Mr Topkins' Follies #2

Having been inundated by requests for a glimpse of celebrated actor Walter Purves in the iconic role of Mr Tompkins [especial thanks to Agnes and Percy Starstruck for their persistence], we are pleased to announce that professorthrupiece.com has been granted exclusive access to a screen test for Episode 3 of the series in which a young Rosalita Ramusovten plays opposite the beloved Dorset star.

Advertising Poster for Mr Tompkins' Follies c1957. The Kids from Bonkers were a well-established troupe of talentless teenagers masquerading as children. They would later become known as the Beachbums - often cited as the inspiration for Ziggy Osmington and the Belle Ends

Cinema buffs will be delighted by the added bonus of seeing former Dorset swimwear model Alma Baythyng-Hutte [Miss Bridport 1927] in a brief appearance as mother. Her delivery of the line "And don't you touch anything" resulted in an Oscar nomination in 1954 for "Best Single Line Delivered by a Foreign Actress in a Short Film or Television Series". She was beaten to the accolade only by Audrey Hepburn's unforgettable "I am not putting my hand in that and if you were a gentleman you wouldn't expect me to!" [Roman Holiday].

Walter was never himself nominated for a major Academy Award perhaps because - as has subsequently emerged - he was blacklisted as a communist sympathiser during the Hollywood witch hunt led by the House Un-American Activities Committee under influential Senator - and later Beatle impersonator - Joseph McCartney.

We are deeply grateful to thrupiecefilm&television as well as the California Courts [Historic Evidence Division] for permission to reproduce this copyright and highly sought-after footage. Readers are kindly asked not to abuse this privilege by re-posting the video or commenting in a lewd or suggestive manner contrary to the Lewd and Suggestive Comments Act 1936.

Mr Purves who died in 1995 is #189 in Thrupini's Unique Dorset Graves Series [Old Burial Ground, Our Lady of the Calcified Trotters, Gussage St Michael].

[NOTE: English readers will observe with dismay the characteristic inability of American writers properly to place the apostrophe in Tompkin's [sic] [Ed].]