igenlode | Entries tagged with bbc

I have been watching the BBC's new drama about King Harold and William of Normandy, which to be honest is making me more and more inclined to go and read Georgette Heyer's "The Conqueror" instead (almost certainly, given Heyer's fanatical research ethic, more historically accurate, and easier to empathize with the characters as well).
Whoever did the adaptation on this one obviously had the brief to emphasise as many significant roles for women as possible, but at least it is done plausibly, with women depicted as canny diplomatic advisers or powers behind the throne, rather than being weapons-wielding warriors. King Edward's mother, Emma of Normandy --I'm *assuming* that connection between the realms is historically accurate, because I've never heard of her-- is basically the villain for the first half of the run, until Edward finally snaps and batters her to death with the crown of England (yes, it's that sort of show). Hard to imagine Edward the Confessor murdering anyone, but the scene makes it seem plausible in context.

Gore is definitely a defining factor, and I get the impression a lot of effort has been put into the fight choreography. The sets and buildings -- maybe not so much. ( Read more... )
My favourite character is currently the elegant and slippery Count Baldwin of Flanders, William's completely untrustworthy father-in-law (who actually does fit my memories of Heyer, so is probably drawn from historical record!)

Not a great show, but not sufficiently actively annoying to cause me to stop following it...

I finished watching The prisoner of the Chateau d'If, and did finally feel something (and there were a couple of songs that I actually liked, though I'm not sure why there were any songs in it at all, as this isn't a musical and there were only a handful of random songs at wide intervals throughout). The reason why there seemed to be "an awful lot of plot to be covered in the final episode" turns out to be that it is much longer than the other two, which are about 65 minutes each while this one runs about ninety minutes...

Even so it still seems quite rushed, and I don't see the point of including such characters as Valentine de Villefort and Maximilian Morrel when the subplot involving them has been entirely removed (also an issue, as I recall, with the Robert Donat version!) I was able to follow more of what was going on in this episode thanks mainly to my familiarity with the original plot, although where departures from this took place I was quickly confused. ( Read more... )

( Soviet Musketeers music )

I watched the first episode of the BBC's new drama "This City is Ours", mainly because it *was* the first episode and I often miss the beginnings of things and then have no interest in watching the remainder. But I shan't be bothering with any further episodes, I'm afraid. ( Read more... )

The second half/series of Sous le Signe des Mousquetaires was actually very intriguing as a set-up, because since they had (like the BBC "Musketeers") abandoned canon and were apparently writing their own material using the established characters and setting, pretty much anything was up for grabs and you couldn't tell which way the story was going to come out. ( Read more... )
At least d'Artagnan has finally confessed to lying to his friends about Milady's supposed death (although Athos nobly points out that, having, as I had suspected, guessed the truth some time previously, the fault was as much his in not speaking out earlier; even though he doesn't share the background of Dumas' character, this animated version of Athos is actually one of the few who looks and feels 'right' to me)

YouTube decided to show me (presumably due to my having watched the entirety of the first one) a whole series of fan-vids on the BBC "Musketeers" -- which apparently I never actually wrote about here, despite having watched it diligently throughout its run[s], and in fact named one of my Raouls in tribute to a character whose arc I particularly enjoyed!

I had forgotten just how *intelligent* that show was( Read more... )

Of course the fan-vids didn't go into any of that beyond the action sequences and the one-liners :-p
But YouTube proceeded in consequence to recommend me a 'review' of the various different screen versions of "The Three Musketeers" by someone who started off his upload with a scathing plot summary of the original story, saying how much he disliked the characters, accusing them of murder (for duelling) and rape and elitist behaviour, and generally demanding that a 19th-century novelist writing about the seventeenth century should adhere to the tenets of his 21st-century Internet-advocated ideology.( Read more... )

My immediate reaction was a strong desire to reread the novel in the original French, of which I own a copy! But I ended up by remembering that I had once been halfway through the animated series which was recommended to me by

Violonaire as a childhood favourite, Sous Le Signe des Mousquetaires, a.k.a 'the one where Milady has green hair and Aramis is a girl' ;-)
( Read more... )

