Just a little note that Joost, those exciting Internet TV people, now have the first two series of Peep Show, as well as a few other Channel 4 shows like Shameless.
The good things about this is:
It’s completely free, unlike iTunes or DVDs
You don’t need to install any software any more, since it runs in any browser than can play Flash video
Basically, all you need is a broadband connection and a web browser. Yey.
PS When did they change the theme tune on Peep Show or is is a licensing problem that stops them from using the proper tune?
Someone I used to train in jiu jitsu with, but who’s been living in India for the last 14 months, has made a documentary, Road to the Future?. It examines the gap between the rich and the poor in the country in the context of media hype about ‘shining India’. It’s going to be on Current TV on Tuesday 11th November at 11pm, so I thought I’d give it a plug
Brand Spanking New
Our brand new weekly half hour show, where we showcase a selection of the weeks new short documentaries, whilst including more background on your stories, extra photos/footage, updates on your contributors progress and pretty much anything else you want to provide us with. It’s our chance to put your work in the limelight and tell the world it rocks!
India’s Economic Divide
In the glow of increasing prosperity and industry in India, Pamela Norwicka finds out what the varying implications are for the countries’ vast population.
Remember Ghostwatch? It was a BBC1 drama that went out on Halloween, 1992, and purported to be a live show, hosted by Michael Parkison, Sarah Greene, Mike Smith and Craig Charles, investigating ‘Britain’s most haunted house’.
It was originally intended to scare the nation crapless by not revealing it was a drama until the end, but the Beeb didn’t have quite enough guts for that and ended up adding warnings in the Radio Times, the standard drama idents, etc, so that it wouldn’t get shot down by Parliament, the Daily Mail, etc. Of course, there’d be no chance of it ever even thinking of making Ghostwatch now.
Ghostwatch was pretty terrifying to be honest, despite some duff acting and a slightly unconvincing ending, although Michael Parkinson proved to be surprisingly good as an actor (he talks about the experience in his biog). It was so terrifying, in fact, that
The Beeb ending up banning repeats of the show for a whole decade.
I heartily recommend it.
I won’t spoil it for you, particularly since you can buy it on DVD (or watch in on YouTube) to see for yourself, but one of the highlights of the show was the ghost, ‘Pipes’. He was more terrifying than your normal ghost because you never really saw him full on – you only spot him in reflections for fractions of a second and you never know when he’s going to appear – so much so, there are at least three appearances I didn’t spot despite repeated viewings.
Thankfully, there are helpful people in the world. You can see a guide to Pipes’ eight appearances here, and in the embedded YouTube vid below.
Or is there a ninth?
If you end up loving Ghostwatch, BTW, check out ‘Ghostwatch: Behind The Curtains’ – both the blog and the YouTube channel. They’re busy putting a documentary together with the support of Ghostwatch‘s writer Stephen Volk, who was also responsible for Afterlife. See if you can help.
This should probably be called The Other The Other Boleyn Girl, given there’s a multi-million dollar effort with Eric Bana, Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman out on DVD right now, too. Also based on Philippa Gregory’s book of the same, this is a study of Mary Boleyn, Anne Boleyn’s elder sister and fellow mistress of Henry VIII. Made for the BBC in 2003 and starring Natasha McElhone, Jodhi May, Jared Harris and Steven Mackintosh, it’s cheaply made yet more powerful and more innovative that its highly turgid American cousin.
It’s quite a traumatic tale, with happy newlywed Mary finding that the king’s interested in her and that both her husband and her father want her to take up with the King to advance their standing in court. Reluctant at first, not least because she regards adultery as a terrible sin, Mary eventually falls in love with Henry and as history recounts, it all goes pear-shaped after that.
The adaption is relatively faithful to the book, although it does skip over big chunks of the narrative – unlike Hollywood, however, the BBC adaptation does at least make clear where there have been jumps of a year or so, something that made the big screen version less than coherent at times.
You couldn’t describe it as historically authentic, though, because despite its best efforts, Gregory’s book isn’t to be trusted on all its details – rather than being a pious so-and-so as Gregory suggests, most of the records hint that Mary was a bit of a goer – and McElhone is obviously too old to play the teenage Mary. I won’t go into the incest stuff either, although Gregory usually does, more or less in every book she writes. Hmmm.
The oddest part of this adaption is that it’s shot on grainy video almost as a reality TV show (complete with partially improvised script), with Mary and Anne both offering video diary-like pieces to camera at various parts of the narrative. This more radical approach does involve you, but it also distances, since its fast cuts and shaky-cam mean you spend more time being fascinated by Philippa Lowthorpe’s direction than having a chance to get involved with the characters.
McElhone’s as good as always; May seems far less devious than other Anne Boleyns you might have seen (on The Tudors for example); Jared Harris, who plays Henry, turns in pretty much the same performance he did in To The Ends of the Earth, which is good in its way but doesn’t seem particularly Henry-ish (again, age seems to be a factor); and Steven Mackintosh is okay in a difficult role: the gay, incestuous (as written by Gregory, anyway) brother George Boleyn.
If it’s a toss-up between the big-screen version and this one, get this one, if only because it’s better and considerably cheaper. But probably only worth getting if you’re a big history buff.
Here’s the first few minutes to give you an idea of what’s it’s like:
Incidentally, Philip Glenister’s in it as William Stafford, Mary’s second husband. Someone’s stuck all his appearances in it together and uploaded the result to YouTube. Enjoy!
![The Other Boleyn Girl [2003]](https://i0.wp.com/images.amazon.com/images/P/B0012X6RG0.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_SX175_.jpg?w=678)
