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igenlodeI wrote a long post, but the browser crashed while I was looking for images :-(
Summarised version:
BBC Radio Lord of the Rings: finished listening, although aging cassettes refuse to play last few minutes at end of Side 1/start of Side 2, resulting in the Scouring of the Shire being entirely inaccessible in the final episode.
Managed to download the missing material from archive.org, although huge and not of great quality. https://archive.org/details/lord-of-the-rings-10_202401
Waiting for the Out: continues very good -- Guardian review
Marie Antoinette: I am won over again despite knowing the outcome of this season in detail already. There are still personal dramas -- I don't know if the sick Dauphin is going to survive or be supplanted by his newborn younger brother -- and little shocks of identification (the Duc de Chartres is going to end up as Philippe-Égalité).
And, as before, the character I can really sympathise with is the poor laborious, well-meaning King himself, trying hard to rise to a role he doesn't particularly want (unlike all his relatives, who can't wait to get their hands on it), and completely oblivious to the efforts of his wife's power-hungry favourite to seduce him until she gets desperate enough to proposition him openly on the grounds that having an official mistress (which need be in name only, she promises -- they don't have to actually *do* anything) will nobly deflect hatred away from his Queen and into her direction instead. And even that doesn't work for her, because he is just too straightforward and honest to entertain the idea.
No resemblance to the notoriously fat Louis XVI of real life, of course, but he has my sort of shy bony face :-p
I'm afraid I'm not at all sympathetic to Marie-Antoinette's supposed passionate love-affair in consequence, however; not only is it obviously incredibly stupid and unwise (and she *knows* that), but I don't get the attraction or indeed any sense of chemistry between the actors, whereas she and Louis have an actual relationship and worry about hurting one another, even if it's not Teh Sexx...
And also *two* Russian Smekhov-adjacent serials: an in-depth nine-part podcast on the 'musical spectacular' "Ali-Baba" (which I had vaguely heard of but hadn't realised he actually wrote all the lyrics for -- apparently it was another beloved Soviet children's classic, at least according to the possibly-not-impartial makers of the podcast!) and a pre-Musketeers adventure serial that was referred to in several recent interviews, "Smok and Malish", in which he plays the lead. Again, I had vaguely heard of this: it is clearly the prior production briefly alluded to in "When I Was Athos" which had involved falling off roofs, out of canoes, and into snowdrifts :-D
This isn't an adaptation of any of the famous Jack London books, "The Call of the Wild", "White Fang" etc, but of what is apparently a set of short stories, "Smoke and Shorty" (helpfully given in English on the title screen before it fades to the Russian title!) Smekhov was head-hunted for the role of the main protagonist, a San Francisco journalist who throws in the successful serial novel he is writing in order to head for Alaska in the Gold Rush, and there survives and comes out on top by the application of brainpower rather than brawn -- naturally a storyline that appeals to me, and one the director clearly felt he was typecast for :-) (According to Smekhov's own account, he was apparently told that he was picked for the role of Athos "because you have such a wise face -- or at least you manage to give the impression of being intelligent" :-D)
And in both cases I was delighted to find that I could actually *understand* sufficient of the Russian to follow it unaided -- rather more so in the case of the podcast, because discussing backstage details happens to be precisely the range of esoteric vocabulary I've acquired ('gonorar' for 'honorarium', an actor's fee; 'kapustnik' for a theatrical skit), but then in the case of the TV serial I have the advantage of the visuals to help guess at what is happening! I did go back over the opening San Francisco scene with subtitles and a dictionary to elucidate some of the vocabulary I just didn't know, and that clarified a lot of the detail (e.g. I think Kit actually *wrote* the song being performed in the night-club, which is why he is taking a bow as he passes the stage...) but I picked up the gist of the plot on the first pass uninterrupted, and quite a lot of the dialogue where it happened to touch on subjects I knew about ;-)
I don't know -- I'm beginning to feel that *maybe* I've crossed some sort of threshold since Christmas, and that I'm actually starting to understand Russian freely at last...? It might have something to do with actually sitting down with textbooks to do some formal learning, but I think it's more a matter of sheer vocabulary acquisition coupled with my ear tuning in to rapid speech; unsuprisingly it is very dependent on subject matter, but I was able to listen to a ten-minute interview with the son of the great singer Chaliapin (advertised as an example of 'old Russian pronunciation', but it sounded perfectly normal to my ear...) and to my astonishment understand almost all of it, because (a) he was enunciating with beautiful clarity (probably the 'old-fashioned' element) and (b) he was talking about the film and theatre world, in which I have inadvertently specialised!
(This gentleman is talking incredibly fast, but the subject in question is an anecdote of history from Versailles, even if not one I'd heard before, and that means I can understand almost all of it without (Russian) subtitles, and guess at the missing words with...)
