Year: 2012

Classic TV

Nostalgia Corner: Private Schulz (1981)

5 July 2012 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Private Schulz

In these times of economic uncertainty, with Germany doing its level best to help everyone in the EU with their currency problems, it seems fitting to have a look back to 1981 – and beyond – to Private Schulz, a wartime comedy mini-series in which Germany tried to do its exact opposite: destabilise the currency of Britain.

Based on the real-life Operation Bernhard and written by Jack Pullman, Private Schulz saw Michael Elphick play the eponymous Schulz, a petty criminal recruited to the SS. He convinces the Nazis to counterfeit British five pound notes, in an attempt to cause massive inflation in the British economy and ruin its war efforts. Schulz, of course, simply wants to steal the fake notes and become rich.

Over six episodes, Schulz – under the direction of Ian Richardson, who played several roles in the series – first has to recruit people to make the notes, which are indistinguishable from the real thing, then infiltrate Britain to distribute the notes – something for which he has to learn how to be English. Of course, as we all know, the scheme never succeeded so you can guess not everything goes according to plan.

Also appearing in the show was Billie Whitelaw as a prostitute with a mental block that stopped her sleeping with any soldier below the rank of major, Rula Lenska, Cyril Shaps, David Swift and Ken Campbell. And as well as Operation Bernhard, a number of other real-life people, operations and incidents from the War were mentioned or used in the show, including the Venlo Incident and Salon Kitty.

Pulman died in 1979, but he was awarded a writers award by the Royal Television Society for his work on the show. It’s available on DVD, but you can watch the first episode on YouTube below (just to be helpful part 1 of the video is part 2 in the playlist and vice versa. Sorry).

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968)

4 July 2012 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

The Year of the Sex Olympics

When BBC2 launched in 1964, it was the first British TV station to broadcast 625 lines of picture, rather than the standard 405 lines of BBC1 and ITV. Yes, BBC2 was the BBC HD of its day – take that, US TV, with your 525 lines of NTSC (Never Twice the Same Colour) goodness.

To show off its technological superiority, one of the first regular programmes on the station was Theatre 625, a 90-minute play slot that ran from 1964 to 1968, giving us 114 separate plays (the last year’s worth in colour, since BBC2 was also the first European channel to broadcast in colour), most of which, in typical BBC fashion, have been wiped.

Of the plays that were made, perhaps the most famous are John Hopkins’ four-part Rashomon-esque Talking To A Stranger, which starred Judi Dench and told the same story from four different viewpoints – it was voted the 78th Greatest British Television Programme by industry experts and was reviewed at the time as “the first authentic masterpiece written directly for television”.

Also of note was a remake of blog god Nigel Kneale’s 1954 adaptation of 1984 and the strand’s penultimate play, also by Kneale (who now has his own category on the blog, incidentally): the highly prophetic and highly appropriate for this month of all months, The Year of The Sex Olympics, which is today’s Wednesday Play. Follow me after the jump to find out more.

Continue reading “The Wednesday Play: The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968)”

Film

The cast of Deliverance reunite for its 40th anniversary and to discuss the effect of its rape scene

4 July 2012 Rob Buckley Post a comment

The cast of Deliverance

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the unnecessary use of rape in fiction, largely as a result of a plan to include an attempted sexual assault on Lara Croft in her new game for no adequately explored reason. It’s something that happens predominantly in other media, particularly in films but also in comics a lot, with attempted or actual rape frequently seen as ‘character development’ for female characters – a worldview that led to Gail Simone’s famous “Women in Refrigerators” website that looked at the larger problem of the disproportionate injuring, killing and depowering of female characters in the medium.

Well, hey, everyone, it’s been 40 years since Deliverance, which featured the most famous rape of a man in movie history.

Now, the main cast – Ronnie Cox, John Voight, Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty – have got together to look back at the movie’s effect. Most notable is Burt Reynolds’ recollection:

“I remember that men had not really had a feeling about rape that they got when they saw the film. And it was the only time I saw men, sick, get up and walk out of a theater. I’ve seen women do that, but to see men do it, I thought maybe this film is more important in a lot of ways than we’ve given it credit for.”

You’ll notice that male rape as a method of character development for protagonists hasn’t been used that much in movies ever since. Watch them all get together for a chat in this lovely vid, courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter.

[via]