It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week
Previously on TMINE
Wednesday again. That’s almost approaching consistency. Can’t have that.
Equally consistently, no new reviews of anything over the past week. But then there’s not been much TV worth watching. And I decided to have a couple of days off. Because I needed them.
Next on TMINE
At some point, even though I’m taking Friday and Monday off, too, I’m going to try to review both Aladdin (2019) and Greyhound (2020) for Covideodrome. Or maybe even Orange Thursday.
TV-wise, we do have some promising things coming up. Brave New World (US: Peacock; UK: Sky Atlantic) has just started, as has Sextortion (New Zealand: TNVZ On Demand). United We Fall (US: ABC) starts tonight, after only a year of waiting, while Arthurian deconstruction Cursed starts on Netflix on Friday.
I might watch any or all of those. Review them? Who knows?
What TMINE has been watching
Dark required more attention of me than I was prepared to give this week, so I’ve not got any further. Less demanding was Stranger Things, which remains true to the original meaning of the word ‘nostalgia’, being an almost physically painful, beautiful journey home to the 80s. I think I could watch it and never get tired of it.
Coupling also proves to be as clever as always, as we went through some of its numerous highlights (The Girl with Two Breasts, The Cupboard of Patrick’s Love, The Man with Two Legs, Remember This and The Freckle, the Key, and the Couple Who Weren’t, to name but a few). The plotting is genuinely superb; the sexual politics less so. But the average sitcom would kill itself for just one of Coupling‘s jokes, so let’s squint passed that.
I’ve also been watching Tron (1982) and Tron Legacy (2010), so I tuned into a weird documentary, Photo Tronology, that must have come out at the same time as the latter movie, in which director Steven Lisberger and his son Carl look through a bunch of photos from the Disney archives that were taken when the first film was being made. It’s not bad, but you have to be a real Tron fan to enjoy a couple of people looking at photos for 17 minutes.
I did watch one new TV show: Retrograde (Australia: ABC), which is one of the first TV comedies to emerge from the Coronavirus lockdown. I’ll tell you about that after the jump.
That’s on top of the latest episodes of the usual regulars: Condor, Das Boot, Doom Patrol,Stargirl and The Twilight Zone. See you in a mo.
An occasional look at what classic TV shows Talking Pictures (Sky 328 | Freeview 81 | Freesat 306 | Virgin 445) is going to be airing soon
The week commencing August 17 doesn’t bring a huge number of new shows to Talking Pictures, but crawling through the schedules, there’s some interesting ones.
It’s not the first time Lynda La Plante’s TV writing debut has been on, but if you’ve never seen it, it’s worth a watch.
Three armed robbers – Harry Rawlins, Terry Miller and Joe Perelli – are killed during an armed robbery. They are survived by their widows, Dolly Rawlins (Ann Mitchell), Shirley Miller (Fiona Hendley), and Linda Perelli (Maureen O’Farrell). With the police applying pressure and a rival gang intending to take over Harry Rawlins’ crime business, the widows turn to Dolly for leadership.
She uses Harry’s famous “ledgers”, a cache of books detailing all his robberies over the years, to find the details of the failed robbery, and, enlisting the help of a fourth woman, Bella O’Reilly (Eva Mottley), they resolve to pull off the raid themselves.
This show was a sequel to Murder Bag (1957–1958) and Crime Sheet (1959), all of which starred Raymond Francis as Detective Superintendent, later Detective Chief Superintendent Tom Lockhart. The new, longer one-hour format allowing for more story and character development, and while still largely studio-based, the series now included more pre-recorded film segments.
A decision was made to cancel the series in 1965, but there were so many protests from the public and the police that it started again for another two years, with 236 episodes made in total
Only one episode is airing, but it’s a doozy: 1963’s A Pocketful of Bones. It’s actually a previously missing episode that Talking Pictures discovered! How amazing is that?
Of course, it’s not the first time they’ve done that and you can watch Music For Murder on Tuesday, July 21 at 3am…