Conclusion of the radio series "Growing Solo": one former BBC journalist spends a year living on only what he can grow on his smallholding in Somerset -- and discovers that what really grows best in Somerset is grass, which is why the county is historically known for its cheese production!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001yhhz/episodes/player

"In many ways this project is a protest; a hunger strike..." https://wickedleeks.riverford.co.uk/opinion/my-year-of-100-per-cent-self-sufficiency/

Edit: apparently he also has a small YouTube channel, and the material broadcast on Radio 4 consists of clips edited down from these longer episodes (with pictures!)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm3CUjP4CBkfFiMyM3FmFjJITVsE-MlCQ

Quick TV roundup: the ending of "A Good Girl's Guide to Murder" didn't live up to the promise of the other episodes, alas. ( Read more... )
And as I suspected they did try to pair off Pip and Ravi in the final reel, and as it turned out it didn't work for me at all. I don't know if the result was any less toe-curling in the original novel (or if it didn't take place at all in the original novel, and was just the producers trying to tie off loose ends!), but Pip simply does not come across as emotionally adult enough to start nursing a romantic interest in anyone, and the enormous height difference between the two characters doesn't help either. The dynamic between them is big brother/younger sister, which makes kissing both unconvincing and unattractive :-(

On the other hand "Piglets" was pretty successful despite my having missed most of the start, although if this week's episode was really the final one it seemed a bit inconclusive. (None of the plot strands were really cleared up except the one about who was going to be the new Chief Superintendent, which was neatly resolved by bringing the old one back over the head of both warring candidates!) With hindsight the programme is very much the modern equivalent of "Carry On Constable", with a similar mix of visual/verbal/character-based humour; the inept Superintendent Bob is least successful for me, because I never did find incompetence entertaining, but on the other hand the clueless trainee Huggins who always takes everything literally is often very funny, so I'm not sure where the distinction is. I suspect it is that Huggins often manages to succeed unexpectedly, whereas Bob just fails...

Another 'season' (well, two episodes) of "Vienna Blood" appeared unexpectedly and I managed to catch it quite by coincidence; the BBC seems to keep it very quiet :( ( Read more... )

( Fic progress )

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. ( Read more... )

( Retuning ITV )

I accidentally triggered the 'Auto Retune' feature on my no-longer-new digital TV set (bought as a result of the forced digital TV changeover) as a result of trying to change channels and inputs without using the remote controller,( Read more... )A desperate third effort (the definition of madness, repeatedly trying the same thing in the hopes of achieving a different result) finally restored what appeared to be the full spectrum of TV coverage, just ten minutes before the end of the programme I had originally been intending to watch on BBC2. I think it's all back now, at least the useful bits, though digital TV reception without a roof aerial has never been great around here. Luckily it wasn't a programme I was particularly invested in, but just a comedy that sounded potentially mildly interesting.

I did enjoy the third series of the Bristol-set "The Outlaws" -- possibly not quite as good as the initial one, as the plotline is getting a bit strained, but it manages to score with me, as ever, by including moments of genuine warmth and feeling for its characters as well as poking fun at them or putting them into humiliating situations for a laugh. ( Read more... )

I accidentally ran across another 'Missing Hancock' episode on the radio this evening: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000cp2n

I remember stumbling across one of these before; they are very well done, so much so that I really couldn't have told that it wasn't the original cast, and -- as I remembered -- a *great* deal funnier than the later TV series. Less self-indulgent (or rather Hancock-indulgent) I think, being much more of a team effort, and of course it's simply much more my type of humour, revolving around wordplay rather than cringe-making humiliations. Here I actually laughed out loud a couple of times at the clever script, and generally enjoyed myself.

Nice to know at least that I wasn't imagining that I did indeed find Hancock funny in the past...

I think my dill and my chilli seeds possibly actually are germinating now, which proves that all the other things that germinated before them simply are weeds in the same pot (poppies and corn-marigolds mostly), deploying the age-old weed strategy of 'germinate first and grow fastest' ;-)
(There's a reason why 'grow like a weed' is proverbial...)