Summarised version:
BBC Radio Lord of the Rings: finished listening, although aging cassettes refuse to play last few minutes at end of Side 1/start of Side 2, resulting in the Scouring of the Shire being entirely inaccessible in the final episode.
Managed to download the missing material from archive.org, although huge and not of great quality. https://archive.org/details/lord-of-the-rings-10_202401
Waiting for the Out: continues very good -- Guardian review
Marie Antoinette: I am won over again despite knowing the outcome of this season in detail already. There are still personal dramas -- I don't know if the sick Dauphin is going to survive or be supplanted by his newborn younger brother -- and little shocks of identification (the Duc de Chartres is going to end up as Philippe-Égalité).
And, as before, the character I can really sympathise with is the poor laborious, well-meaning King himself, trying hard to rise to a role he doesn't particularly want (unlike all his relatives, who can't wait to get their hands on it), and completely oblivious to the efforts of his wife's power-hungry favourite to seduce him until she gets desperate enough to proposition him openly on the grounds that having an official mistress (which need be in name only, she promises -- they don't have to actually *do* anything) will nobly deflect hatred away from his Queen and into her direction instead. And even that doesn't work for her, because he is just too straightforward and honest to entertain the idea.
No resemblance to the notoriously fat Louis XVI of real life, of course, but he has my sort of shy bony face :-p
I'm afraid I'm not at all sympathetic to Marie-Antoinette's supposed passionate love-affair in consequence, however; not only is it obviously incredibly stupid and unwise (and she *knows* that), but I don't get the attraction or indeed any sense of chemistry between the actors, whereas she and Louis have an actual relationship and worry about hurting one another, even if it's not Teh Sexx...
And also *two* Russian Smekhov-adjacent serials: an in-depth nine-part podcast on the 'musical spectacular' "Ali-Baba" (which I had vaguely heard of but hadn't realised he actually wrote all the lyrics for -- apparently it was another beloved Soviet children's classic, at least according to the possibly-not-impartial makers of the podcast!) and a pre-Musketeers adventure serial that was referred to in several recent interviews, "Smok and Malish", in which he plays the lead. Again, I had vaguely heard of this: it is clearly the prior production briefly alluded to in "When I Was Athos" which had involved falling off roofs, out of canoes, and into snowdrifts :-D
This isn't an adaptation of any of the famous Jack London books, "The Call of the Wild", "White Fang" etc, but of what is apparently a set of short stories, "Smoke and Shorty" (helpfully given in English on the title screen before it fades to the Russian title!) Smekhov was head-hunted for the role of the main protagonist, a San Francisco journalist who throws in the successful serial novel he is writing in order to head for Alaska in the Gold Rush, and there survives and comes out on top by the application of brainpower rather than brawn -- naturally a storyline that appeals to me, and one the director clearly felt he was typecast for :-) (According to Smekhov's own account, he was apparently told that he was picked for the role of Athos "because you have such a wise face -- or at least you manage to give the impression of being intelligent" :-D)
And in both cases I was delighted to find that I could actually *understand* sufficient of the Russian to follow it unaided -- rather more so in the case of the podcast, because discussing backstage details happens to be precisely the range of esoteric vocabulary I've acquired ('gonorar' for 'honorarium', an actor's fee; 'kapustnik' for a theatrical skit), but then in the case of the TV serial I have the advantage of the visuals to help guess at what is happening! I did go back over the opening San Francisco scene with subtitles and a dictionary to elucidate some of the vocabulary I just didn't know, and that clarified a lot of the detail (e.g. I think Kit actually *wrote* the song being performed in the night-club, which is why he is taking a bow as he passes the stage...) but I picked up the gist of the plot on the first pass uninterrupted, and quite a lot of the dialogue where it happened to touch on subjects I knew about ;-)
I don't know -- I'm beginning to feel that *maybe* I've crossed some sort of threshold since Christmas, and that I'm actually starting to understand Russian freely at last...? It might have something to do with actually sitting down with textbooks to do some formal learning, but I think it's more a matter of sheer vocabulary acquisition coupled with my ear tuning in to rapid speech; unsuprisingly it is very dependent on subject matter, but I was able to listen to a ten-minute interview with the son of the great singer Chaliapin (advertised as an example of 'old Russian pronunciation', but it sounded perfectly normal to my ear...) and to my astonishment understand almost all of it, because (a) he was enunciating with beautiful clarity (probably the 'old-fashioned' element) and (b) he was talking about the film and theatre world, in which I have inadvertently specialised!
(This gentleman is talking incredibly fast, but the subject in question is an anecdote of history from Versailles, even if not one I'd heard before, and that means I can understand almost all of it without (Russian) subtitles, and guess at the missing words with...)