It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching this week
So much TV, so little time, particularly if you’re stranded in Germany, queuing for three hours to arrange a new flight home and then get a stomach bug on top of a cold. Grrr.
There are also too many boxsets for me to take in: I’m still only on episode 3 of Dark, and I’ve seasons 2 of Professor T, The Crown and Babylon Berlin to hit up, as well as seasons 1 of Godless and She’s Gotta Have It; there’s more due out this week, too, including season 3 of The Tunnel and season 1 of Jean Claude Van Johnson. What should I watch, hey, pop-pickers?
Still, I did manage to watch the first episode of Happy!(US: Syfy), as well as of Knightfall (US: History; UK: History UK), which I’ll discuss after the jump.
Also after the jump, the remaining regulars: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Marvel’s Runaways, Mr Robot, No Activity and a double-helping of Travelers as Showcase in Canada tries to get the finale out before Christmas and Netflix starts airing it in the rest of the world. One of these is for the chop, best beloved, two are about to walk the plank, but which will it be? Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Knightfall, Travelers, No Activity and Mr Robot”
Every month, TMINE lets you know what TV the BFI will be presenting at the South Bank in London
Just in case you were wondering what the BFI is going to be showing at its annual Missing Believed Wiped event this weekend, they’ve sent me through some details. I’m assuming tickets might still be available…
The BFI’s Missing Believed Wiped returns to BFI Southbank this December to present British television rediscoveries, not seen by audiences for decades, since their original transmission dates. The exciting, bespoke line-up of TV gems feature some of our most-loved television celebrities and iconic characters including Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part: Sex Before Marriage, Cilla Black in her eponymous BBC show featuring Dudley Moore, Jimmy Edwards in Whack-O!, a rare interview with Peter Davison about playing Doctor Who, an appearance by future Doctor Who Patrick Troughton from ITV’s early police drama, No Hiding Place plus a significant screen debut from a young Pete Postlethwaite.
Lost for 50 years and thought only to survive in part, Till Death Us Do: Sex Before Marriage, originally broadcast on 2 January, 1967 on BBC1, sees Warren Mitchell’s Alf Garnett rail against the permissive society, featuring guest star John Junkin alongside regular cast members Dandy Nichols, Anthony Booth and Una Stubbs. Although the existence of this missing episode from the 2nd series has been known for some years, previous attempts to screen the episode had been refused with the print in the hands of a private collector. Having recently changed hands, MBW is delighted that access has been granted for this special one off screening, for one of 1960s best known and controversial UK television characters.
Following last year’s successful screening of a previously lost episode of Jimmy Edwards’s popular 1950s BBC school-themed comedy romp Whack-O!, this year’s MBW programme includes a 1959 episode entitled The Empty Cash Box. Written by Frank Muir and Dennis Norden and starring Jimmy Edwards as the cane-happy headmaster, this episode was originally broadcast on the BBC on 1st December 1959.
A genuine national treasure and much-missed performer and presenter, Cilla Black is remembered here with a rare screening of an episode from her previously lost BBC 60s pop/variety show, Cilla. Screened in full for the first time since its original transmission on 26 March, 1968, Cilla features performances from Roy Hudd, The Dudley Moore Trio and Cilla herself, a fascinating record of 60s pop culture.
Fans of TV horror are in for a treat with the recently disinterred Late Night Horror: The Corpse Can’t Play. Originally broadcast on 3 May, 1968 on BBC2 this is the only surviving episode from the BBC’s spine-tingling anthology series of atmospheric chillers, set at a children’s birthday party where an uninvited guest delivers some unusual and horrifying variations on the usual party games. Screened here courtesy of MBW colleagues at The Kaleidoscope Archive, The Corpse Can’t Play was directed by Paddy Russell, one of the first two women directors in BBC television, whose impressive broadcast career spanned 40 years working on classic shows including Z Cars, Doctor Who and Emmerdale, and who sadly died this year.
During the 1970s, a key strength of the drama department at BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham was its ability to unearth exciting new acting, writing and directing talent. Running from 1973 for ten series, Second City First’s half-hour original drama slot proved highly influential, launching a spectacular range of ‘regional talent’ including Willy Russell, Mike Leigh, Mike Newell, Julie Walters, Brian Glover, Alison Steadman and many others, offering a diversity of representation, comparable with the best television drama today.
