“You know how to whistle, don’t you?

You just put your lips together and blow.” Both BBC World Service and Voice of America chose that line to play a recording of this morning, when they reported the death of Lauren Bacall. It’s from her first film, ‘To Have and Have Not’, based on the Hemingway story. In the film we can watch Humphrey Bogart, always a sucker for a coquettish young girl — Bacall was twenty then — become totally besotted with her.

Personally I think the bar scene between them in ‘The Big Sleep’, where they use a witty and sometimes quite raunchy exchange of horse-racing double-entendres to work out whether their relationship will remain strictly business or might become something else, shows the now slightly older Bacall’s talents better.

I was going to go on to compare the merits of Beeb World Service and VOA news coverage, but I must remember Honey-boy’s advice to keep blog entries short. Tomorrow perhaps.