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igenlodeI have *finally* managed to get the Comte de Brencourt and Gaston de Trélan face to face, which was the original point of the entire story, and now have to remember all the things they were supposed to say to each other and in what order this was supposed to work :-O
(thanks/grieving widow jibe/Sussex(?)/Roland/backstory/Valentine are what currently come to mind...)
A tale of two thrillers: a lot of new series seem to be starting on TV at the moment, and due to the BBC playing around with the usual schedules thanks to Wimbledon/football I found myself watching the first episodes of two thrillers that turned out to share a surprising number of tropes in common -- "Jetty", and "A Good Girl's Guide to Murder", which I'm pretty sure I've seen on the second-hand book shelves in a pink chick-lit cover without being inspired from the blurb to read it. It certainly wasn't something I was expecting to enjoy, since teenage preoccupations have always been utterly alien to me, and any programme that starts off with "nerd gets humiliated into ineptly breaking rules in order to appear 'cool' in front of contemporaries" is likely to strain my tolerance very quickly. But it managed to win me over by the end of the first episode, by which point I'd realised that the fact I felt a lot more interest and sympathy for the accused murder suspect who had killed himself (or had he been killed and set up to take the blame? It hasn't been openly suggested yet but I'm wondering about that...) than in the pretty, popular, teenage blonde victim was precisely the way the story was *intended* to work.
And the balance between Pip being socially inexperienced (she has never touched alcohol) but still prepared to put herself into uncomfortable situations in the name of her quest for justice (she is prepared to face a bargain that requires her to 'take a shot' in return for every question her uncooperative witness agrees to answer) is pretty sensitively handled. She clearly *is* younger, chronologically and/or in terms of experience, than just about all the other characters, and is carrying on her investigation in the Nancy Drew spirit without necessarily understanding how raking up dirty linen is likely to affect those who were involved. On the other hand her emotional unsophistication isn't as a rule being played for laughs, and her resulting tendency to walk up to people and say the unthinkable can pay off in terms of results.
Meanwhile "Jetty" is coincidentally hitting a remarkably large number of the same target points (missing girl, teenage cliques and bitchiness, tense thriller situations, mother/daughter relationships, lesbians, bunking off school, suspected sex with older man) but doing so in what I assume to be a self-consciously 'gritty' way that left me with absolutely no desire to see any further episodes... while after seeing the first two episodes of "Good Girl", transmitted together as a double broadcast, I ended up going to the lengths of recording the late-night sign-language repeats in order to find out what happened next, after the next transmission clashed with a regular programme returned to its normal slot :-O
The difference is possibly partly that a programme made for the 'youth' market on BBC Three is consciously being kept below my preferred 'PG' level, rather than trying to justify an 'after the watershed' slot -- even if they are both, in fact, being transmitted well after the watershed! For example, the worst thing *objectively* speaking that is likely to happen to Pip if she is caught hiding in the murdered girl's bedroom is that the victim's younger sister will yell at her... but she is sick with fear, and the way that scene is filmed is incredibly tense. Meanwhile, in the series where you've got bad language, violence, and accusations of paedophilia flying left, right and centre, the threats bring little more than cheap thrills, or are simply tedious and unpleasant.
The major difference, I think, is that I simply didn't care about any of the characters or worry for their happiness or wellbeing, which is always fatal. In fact, I disliked the teenage scenes in "Jetty" so much that it was a major factor putting me off watching any further, whereas although "Good Girl" is basically *entirely* teenagers, and moreover teenage girls inhabiting a world that is almost totally alien to me (just for starters, they are all driving themselves around in cars, which their parents appear to find entirely normal), even the obvious 'suspects' get sympathetic moments; the characters in this show are far better imagined. I am still predictably hoping that the series doesn't decide to pair Pip and Ravi off, as I suspect it will, on the general principle that I prefer trust and friendship not to be cheapened by dumping a generic romance lever onto it, but they work so well together that I think I could be reconciled to it.
It took me two weeks to notice that, after the Great Retuning Fiasco, all the ITV channels were still missing :-O
I wanted to watch the start of another comedy, "Piglets", on ITV, and discovered that Channel 3 was simply missing, as was "ITV2", "ITV3" and in fact everything between BBC2 and BBC4 -- even the ITV 'plus one' channels had gone. Since I now had some experience of what was happening I managed to activate the remote controller to 'Auto-Tune' the entire spectrum all over again. This is a rather scary process since the analogue transmission channels are now entirely blank and so for at least half the process there is nothing visible but snow and a report of zero channels found -- but it did eventually detect a hundred-plus digital channels, which appeared to *actually* include all the 'useful bits' at the top this time. (Without a properly working TV remote, explorations that scroll more than about 20 channels down are laborious to say the least: I think the furthest down I have ever been was for "Talking Pictures" on one specific occasion when there was an advertisement that a film I was curious to see was being shown there. But I wouldn't normally look!)
