Some lines don’t just stay in the programme or film they came from, they somehow escape into real life.
My wife and I do this all the time. A line from a sitcom, a film, or some daft bit of telly will work its way into our everyday language, and after a while it stops feeling like a quote. It just becomes something we say.
So this page is a little collection of those lines. The ones that stuck.
"Green it were!"
These words were uttered by the late, and very great, Brian Glover. It comes from an episode of Porridge, where Brian brilliantly played the dim-witted Cyril Heslop. The full, and correct, line is "I read a book once, green it was!", but we’ve changed it a little. So quite often at home, when we mention the colour of something, we’ll end with "Green it were!"
"Mickey Pearce lives on the Nyerere Estate"
This one comes from Only Fools and Horses, in the episode Yuppy Love, which is also the one where Del falls through the bar. Cassandra has dropped her friend off on a posh street, and Mickey mentions that it’s going to be a bit of a culture shock when she drops Rodney off at Nelson Mandela House. So when Cassandra gets back in the car, she says she’ll now drop Rodney off at the Nyerere Estate.
Rodney quickly corrects her: "I don’t live in the Nyerere Estate! Mickey lives on the Nyerere Estate. I live near it. I’ll show you."
We tend to use this one whenever someone has slightly misunderstood where something is, or what someone has said. It’s one of those lines that doesn’t really need much explaining in our house any more.
"Hag!"
This one is from Hot Fuzz. Sometimes, as a daft put-down, my wife or I will call the other one "Fascist!", and the reply is always "Hag!"
In the film, Sergeant Nicholas Angel is trying to check into his hotel while the receptionist is doing a crossword. She suddenly says "Fascist!", then explains that she’s looking for a seven-letter word meaning a system of government categorised by extreme dictatorship. Angel correcting her with the word "Fascism", then he looks at her and utters the word "Hag!", explaining that it means an evil old woman, considered frightful or ugly, one of the answers for her crossword. It’s childish, obviously. But that’s probably why it works.
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