I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.
The ‘Renaissance Fair’ is a curious US phenomenon, the origin of which is unclear. A popular holiday-weekend form of entertainment all over the country, the Renaissance fair has nothing to do with the Italian Renaissance, offering instead a melange of earlier British medieval history that arrives in the present day via Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and the Errol Flynn Robin Hood, taking in jesters going ‘hey nonny nonny’, knights in shining armour, dragons and random fairground attractions along the way.
But fair enough. It’s the US. The average European would find it hard to name most US presidents of the 19th century, let alone know the difference between the Roanoake and Jamestown colonies. Let’s not quibble too much over it and we can always take the kids to the Excalibur Hotel in Las Vegas and enjoy a permanent Renaissance Fair if we want.
The problem is when you get something like The Bastard Executioner, Kurt “Sons of Anarchy” Sutter’s latest show on FX. Allegedly set in the early 14th century in Wales during the reign of Edward II (US readers: that’s the wimpy gay one in Braveheart), it sees one man lead a rebellion of the Welsh peasants against the evil English baron who’s oppressing the masses.
And while The Bastard Executioner would very much like to be a rousing, gritty historical drama, it is instead pretty much a Renaissance Fair on TV.
Bear with me children and foreigners as we take a quick journey into the weird British past.
Back in the day, we only had three TV channels – four once Channel 4 and S4C arrived in the early 80s. You’d have thought that would make it easy to know what was going to be on television, but it wasn’t. Television was analogue and not digital so there were no EPGs. We had phones, but they weren’t mobile and they certainly didn’t have Internet connections. And while we did still read newspapers in those days, that only had that day’s listings. Next week? No chance.
So when we wanted to know what was on television some point in the near future, we had to buy a listings magazine. You can still find those in newsagents if you look hard. The unusual thing was there was only two: Radio Times and TV Times. Despite the titles, both did TV listings. However, the Radio Times did radio, BBC1 and BBC2, and TV Times did ITV and Channel 4. If you wanted to know what was on all four channels, you had to buy both magazines.
Odd, hey.
Still, with a captive market of tens of millions of viewers and not much television to actually list, both Radio Times and TV Times could not only include halfway decent, intelligent editorial, they also could get the important and famous to appear in their pages – and could pay top photographers to capture their likenesses.
All of this preamble is because TV Times is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year and if you’re in London and happen to be around the Blue Fin building near Blackfriars, from today you’ll be privy to an unusual open air celebration – 60 of the best photographs to have appeared over the years in TV Times are on display around the building. Here’s a few I captured this morning, but you can get a complete listing and audio guide over on the What’s On TV website.
The exhibition is going to be running until 18th October, so you’ve still got plenty of time to catch it.
In Australia: Tuesdays, 8.40pm, Seven
In the UK: Mondays, 2.15pm, BBC One. Starts April 9 2018
Stories about city slickers who up sticks and head off to the country, where they find a better, quieter life, aren’t exactly new: think Doc Martin (and its many adaptations), Hot Fuzz, Hart of Dixie, Doc Hollywood and, erm, City Slickers. But generally, when they do head off to the country, it’s not another country.
However, 800 Words gives us just that, presenting us with a recently widowed journalist (Erik Thomson) who decides to relocate his family from Sydney, Australia, to the New Zealand coastal town he used to holiday in as a child. Whether that’s because Australian TV network Seven wanted something a little bit more exotic or its because New Zealand production company South Pacific Pictures (Outrageous Fortune, Shortland Street, Westside, The Almighty Johnsons) had got tired of trying to get funding from NZ On Screen and figured it could get more cash from Oz, I couldn’t say.
There he has to deal with all manner of disasters, including shipwrecks, dangerous sculptures, building works, nudists and his two bereaved and often sullen teenage children. But wouldn’t you know it? Thanks to the friendly but sometimes strange townspeople, it turns out that his life in his new home isn’t as bad as all that. Or at least it wouldn’t be if he didn’t insist on writing up 800 words of his thoughts about it every week for a major Australian newspaper that’s accessible over the Internet.
The show is created by James Griffin, who as well as being responsible for creating and writing most of those South Pacific Pictures shows, wrote 800 words a week for 12 years for New Zealand’s Canvas magazine, so knows what he’s talking about. Although I couldn’t get by on UK magazine pay rates for 800 words a week, let me tell you, and I’m sure hoping that Griffin dispensed more words of wisdom than Thomson does here: “Logically, the best place to start the story of a new beginning is at the beginning.” That’s 2% of your word count gone already there, mate, and I’m pretty sure any sub worth their salt is going to edit that out anyway.
Griffin’s presence also assures 800 Words a certain quality of writing, both dramatic and comedic, albeit a bit male-oriented. Here he gives former Plainclothes mate Thomson both plenty of screentime and an implausibly large bevy of mostly much younger women to chase after him. To be fair, Thomson is the show’s main draw, having starred in Seven’s long-running family comedy drama Packed To The Rafters for years and won several awards.
But it also means that bevy of women aren’t desperately well characterised yet (“My mum’s great with women’s feelings, terrible with men’s” being the most any of them gets yet) and sometimes don’t get to wear any clothes and Thomson’s teenage daughter (Melina Vidler) largely only gets to pout, hunt for phone signal and storm out of every scene.
Apart from the general joking, there’s a fair bit of comedy from Woody (The Doctor Blake Mysteries’ Rick Donald, who seems to have returned to Oz after a brief foray into the US), an implausibly thick but genial ex-pat Australian builder. As you might imagine, there are also some bittersweet moments as Thomson has to deal with the death of his wife and his children’s general misery.
But this is largely a show admittedly designed to feel a lot like Packed To The Rafters, equally admittedly without Rebecca Gibney, who’s off elsewhere on Seven with Winter. Rocking the boat, being too innovative, giving too unflattering a view of NZ are probably not on the menu. It’s intended to feel comfortable and familiar.
If you like your drama to feel like a warm hug, or you’re a fan of The Almighty Johnsons and (understandably) want to see more of Michelle Langstone and John Leigh, 800 Words could be for you.
It may be a video game (it turns out) but Lego Dimensions is shaping up not only as a good sequel to The Lego Movie, bringing back Chris Pratt, Allison Brie, and Elizabeth Banks among others, it’s also got a voice cast that would make the average movie casting director weep with happiness: Gary Oldman, Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman, Bryce Dallas Howard, Elizabeth Banks, Joel McHale, JK Simmons, Sean Austin, and Michael J Fox and Christopher Lloyd, reprising their Back to the Future roles.
But I’ve just started. Watch the trailer to find out who else is out there reprising their roles from the 80s and beyond…
