A Cock and Bull Story A Cock and Bull Story A Cock and Bull Story (marketed in Australia, New Zealand and the United States as Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story) is a 2005 British comedy film directed by Michael Winterbottom. It is a film-within-a-film, featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing themselves as egotistical actors during the making of a screen adaptation of Laurence Sterne's 18th century metafictional novel "Tristram Shandy". Gillian Anderson and Keeley Hawes also play themselves in addition to their "Tristram Shandy" roles. Since the book is about a man attempting but failing to write his autobiography, the film takes
John Hall-Stevenson the result that in 1760 Hall-Stevenson abused Smollett and his associates in "A Nosegay and a Simile for the Reviewers" and "Two Lyrical Epistles, or Margery the Cook Maid, to the Critical Reviewers". Hall-Stevenson's "A Sentimental Dialogue between two Souls in the palpable Bodies of an English Lady of Quality and an Irish Gentleman" (1768) was seen as a parody of his friend Sterne's "Tristram Shandy". Hall-Stevenson also wrote on politics. He denounced the Earl of Bute and all politicians, whether Whig or Tory, with such works as "A Pastoral Cordial; or an Anodyne Sermon, preached before their Graces Newcastle