DVD and Blu-Ray reviews

An archive of the blog’s reviews of DVD and Blu-Rays

Today's Joanna Page

Today’s Joanna Page: Mine All Mine

12 June 2008 Rob Buckley 9 Comments

Mine All Mine

Today’s proper Today’s Joanna Page is Russell T Davies’s Mine All Mine. Stick around Who-ers and Torchwood-ers, this might be about a girl but there’s something in it for you as well.

Just kidding. I am awful, aren’t I?

Now Russell T Davies has been mentioned rather a lot on this blog and it’s not always been positive – which is a little unfair. So I thought I’d first take a moment to give some well deserved praise and thanks to the great RTD.

  • Thank you RTD for enlivening children’s TV in the 80s and early 90s with shows such as Dark Season and Century Falls.
  • Thank you RTD for writing for Touching Evil. While I didn’t like the UK version of the show much, the US version, which used your scripts, remains one of my favourite shows of all time.
  • Thank you RTD for rescuing us from stultifying conformity by increasing the range and number of gay characters on television, whether in shows you contributed to such as The Grand, or shows you created such as Bob & Rose, Torchwood and, of course, Queer as Folk. The effect can be seen as far afield as Footballers’ Wives and Caerdydd
  • Thank you RTD for casting David Tennant
  • Thank you RTD for bringing back Doctor Who and revolutionising Saturday night television

Most of all though, thank you RTD for your “stealth Welsh” initiative.

The Welsh on television pre-RTD
It’s hard to remember what television was like before Russell T Davies. For years, Welsh actors and characters either didn’t get a look in or were there for comedy value. Back in the 70s, it was Pobol Y Cwm on BBC1, just before kids television started and that was about it. No, Ivor the Engine doesn’t count.

Come the 80s, S4C started up and took Pobol Y Cwm with it. That left mainstream TV with Ruth Madoc in Hi-De-Hi, and the hysterical John Sparkes as Siadwell in Naked Video and in Absolutely. Catherine Zeta Jones’s turn in The Darling Buds of May before her move to Hollywood helped up the Welsh profile a bit, but she never played any roles with her own accent – something that’s been true for the vast majority of Welsh actors and actresses since. As for shows set and filmed in Wales, they were pretty few and far between – can you think of any?

Then along came Russell T Davies (joined by Julie Gardner later on) with his “stealth Welsh” initiative – his plan to “normalise” the Welsh accent as a feature of British TV shows, get Welsh people represented on-screen and to create a viable TV industry in Wales.

And he’s doing it, too. There’s Torchwood and Doctor Who filmed in Wales, with Welsh actors and Welsh characters; Gavin & Stacey does likewise, coming in those programmes’ “Cool Cymru” wake. They’re all some of the most popular programmes on their respective networks (BBC2, BBC1, BBC3).

There’s a long way to go still and the scaling back of DW and Torchwood from 13 episodes plus specials to four and five episodes next year respectively, coupled with the impending end of Gavin & Stacey altogether, suggest it could all fall apart again. A certain Joanna Page, for example, has even remarked that’s she’s been to auditions, asked to do the role in her own accent, and been told “It’s fine for you to have any regional accent apart from Welsh”. But look how much he’s achieved.

No wonder Cardiff is thinking of erecting a statue of the man.

But the first real strike in his “stealth Welsh” plan wasn’t with the BBC – it was for ITV. Set in his home town of Swansea, Mine All Mine was a comedy drama starring Griff Rhys Jones as Max Vivaldi, a man who claimed to own the whole city, and a mostly Welsh cast able to use their own accents for once.

Now I really wanted to like this. Just about every possible checkbox was ticked for my liking it: Russell T Davies – check; Swansea – check; Joanna Page – check; Siwan Morris from Caerdydd – check; Griff Rhys Jones – check; Ruth Madoc – check; lots of Welsh people – check; etc.

Yet, even though rewatching it I liked it more than when I watched it the first time, it still wasn’t what you could describe as “great”, unfortunately.