To my surprise I also have a shoot splitting the dead topknot on one of the narcissus bulbs, in addition to the existing side-shoots that all the others have been doing. But I'm increasingly worried that my bonsai birch may have failed to survive the frosts earlier this year, as the nice plump dormant buds that developed after its pruning are now looking increasingly brown and withered rather than promising to unfurl; it is still rather early for silver birch, but some of the smaller branches are starting to look dead under the bark as well. We shall see.

( Marie Antoinette )

( Better )

It's looking as if[†] they are going to go through Marie Antoinette's entire life, rather than just creating a 'teen couple try to make arranged marriage work' drama... which means that this could get a good deal darker than I was expecting :-( The show was up to the stated year 1780 already at the start of this episode, and we have to be then at least a year or two later by the end of it, which is getting into 'dangerous' territory. We already had ironic hints this week about how "you too will grow old and ill, Sire"; as we know, he very notoriously won't...!( Read more... )

I very nearly didn't watch the BBC's new show Marie Antoinette, partly because I had it vaguely confused with the French production "Versailles", which I had gathered was something along the lines of "The Tudors" ("Louis the Phwoarteenth"), and partly because I'd seen someone enthusing over it based on 'it has two women kissing', which did not seem like an adequate basis for endorsement. (Spoilers: it *does* have two women kissing, but via the "I'll teach you how to get your man" trope -- I suspect there was a trailer shot in circulation with a certain amount of deliberate misrepresentation.)

Anyway, I did watch the first episode, and found it enjoyable, and have gone on to watch the rest so far. ( Read more... )

It's a bit damning when Michael Palin's non-fiction "Around the World in Eighty Days" challenge is proving to be closer to the spirit of the original and more watchable than the BBC's fancy new drama :-(

And the dispiriting thing is that the latter *could* have worked, even with all the revisionism and re-casting; there are moments in every episode when you can see the ghost of what might have been, despite the fact that it has practically nothing to do with the original plot. ( Read more... )

Current Mood: annoyed

https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/what_is_ultra-processed_food

An interesting way of classifying food intake -- and which would seem to suggest that I'm currently eating a diet of well over ninety percent non-'ultra-processed' food, depending on whether you count things like butcher's sausages and white pasta (sole listed ingredient durum wheat, but made in a factory; definitions appear to vary). So far this year I've bought three packets of chocolate biscuits (and eaten two), and been given an Easter egg, and just about everything else has been cooked from scratch.

( But... )

Current Mood: confused

I watched the Greta Thunberg programme, on recommendation -- very disappointed. ( disappointment )

I've made several recipes successfully out of the pre-war recipe booklets I mentioned. These were among a big box of old books left outside by one of my neighbours for passers-by to help themselves to. I really don't need more cookery books, but felt I had room for two small ones...( Read more... )

Current Mood: disappointed

I've finished typing up to the end of Christine and Erik (as yet unedited, but word counts aren't likely to change much), which gives me twelve chapters — four short and relatively fast-moving ones on Raoul, and seven longer and slower ones on Christine... plus the one at the beginning, which is from her viewpoint too. That catches me all the way up to June 2018 ;-p

It also suggests that the total word count is going to be rather more than I'd estimated; I make the cumulative total almost exactly 44,450 so far, which is somewhat over the rule-of-thumb estimate for 85 pages at 500 words/page (42,500). Which means the entire thing is going to be even longer than I thought — fine as a fanfic serial epic, not so good as a submittable manuscript. ( Read more... )

Current Mood: tired

I've been re-watching the first series of "Life on Mars", and was rather surprised by the frequent (in the last few episodes at least) references to Gene Hunt as being married. He certainly doesn't seem to be encumbered by a wife for the purposes of "Ashes to Ashes", let alone taking exception because a colleague 'made a pass at the Gov's missus'...

