I'd recommend the lunatic, Machiavellian world of The Abbess of Crewe, the perfect sense of period in Girls of Slender Means, the peculiar insistence and spiritual insight of Memento Mori and hopefully Miss Jean Brodie and her girls would go without saying.
But at the same time it was also a magnet for all sorts of lunatics, redeemers, world reformers, and self-fashioned messiahs.
Of the show's host, the Canadian greengrocer and media personality Pete Luckett, she says happily, "We are following this lunatic around the world".
"To have other people go, 'This is outrageous' meant that I didn't feel like this sort of mad, paranoid, dystopian lunatic saying, 'the world's following me — what's going on?' " he recalled.
She has had to watch me struggle through a crush on my trainer, fret about my aging looks, and now she's worried that because I have declared "I'm pathetically single," every lunatic in the world is going to come up to me with a marriage proposal.
"Is the world a lunatic asylum then?
Did you think the Liam Neeson movie Taken was a documentary about a lunatic running around the world snapping people's necks?
In THE LUNATIC EXPRESS: Discovering the World... Via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes (Broadway, $24.99), Carl Hoffman leaves his comfortable Beltway life and sets out on a round-the-world odyssey "from the exits of the New Jersey Turnpike to the peaks of the Andes and the plateaus of Asia".
Meanwhile a truly inimical force in the world — a lunatic geezer player by Hal Holbrook — is busy kidnapping girls and poisoning them so that they start to look 55 at 7. It isn't rogue terrorists our society really needs to fear, apparently; it is wrinkles.
If you thought all Russians were bloodthirsty lunatics hellbent on starting World War III, you would be wrong.
