48. PETER BROUGH & ARCHIE ANDREWS REPORT FROM MISSION NIGHTINGALE

REPORT FROM PETER BROUGH AND ARCHIE ANDREWS, Hampshire, England 1844.

BROUGH: Good morning, everybody, I’m here with Archie, my boy, after a successful night in Miss Florence Nightingale’s bedroom.

ANDREWS: Here, steady on Brough, you’d better not let Richard Monckton Milnes hear you say that or it will be pistols at dawn. We’re still in 1844 don’t you know?

BROUGH: Now don’t be ridiculous, Archie, my boy. Now what do you know about night time affairs? Is that in the curriculum?

ANDREWS: No, Brough, it’s extra-curricular activity. I make a point of staying up late to watch all Jayne Mansfield’s films.

BROUGH: I was going to say we’ve succeeded in our mission to save the world, my boy! And you played an important role. I rather think at one stage Miss Nightingale was convinced you were dead.

ANDREWS: I convinced myself that I was my cousin Hector as I led there on the floor of Miss Nightingown’s boudoir and it helped me keep still and not move a muscle.

BROUGH: Oh, good, my boy. Is Hector an actor?

ANDREWS: No, he’s a shelf in a tobacconist’s in Cleethorpes!

BROUGH: Don’t be silly, Archie. I rather think due to our success we’ll be invited to the Palace, my boy.

ANDREWS: But I support Queens Park Rangers!

BROUGH : Not Crystal Palace you buffoon. Buckingham Palace. I’ll order a suit or I could possibly save the expense and wear one of my old suits.

ANDREWS: How do you know it would still fit?

BROUGH: Because, Archie, I haven’t put on a pound since I left school.

ANDREWS: You haven’t spent one, either!

BROUGH: Miss Nightingale was convinced I had brought you back to life, my boy. The lightning outside the window made your miraculous revival all the more dramatic. It couldn’t have gone any better.

ANDREWS: Well, Brough, we rode our luck.

BROUGH: Yes, my boy, we can be proud. She’ll want to take up medical matters now, as sure as eggs are eggs. She was so taken with my talents, Archie, that she called me your creator, which happens to be true, my lad.

ANDREWS: For such a hero, Brough, you look a bit of a Charlie with all that sawdust on your shoes.

BROUGH: Sawdust? Yes, you’re right, my boy. It’s all over the place.

ANDREWS: I was filing my nails, Brough. Got to look spick and span for our date at the Palace.

BROUGH: Well, that’s right, my boy, we will be top of the bill and rightly so.

REPORT ENDS

LATE NEWS

The Peter Brough and Archie Andrews holograms have been aborted. It has become clear that they were not in Florence Nightingale’s bedroom in 1844 but in Lord Byron’s villa in Switzerland in June, 1816. It was there that Mary Shelley, the teenage partner of the radical English poet Percy Bysshe, was staying with others when she had the dream that led to her writing Frankenstein the following year. This is how Mary Shelley describes the event:

I saw with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.

It has now become apparent that what Mary Shelley actually saw (with open eyes) were the holograms of Peter Brough and Archie Andrews doing their life reviving act.

In trying to maintain history as we know it we have literally created a Frankenstein.