Igenlode Wordsmith

I found the missing new season of Marie Antoinette on the BBC catch-up service (with five months left to run); unfortunately it looks as though this season is based around the same events as Antal Szerb's The Queen's Necklace, which I have literally just finished reading. So whereas the first series benefited from the fact that I knew very little about events at the French court at that end of Marie Antoinette's life and had no idea which characters were going to be significant, how events would turn out for the protagonists, or what to hope for, in this case I'm immediately recognising the whole set-up with foreknowledge of how it is going to end in advance. The annoying thing being that I knew nothing about the entire necklace affair (vaguely associating it with Anne of Austria and the Duke of Buckingham) until this week, and indeed would have avoided reading the book if I'd had any idea the TV series was going to re-emerge...

I tried watching the BBC's new "The War Between the Land and the Sea", which was being put into the Saturday-evening slot. Unfortunately I really struggled to understand what was going on.

( If I am going to struggle, I should prefer it to be with Russian )
Sorry, Russell T. Davies, but you had one chance to fix my interest, and you didn't make it. (Which, by an ironic coincidence, was more or less what Boyarsky was saying about his own experience of recent film releases in that school-interview :-p)

Catching up with the hideous backlog of washing-up with the aid of my pocket Walkman and Episode 1 of Brian Sibley's masterly 1981 radio adaptation of "The Lord of the Rings" for BBC Radio. Even now the music is instantly evocative...

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)

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

( 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 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...

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... )

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... )

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

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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... )