TUGBOAT SINKING RAISES STINK

All the publicity about the pollution of Darwin Harbour has forced the cancellation of the planned reshoot of the 1933 Hollywood box office hit Tugboat Annie . Little Darwin can , as usual, exclusively reveal that a team of talent scouts has been in town secretly looking for locals to play key parts in the proposed movie. They had already spotted a feisty local woman who they say would make an ideal Tugboat Annie .

While they would no reveal her name, they dropped some tantalizing clues :she reeks of garlic prawns , calls a spade a spade , has put the wind up several prominent port rats , is a champion arm wrestler and intends to stand as an independent at the next NT election .

The original Tugboat Annie movie was about a comical , quarrelsome couple who ran a tugboat. Marie Dressler played Annie Brennan and Wallace Beery , was her husband, Terry, a lazy, bragging drunk who crashed the vessel. Finding a person in Darwin to play Terry is easy because of the many beery blokes on stools.

However, financial backers of the movie pulled out after reading about the pollution of Darwin from ore loading ships and the poo shooter effluent which now not only discharges in technicolour but in putrid 3D as well . American audiences, they say, would be repulsed by such a location for a wholesome family film.