The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: Cathy Come Home (1966)

27 June 2012 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

Well, we’ve done a little dance around the decades to take in all manner of different genres for The Wednesday Play, but today it’s time to go hard-core for a play that’s been voted the best British drama ever: The Wednesday Play‘s Cathy Come Home, starring Ray Brooks and Carol White.

Written by Jeremy Sanford, produced by legendary producer Tony Garnett and directed by one of Britain’s finest, most important film directors, Ken Loach, Cathy Come Home is also possibly the most influential British TV play ever made, highlighting on TV for the first time the problems of the homeless in the Britain of 1966: the play was watched by 12.5m viewers, a quarter of the British population at the time, and eventually led to the formation of the charity Crisis as well as changes in the law to allow homeless fathers to stay with their wives and children in hostels.

As well as revolutionising attitudes to homelessness, the play also revolutionised British TV direction. At the time, most TV plays and dramas were shot in studios on video, with a somewhat theatrical direction. Loach instead used a documentary style, shooting everything on location on 16mm film, often with handheld cameras – although union regulations of the time forced Loach and cinematographer Tony Imi to shoot about 10 minutes of the play on video, which they telerecorded and spliced into the film as required.

So, yes, it’s important.

But without further ado, here’s the play, which you can watch in one of three ways: DVD, by giving Ken Loach films some money with the first YouTube clip after the jump, or by watching the regular YouTube version that follows it. Obviously, if you choose option three and like the play, go for options one or two afterwards to ensure that nice Mr Loach and the BBC get some money for their hard work.

Continue reading “The Wednesday Play: Cathy Come Home (1966)”

Jeremy Paxman is a journalism god

27 June 2012 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

This week, we’ve been talking a bit about The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s new show calling for a return to decent journalism on US TV. In it, there are well intentioned journalists who are supposed to be good at interrogating people to get the truth out of them.

Let it be stated for the record that although Jeff Daniels and co may seem hard-hitting to Aaron Sorkin, he clearly hasn’t seen the god-like Jeremy Paxman on the BBC’s Newsnight. Last night, he demolished Chloe Smith, one of the Treasury’s ministers, over a recent u-turn in policy over fuel tax duty. If you ever want to see what a proper firebrand journalist can do, this is a must-see:

Of course, Paxo has form. Possibly one of the greatest journalistic interviews in British TV history involved Jeremy Paxman interrogating the then-Home Secretary Michael Howard over certain decisions he’d made regarding prisons. It’s amazing the power of one single question and certainly Michael Howard’s reputation was never the same afterwards:

And if that’s whet your appetite, here’s a collection of great Paxman moments.

US TV

Arrested Development: the art show

27 June 2012 Rob Buckley Post a comment

I still might not ‘get’ Arrested Development, but I understand a lot of people like it. Enough people, in fact, that there’s going to be a one-day art show in Los Angeles dedicated to the programme. It looks pretty good, actually.

The Bluths

Tobias dolls

“There’s Always Money In The Banana Stand” will run for one day only on June 29th and will run from 7-10pm.

[via]

Before The Newsroom there was The Newsroom, Drop The Dead Donkey and Dead Danes Don’t Count

27 June 2012 Rob Buckley 11 Comments

Aaron Sorkin isn’t the first person to come up with the idea of a television newsroom as a great way to look at politics. Back in the Channel 4 had Drop The Dead Donkey, a topical sitcom written the same week as it aired, that introduced the world to Haydn Gwynne, Stephen Tompkinson and Neil Pearson. Here’s the pilot episode, with its weirdly different theme tune.

Drop The Dead Donkey ran between 1990 and 1998 (go buy it on DVD), inspiring along the way the Swedish show Döda danskar räknas inte (Dead Danes Don’t Count). But over in Canada, Ken Finkleman, the man behind Good Dog, was developing a show that, like Drop The Dead Donkey, featured a TV producer called George. Called The Newsroom, it crossed Drop The Dead Donkey with The Larry Sanders Show.

The Newsroom was a surprisingly successful show by Canadian standards, running from 1996-97… and 2003-4… and 2004-5, as well as having a two-hour TV movie Escape from the Newsroom air in 2002. It featured cameos from famous Canadians, including David Cronenberg, Noam Chomsky and Atom Egoyan, playing versions of themselves in newscasts. The George character also went on to appear in other shows, More Tears, Foolish Heart and Foreign Objects, as well as Good Dog and Good God.

It’s also considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest show Canada has ever produced. So it’s ironic that Sorkin chose the title The Newsroom for his new show, given the stereotype of how little attention the US pays to Canada and Canadian TV.

So it seems while Sorkin may not have created the first TV show set in a newsroom or even the first TV show called The Newsroom, he is, at least, one of the first to have created a semi-serious drama series about the news.

Wednesday’s “Nathan Lane and Kristin Chenoweth to recur on The Good Wife, and Comedy Central picks up The Daily Show” news

27 June 2012 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Films

  • James Woods and Lesley Ann Warren join Steve Jobs biopic

Trailers

  • Trailer for Here Comes the Boom with Kevin James, Salma Hayek and Henry Winkler
  • Trailer for Hit and Run with Dax Shepard, Kristen Bell, Bradley Cooper, Tom Arnold and Kristin Chenoweth
  • Trailer for Arbitrage with Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and Tim Roth

Canadian TV

UK TV

US TV