A while ago Sara Kennedy, Radio 2’s early morning jock and Peter Briffa fave, was on holiday and her stand-in asked his listeners to e-mail or text in their suggestions for the best ever movie car chase. All the obvious contenders were present and correct; Bullit, Ronin, Italian Job and so on. However I don’t recall anybody suggesting the real undisputed champion, the climactic car chase at the end of the classic meisterwerk that is Confessions of a Driving Instructor. I’m serious.

Here’s the, erm, plot so far.

Jack the lad lethario Timmy Lea, played by Robin Askwith, and his brother-in-law Sidney Noggett, played by Tony Booth, have knocked the window cleaning game on the head and opened a driving school. Relations with their rivals Mr. Truscott, Windsor Davies, who is bizarrely a Scotsman in this film, and his business partner, one Tony Bender (oh yes), get off to a poor start. From then on they can only get worse because Truscott’s daughter Mary, who Bender still thinks is his girlfriend, has the hots for Timmy Lea.

Having been coerced by Mary into playing in a rugby match against macho regular rugby player Bender, Timmy Lea takes to the field on the opposing side. At half time Sid Noggett attempts to boost his brother-in-law’s flagging energy with a “Bang On Sex Paket” love pill dissolved in his drink. Mr Truscott had obtained the pills from Denmark, naturally, and Timmy had managed to liberate them from his sideboard the previous evening. However, as chance would have it, before Sid has a chance to stop him, Bender manages to gulp down the potion instead. Hilarity ensues…

Click on the thumbnails for a larger image.

Play resumes and the potion soon begins to take effect on Tony Bender.

The object of Bender’s desire is, so he thinks, his girlfriend Mary Truscott as played by Oxo mum Lynda Bellingham. And hey, isn’t that the Prime Minister’s father in law?

As Bender’s uncontrollable urges overwhelm him he rushes over to Miss Truscott.

She promptly flees.

She runs around Timmy’s driving instructor’s car.

And tries to clamber in through the driver’s side door and out through the passenger’s side.

However because the door is jammed shut she is unable to escape, Bender jumps in to the driving seat and starts the car.

Timmy Lea and Mr Truscott watch in horror as the pill powered sex crazed maniac drives off with their friend/daughter/car.

Bender’s away. The ancient Ford’s tyres smoke as it understeers around the corner.

Lea and Truscott set off in hot pursuit in the latter’s Bentley. Because of a stuck door our hero Timmy has to drive. Presumably 1970’s car makers ought to have looked into the growing problem of sticking doors.

Soak up the awful crapitude of an average 1970’s British high street.

He’s got fire in his eyes.

Really? In the 1970s?

Bender goes left.

Lea goes right and the workmen must leap for their lives.

And the Welshman playing a Scotsman turns his usual puce.

That’s a tight squeeze.

A pipe band just happen to be marching along the road. As they often do about South London’s suburbs.

The two cars approach the pipes and drums at high speed.

And they whizz by on either side.

Leaving the marchers without kilts. But of course! Bet that doesn’t happen in The Dukes of Hazzard.

Smack! The pride of the British motor industry takes a direct hit from Bender.

Then he manages to sneak between that Austin Maxi and that brick wall.

But unfortunately someone has stacked a load of oil drums right in the way.

Remember that brick wall?

Oh dear.

Now what lies in our heroes’ path?

Only the driving examination centre.

And once they’ve crashed through the wall and into the building what do they find? Of course, the manager and his secretary busy on the job.

Magnificent stuff I’m sure you’ll agree. And if you don’t, then you’re a stuck up jaded old cynic.

“Would you like to appear on the programme?” their email stated. “I’d love to.”, I replied. “I’ll take ‘Nimrod’, the overture from ‘Der fliegende Holländer’, ‘All Join Hands’ by Slade…”, and so on.

Of course that isn’t quite how it happened.

However I did receive a pleasant note for sending them a correction to the archive page of one of their castaways, the venerable actress Cicely Courtneidge.

Hi Mark

Thank you for your email to Desert Island Discs. I have changed the Albert Coates to Eric Coates. I think looking at the recording Albert might have been conducting but as you rightly point out Eric was the composer.

Thank you for your interest in our programme.

Best wishes

Desert Island Discs team.

How kind of them. It’s almost as if Roy Plomley had written it himself.

From Here.

I’m always having to look this up:

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find . -name '*.DS_Store' -type f -delete

An aide memoire for my own future reference.

In order to run Padrino Rake tasks in the production environment the ENV variable needs to be placed before the command. It took a fair bit of flailing about before discovering this.

For example:

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PADRINO_ENV=production bundle exec padrino rake -T

The asp.net MVC validation summary is a bit plain. Let’s beautify it.

First grab the alert styles from the Twitter Bootstrap source and add the ‘.validation-summary-errors’ class selector where appropriate. I’ve used the “danger” (red) version of the flash.

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   .validation-summary-errors,
  .alert-message
  {
     clear:both;
    position: relative;
    padding: 7px 15px;
    margin-bottom: 18px;
    color: #404040;
  
  etc...   

Just that alone will make things look miles better already.

However the Bootstrap flash has a close button on it in order to hide the message away which is kind of neat. Let’s use JavaScript to add that.

First we need to know if flash is present. If a full page postback has triggered the showing of the validation error message then we can just look for it in the DOM on document ready.

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   var $validationSummaryErrors = $('.validation-summary-errors');
  
  if ($validationSummaryErrors.length !== 0) {
      addCloseButton($validationSummaryErrors);
  }

Simple.

But what if the validation error message was injected via client side code?

jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js, the Javascript code which performs client side model validation, runs on page load and has no input parameters so we can’t pass in a callback directly. Instead, I’m afraid, we need to add a function to the global object.

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   window.onValidatorSummaryShown = function () {
      addCloseButton(this);
  };

And we’ll call it when the ‘.validation-summary-errors’ div is injected into the DOM.

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    if (window.onValidatorSummaryShown) {
                window.onValidatorSummaryShown.call(container);
     }

And there you have it, a beautiful and arresting validation error message complete with working close button.

The code in full: