Category Archives: Television

Christmas and TV

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I didn’t really expect to take a short blogging break, but it just sort of happened, so what have I been doing? Well as you can see we had a few games of Cluedo on Christmas evening, before those we played Trivial Pursuit – no blood was spilled!

There always seems to be someone in our family photos looking either completely gormless or miserable, we take it in turns I think. This time it’s Laura by the looks of it although she would say that it is a plus that her eyes are actually open.

The offspring left on the 26th, unusually early for them but they had more exciting places to be, Skye and Iceland to be precise for Hogmanay, lucky them.

Otherwise I haven’t been doing much, what about you?

It seems to me that the TV companies have more or less given up on Christmas, there was a time when there was quite a battle over viewers but that doesn’t seem to happen now. I was reduced to watching the film of War and Peace which I quite enjoyed, apart from the American accents, it was filmed in 1956 when obviously it wasn’t the fashion to be in the least bit authentic accent wise.

I even watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – again, but why not when I always enjoy it.

I also had a look at the updated Open All Hours which I thought was likely to be a bit of a car crash as these things usually are, it’s often a mistake to try to resurrect past TV successes but I think it really worked, I hope they are going to do some more.

Then there was the three part dramatisation of Death Comes to Pemberley. I read the book a couple of months ago (P.D. James) as I knew it was going to be on the telly at Christmas. I don’t think the book was up to much but it worked fine on TV as I thought it would, although I still think that in reality Lydia and Wickham would have come to grief long before they had reached a six or seventh anniversary of their marriage.

But – why oh why?!? did they choose Anna Maxwell Martin to play the part of Lizzie. Lizzie remember has ‘fine eyes’. This Lizzie has anything but fine eyes and in fact has the presence of a maid rather than a fine lady as she would certainly have been after being married to Darcy for six years, she was handsome and stylish enough as a youngster on a shoe string and was obviously interested in clothes. The clothes which Lizzie was given to wear in this production were fairly dire, I can’t imagine that the wife of an exceedingly rich man would have been wearing what looked like rough homespun linen which Lizzie had on for daytime. Very strange.

Have I missed anything good on TV do you think, what did you watch and enjoy?

Visit Scotland 2014/Rab C. Nesbitt/Dick Emery

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I did mention a wee while ago that 2014 is going to be a big year in Scotland, in fact it’s a Homecoming Year as well as being our Independence Referendum year. You can read all about some of the events which will be going on throughout Scotland at the Visit Scotland site.

If you are feeling fraught at the moment what with the stress of the coming season you might like to cheer yourself up with a look at some old Scottish comedy from Rab C. Nesbitt. You can see him having a wee bit of a rant below. Anyone who has trouble understanding David Tennant’s accent might find this interesting!

Just to even things up I’m mentioning an English comedian too as
it has come to my notice that Dick Emery didn’t make it to the US in the way that Benny Hill did. If you want to see some of his sketches have a look below, they’re mostly from the 1970s, my favourite decade, although the first one is the 60s I think. One of his most popular characters was Mandy, who never did master the art of walking in high heels, that’s the one thing I have in common with ‘her’.

Frances – the Bake Off winner.

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For once my favourite to win this year’s Great British Bake Off actually won. I was rooting for Frances all the way. If you are interested you can read more about her and the Bake Off here.

I love her clever designs so I wasn’t surprised to find out that she is a children’s clothes designer. Although she was originally criticised by the judges for having more interest in the look of her food rather than the flavours, she obviously learned from her earlier mistakes and deserved to win.

I’m still not happy that James Morton didn’t win last year as he seemed to me to be by far the best baker. He had great taste in Fair Isle jumpers too!

The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

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This one was first published in 1930 and is apparently the first one in which Miss Marple appears, it has been dramatised for TV in fact I’ve seen it umpteen times but I still enjoyed the book. The story is told by the vicar of St Mary Mead, Mr Len Clements but the whole book is very dialogue heavy, which must have made dramatising it so easy as Christie is very good at dialogue with a perfect ear for the differences in speech of the various classes of those days.

