The French Resistance...after a fashion
Now and again I dabble in making dioramas; at some stage I'll post a pic of the last one - Ankh Morpork - onto my blog. However, my purpose here is to find out if anyone knows of suitable French resistance figures or the like with which I could put together an Allo Allo model? So, resistance girls in the outfit, portly cafe owner, also portly german officer and so forth. Possible a little tank for Lt. Gruber as well. That sort of thing... Any ideas? Cheers!

If you acheive this you will earn the life time admiration of my girlfriend who is a massive allo allo fan! One of the stalls at Partizan had a cafe rene front with a model that looked like Rene, I think it was BEF minatures.

Now lissen vereee carefully, I shall tell you thees only once Artizan does most of them in 28mm -have a look at their Pulp/Thrilling tales figures and you'll spot most of the characters.

Can't help you with Resistance minis, but I can't wait to see your Ankh Morpork diorama!

Artizan should have what you're looking for. You might have to poke around a bit to find out who makes Herr Gruber's little tank, a Sdkfz 222 by the look of it. Or consider 1/35, where there's a vast range of suitable figures.

Bolt Action do the '222...

So Rob only needs the BAM & Artizan sites then! http://www.artizandesigns.com/index.php http://www.warlordgames.co.uk/

Well this one is probably going to be a birthday present for a friend of mine who is also a huge fan; so far I've found a a few suitable figures on Artizan, will have to look elsewhere for a suitable crabtree and some waitresses though - the Artizan ones are all carrying guns... Other germans and hopefully some scruffy Italians shouldn't be too hard to find. Thanks for the pointers chaps, the 222 looks good so I expect one of those will go on as well. The Ankh Morpork one is only small - made that as a birthday present for a different friend actually, who is a discworld nut. Used some of the Micro Art Studio figures for it.

I saw a theatre production in Windsor a couple of weeks ago. Took the daughters as just up their street. Audience hooting with laughter at the same old jokes. The only original cast member was one of the waitresses but the others were a pretty good match. Funniest was the mad policeman and Lt Gruber.

I saw the original cast in the stage production many years ago at Wimbledon Theatre. It was just after the guy who played Rene had his car accident where the frame of an advertising hoarding came through the windscreen of his car and trepanned him. I'm not into "luvvydom" but it was extremely moving when he first came onto the stage and the entire audience (me included) stood and applauded. However, the abiding memory of the performance was an elderly woman in front of me who, whilst Rene, Gruber and the Policeman were trying to inflate a life-size human dummy (I'll let you guess via which orifice), had a senior moment and said out loud: "This is very reminiscent of something that happened between my husband and Jimmy Young." Even though they must have been used to bizarre heckles, it took the cast a couple of minutes to stop laughing long enough to complete the scene.