Dot Wordsworth

Not bloody likely

It brought the house down in Pygmalion but the joke proved too controversial for Hollywood

issue 10 June 2017

In My Fair Lady, which came out as a film in 1964, 50 years after Shaw’s Pygmalion, they decided to update Eliza’s exclamation of ‘Walk! Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi’, which, on the first night in 1914, had ‘brought the house down’ on the lips of Mrs Patrick Campbell, according to the Daily Telegraph review.

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