Good evening my honeys. There's been a hiatus on this blog because I've wanted to write about other things. So I've finally decided to create a new blog, where I write about all of the things I'm interested in, including the telly machine. Its called Dirty Modern Scoundrel and it's here.
I shan't be updating this blog any more, but there will be plenty of TV based shenanigins on t'other place once I get my arse in gear.
Thanks to everyone who's posted on this blog, I really appreciate it and I hope you like the new one.
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Monday, 15 March 2010
Sunday, 31 January 2010
Radiophonical
This is the first part of the BBC4 documentary on the BBC Radiophonic Workshop which I missed when it was on (links to the other 5 parts at the end). Magic.
Monday, 11 January 2010
American Life
As you might suspect from the title, Glee is pretty happy with itself. It's caught in the same smugly camp cartoon irony mode as Desperate Housewives and Ugly Betty, though so far with no signs of the tedious overcomplications of the former or the unchanging format of the latter. But it shares their black humour and reliance on grotesque female monsters to drive the plot.
In this instance the monster is Jane Lynch's Sue Sylvester, a character somewhere between Heathers, Donnie Darko and The Royal Tenenbaums. All of the cliches of American high school dramas are here: the horny, dumb jocks, the bitchy cheerleaders, the embarrassing nerds, etc. It's amazing how flexible these shorthand tics are: ever since John Hughes, Clueless and Election, the high school has taken over from the Western as the primary metaphor for American life. Here you have hope, fear, laws and lawlessness, emotional distress, cruelty and inspiration, role models and villains, and an endless cast of schoolkids and teachers to draw on for further issues and twists.
At the moment it's great fun – and it knows it. So far my favourite character by far is OCD emotional wreck (and obviously school guidance counsellor) Emma Pillsbury, whose Bridget Jones-style sobbing in a rain-soaked car to All By Myself in a tiny comic aside as she attempts to offer advice to a student did make me yelp with laughter. It's fun and silly and – oh yes, has songs (Goldigger being the only goodie so far) and I'm sure to get bored some way through this season as I always do with these invariably bloated and overlong American seasons.
Interesting to read the slew of homophobic comments from woolly liberals on the Guardian website under a piece about the show a few weeks back – it's like it was an opportunity for a lot of HBO fans to say 'that sounds soooo gay' over and over again. And, frankly, if it's annoying them then it's definitely doing something right.
In this instance the monster is Jane Lynch's Sue Sylvester, a character somewhere between Heathers, Donnie Darko and The Royal Tenenbaums. All of the cliches of American high school dramas are here: the horny, dumb jocks, the bitchy cheerleaders, the embarrassing nerds, etc. It's amazing how flexible these shorthand tics are: ever since John Hughes, Clueless and Election, the high school has taken over from the Western as the primary metaphor for American life. Here you have hope, fear, laws and lawlessness, emotional distress, cruelty and inspiration, role models and villains, and an endless cast of schoolkids and teachers to draw on for further issues and twists.
At the moment it's great fun – and it knows it. So far my favourite character by far is OCD emotional wreck (and obviously school guidance counsellor) Emma Pillsbury, whose Bridget Jones-style sobbing in a rain-soaked car to All By Myself in a tiny comic aside as she attempts to offer advice to a student did make me yelp with laughter. It's fun and silly and – oh yes, has songs (Goldigger being the only goodie so far) and I'm sure to get bored some way through this season as I always do with these invariably bloated and overlong American seasons.
Interesting to read the slew of homophobic comments from woolly liberals on the Guardian website under a piece about the show a few weeks back – it's like it was an opportunity for a lot of HBO fans to say 'that sounds soooo gay' over and over again. And, frankly, if it's annoying them then it's definitely doing something right.
Saturday, 9 January 2010
YesterDay Today
It's wonderful that Chris Morris has returned to our screens creating the brilliant parody history doc, History of Now: The Story of the Noughties. With a nosebleed of flashy graphics which interrupt the flow of the talking heads with a splat of neon jargon wobbling over the shoulder of a few dodgy professors and pundits, this is a great spoof of BBC3 documentaries and online web tutorials.
