Previews of forthcoming events and reviews of past events.
So, nothing but pants on BBC4 for ages. Agreed? Then a Ghost Stories season. Wow. But just as soon as that finishes, a Sherlock Holmes season? Have they put Kool Aid in the water fountain? What’s happening? With weirdness like this, can we expect ITV1 to embark on a season of the plays of Sophocles starring Patsy Palmer and Robson Green?
This piece of viral marketing on behalf of Virgin Digital has been doing the rounds, but it’s fun enough that I’m willing to put it here. There are 72 bands in the picture (eg Guns n Roses bottom left). Can you find them all? Click on the picture for the full size version.
Work on a movie of The Equalizer is back on course. For those who forget, The Equalizer was an occasionally good 80s show starring Edward Woodward as the hardest OAP in New York (okay, he was in his 50s at the time). If there was an injustice, he would right it with his CIA training and skills, usually violently. Not sure how much resonance it will have nowadays, given the plummeting crime rates in New York for the last decade: maybe they’ll shift it to Los Angeles, although changing the plot to “rich, white, English guy cleans up the violence of South Central” would make it walk a very thin tightrope, I reckon.
Woodward got the job as The Equalizer after the producers saw a few old episodes of Callan, one of the best British television shows ever made. I caught the first episode in a double bill with an episode of Danger Man at the NFT last Friday. Typical NFT audience (stop chatting, you scrotes: save it till the end) but everyone was quiet for Callan, the story of a former British government assassin blackmailed into working for his ex-employers again. Callan remains one of the most bleakly realistic shows ever made – only The Sandbaggers exceeds it as a realistic depiction of espionage. It paved the way for even grittier shows such as The Sweeney and Special Branch. Only the third and four seasons are available on DVD, although most of the first two black and white seasons do still exist and if you ever get a chance to see them, grab it. They make 24 look like the unrealistic cartoon it is, while pre-empting its theme that the “good guys” will often use the same ruthless techniques as the “bad guys”.
Danger Man, incidentally, was a slightly cartoony episode itself, improved only by the impressive Patrick McGoohan and its failure to use that tried and tested method of 60s spies dramas “everyone foreign speaks English, even when they’re by themselves”. Some of the Swiss German accents were iffy, but for the most part, the pronunciation was pretty good, giving the otherwise outlandish plot some grounding in reality, as McGoohan tries to infiltrate a dastardly plot without speaking the language of the locals.
Scary fact: Ian Hendry and Colin Blakely were identical twins during the 60s. Check it out and you’ll see that I’m right.
I went to the NFT to watch Ace in the Hole on Friday. What can I say? A movie about a cynical reporter – how could I resist, even if it did had the most implausible scissor-wound in movie history? But there’s something I want to share with you.
The NFT audience is filled with some strange people. Sure, it’s mostly packed with perfectly innocent cinephiles. But there was a different kind of person there as well…
The chattering classes were there. I’m talking about:
During this particular movie, said chattering classes laughed uproariously at every single joke, no matter how slight. I’m not talking about regular laughs, either. These were odd. “Ha, ha, ha, ha!” I’m not being onomatopoeic here. You could hear every letter. And for people who object to “youths” talking during movies, they weren’t half a bunch of gasbags.
They irritated me something chronic and ruined a perfectly good cinema experience. Is there some way to get them banned? Surely there must be.
I’ve signed up for tickets for The F Word, Gordon Ramsay’s cooking and chat show. Unlike the BBC’s tickets request service, this required filling out about a dozen questions, including “Favourite Chef” (Gordon, of course), “Favourite meal ever had” (Bradley Ogden’s at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. That was some tasty food) and profession (see how well “Freelance journalist” goes down).
© 2022 The Medium is Not Enough