Colonel Protheroe is much disliked in the village so when he is found dead in the vicar’s study, sitting at his desk, there are plenty of possibilities as to who the culprit might be.

The relationship between the vicar and his much younger wife Griselda is a lovely one with Griselda’s light-hearted personality – on paper everything that a vicar’s wife shouldn’t be – perfectly complementing her husband’s necessarily more serious attitude, but he is obviously besotted with her, a great couple of characters.

In general the books are always better than the TV shows but I must admit to loving the period clothes, jewellery, handbags and hats, all very stylish, whether the setting is 1930s, 40s, or even 1950s, although that isn’t my favourite decade.

If you haven’t seen the most recent TV Murder at the Vicarage you can see it on you tube below.

Scott and Bailey and TV

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I was brought up with the TV on in the living-room every evening and often I put it on just to watch the news 24 during the day. We have loads of channels nowadays but often there’s nothing that is worth actually watching.

I rarely watch ITV because I can’t stand the adverts, but I did start to watch Scott and Bailey recently as it has been getting good reviews. I liked it, it has lots of good female characters and it seemed a good balance of their private lives and the goings on at the police station.

But, I was amazed by the last couple which I watched because it quickly became obvious that the crime which they were investigating was just a rewrite of the Fred and Rosemary West murders in Gloucester. How lazy and sloppy is that? I know that a lot of authors get their ideas from the newspapers, but they usually have the sense to disguise and twist the storyline and it eventually turns into something more original.

I kept waiting for an unusual twist in the storyline, but it never came. I was actually quite embarrassed for whoever made the programme, but they obviously didn’t feel ashamed of what they had produced.

At the end of the investigation they ‘got their man’. How did we know? Because Bailey came in and announced that the murderer had inadvertently let slip some information which he could only have known if he had been there.

We didn’t actually see that crucial part of the questioning till after we had been told it had happened which made the whole thing a damp squib. Have police drama programme makers in Britain lost it completely? The only good things recently have been Scandinavian or, yes even Italian police investigations. Bring back Inspector Montalbano!

Bookish Thoughts

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You might know that I recently borrowed The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller from my local library, I had been under the impression that it was the book which Peggy Ann at Peggy Ann’s Post had enjoyed, but that was a different one by the same author. So I didn’t even look at the blurb before borrowing it and when Judith (Reader in the Wilderness) commented that she had tried the book and had given up on it, I thought that I was unlikely to have the same reaction – just because I rarely give up on books – but I gave up on The Lake Shore Limited on page 56 to be precise – nine lines from the bottom of the page.

It was the words Lou Gehrig’s disease which stopped me, and I only realised a few weeks ago that that is what people in the US call Motor Neurone disease. For me that was the last straw in what was a bit of a doomfest of a book with one character mourning the loss of a brother at a young age in one of the September, 11th planes.

It reminded me of the Kate Atkinson book When Will There Be Good News – which I ploughed my way through as I really usually enjoy her books but at the end of it I could only think – what a miserable book. Why write such depressing stuff, I feel like prescribing the writers a course of anti-depressants just so that they won’t infect the rest of us with negativity.

This could well be an age thing. I imagine that as a young thing there’s a fair chance that you haven’t had the misfortune to have experienced at first hand things like the early death of siblings – or in my case three cousins who died before the age of 10. You might not have had to nurse your parents and in-laws who had diseases such as cancer, heart disease, peritonitis and MS. You probably haven’t experienced at close quarters someone with MN disease, but I have. And that was why I couldn’t read on any more. I read for entertainment and that doesn’t include horror. I feel the same way about television programmes, it has always been a mystery to me that things set in hospitals are so popular. I suppose those who watch them are not the people who have had to visit hospitals or even had the misfortune to be the person in the hospital bed. When you are the one having to give permission for a life-support machine to be switched off in reality, then you don’t wish to revisit the experience again, not even at second hand.

