Such is our exciting life, that we sometimes watch whatever is on the Turner Classic Movies channel, and so it was that we recently came across Rosalind Russell and Alec Guiness in a film version of the stage play A Majority of One. Russell, who won a Golden Globe for her performance, plays a Jewish American widow who, thanks to the posting of her diplomat son in law to Japan, meets and is courted by a Japanese millionaire...played by Alec Guiness! The film, which was made in the early 1960s also won an award for its promotion of international relations. Russell's character, Mrs Jacoby, a Russian emigre to the USA, had lost a son in the war aginst Japan, and the film shows how her prejudices are challenged by contact with "real Japanese people", but since this is mostly in the form of a character played rather well by Guiness there is something exquisitely uncomfortable about watching it from a 21st century perspective. Meanwhile, quite without irony it would seem, one of the acts which has made its way through to the final rounds of the Cadiz Carnaval is a version of the Black and White Minstrel Show. I am not sure what I am saying here, except that Franco means that Spain missed out on a whole segment of 20th century development.