – or supporting features as they were known back then – were subsidised by the government to offset the dominance of the Hollywood main features.<\/p>\n

They were made by director Harold Baim<\/a><\/strong> who managed to persuade Savalas via his agent – Dennis Selinger<\/a> of ICM<\/a> – to provide the voice for these travelogues.<\/p>\n

What makes it even funnier is that Savalas never even visited the locations he is waxing lyrical about.<\/p>\n

You can listen to the Radio 4 show here<\/a> or download it as an MP3 here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

> Find out more about Telly Savalas at Wikipedia<\/a>
\n> Radio 4 page for Telly Savalas and the Quota Quickies<\/a>
\n> The Baim Collection<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in the 1970s Telly Savalas (best known for playing Kojak) recorded a series of short films that extolled the virtues of UK cities like Birmingham, Aberdeen and Portsmouth. I recently came across a Radio 4 show (via the excellent Speechification) about these bizarre and unintentionally hilarious films. Check out Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,9,31],"tags":[117],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1646"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1646\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}