Ten rebrands as 10, green lights: dark drama The Secrets She Keeps, Lucy Lawless investigator My Life is Murder and comedy Mr Black with Stephen Curry and Nadine Garner
It’s Halloween today. It’s also Wednesday. As it’s an occasional TMINE tradition to feature not only a spooky play at Halloween but also a play on Wednesdays, how can I resist featuring one today, in this year of all years?
But what to choose? Well, since I’ve been talking about The Haunting of Hill House quite a bit of late and since I happened to mention Lost Hearts in passing thanks to certain bad make-up decisions, there’s an obvious choice, isn’t there?
It’s Lost Hearts. Wasn’t that obvious? It was certainly as obvious as just about everything in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
A Ghost Story For Christmas
For those of you who don’t know, Lost Hearts was one of the much revered scary plays the BBC put out every Christmas during the 1970s, usually as part of the A Ghost Story For Christmas strand. As with most of the plays, Lost Hearts was an adaptation of a classic MR James ghost story. This one sees a young orphan sent to stay with his much older cousin at a remote country mansion. His cousin is a reclusive alchemist obsessed with making himself immortal and Stephen is repeatedly troubled by visions of a young gypsy girl and a travelling Italian boy…
Adapted by Robin Chapman and directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, it’s notable as both the shortest of the Ghost Story For Christmas series as well as the only one to use hurdy-gurdy music to scare the crap out of the viewer.
Incidentally, this wasn’t the first British TV adaptation of Lost Hearts, since it was featured in ITV’s Mystery and Imagination series in 1966. However, just like The Road (recently remade by Radio 4) no copy of that first version exists, unfortunately.
Sleep well, everyone.
As always, if you liked the play, support its creators by buying it on DVD
It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week
Not many new shows this week, so I was able to make it through the entire first season of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina yesterday. I also passed verdict on Titans(US: DC Universe; UK: Netflix). I’m not sure if Netflix or Amazon have anything shiny and new for me this coming weekend, so who knows what might happen on Monday. I might even review all the films I’ve watched in the past six months in the exceptionally infrequent ‘Movie Monday’…
After the jump, we can talk about all the usual regulars: Black Lightning, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Doctor Who, Happy Together, The Last Ship, Magnum P.I., Pine Gap, and You. We can also talk about the final episode of Mr InBetween and the final two episodes of The Haunting of Hill House…
The long-running Archie comics have been a source of much TV, film and even music over the years. Their vanilla, 50s-nostalgia-tinged peppiness and general lack of darkness have been one of the reasons for their longevity, as have their characters, which have been reinterpreted in other media. At the movies, the most famous spin-off was Josie and the Pussycats, which some rate as one of the most overlooked and greatest movies of the 21st century.
On TV, however, we’ve had Riverdale. When that show was first mooted, the immediate question was how it would work, particularly on young adult-focused network The CW. The short answer was very well, since its creators basically decided to do their own version of Twin Peaks, with murder-mysteries and more. It wasn’t what people expected, but it was… good.
Sabrina
Riverdale‘s been doing quite well for itself since, so naturally, a spin-off was suggested based on another Archie character: Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Of course, there’s already been a movie adaptation followed by a rather famous, long-running TV adaptation, Sabrina The Teenage Witch.
Fully in keeping with the comic, Sabrina the Teenage Witch was a light-hearted sitcom all about a teenage girl’s struggles to go to a regular US High School and have a regular mortal life while juggling the fact she’s a witch with two equally witchy aunts and a talking cat. It was… nice.
So again, given the Twin Peaks-isation of Archie in Riverdale, everyone wanted to know what the new Sabrina show would be like – particularly once The CW rejected the spin-off and Netflix picked it up instead.
Whatever you guessed, it almost certainly wasn’t Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. I don’t think anyone expected this. Spoilery discussion after the jump as we discuss the entire first season…
