Talking Pictures TV to show Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies: Watch a cast reunion from 1996

On Saturday week (19 December) Talking Pictures TV is showing Peter Brook's 1963 film of William Golding's Lord of the Flies.

I first saw this film at school because I was educated in an era when it was more or less compulsory to study Golding's novel for O level.

In those days it was taught to us as a fable about human nature, but (as I once blogged) today it reads more like a study of the inevitable consequences of the barbarities of the 1950s English prep school.

Anyway, this screening gives me a reason to post this video of an unexpectedly moving reunion of Brook and most of his leading actors that took place in 1996.

The American accents of Tom Chapin (Jack) and Tom Gaman (Simon) are a reminder that the boys were recruited from English families living in the US or Caribbean. Only Hugh Edwards (Piggy) was flown out from Britain to Puerto Rico take part. Indeed, I believe Chapin's lines had to be dubbed by another boy as his accent had already grown too American.

Confusingly, James Aubrey (Ralph), who lived around the world as a boy but settled in England, used an American accent when he reappeared on British screens in 1976 in the scandalous Bouquet of Barbed Wire.

Touchingly insecure in this film, Aubrey (who died in 2010) was one of only two cast members to go on to acting careers. The other, who did not attend the reunion, was Nicholas Hammond, who played Robert - a member of the choir and hunter alongside Jack. He was next seen as Friedrich in The Sound of Music.

And he is still working. He was Sam Wanamaker in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which was the last film I saw in a cinema. This year has sometimes made it feel as though it was the last film I will ever see in a cinema.

David Surtees, who played Sam (one of the twins), mentions working for the Conservative Party. It appears he is, or was until recently, its regional director for the East Midlands.

A word on resemblance... When we first see Tom Gaman he seems comically elderly when set against the Simon of the film. By the end you are struck by how little he has changed. And he has grown younger since, as this news story from 2014 shows.

And a couple of sociological observations... I was wondering if this film would be shown on television again, because it contains a degree of child nudity that will worry modern sensibilities, and Piggy is not fat at all by modern standards.

My other reason for blogging about Lord of the Flies is that I have taken to tweeting quotes from it and linking them to Brexit.

Jack appears a spokesman for it. Try his:

"We're English, and the English are best at everything."

And there's:

"The rules!" shouted Ralph, "you're breaking the rules!" 

"Who cares?"

Ralph summoned his wits.

"Because the rules are the only thing we've got!"

But Jack was shouting against him.

"Bollocks to the rules! We're strong - we hunt!"

While we Remainers feel very like Ralph:

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.

A lot of people are going to feel pretty foolish when the Navy turns up to rescue us. That's if we don't have a rock dropped on us first.