Black Jack Justice (60) - The Learner's Permit
Decoder Ring Theatre
Gregg Taylor
4.8 • 661 Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2014
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
They say that a little learning is a dangerous thing, my friends, but in all fairness, they don't usually mean the life-and-limb variety. But when a would-be writer of hard-boiled fiction hires a certain team of his and hers private detectives to help his prose ring true, he had better drink deep or think twice about the whole "Pierian spring" business.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Once again, Decoder Ring Theater presents another page from the casebook of that Master of Mystery, |
| 0:07.5 | that's Sultan of Sleuthing, Martin Bracknell's immortal detective Black Jack Justice, |
| 0:13.5 | starring Christopher Mott as Jack and Andrea Lyons as Trixie Dixon Girl Detective. The name's Justice. |
| 0:27.6 | Jack Justice. |
| 0:29.6 | A lot of people will tell you that a little learning is a dangerous thing. |
| 0:33.6 | They do not say it with the intention of discouraging you from learning anything at all, in spite of the fact that in order to learn a lot about anything, you first must learn a little. |
| 0:41.3 | No, they say that little learning is a dangerous thing in order to encourage you to know more than a little before you open your mouth. |
| 0:48.3 | I have found through unscientific but extremely sarcastic survey that few of said quoters realized that the line is from Alexander Pope's essay on criticism, |
| 0:57.0 | that even fewer could tell you that the other half of the couplet is |
| 1:00.0 | Drink deep or touch not the Pyrion Spring, and that approximately none of them are aware of the dripping pools of irony |
| 1:06.0 | forming all around the place every time they sound off on the subject. |
| 1:10.0 | Dangerous it may be, but little |
| 1:12.1 | learning abounds in this big city, my friends. Having said all of that, Pope was onto something here. |
| 1:18.6 | If only people would proceed with caution when they were hopelessly over their heads, |
| 1:22.7 | they could probably save themselves an awful lot of trouble and trips to see their local |
| 1:26.1 | private detective, which was almost certainly not quite what old Alexander was on about either. |
| 1:31.4 | That's okay. The rape of the lock wasn't nearly as filthy as the title seemed to promise, |
| 1:36.1 | and schoolboy Jack had yet to forgive the poet for that. If all of this seems like it must |
| 1:41.7 | surely be at least somewhat beside the point, you'd be right. |
| 1:45.2 | Because there are some folks that, no matter how much you tell, you just can't learn them. |
| 1:50.3 | And this is the story of one of those times. |
| 1:53.0 | It began, as most things do, on a foggy morning where the girl detective and I were doing our very best to annoy one another, and largely succeeding. |
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