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.
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M Night Shyamalan is a director who first came to fame with The Sixth Sense, an audience-wowwing supernatural thriller about a child who can see dead people and his psychiatrist, Bruce Willis. The principal reason for its success was the twist in its tail.
Shyamalan repeated his success with Unbreakable, which also featured a twist, and as a result, his fate was sealed. As long as name was on the credits, whatever he worked on needed a twist. Or something weird, be it mermaids or Joaquim Phoenix. He tried to fit in twist-free movies such as The Last Airbender, but that’s not what the public wanted and they failed.
So now we have Wayward Pines, a twisty thing exec produced and directed by Shyamalan. It stars Matt Dillon as a Secret Service agent investigating the disappearance of two federal agents, including former lover Carla Gugino, in the eponymous Twin Peaks-like Idaho town of Wayward Pines.
Except his car gets hit on the way and he wakes up in the town hospital without his partner, his wallet or his phone, but with a very sadistic nurse (Melissa Leo). He meets barmaid Juliette Lewis who thinks it’s the year 2000 but that she’s only been in the town a year; he meets Gugino, except she thinks she’s been in the town for years; and sheriff Terrence Howard isn’t too helpful, but really doesn’t want Dillon to leave, even if there’s a risk that Dillon will snuffle up his ice creams. Not that Dillon finds leaving that easy at all, given the town’s Pleasantville-like geography. And death fence.
All weirdy and Shyamalany, hey?
Trouble is that Shyamalan is only directing and fellow exec Chad Hodge (The Playboy Club) is the writer. I say ‘trouble’, but that might be one of the show’s assets, as the script itself isn’t that bad – it’s everything else about it that’s the problem.
Continuing on from our previous Wednesday Play, we have another Noël Coward comedy – Present Laughter. A semi-autobiographical work that heteronormalised many of the relationships in Coward’s life, it was first staged in 1942 and follows a few days in the life of light comedy actor Gary Essendine (then played by Coward) as he prepares to tour Africa. Along the way, Garry has to deal with women who want to seduce him, placate his long-suffering secretary and his estranged wife, cope with a crazed young playwright, and overcome his mid-life crisis.
There are, of course, many ways to film the play and in 1981, the BBC took the most literal route possible, filming Alan Strachan’s production at the Vaudeville Theatre in London. Starring Donald Sinden as Essendine, as well as Dinah Sheridan, Gwen Watford and Elizabeth Counsell, it also gave a young Belinda Lang (Dear John, 2point4 Children, Alleyn Mysteries, Second Thoughts, Bust, The Bretts) one of her earliest roles as a groupie of Essendine and featured as the crazed young playwright a certain Julian Fellowes, who would of course go on to become a playwright in real-life and eventually give us that little heard of series Downton Abbey. I’m not completely convinced the initial scenes of the actors arriving at the theatre are 100% genuine, but YMMV.