Continue reading “Today’s Joanna Page: Mine All Mine”

Today's Joanna Page

Today’s Joanna Page: To The Ends of the Earth

5 June 2008 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

First, a couple of public service announcements. You can listen to Joanna Page and Kris Marshall on Tuesday’s Daily Mayo (34 minutes, 16MB) talking about Fat Pig, and it turns out that absolutely everything I said about their interpretations of the play was right. I’m a theatre genius. You should listen to it purely for that reason alone, but it’s also possibly the only time you’ll hear either actor being asked to work out the volume of a hemisphere of radius 10cm. That might float your boat, too.

Our Joanna is also going to be on The Paul O’Grady Show this Friday (5pm C4, 6pm C4+1), discussing Fat Pig again – yes, I belong to a gym that has The Paul O’Grady Show (and Robyn and The Ting Tings) playing 24/7 on its TV screens: why do you ask?

Now, on with Today’s Joanna Page, which is To The Ends of The Earth. As you might have gathered by now, I do loves a nice bit of naval fiction, particularly if it’s set in the 19th century.

Not all period naval fiction is the same, though. CS Forester’s series of books featuring Horatio Hornblower, personified on TV screens most recently by another Welsh god, Ioan Gruffudd, is about ambition, moral values, doing the right thing and the little details of life in the Royal Navy.

The Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O’Brian, on which the movie Master and Commander was based, are about many things including the mechanics of sailing, politics and the state of science and medicine during the times of the Napoleonic Wars. But principally they’re about the etiquette and social life on board ships and within the Navy. You’re stuck on board a ship of war for anything up to a year with a bunch of men who were probably pressed into service, rather than having volunteered, and you have very little to do: how do you keep charge? How do you while away your time?

William Golding’s “To The Ends of the Earth” is a trilogy of books that follows young aristo Edmund Talbot as he makes his way down to Australia to become a politician. As you might expect from the author of Lord of the Flies, it’s almost the flipside of the Aubrey-Maturin series: Aubrey, Maturin and the crews of the various ships Aubrey commands in the series are all jolly good chaps and fine company, with only a couple of exceptions; “To The Ends of the Earth” asks the more unpleasant question: what if you’re stuck on board a ship populated by complete bastards and you’re not too well laden with social skills yourself? What do you do then?

Book 1, the Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage, concerns the downfall of one of Talbot’s fellow passengers, the Reverend Colley and is something of a mystery story – what happened to the Reverend that brought him so low? Close Quarters follows on and concerns an obviously ill Talbot and his instant love for Marion Chumley, a passenger on another ship they encounter. The third book, Fire Down Below, concludes the voyage of the increasingly unreliable HMS Pandora.

In 2005, “To The Ends of the Earth” was turned into a series of three TV movies for BBC2. Guess who they got to play Marion.
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Win Porterhouse Blue on DVD

4 June 2008 Rob Buckley 25 Comments

As promised, it’s competition time again. This time, it’s your chance to win a copy of classic Channel 4 comedy drama Porterhouse Blue on DVD.


Porterhouse Blue

In late-’80s Britain, Porterhouse College, Cambridge, is an anachronism, its students uniformly male and (in the vast number of cases) privately educated. When the incumbent Master dies (from a stroke brought on by overeating – a Porterhouse Blue) the government gets its revenge on Porterhouse by appointing as his successor an old graduate, the politician Sir Godber Evans. One of the tiny minority of state-school students the college has had forced on it over the years, Evans returns to his alma mater determined to drag this bastion of privilege into the twentieth century. The elderly academic staff cease their bickering and close ranks against him, but the new Master finds his most implacable and unscrupulous opponent in Skullion, the college porter.

First broadcast in 1987, Porterhouse Blue was based on the book by Tom Sharpe, and starred David Jason, Ian Richardson, John Sessions, Griff Rhys Jones, and a host of top notch character actors. It’s still very funny, although even at the time of broadcast, it was satirising a Cambridge University of decades past, rather than the University as it was then: there were no men-only colleges or curfews; you couldn’t move for condoms and sex advice being handed out to freshers and research students; and porters mostly rolled their eyes at any ‘young gentlemen’ who weren’t so good at actual work. It’s fairer to say it satirised the university’s latent tendencies and attitudes with a college of extremes.