Another great find, Second City Firsts: Thwum, originally broadcast in 1975, features a young Pete Postlethwaite in his earliest television appearance. This sci-fi themed short play sees UFO fanatic Bernard (Paul Moriarty), trying to convince a skeptical reporter (Pete Postlethwaite) to cover the story of an imminent alien craft landing. This almost complete copy (2 minutes missing) was recovered from a domestic video recording kept by director Pedr James (Our Friends in the North, Martin Chuzzlewit) and we are delighted that Pedr will be joining us to introduce the screening and reveal the fascinating story behind the production, Pete Postlethwaite’s debut and the tape’s survival.
As well as screening rare complete episodes MBW offers a chance to view recovered clips with a wider cultural significance. Highlights from a recently digitized video collection includes a James Bond set visit on The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) for Granada TV’s children’s cinema show Clapperboard, hosted by Chris Kelly. In addition there are rare interviews with Doctor Who’s Peter Davison, here discussing his thoughts on being the 5th incarnation of the legendary Time Lord as well as influential BBC visual effects designer Mat Irvine (Blake’s 7, Doctor Who, The Tripods), who talks about Blake’s 7 iconic Liberator spacecraft.
A late addition to the programme is an extract from a recent discovery, an episode of the influential and long thought lost ITV police drama No Hiding Place which was found in Australia. Attracting over 7 million viewers at its peak in the mid-1960s, the series became ITV’s best known police drama, making household names of its principal cast. Hailed for its authentic portrayal of local law enforcement matters the show holds an important place in the history of British independent television production.
Of the 236 episodes produced by Associated Rediffusion, only 20 complete episodes were previously known to survive in Britain. The show’s success meant it was sold to other territories, including Australia where it broadcast on ABC. Detection work from The Kaleidoscope Archive lead to the positive identification of the National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (NFSA)’s solitary episode as a missing part of the show. Two Blind Mice (Series 2, Episode 5) first broadcast on 2 June 1960, is notable both for being the 2nd earliest known surviving episode and for its guest appearance by future Doctor Who, Patrick Troughton.
In the US: Wednesdays, 10/9c, Syfy
In the UK: Netflix. Starts April 26
Grant Morrison is one of those comic book writers who started off well but who began to feed on his own reputation over time, almost to the point where he’s just reputation. Back in the late 80s/early 90s, he was part of the post-Alan Moore surge in DC comics with more adult writing. While Neil Gaiman was off giving us the Endless in Sandman, Morrison was dishing up Animal Man and Doom Patrol, which was full of people with multiple personality disorders and characters who were actually streets (yes, you read that correctly).
After that, he was allowed to do pretty much anything he liked, which usually involved reading lots of comics and resurrecting characters you’d never heard of so that he can undermine genre. Fancy a comic featuring the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh? Of course you don’t, but Morrison brought him back anyway.
His most recent project of note was an attempt to retell Wonder Woman’s origin story. But while Morrison talked a lot about all the research he did, reading feminist texts such as The Second Sex and trying to put the sexy back into her storyline, Wonder Woman: Earth One was really just Morrison playing around with genre conventions without adding much.
Happy?
And so it seems to be with Happy!, Morrison’s adaptation of his own, original comic Happy!. It sees Christopher Meloni (Law & Order: SVU) playing a disgraced cop turned hitman who gets shot and left for dead. But when he’s restored to life by paramedics, he finds that he can now see a flying blue unicorn called Happy (Patton Oswalt). Yes, you read that correctly.
Happy wants Meloni to help a little girl called Hailey, who’s been kidnapped by a man dressed as Santa Claus. But is Happy real or a figment of Meloni’s imagination? And if he is real, who’s Hailey and why does Happy want to help her?
Self-examining
These two questions are the most interesting aspects of a show that is otherwise just the standard Morrison semi-comedic, semi-serious messing around with genre and convention. Meloni gets good lines and some of the violence is graphically innovative, if massively implausible. Everything else is cliché, though. There are crime bosses with secrets, there’s a good cop who might also be a bad cop (Lili Mirojnick) and everyone has as much depth of characterisation as the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh, even Meloni. Not one character revelation will surprise you. You probably won’t even laugh much.
Even the bits with Happy aren’t that good. He just flies around and chats. He doesn’t advance the plot really, doesn’t have any great insights or talents. He’s not even that funny. He’s there… because he’s a blue flying unicorn and isn’t that a great meta, incongruent concept for a dark corrupt cop storyline that makes you re-evaluate its genre underpinnings? Hey? Hey?
