John Steinbeck allowing Steinbeck to spend a full day on the set of "The Grapes of Wrath" and the next day on the set of "Of Mice and Men." In the 1930s and 1940s, Ed Ricketts strongly influenced Steinbeck's writing. Steinbeck frequently took small trips with Ricketts along the California coast to give himself time off from his writing and to collect biological specimens, which Ricketts sold for a living. Their joint book about a collecting expedition to the Gulf of California in 1940, which was part travelogue and part natural history, published just as the U.S. entered World War II, never
Lenny Blue on DVD on 15 October 2008. The plotline for the first series was given by ITV as follows: "Lenny Milton (Ray Winstone) is not as ambitious as his best friend and popular boss DCI Michael Love (Adrian Dunbar), but the pair are drinking partners and their wives and children are close. However, this goes very wrong over the space of seven days, when Milton is approached by the police complaints division asking him to go undercover and investigate allegations of corruption against his friend. Milton finds this difficult at first and tries to dismiss the evidence building up. But as