Previous Saturday ratings-slayer Merlin, with its straight tales of chivalric knights, cannily featured more buff boy-flesh than a Soviet gymnasium.
The readers were transfixed not by the latest political scandal or account of parking violations (a Cairene preoccupation), but by a straight-talking tale of sex, lies and Islamism in the 'Mother of the World' - al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building.
Frost knew that reading the poem as a straight morality tale ought to pose a number of difficulties.
He's produced two albums, 2007's A Tale Of Two Cities, and 2009's Straight No Chaser.
Playing it straight as a tale of suspense, "Bodega Bay" passes on the opportunity for camp and farce that the Broadway adaptation of "The 39 Steps" showed that Hitchcock was ripe for.
The most recent contender is John LeFevre's "Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals," published in mid-July.
John LeFevre is the creator of the @GSElevator Twitter feed and the author of the soon-to-be-released Straight To Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals.
In the early 19th century, Mérimée put out an entire book called Songs of the Western Slavs, which the whole world (including Pushkin, who translated it) took to be a straight recording of various folk tales.
In fact, his is a remarkable tale of straight-talking his way to success.
"Straight Man" is a tale of self-discovery, and could have had quite a melodramatic ending.
His last film, retro-styled crime caper American Hustle, was so exuberantly cynical that you can't quite believe he's playing with a straight deck in telling the tale of a hard-working woman realising her destiny on the QVC shopping channel.