That said, I did like the idea that (spoiler) (spoiler alert) Happy isn’t Meloni’s imaginary friend, but is actually Hailey’s, Hailey being Meloni’s daughter, which at least opens up some possibilities for future storylines that won’t simply be either deliberate cliché or an attempt to undermine cliché by being silly. I guess it’ll probably be a “road to redemption” storyline with a hint of It’s A WonderfulLife crossed with Harvey, but there are worse things in the world than that.
Meloni is great, although playing it as much for laughs as Morrison is. Aside from the impressive Patrick Fischler as a torturer, the supporting cast are unimpressive, but at least they won’t screw it up. The CGI needs work, mind, so maybe Happy can sit down for a bit.
Not Happy!
There’s enough potential in Happy!‘s story that I’m prepared to try a couple more episodes. But this feels less like an original new story that needs to be told, more like an intellectual exercise in sub-Daliesque dadaism than it needs to be to support a whole series.
On the face of it, ‘licensing’ is probably a good thing. I’m not talking about alcohol here, BTW – licensing in the creative industry refers to handing over a chunk of money to the ‘rights holder’ (the person or company that made something) so that someone else can use it.
Why is licensing good, on the whole? Well, consider a piece of music that a TV company wants to use in a TV programme. Without licensing, the music writer would essentially have to sign over the music to the TV company, either for free or for an arranged sum. After that, they’d never be able to make money from the music again and might not even be able to play it themselves.
But with licensing, the music maker not only keeps the rights to the music, they can also let others use it, including the TV company. How much? This is the important bit. The amount depends on when, where and for how long the company intends to use it.
Plan on using it once in a TV programme that’s only going to be shown in the Ukraine? You pay x. Plan on showing it on satellite TV in just the UK and Ireland for the next six months? You pay a bit more – 15x, say. Plan on using it in a TV programme that’s going to air once a minute all over the world for the rest of time, as well as on DVD? You pay 1,000,000x, say.
Without licensing, the music owner wouldn’t have the opportunity to profit from their work in this way and the TV company might not be able to afford to use the music and would have to use something else instead.
Bad licensing
If you cock up in the licensing, weird things happen. In the US, the theme tune for House was Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’; but here and in many other countries, licensing issues meant it was one of two pieces of stock music, depending on where you lived:
Equally, the makers of classic 70s US sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati never expected their show would end up on DVDs, streaming services et al so didn’t license the soundtrack for such uses; they also only licensed the music for a limited time, to reduce costs. Oops – double oops, given that the show was set in a radio station so featured groups of the time including The Grateful Dead and the Cars.
That meant that after the original licences expired, re-runs in syndication stopped altogether, until 20th Century Fox replaced all the hits with stock music instead, which is how the show aired for the next few decades. It wasn’t until some painstaking licensing work by Sound! Factory that the show got its original soundtrack back for its 2014 DVD release.
Babylon
A few decades on, keeping track of licensing in this multinational, multi-channel, web-enabled world is tricky. It’s therefore far easier to impose blanket rules rather than try to do everything case-by-case.
Take Babylon Berlin. That’s a German TV show made by Sky Deutschland. Sky Deutschland is a subsidiary of News International, which also owns BSkyB, which has licensed Babylon Berlin for its Sky Atlantic channel.
And yet… there I was in Germany this weekend when I thought I might try watching the second season, using BSkyB’s Sky Go app. Here’s the message I got:
That’s right, even though I was in Germany, trying to watch a German TV programme made by (more or less) the same company as made the app and airs the show in the UK, I couldn’t. Why? Well, BSkyBgenerally only buys licences covering the UK and Ireland, as it’s cheaper for them than if they tried to buy the worldwide rights. But it does mean they have to be strict about not allowing anyone outside the UK and Ireland from viewing their content, even if it’s one of their customers simply trying to watch a show they could normally watch at home.
Of course, if I’d downloaded Babylon Berlinbefore I left the UK, I’d still be able to watch it in Germany. And if the hotel where I’d been staying had had anything except Das Erste and ZDF, I could have watched Babylon Berlin on Sky Deutschland no trouble.
All of which makes me think that maybe there needs to be a bit more flexibility, at least when it comes to Sky Go – seriously, Sky, you own most of the world’s TV channels, so could you maybe just add a database to Sky Go that checks to see if a local Sky channel has the rights to a show, too? Surely that couldn’t be too hard.
