Extra Content: Translation Central

Since this blog rarely gets any use for its original purpose (writing about TV and occasionally movies and related media), I've decided to populate it with more general musings - mostly things that I write as comments elsewhere that I feel are worthy of collection. Beginning with a Tumblr meander on an important object in the history of language and understanding - the Rosetta Stone.

Pageview: Freedom

Freedom by Daniel Suarez

The only comfort we have that the US military is nothing like its portrayal in Daemon is that Suarez was still alive and at liberty to write the sequel - in which it gets worse. A very worthy continuation of the fantastic Daemon story, with the occasional hole or typo (worst author for uncaught typos I've ever read). As with the first book, it's good to read someone who knows exactly what they're talking about when they invoke technology, but doesn't show off.

Pageview: Skippy Dies

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

This is not the easiest book to read. It meanders, it loiters and the way Murray renders certain characters' thought processes in text via grammar, font changes and disconnected run-ons is sometimes challenging. But it makes the book more real.

Timey-wimey

So it's been well over a year since I last published a post on here. I have to confess, I had an ulterior motive in setting up this blog in the first place - I was applying for a postgraduate degree in film and TV production, and wanted somewhere I could prove my ability to write and that I'd paid attention to TV and film. And it achieved that aim (with the exception of starting that sentence with 'And', just there)! I've been busy on that course for a while. So busy that I haven't posted.

Felix and Murdo

Armstrong and Miller, how could you? A few brief
laughs surrounded by a load of misses and
some spectacular bad taste. © Channel 4 2011

A disappointment. You can tell it’s not written by Armstrong and Miller themselves, but by Simon Nye – who, after writing the thoughtful Doctor Who episode Amy’s Choice, should know better… but then I suppose he did create Men Behaving Badly. Whatever possessed the talented comic duo to throw their lot in with this show? The sets and lighting looked like a bad early 90s soap, the acting was hammy, the premise flimsy and the jokes swung between dull and bad taste. “Hey, I know what, we can have a reference to these two toffs attending Oxbridge, then show a flashback of them bumming in a bush! That’s the kind of insightful satire that Channel 4 really wants brought to a sitcom pilot set in 1908!” I won't even bother to cover the lame shreds of plot in summary form.

Great Expectations

Can Sarah Phelps' adaptation live up to previous
outings of Dickens greats? © BBC 2011

At last, another big Dickensian on the BBC. Having been blown away in my mid-teens by Andrew Davies’ gaspingly epic Bleak House (just look at the cast list – 50 names in the principal corps and not one of them without a Wikipedia article) and the slightly smaller but no less enjoyable Little Dorrit in 2008, it’s about time. But does this three-hour tiddler show the BBC tightening its purse strings, or a lesser commitment to gargantuan period storytelling? Let’s hope not.

Absolutely Fabulous: Identity

Edina & Patsy (Jennifer Saunders & Joanna Lumley)
in their glory days. © BBC 2011

Having never seen a full episode of Ab Fab before, I didn’t know exactly what my expectations for this should be. I’d seen miscellaneous work by most of the cast (Saunders’ Shrek 2 voicing and French & Saunders, Lucy Montgomery in Armstrong and Miller, Horrocks’ Little Voice, the fleeting Naoko Mori in Doctor Who and Torchwood and of course Lumley’s ball-crunching takedown of MP Phil Woolas on the widely-reported issue of Gurkhas’ resettlement rights in 2009, as well as various Comic Relief sketches and her Bond Girl performance), and the occasional clip of the show – my favourite’s at the end of this post – so I almost felt I could grasp the shtick of each character. Patsy Stone is drugged-up, opinionated and completely out of touch with the world, Edina Monsoon is also trying far too hard to be ‘cool’ and younger than she really is through clothes and speech, her daughter Saffy’s the long-suffering sane one trying to help them and her Mother is prying, unappreciated and a kleptomaniac.

And of course I’d heard of the general reputation of the show – my parents thoroughly enjoyed its original run and I remember it being talked about, so it wasn’t a surprise that the buzz for its return in the form of three 20^th-anniversary specials was high. In fact, after cursory research, it appears the show was more highly lauded than I’d expected – the BFI’s 17^th greatest British TV show of all time in 2000, and celebrated recently by Attitude magazine’s Paul Flynn in the Guardian as “prescient […] tour de force comedy and searing satire”. High praise for sporadic splurges of 37 episodes over five series, a two-part TV movie, three one-hour specials and a Comic Relief sketch (and apparently plans for another film). So why did this new half-hour reintroduction feel a bit flat?