After half a lifetime toiling away in frowsty rooms above pubs, preaching the disregarded gospel of socialism to sparse gatherings of the like-minded dozing on rickety chairs, here he was, reborn as the headline act.
McCoy's final story, a parable about Thatcherism set in a frowsty tract of west London, written by Ken Loach's screenwriter Rona Munro, wouldn't require much revision to serve as a script for Tennant.
In a frowsty bed-and-breakfast by the cold English sea, he draws a delicate Arabian ostrich feather on her spine with bamboo calligraphy sticks.
The frowsty bedroom in which our antihero wakes up to the same sounds and sights each morning is in the midst of a perky town.
Explore it from the bottom of the bill and you'll encounter something different: tracts of featureless industrial estates, a world in which Wolseley police cars clatter under railway bridges in Croydon and mid-price actors occupy frowsty suburban drags.
In a frowsty office a man sits in front of a broken computer.
"In previous centuries authors would have presupposed both faith and familiarity with the scriptures in their audience, but now religion has withered in the bright glare of science (at least in Britain), and our churches are increasingly Larkin's 'accoutred frowsty barn[s]'.
On his arrival, there is a warm handshake for Guardian reporter Ewen MacAskill, whom he last saw in Hong Kong – a Sunday night after a week of intense work in a frowsty hotel room, a few hours before the video revealing his identity to the world went public.
Burrough has no illusions about most of his cast of desperadoes: Ma Barker was a frowsty housewife obsessed with jigsaws, nowhere near intelligent enough to mastermind her sons' gang as the FBI alleged.
Brown grass, frowsty gray mold, fungal frills.
When D. H. Lawrence visits Cambridge, he gravitates to Hardy, horrified by the other Apostles, and confides that he finds homosexuals "horrible little frowsty people".