The obvious heir to The Day Today, this hilarious mockumentary series imagines a cultural doc directed by Nathan Barley, where the big issues of the decade are boiled down into meaningless soundbites about football, stag nights and the O2. Getting clueless celebs such as Andrew Marr and Will Self to earnestly contribute, as Paul Daniels and Noel Edmonds did to Brass Eye, made it look for all the world like a serious attempt to debate the history of the last decade, but the hilariously superficial angles the series has taken, debating such burning issues as second homes in Dubai, posh bakers and eastern European nannies, utterly undermines them.
Getting witless comedyslut Robert Webb to do his curlingly contemptuous and patronising narration added the final flourish to this outrageous spoof. His sneering, voice-of-cunt commentary was designed to tell us what we'd thought and how things were, but warped out of shape to such an outrageous extent that the last decade is rendered utterly unrecognisable, in the same way that government PR represents reality through a trail of surreal falsehoods and mangled statistics.
Cracking comedy start to the year, possibly a bit broad and unrealistic, but funny all the same, if cringingly embarrassing at times. Of course, there's no mention of Morris in the credits, and it's been trailed and put out as a completely straight doc, but we can all see it for what it is. Can't we?
The obvious heir to The Day Today, this hilarious mockumentary series imagines a cultural doc directed by Nathan Barley, where the big issues of the decade are boiled down into meaningless soundbites about football, stag nights and the O2. Getting clueless celebs such as Andrew Marr and Will Self to earnestly contribute, as Paul Daniels and Noel Edmonds did to Brass Eye, made it look for all the world like a serious attempt to debate the history of the last decade, but the hilariously superficial angles the series has taken, debating such burning issues as second homes in Dubai, posh bakers and eastern European nannies, utterly undermines them.
Getting witless comedyslut Robert Webb to do his curlingly contemptuous and patronising narration added the final flourish to this outrageous spoof. His sneering, voice-of-cunt commentary was designed to tell us what we'd thought and how things were, but warped out of shape to such an outrageous extent that the last decade is rendered utterly unrecognisable, in the same way that government PR represents reality through a trail of surreal falsehoods and mangled statistics.
Cracking comedy start to the year, possibly a bit broad and unrealistic, but funny all the same, if cringingly embarrassing at times. Of course, there's no mention of Morris in the credits, and it's been trailed and put out as a completely straight doc, but we can all see it for what it is. Can't we?
Sunday, 3 January 2010
The Power of Ten
David Tennant, eh? Blink and you'd have still seen him. For ages. Even narcolepsy wouldn't have blanked him out. He's been on TV more than John Barrowman for once, which is in itself a miracle. Still, no-one watched his Hamlet on Boxing Day, so the UK yule wasn't an entirely Tennant-based affair. Five hours of Shakespeare was probably not ideal viewing in the family-wrecked aftermath of Christmas.
And there was the little matter of Doctor Who, regenerating from Tennant to Matt Smith on New Years Day after a Christmas Day special. This would have been an unfathomable piece of scheduling for the series in any era other than the Dalek mania of 1964-66, and attests to a transformation in the fortunes of this series, from the cult hit of the seventies to the incongruous mess of the eighties, and then its miraculous mainstream rebirth in 2005. Naturally, Doctor Who fans being what they are, they all love it so much they hate it, but their small-minded whinnying can't diminish the amazing feat this has been and Russell T. Davies's overwhelming success at achieving the impossible: resurrecting a much-loved but dead series, reworking the emphasis so that it worked in a more human and mainstream way (if only his old companions had anywhere near the journey of Rose or Donna I doubt it would have been cancelled in the first place...) and making the most of the budget to create the best visuals they could afford. Anyone who thinks this was easy or that anyone could have done it better are either hopelessly naive or pointlessly cruel. Moffat is, of course, the flavour of the month with the fans (till his series starts, and then all the grumbling begins again) but he's hardly had an illustrious history of TV success behind him, and though he is brilliant and I am terribly excited by his arrival as show-runner, he's lead a lot of series to cancellation down the years.