Having said that, the real-life Peterhouse College was still a bit weird.

All the same, it’s still very well written, funny and some of its points still hit home, whether you’ve ever been there or not. The students who think they can solve all the world’s problems so easily – by banning sex – the academic vs sporty divide: it’s all recognisable.

Jason opened everyone’s eyes to his acting potential with his portrayal of Skullion, the most fervent of Porterhouse supporters, and Richardson’s lefty Master makes an interesting contrast to his later, more famous Machiavellian roles. Sessions is a little bit lacking as the swot who hates all the ‘young gentlemen’ and has a crush on his bedder, but he still manages to carry the b-plot well. And there’s a cracking theme song by the Flying Pickets.

At three hours run-time, it’s a little bit of a marathon but one that’s probably worth running. No extras to speak of on the DVD, but we’re used to that by now from 4dvd.

To win a copy of Porterhouse Blue, as per usual, all you have to do is leave a witty and amusing comment below or plead your case, explaining why you’re the most deserving recipient. The deadline for entries is the 18th June 2008. Good luck!

Porterhouse Blue is available for £19.99, but you can buy it from Amazon.co.uk for £9.48.

Disclaimer: I went to Cambridge University. In mitigation, I’ll just say that I did go to one of the more rubbish colleges, rather than one of the posher central ones. It’s interesting to see, incidentally – despite the fact all the Porterhouse scenes were filmed elsewhere – how much the town has changed, and how much it hasn’t. No bike ban on Trinity Street in 1987 for starters…

Review: Absolutely Everything

3 June 2008 Rob Buckley 5 Comments


Absolutely - Absolutely Everything

Absolutely is something of a lost gem (note to self: will it be obvious to readers that this is the start of the blog’s “Lost Gems” series? Must consider better way of introducing it). First broadcast on Channel 4 between 1989 and 1993, it was repeated approximately… never.

Yet it is fondly remembered by literally lots of people. Even me, who went to see one of the third series episodes being recorded, which was triffic.

An exciting union of Scottish comedians (Gordon Robin Hood Kennedy, Jack The Jack Docherty Show Docherty, Moray ‘Not a Lot’ Hunter, Pete ‘Just as little’ Baikie), a Welsh comedian (John Naked Video Sparkes) and an English comedienne (Morwenna The Morwenna Banks Show Banks), it was, in many ways, the natural successor to Monty Python.

Both absurd and dark, it wasn’t afraid to mock, gross out or write overly long musical sketches and remains an influence for comedians ranging from Paul Whitehouse to Hardeep Singh Kohli – as you’ll find out from this DVD box set that collects together every single episode as well as the cast.

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Review: Gavin and Stacey – Series 1

1 April 2008 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

WARNING: If you are married to a blonde woman from South Wales who’s lived in London for a while and has lost her accent and started talking like an English person, you might find that after exposing her to this DVD for two or more episodes, she exhibits certain behaviours. Her accent might return; she might start saying "lush", "by here" instead of "here" or "whereto" instead of "where"; and she might start calling you with "Oh! Rob!" These effects can last anything up to three days or more, during which SHE WILL BE UNAWARE SHE IS DOING ANY OF THIS. It’ll be very endearing though.

Gavin And Stacey

The thing about award-winning comedy shows is that no one’s going to watch them if you stick them on a network primarily devoted to Two Pints of Lager and shows like Can Fat Teens Hunt?.

Had we known there was a show called Gavin and Stacey in which a blonde woman from South Wales meets, falls in love with and marries a dark-haired guy from SE England, we’d have watched every single episode and repeat from the very first moment – it’ll be the closest we get to a biopic on Hallmark. Instead, it’s not until the second series (which is brilliant) that we found out about it. Heaven knows how those awards people came across it.

Although BBC3 will no doubt be repeating the first series again approximately five times a day (seven times a day if it wins any more awards) once the second series finishes, we decided – as might you, gentle reader – to give that first series a go by buying it on DVD. If you are considering it, here’s a handily timed reviewed to help you decide whether to spend your hard-earned money or not. Although it’s only £8 on Amazon – bar-gain!

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