perfidy

Or, perhaps not, since spoofs don't count.

In Tuesday's UK Telegraph, a story entitled A-Z of Rock Biopics. Among its more helpful bits, in random order, you'll find encyclopedic entries like this:

Dylan, Bob: Some critics maintain that the great English classical actor Sir John Gielgud was mis-cast as Bob Dylan in the 1975 biopic "A Tiresome Rain Is Expected Shortly".

Or this:

Edelweiss: Perhaps the most catchy and popular of all the tunes in The Sound of Music (1966). This is often seen as the very first rock biopic, telling the story of the Von Trapp family singers and their flight from Nazi Austria.

The original director, Alfred Hitchcock, had planned to make it a much darker, more disturbing film, with the ageing Joan Crawford as the drink-addled Maria, Edward G. Robinson as her sadistic employer and the Von Trapp children played entirely by surviving extras from Tod Browning's classic 1932 movie Freaks. In the original screenplay, Maria attempts to get rid of the first Countess Von Trapp by cutting up a clump of poisonous Edelweiss and baking it in a chicken pie.

But my favorite?

Choking on one's own vomit: The current wave of rock biopics has made one British company, "Vom of Norwich", a world leader in the production of artificial vomit. "In the old days, producers of rock biopics found it impossible to find a product with the right texture and consistency, but since 1999 we've changed all that," says chief executive Brian Spanner. "We make it to our own unique recipe, and are now producing 10,000 gallons a month. It's a great British success story."

A great British success story, indeed - because I don't think you can do rock biopics without vomit. But, dayam - 10,000 gallons a month?