So, I went off to Snowdonia (that’s in North Wales, non-UK readers. You know where Wales is, right?) for the weekend – hence my absence on Friday. Bit of a trek, what with the traffic and all, so seven hours drive each way. Argh.
Anyway, we’re just coming up to our hotel when to my surprise, I see a sign to Portmeirion. Honestly, I had no idea it was there – I thought it was further north. It’s not.
But the TV gods had clearly spoken to Dealcloud, which is how we ended up at this particular hotel (which also turned out to have been visited by Jackie O and Ted Kennedy at some point) only 15 minutes away from where The Prisoner was filmed. Remember The Prisoner – the original Patrick McGoohan version, not the remake? Here, at least, is the iconic title sequence, which also explains the plot (secret agent resigns so is kidnapped and imprisoned in a seemingly loving prison called The Village):
Anyway, having made it out that far, how could we not go and have a wander round? Okay, it’s £10 per adult, but we’ll live. So, after the jump, lots of pictures of Portmeirion: how much will you recognise, discerning Prisoner fans?
If you grew up in the UK in the 70s and 80s, there’s about a 95% chance you’ll have watched Battle of the Planets, an American cartoon series about G-Force, five orphans who get given incredible powers and machinery in order to fight terrors from outer space including Galactor and its representative Zoltar. To remind yourself of the show (as if you need any reminding), watch this video:
Well, what you might not know (but probably could have guessed) is that it was originally a Japanese cartoon series called (Science Ninja Team) Gatchaman. Catchy, huh? Now, to see it was a loose adaptation would be an understatement. Suffice it to say, unless you want to watch the video below – which includes a more faithful re-dubbing of the original – that not only were there big changes in characters, set-up and more to avoid the inevitable freaking out that UK and US parents would have had in the 70s when exposed to raw Japanese anime mentalness, everything involving 7 Zark 7 and 1 Rover 1 was added by US animators – hence the difference in animation quality.
Well, guess what. In August, a live-action version of Gatchaman is out in Japan. Here’s a trailer. It’s in Japanese obviously, but you can see both the differences and the similarities. If your Japanese is good, there’s an official web site.
Greek tragedy was the very first formal theatrical genre to be invented. Created in the 5th century BC to honour the Greek god Dionysos during his annual festival in Athens, it developed over the next century or so thanks to numerous playwrights, including Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, to give us some of the greatest ever works of Western theatre and literature.
But since those times, as a genre, it’s pretty much fallen by the wayside. For all that David Simon and his fellow writers on The Wire may claim to have written to the rules of Greek tragedy rather than the more common Shakespearean model, they rarely touched on the classic formula devised by Aristotle for tragedy: the hubris, catharsis then nemesis of the protagonist, an ordinary man, who through some tragic flaw or mistake is eventually undone by the gods.
Greek tragedy itself didn’t always stick to the formula (e.g. Euripides’ Helene, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound), so you have to hand it to former Daily Mirror journalist turned TV writer Michael J Bird to not only create one of the very few modern pieces of drama to stick to that formula, but to also set it and film it in Greece with a largely Greek cast.
1977’s BBC2 serial Who Pays The Ferryman? sees former soldier turned boat builder Alan Haldane (Jack Hedley from Colditz) return to Crete after more than 30 years’ absence. A legendary fighter with the Crete resistance during the War, he’d been a hero to the people and had fallen in love with Melina, one of the women he’d met there. Hoping to meet with her again after all this time, he tragically discovers that she has died. Compounding his misery, he is now getting a cold shoulder from the people who’d formerly seen him as a hero and been his friends.
Why? Well, unbeknownst to him, she’d fallen pregnant with his child. She wrote to him and, given the Cretan attitudes of the time and receiving no reply, she ended up marrying another man who would raise the daughter as his own. Haldane, who never received the letters and who now discovers his own letters to her were never received, decides to meet the now grown-up daughter he never knew he had and become her benefactor. And along the way, he meets a woman Annika (played by the very famous Greek actress Betty Arvaniti), who seems very familiar …
Why no one received the letters from their respective lovers and the lengths some people will go to to destroy Haldane are some of the central dilemmas of a very Greek story about vendetta, family and even the gods themselves that does not, of course, have a very happy ending. Here’s the title sequence, followed by the opening of the second episode. It features the incredibly popular and catchy theme song by Cretan composer Yannis Markopoulos.
Oh, and here’s Marina Sirtis – Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation – in her second ever TV appearance. This is all she gets to do, mind.
My lovely and esteemed wife has recently introduced me to the joys of Cabin Pressure, a Radio 4 comedy series set aboard the fictitious MJN (My Jet Now) Air, a tiny little outfit run by the crabby Carolyn Knapp-Shappey (Stephanie Cole from Waiting for God) that has only two pilots – the by-the-book captain Martin Crieff (Benedict Cumberbatch from Sherlock, Star Trek et al) and the ever-superior first officer Douglas Richardson (Roger Allam from The Thick Of It and Endeavour) – and an air steward, Cole’s simple but eternally upbeat son Arthur (John Finnemore, who also writes the show).
Featuring guest stars including John Sessions, Anthony Head (playing the fabulously named Hercules Shipwright), Prunella Scales and Alison Steadman, it’s an award-winning comedy with surprising depths that largely revolves around the games the pilots play to stave off boredom on long flights, the schemes they need to concoct to deal with difficult customers, mechanics and other airlines, and the tensions between Crieff and Richardson, Crieff always wanting to have been a pilot but having no real aptitude, while Richardson has never found anything hard but after a distinguished career, now finds himself first officer to Crieff at MJN thanks to his crossing certain legal lines at his previous job.
As well as being very funny, well written and well acted, it’s also capable of pathos and drama, so I recommend you catch up as best you can via Amazon, iTunes or other avenues.
The show is also a creator of some great memes. Here, for example, is the birth of the ‘Hey, Chief…’ meme, which my wife and I find a constant source of hilarity when we use it on each other (yes, we’re a fun pair):
If you’re a Cabin Pressure fan already, though, please enjoy the following encapsulation of a whole bunch of Cabin Pressure memes in a manner similar to the current Nikon ads. Do you recognise them all?
