GEORGE Osborne’s Budget this afternoon will hopefully bring no more bad news about the retirement age.
The chancellor has already put back the day we start getting our state pensions from 65 to 66.
And the cynic within me assumes that, if and when I get to my mid-60s, the retirement age will have been pushed back even further. I’ll probably still be banging out mildly sarcastic columns into my 80s. Oh great.
But, if Mr Osborne needs any confirmation that workers can’t go on forever, he should get himself down to his nearest cinema to watch You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.
Jenny, myself and three other punters crowded into Screen 9 of the Bradford Cineworld on Sunday to watch the latest film by Woody Allen, who turned 75 a few months ago (inset).
Time was when you couldn’t watch one of his films without laughing out loud.
Classics like Manhattan and Annie Hall are full of witty one-liners – most of them delivered by Allen himself.
But the director has fallen a long way since his 1970s heyday. In the last decade the ageing Allen has produced stinkers like Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
And his latest offering is the worst of the lot. I didn’t laugh a single time during the entire 90 minutes of the film, but I did wince frequently at the terrible acting.
Allen recruited some fine actors – notably Anthony Hopkins – yet they all sounded as though they were reading their lines for the first time as they ambled through a pedestrian plot about love and betrayal in middle-class London.
If Allen had hung up his clipboard 10 years ago he could have gone off into retirement with his reputation as one of the great comic directors intact.
But each film he’s made past pensionable age has tarnished what came before.
Worth thinking about, George.
