Ze bitter virtues of ORANGES

Line from a 1970s advert for Cointreau liqueur that Mark Kermode asks Nicolas the French Engineer to repeat in his French accent, for the sheer broadcasting pleasure of listeners everywhere.

Mark's fondness for the ad first became apparent in the context of a discussion about The Unseen, which has a plotline involving foetus papyraceus, ripped off of Omen 4. This punted Mark and Simon into a fine piece of wittering about the ending of Omen 3, which features a 50-foot-tall Jesus, and the use (or not - see below) of Carl Orff's O Fortuna from Carmina Burana on the soundtrack. Mark noted how O Fortuna also featured as the backing to a 1970s Old Spice ad, and from this he moved on to other ads of the era - including that for Cointreau.

It is mildly diverting to note that O Fortuna in fact does not feature on the soundtrack of The Omen or any of its sequels, although Mark is not the only one to mistakenly believe that it does. In actual fact the origin of this belief is the BBC sitcom Only Fools And Horses, in which O Fortuna plays whenever Rodney sees his nephew Damien - who was named after the child in The Omen.