I also watched the musical broadcast of "Kinky Boots", which left me with the impression that the original film was probably a rather attractive Ealing Studios-type drama that I would have enjoyed watching. Unfortunately I didn't like the music at all.
Likewise the Matthew Bourne ballet version of "The Red Shoes" ended up simply inspiring me with a desire to see the Powell & Pressburger film (I may just have a videotape of it somewhere). ( Read more... )

I managed to miss all the last few David Attenborough BBC wildlife documentaries -- there seems to be one along every minute nowadays -- but caught the latest one on Sunday evening. ( Read more... )
"World on Fire" started out well and has continued excellent, with new depths unfolding with every episode. ( Read more... )
I never saw the feature-film adaptation of "The Name of the Rose"; I read the novel and didn't particularly care for it, which is often a good thing when it comes to screen versions. (Great books rarely make great films, and conversely if you are particularly fond of a book then someone else's vision of it rarely accords with your own.) The first episode of the new BBC adaptation looked promising, but I'm having increasing difficulty in following what's going on :-(
( Read more... )
I watched the film adaptation of "Reach for the Sky" with Kenneth More, and was rather disappointed. I'd assumed it would be better than that, and indeed thought I'd seen it before and enjoyed it. But again it suffers from a tendentious narration problem (in fact they've actually created a fictitious best-friend character to do the narrating, which doesn't work very well). Parts of the film are excellent, and I think some of the problem is that they just tried to fit in too much of Bader's life story; ironically it also doesn't help that I know Paul Brickhill's original book too well and was aware of the things that had been altered and left out.( Read more... )

This was so heavily trailed that I attempted to watch it last week, not realising that it was being advertised so far in advance ;-p
Thanks to the TV's appalling onscreen interface, I managed to miss half an hour of the first episode while patiently sitting and waiting for it supposedly to start, and found myself flung into the middle of a firefight between unknown foreigners in an unknown location with zero dialogue, just a lot of explosions: definitely not the most auspicious start. And while the publicity sold it as "Sean Bean plays a shell-shocked pacifist", in fact he got a couple of lines in the background as the father of one of the main characters -- luckily I wasn't watching it for Sean Bean :-p

But with all those disadvantages the story hooked me, just as the first series of "Sherlock" did under similar circumstances. By the end of the episode I'd worked out who everyone was and why, and cared what happened to them; the scene on the railway platform had every bit as much impact as the writers could have wished. I was definitely impressed.

I've been watching classic "Hancock's Half Hour" TV episodes as part of my quest to reduce the video library (e.g. watch them and then throw them away unless I'm likely to want to rewatch them). I remember the radio episodes as being quite funny, but either my sense of humour has changed or the format didn't transfer well to television -- this is the humour of humiliation again, where the viewer is invited to laugh at the protagonist's increasing discomfort and self-exposure.

Judging by the video sleeve, the final episode on this tape, "The Radio Ham", was expected to be the big draw, and indeed it actually got a laugh or two out of me at the beginning, pleasantly to my surprise. But as soon as we go into the "Mayday" sequence the script turns from wrongfooting the listener to putting the protagonist through a series of cringemaking experiences again, and watching Hancock demonstrate his incompetence at the expense of a desperate man just makes me wince. It's not quite the same as the sort of comedy that relies on Laurel & Hardy smashing things up by mistake or Charlie Chaplin taking a pratfall, but it's not far off -- people getting hurt doesn't amuse me.

Current Mood: disappointed

Sharing this again because it's just such a good piece of writing -- about acting, about editing, about Blake's 7: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/boucher-backbone-and-blake-the-legacy-of-blakes-7/

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Igenlode Wordsmith

Entries tagged with bbc

King & Conqueror

Screen update

The Three Musketeers

Growing Solo

TV conclusions

More TV

Digital TV

Missing Hancock

Plants and TV

"Marie Antoinette"

Marie Antoinette

Around the World in Eighty Days

Ultra-processed food

A Meatless Supper Snack

Some Arctic Raoul stats

Gene Hunt's wife

Screen roundup

"World on Fire", BBC1

Hancock's Half Hour

Boucher, Backbone and Blake