Wow. Would you believe it? There was absolutely no news over the weekend. Incredible!
Not believable is it? Truth is, life caught up with me a little over the weekend and I didn’t have time to do the news this morning. Fingers crossed, it’ll be back tomorrow and I’ll get reviews of The Haunting of Thomas Brewster and The Poison Sky done between now and the end of the week, at least.
Sorry for any inconvenience or disappointment caused!
Today’s Joanna Page (or did y’all prefer "Page of the Day"? Or even just "Joanna page"?) is from Gavin & Stacey (obviously). Hope you enjoy it.
Just as a brief – okay, not very brief at all – aside though, I’ve been listening to Safety Catch, which was a Radio 4 comedy show on in September/October last year. The lovely Ms Page isn’t in it much, even though she gets almost top billing, but she’s brilliant when she is, particularly when she gets a load of good lines in the fourth episode. Plus, ooh! She’s allowed to keep her Swansea accent! Yey!
In case you don’t know what it’s about, here’s the plot from the BBC Radio 4 web site:
Safety Catch is the story of a man who never intended to go into the arms trade: he fell into it but he’s definitely going to leave soon. And if he wasn’t doing his job, someone else would. And at least he doesn’t work for McDonald’s
Simon McGrath likes to think of himself as a good person. He donates blood (although not bone marrow because he’s heard that hurts), he recycles and he’s adopted two tigers. But he has to pay his mortgage just like everyone else and that’s why he currently works as an arms dealer.
It’s actually really funny (Laurence Howarth wrote it), so worth listening to in its own right. How can you do that, given that Radio 4 isn’t playing it any more, and it’s not on Listen Again? I couldn’t possibly comment, but you could try clicking the Play buttons below…
PS I had the strangest impression they’d done a TV pilot of it with Stephen Mangan recently, but I can’t find the slightest trace of that anywhere, so I must have imagined it.
PPS No hint of a second series. Sigh. Still, if you stick it on at 11.30pm on a Wednesday, what do you expect?
In the UK: Thursdays, 9pm, BBC1
Clearly, with all the kids off watching their XBoxes instead of TVs now, commissioners at the mainstream channels are looking at tired, worn out, older viewers who remember a better time to bolster their audience figures.
Look at New Tricks, in which a bunch of old blokes from better TV shows that we all remember from the 70s and 80s get together to fight crimes and show us how it was done in the good old days.
Now here’s the flipside of that coin, in which two actors we remember from shows (and adverts) of the 80s and 90s get together to commit crimes. Course, back in those days, the gangsters were proper gentlemen weren’t they. Not like the scum these days. They won’t even tell proper jokes while they’re breaking into your safe.
Went to the NFT’s showing of Murrain, an episode of the old play strand Against The Crowd* written by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale, and Robin Redbreast, from the BBC’s Play for Today written by British arch-surrealist John Bowen.
Robin Redbreast
Surprisingly, Robin Redbreast was the stronger of the two: think a cross between Rosemary’s Baby, The Wicker Man and The Aphrodite Inheritance, all set in the Cotswalds, in which a newly single TV script editor finds that country folk have their own strange ways. Absolutely off its head, with bizarre naked karate in the woods, appearances by Herne the Hunter and Wayland the Smithy, and some of the weirdest dialogue you’d ever hear, it was just endlessly entertaining.
Murrain
Murrain was relatively normal by comparison, a standard piece of Kneale fare in which superstition meets science – in the form of a pig farmer who thinks a local woman is really a witch and a vet who wants to protect the little old lady from those nasty bumpkins. If anything, it proved that DoPs in the 70s shouldn’t have got ambitions above their stations so many years before the invention of the Steadicam. Not really worth looking out for unless you’re a big fan of Bernard Lee (the original M in the Bond movies) or the scary dad in Sapphire and Steel – Assignment 1.
The audience: As always, it’s worth reviewing the audience:
I’ve had better nights out
* My, didn’t they think they were being subversive?
News will be back on 6th May because of the UK bank holiday on Monday
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