Watching ‘A Spy Among Friends’ last night Kim Philby excuses himself and says “must point Percy at the porcelain ” I thought that was not quite right. Of course it was a phrased coined in the seventies by Barry Humphries and used in the Barry Mackenzie strip in Private Eye (I did a check to make sure). It jarred in an otherwise excellent series, although the filming is set to colour washout and gloom. Do any of our Antipodean allies know if it was in use in the sixties and would Philby have known of its use?
Anachronism
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