Ello, Ello, Ello, thank you for joining us this evening as the Sanford Police constabulary presented a tasting of fine English wines alongside Hot Fuzz.
Read on for details on all our wines from the evening, our rogues gallery of photos, and a dossier of trivia.
As promised, these are the wines we enjoyed ...
An arresting selection of wines
Ellercombe English Sparkling, Sainsbury's £22
Grapes grown in the South Downs, Hampshire. 55% Chardonnay, 40% Pinot Noir and 5% Pinot Meunier. Traditional method. Made by English Wine Legends Nyetimber.
Toasty with fresh citrus on the nose; palate is elegant and lifted, balance of rounded citrus and crisp acidity, long finish.
Blueprint English Dry White, Denbies, Surrey, Waitrose £11.49
The Denbies Estate is situated on the North Downs, Dorking, featuring chalky soil.
A blend of grapes, Bacchus, Rivaner, Ortega, Reichensteiner, Madeleine Angevine deliver aromatic lime on the nose, grapefruit, ripe apple and lychee fruit on the palate.
Denbies Surrey Gold, Waitrose £10.99
Another Denbies wine, this time a medium dry blend featuring Müller-Thurgau, Ortega and Bacchus. On the nose floral notes, honeysuckle and peach. On the palate, citrus and stone fruits. A fantastic matches for spicy Asian food or blue cheese.
Giffords Hall Rosé, Suffolk, Waitrose £14.49
From vines grown in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. A location for wine production popular in Roman times with Legionaries because of the fantastic soil for wine production.
This is another blend, this time featuring Madeleine Angevine and Rondo.
On the nose, a wild strawberry bouquet with white fruit, flowers and pink grapefruit. On the palate white peach and roses, with a racy crisp acidity.
Halfpenny Green 'Penny Red', Staffordshire £11.85
It was the vision of farmer Martin Vickers 30 years ago to plant a vineyard that would one day match continental sites.Today, 30 acres of vines are managed by Martin and produce award-winning wines crafted by his son Clive.
A blend of Rondo, Regent, Triomphe d’Alsace and Divico. This is an Off Dry red wine with aromas and flavours of Black cherries and forest fruits.
Rogues Gallery
A dossier of trivia
The first draft of the script included a love interest for Nicholas named Victoria. She was cut from subsequent drafts, but a good amount of her dialogue was given to Danny, often without any changes.
Nick Frost only agreed to do the film if he could get to name his character. He was also asked to watch over twenty action films to warm up for the role. He only watched one, Bad Boys II.
At a Q&A session, following a screening of the film in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Edgar Wright revealed that the film featured disguised cameos by two Oscar winners: Cate Blanchett and Sir Peter Jackson. Jackson appears as the Father Christmas who stabs Nick Angel through the hand during the opening montage, and Blanchett appears masked as Angel's ex-girlfriend who is a Scene of Crime Officer (SOCO).
When in costume, Nick Frost and Simon Pegg often were assumed to be police officers. Many strangers asked them for directions, and instead of telling the truth they went along with it. They claimed it made them feel powerful.
As this is the second part of the Cornetto Trilogy, the blue wrapper makes its appearance in the film. Nick and Danny are seen eating vanilla flavor ice cream. According to Edgar Wright, blue represents the police, which is the main motif in the film. For Wright's other films, Shaun of the Dead (2004), it was red and strawberry flavor, representing blood and zombies, while the final part, The World's End (2013), it was green and peppermint with chip, representing science fiction and extraterrestrial elements.
In all of the Cornetto Trilogy (Shaun of the Dead (2004), this film, and The World's End (2013)), there is always the same gag about them running through and over a fence. This is when Sergeant Angel is chasing the shoplifter, he asks Danny, "Never taken a shortcut before?" Again, a line parodied in the entire Cornetto trilogy.
This is actually the only movie in The Cornetto Trilogy where Simon Pegg's character doesn't fall off a fence. In Shaun of the Dead (2004), Shaun tried jumping over it and it fell once he was on top. In The World's End (2013), Garry jumps on the fence and knocks it over. In this film, Nicholas (Simon Pegg) jumps over all of them successfully while Nick Frost's Danny knocks the fence down.
The names of the townspeople of Sandford are almost all words for occupations or activities: Cooper, Porter, Turner, Shooter, Prosser, Hatcher, Paver, Butcher, Skinner, Fisher, Walker, Thatcher, Weaver, Roper, Tiller, Reaper, Messenger, Staker, Treacher, Cocker, Blower, Draper, Merchant, Cartwright, Wainwright.
After the huge success of Shaun of the Dead (2004), Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright were given free rein to do whatever they wanted on their next film.
While doing research for the film, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg discovered that a disproportionate number of police officers were named either Nick or Andy, which led to the character names of Nicholas Angel and the two Andys. The Angel part of Nicholas Angel was named after the film's music director, and the joke where the local paper misspelled Angel's name as "Angle" was based on several incidents where this happened to him.
Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright interviewed many real police officers while doing research for the film. Many lines in the film such as "I prefer to think my office is out on the street" came directly from those interviews. The stylised scenes of Nick doing paperwork were inspired by the officers noting that paperwork is a huge part of the job, but it is never depicted in cop shows and films.
When Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg went to Brixton Police Station hoping to get some anecdotes from serving officers, even offering to take them to the pub, every officer refused to speak to them. The liaison officer had wrongly told the officers that Mr. Wright and Mr. Pegg were journalists. The liaison officer has never been forgiven.
Edgar Wright said that the role of Simon Skinner was written with Timothy Dalton in mind, so they were thrilled when he signed on to play the character. Simon Pegg says that he and Wright shared a thumbs-up when Dalton first played the character in the read-through, as they both knew they'd gotten the perfect person for the part.
Simon Pegg lost over two stone (twenty-eight pounds, thirteen-ish kilograms) in preparing for the role of Nicholas Angel.
Nicholas Angel's service number is 777, this is often seen as the mark of God, just as 666 is seen as the mark of the devil. The only character to call him by that number is Timothy Dalton, who played Agent 007 in The Living Daylights (1987) and Licence to Kill (1989).
Police Constable Doris Thatcher was so named because prior to equality in the UK police service, female officers were all referred to as "Doris", regardless of their names.
Somerfield used to be a real UK supermarket chain, and all of the exterior scenes were shot at one of their stores. Edgar Wright chose to use it as he worked there as a shelf-stacker as a teenager, and in a nod to this, he makes a blink-and-miss-it cameo as a shelf-stacker in the Somerfield store.
Simon Skinner (Timothy Dalton), the manager of the local Somerfield supermarket, was partly based on Edgar Wright's old boss Mike Stockwell, who was manager of the same Somerfield supermarket that is used in this film, where Wright used to work. But Wright decided not to name the character after him because he thought 'Stockwell' sounded too much like a punny name for a supermarket manager.
In the movie, Edgar Wright's hometown of Wells, Somerset, England, doubled as Sandford. The alley down which Nicholas Angel pursues the shoplifter is where Wright used to walk to school, and where he had his first kiss. The shot during the chase, where Angel spots the swan, was shot outside the house of one of Wright's friends.
Jim Broadbent was a big fan of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead (2004) and asked them for a role in their next film. They wrote the part of Inspector Butterman for him.
Before filming the lay-by scene, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost reportedly had an argument. Pegg claimed Frost was getting cocky and making the assistant directors get him coffee, whereas Pegg wanted him to get his own. As a result, they took four hours to do that scene, and they didn't talk to each other at all, except when acting.
"N.W.A.", Sandford's Neighborhood Watch Alliance, is also the name of the seminal rap group "N.W.A.," whose most famous song is "F**k Tha Police", a sentiment with obvious relevance to the film's plot.
Despite their homespun image, many members of the N.W.A. are veterans of the action genre. Paul Freeman was in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Stuart Wilson was in Lethal Weapon 3 (1992) and No Escape (1994), and Timothy Dalton played James Bond in The Living Daylights (1987) and Licence to Kill (1989). The head of the N.W.A., Edward Woodward, was voted the greatest British action star for his roles as secret agents in the television series Callan (1967) and The Equalizer (1985).
Throughout the first half of the film, Danny asks Angel several annoying questions, like "Have you ever shot two guns at once while diving through the air?" to which Angel responds "No - you've been watching too many cop movies! The job isn't like that." Then in the second half of the film, every single thing that Danny has asked about, Angel does. He does shoot two guns while leaping through the air, et cetera. The only thing that Angel doesn't do is shooting into the air while screaming. Danny does that. Also, when the police crew are in the pub (on Nicholas' first day), the Andys mention that in small towns, everybody carries a firearm, especially farmers and their mothers. Not only are they correct (at least in Sandford), but the first people who shoot at Angel are a farmer and his mum.
The film bears the same plot as Outland (1981), starring Sean Connery sent to a mining colony on Jupiter. This in turn was a remake of the classic western High Noon (1952). Nicholas Angel is transferred to Sanford and begins investigating the gruesome deaths of members of the community, believed to be accidents, and he begins to believe that the deaths were no accidents, but murders, and uncovers a conspiracy behind it, and discovers Inspector Frank Butterman and other residents of the village are behind it.
Trivia courtesy of IMDB
You are pun-der arrest!
The perfect crime was committed last night. Someone broke into the police station and stole all the toilets. Police say they have nothing to go on.
Did you hear about the criminal who stole a lamp? He got a very light sentence.
Knock, knock.Who’s there? Dishes. Dishes who? Dishes the police. Open up!
Did you hear they arrested the Duracell bunny? Charged with battery.
I used to be an undercover cop of course. Well, only when I went to bed.
Caught a graffiti artist spraying police station in a really thick font. Before cuffing him I said “Now that is bold.”
He’s trying to say I assaulted him with a sheet of sandpaper. All I did was rough him up a bit.
And there’s a man in town stealing wheels off police cars. As you’d imagine, we’re working tirelessly to catch him.
We had a clairvoyant who escaped from prison .. Big headline in the newspaper ‘A medium at large.’
Be careful as you leave tonight, two peanuts walking past about same time last night and
One was assaulted.
Thank you once again for joining us this evening, SGT. Tony Elvin and the Wine Events Crew
We look forward to welcoming you back to another of our events very soon but why not check out our website or sign up to our monthly mailing list to find out about new events first:
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