(thanks/grieving widow jibe/Sussex(?)/Roland/backstory/Valentine are what currently come to mind...)
A tale of two thrillers: a lot of new series seem to be starting on TV at the moment, and due to the BBC playing around with the usual schedules thanks to Wimbledon/football I found myself watching the first episodes of two thrillers that turned out to share a surprising number of tropes in common -- "Jetty", and "A Good Girl's Guide to Murder", which I'm pretty sure I've seen on the second-hand book shelves in a pink chick-lit cover without being inspired from the blurb to read it. It certainly wasn't something I was expecting to enjoy, since teenage preoccupations have always been utterly alien to me, and any programme that starts off with "nerd gets humiliated into ineptly breaking rules in order to appear 'cool' in front of contemporaries" is likely to strain my tolerance very quickly. But it managed to win me over by the end of the first episode, by which point I'd realised that the fact I felt a lot more interest and sympathy for the accused murder suspect who had killed himself (or had he been killed and set up to take the blame? It hasn't been openly suggested yet but I'm wondering about that...) than in the pretty, popular, teenage blonde victim was precisely the way the story was *intended* to work.
And the balance between Pip being socially inexperienced (she has never touched alcohol) but still prepared to put herself into uncomfortable situations in the name of her quest for justice (she is prepared to face a bargain that requires her to 'take a shot' in return for every question her uncooperative witness agrees to answer) is pretty sensitively handled. She clearly *is* younger, chronologically and/or in terms of experience, than just about all the other characters, and is carrying on her investigation in the Nancy Drew spirit without necessarily understanding how raking up dirty linen is likely to affect those who were involved. On the other hand her emotional unsophistication isn't as a rule being played for laughs, and her resulting tendency to walk up to people and say the unthinkable can pay off in terms of results.
Meanwhile "Jetty" is coincidentally hitting a remarkably large number of the same target points (missing girl, teenage cliques and bitchiness, tense thriller situations, mother/daughter relationships, lesbians, bunking off school, suspected sex with older man) but doing so in what I assume to be a self-consciously 'gritty' way that left me with absolutely no desire to see any further episodes... while after seeing the first two episodes of "Good Girl", transmitted together as a double broadcast, I ended up going to the lengths of recording the late-night sign-language repeats in order to find out what happened next, after the next transmission clashed with a regular programme returned to its normal slot :-O
The difference is possibly partly that a programme made for the 'youth' market on BBC Three is consciously being kept below my preferred 'PG' level, rather than trying to justify an 'after the watershed' slot -- even if they are both, in fact, being transmitted well after the watershed! For example, the worst thing *objectively* speaking that is likely to happen to Pip if she is caught hiding in the murdered girl's bedroom is that the victim's younger sister will yell at her... but she is sick with fear, and the way that scene is filmed is incredibly tense. Meanwhile, in the series where you've got bad language, violence, and accusations of paedophilia flying left, right and centre, the threats bring little more than cheap thrills, or are simply tedious and unpleasant.
The major difference, I think, is that I simply didn't care about any of the characters or worry for their happiness or wellbeing, which is always fatal. In fact, I disliked the teenage scenes in "Jetty" so much that it was a major factor putting me off watching any further, whereas although "Good Girl" is basically *entirely* teenagers, and moreover teenage girls inhabiting a world that is almost totally alien to me (just for starters, they are all driving themselves around in cars, which their parents appear to find entirely normal), even the obvious 'suspects' get sympathetic moments; the characters in this show are far better imagined. I am still predictably hoping that the series doesn't decide to pair Pip and Ravi off, as I suspect it will, on the general principle that I prefer trust and friendship not to be cheapened by dumping a generic romance lever onto it, but they work so well together that I think I could be reconciled to it.
It took me two weeks to notice that, after the Great Retuning Fiasco, all the ITV channels were still missing :-O
I wanted to watch the start of another comedy, "Piglets", on ITV, and discovered that Channel 3 was simply missing, as was "ITV2", "ITV3" and in fact everything between BBC2 and BBC4 -- even the ITV 'plus one' channels had gone. Since I now had some experience of what was happening I managed to activate the remote controller to 'Auto-Tune' the entire spectrum all over again. This is a rather scary process since the analogue transmission channels are now entirely blank and so for at least half the process there is nothing visible but snow and a report of zero channels found -- but it did eventually detect a hundred-plus digital channels, which appeared to *actually* include all the 'useful bits' at the top this time. (Without a properly working TV remote, explorations that scroll more than about 20 channels down are laborious to say the least: I think the furthest down I have ever been was for "Talking Pictures" on one specific occasion when there was an advertisement that a film I was curious to see was being shown there. But I wouldn't normally look!)