Double X: The Name of the Game

You probably thought every film Norman Wisdom ever made had been on TV at least a dozen times in the past five years. But his personal favourite of his own films was an independent production in which he played a safecracker trying to go straight called 'There Was a Crooked Man' which flopped in 1960 and which problems over rights have kept off TV screens for over fifty years.

Shot at Bray Studios and in Scotland, parts of 'Double X' resemble a semi-remake of the earlier film; although in 1960 Wisdom would have played a character called Norman rather than Arthur, and Robert Asher would have breezed through it in about half the time. A serviceable cast (including Bernard Hill camping it up in the role Garry Marsh would have played in the fifties) disappear and then reappear throughout this tinny, talky film which looks and sounds as if it was shot on a camcorder by film students; and is more dated after less than thirty years than the earlier film probably is after over sixty.