So I prescribed myself more from P.G. Wodehouse, and I’m feeling quite like my old self again. What ho!

Sound Memories

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I caught the back end of a Radio 4 programme last night, it was something about sounds which instantly take you back to another time. There was a woman saying that the sound of an old push along lawnmower takes her back to memories of her father in the garden when she was a very young child and he was only about 25. I thought – how strange to remember your dad being just 25, my first memories of my dad, he must have been around 40, and that was old in the 1960s.

Anyway, when they played the sound of an old lawnmower, so much nicer than the violent noise of a Flymo, I was back in my childhood garden where I spent plenty of time cutting the grass, I could almost see and feel that big circular dip in the middle where the ground had sunk, presumably a previous gardener had had a round flowerbed there.

By coincidence Chris Evans played the original 1960s Doctor Who music on the radio early this morning. I knew that the music had been re-arranged a few times over the years, but I thought that it was just age which had sort of inured me to that sound. It doesn’t seem nearly so scary now, however when I heard the 1960s version it all came back, if I hadn’t already been under the covers, I would have just about been hiding behind a sofa, my usual position when Doctor Who started! Have a listen, I think the first version is by far the most menacing one. What do you think? I am just old enough to be able to remember all of the Doctors.

2012 New Year’s Day Concert from Vienna and Gustav Klimt

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It has become a tradition in our house to watch the Vienna Philarmonic Orchestra’s New Year’s Day concert. It’s a lovely peaceful way of starting the day, even if you aren’t nursing a hangover. There’s always a lovely mixture of music and dance and they show you bits of Vienna too, it’s somewhere I’ve never been but it looks gorgeous.

This year the dance literally revolved around Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. I love his artworks, whether they’re landscapes or portraits. He was so great at getting the feeling of textures into his work which I suppose is why so many of his designs have been used for tapestry and embroidery kits.

The Kiss dance is around about 39 minutes into this video if you’re interested in looking at it.

I know people always slag off artists whose work is used for things like calendars, it’s daft really because it just proves that it’s beautiful and easy on the eye, after all you don’t want to look at ugly works of art for the whole year.

Klimt

I have this one above the fireplace in my living-room and I always fancied visiting the place, until I saw it on TV smothered by tourists and that put me right off. Now I’m quite happy just to have it on my wall.

Outraged

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I was flicking through the Guardian the other day (yes we do actually buy it) when I came across this article. It’s quite long but well worth reading, even if the result is to make you spitting mad, like me.

The upshot is that the BBC is having to pay Rupert Murdoch £10 million a year to have the privilege of BBC programmes being shown on Sky. I feel as if I’ve wandered into an alternative universe again. I thought that we lived in a Capitalist society which is very simple to follow. If you have something which someone else wants then they have to pay you for it, if you want them to have it. So why isn’t Murdoch paying the BBC £squillions to be allowed to broadcast BBC programmes?

I have always prided myself that I haven’t knowingly added any money to the Murdoch coffers. I’ve never bought one of his newspapers and I don’t have Sky, so I’m more than a wee bit peeved – actually I’m incandescent – that my licence fee money is going to Murdoch.

I’ve always thought that the TV licence is just about one of the best bargains around. I would even be quite happy if Auntie Beeb didn’t block the internet viewing so that people in other countries could look in. That would stop Murdoch in his tracks, which could only be a good thing.

Please BBC, stop giving money to Rupert Murdoch et al!

Square up to politicians. Nothing is perfect but the BBC has a place in the hearts of most Brits which is second only to the NHS.

Why am I not surprised that this whole situation came about through Maggie Thatcher’s sucking up to Murdoch. Cakes and ale anyone?!

I could go on at length but I can already see that 2012 is going to be a year of grumping and groaning. Now, does anybody know how I go about setting up an online petition to support the BBC?