I have to say, I wasn't mad about the Christmas episode, it felt unstructured and lacked a compulsive narrative. I've not been keen on the fancy-gizmo-on-Earth stories (be it Sontarans, Cybermen or bad CGI Mark Gatiss) and this just felt like another of those. Yet the second episode was tremendous, most particularly for the performances by Bernard Cribbins and Tennant. I loved all the nods to previous regenerations (Davisons's crashing spaceship, Pertwee's radiation sickness, Tom Baker's Watcher, Troughton's trial by Time Lords), the 'fuck it' moment when he resigns himself to dying and goes and breaks the laws of time in small ways to say goodbye to all of his friends, and the lump-in-throat moment when he shut the Tardis door behind him and was all alone. And I got very excited to see Matt Smith, who just looks the part.
Davies has given us five years of brilliantly fun, exciting, entertaining and sometimes extremely moving TV in a format (saturday night family telly) and show everyone thought was dead. It could have missed the point, like the terrible McGann TV Movie, and turned Doctor Who into yet another witless sci-fi series, but instead it's returned with all of the charm, fun and excitement of the old series, and a whole load of new emotional, human stories to ground the entire thing, which it had really needed all along. And now onto Steven Moffat, who might turn out to be the Philip Hinchcliffe/Robert Holmes from Tom Baker's gothic, horrifying early years, to Davies's Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks from Jon Pertwee's earth-bound era. Or he might just be Al Gore to Davies's Clinton... I'm hoping the former. I think the next season is going to be really special.
And there was the little matter of Doctor Who, regenerating from Tennant to Matt Smith on New Years Day after a Christmas Day special. This would have been an unfathomable piece of scheduling for the series in any era other than the Dalek mania of 1964-66, and attests to a transformation in the fortunes of this series, from the cult hit of the seventies to the incongruous mess of the eighties, and then its miraculous mainstream rebirth in 2005. Naturally, Doctor Who fans being what they are, they all love it so much they hate it, but their small-minded whinnying can't diminish the amazing feat this has been and Russell T. Davies's overwhelming success at achieving the impossible: resurrecting a much-loved but dead series, reworking the emphasis so that it worked in a more human and mainstream way (if only his old companions had anywhere near the journey of Rose or Donna I doubt it would have been cancelled in the first place...) and making the most of the budget to create the best visuals they could afford. Anyone who thinks this was easy or that anyone could have done it better are either hopelessly naive or pointlessly cruel. Moffat is, of course, the flavour of the month with the fans (till his series starts, and then all the grumbling begins again) but he's hardly had an illustrious history of TV success behind him, and though he is brilliant and I am terribly excited by his arrival as show-runner, he's lead a lot of series to cancellation down the years.
I have to say, I wasn't mad about the Christmas episode, it felt unstructured and lacked a compulsive narrative. I've not been keen on the fancy-gizmo-on-Earth stories (be it Sontarans, Cybermen or bad CGI Mark Gatiss) and this just felt like another of those. Yet the second episode was tremendous, most particularly for the performances by Bernard Cribbins and Tennant. I loved all the nods to previous regenerations (Davisons's crashing spaceship, Pertwee's radiation sickness, Tom Baker's Watcher, Troughton's trial by Time Lords), the 'fuck it' moment when he resigns himself to dying and goes and breaks the laws of time in small ways to say goodbye to all of his friends, and the lump-in-throat moment when he shut the Tardis door behind him and was all alone. And I got very excited to see Matt Smith, who just looks the part.
Davies has given us five years of brilliantly fun, exciting, entertaining and sometimes extremely moving TV in a format (saturday night family telly) and show everyone thought was dead. It could have missed the point, like the terrible McGann TV Movie, and turned Doctor Who into yet another witless sci-fi series, but instead it's returned with all of the charm, fun and excitement of the old series, and a whole load of new emotional, human stories to ground the entire thing, which it had really needed all along. And now onto Steven Moffat, who might turn out to be the Philip Hinchcliffe/Robert Holmes from Tom Baker's gothic, horrifying early years, to Davies's Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks from Jon Pertwee's earth-bound era. Or he might just be Al Gore to Davies's Clinton... I'm hoping the former. I think the next season is going to be really special.
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