(I'm sorry, I'll post that again; I'm very hungover this morning after a roaring night at The Moorbrook. Actually the landlord was playing Logan's Run on the pub TV when we arrived which set the tone quite nicely - I've promised to lend him The Canterbury Tales DVD...)

It's certainly possible to be a fan of both anyway.

True, true - but, just compare those opening sequences, CS. In the TWM the rather earnest faux-traditional Highland Widow's Lament seques / detunes into Giovanni's somewhat precious arrangement of Corn Riggs, thus establishing the wonky agenda of the neo-pagan / neo-fascist regime on Summerisle. In TCC you get Francis McPeake's glorious rendition of The Ould Piper (no doubt under license from Peter Kennedy!) which serves to invigorate the soul as the pure drop itself. If that ain't diametric opposition I don't know what is. The Ould Piper recurs as a motif in one of the Tales* in which a bizarrely Chaplinesque chancer (who seems to have strayed out of a Spaghetti Western) uses it as part of his general insolence, or else immunity, in the face of whatever life throws at him - be it the prospect of a menage a trois with his gawky low-life pal & his pretty prostitute wife, or else ending up in the stocks as a result of his various misadventures. All together now: nyah-a-ah-a-ah-a-ah...

* I must confess to being a sucker for the Portmanteau film, a format common in horror films of the 60s / 70s (though the classic Dead of Night was made in 1945). One of these, The Vault of Horror (AKA Tales from the Crypt 2) from 1973, also features Tom Baker. Another, Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1965), features an unlikely cast that finds Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee rubbing shoulders with Roy Castle and Alan 'Fluff' Freeman (not half!). I must also confess that one of the principle joys of watching Pasolini's Canterbury Tales was seeing the bald bloke with the big ears from Are You Being Served? in a monk's habit...