dpgmel

Julian, thanks for this- mind boggling

batman

An episode of Juliet Bravo on BBC4 followed by a short doc about the programme. I also watched the 70s TV version of Casting the Runes and also Send for Paul Temple.

"Boom boom a baby .... Banham Zoo .... Banana pants! Hahahaha"

bertie

Battle of the River Plate - stirring stuff. Watched many times before but I had forgotten it was in colour unlike most WW2 films of that vintage.

Maurice

There were extracts from The Late Middle Classes.

Does anyone have information about that production, DVD availability etc. ?

Steve Crook

And that the film-makers had real warships to play with, unlike most other makers of films about naval battles.

Steve

Steve Crook

Last night's monologue had Rhys Ifans as Huw, a lonely Welsh farmer advertising for a wife. He says that any prospective wife will live a life like in Dallas. Well, without the hats and without the oil and without the cars or the money. But they'll live on a farmstead with him and his dying mother.

He told us how he was from 6 generations of lonely Welsh farmers and that in each generation the mother seems to have hung on for just long enough to see the next generation born. His grandma died just after he was christened. His grandma died from a deliberate overdose of ergot infected bread. She died with a smile on her face.

He tells us how with all the damp weather and poor harvests they get a lot of ergot on their wheat and that they often make bread from it. In small doses it's like LSD or magic mushrooms. But you mustn't have too much of it.

Reflecting over his life he recalls how his Dad died when a tractor rolled over onto him. Was it an accident or had his Dad had enough?

He recalls how they used to have a larger flock of sheep and how there were a lot more sheep in the area and the "Sundowners" used to come over from Australia and New Zealand to shear them. He recalls being taught how to shear by one handsome young Maori. They got on so well that this chap stayed on the farm for 6 weeks and there was quite a bit of homoerotic play (at least) between them. But when he left, Huw couldn't go with him because he had to look after the farm, and his Mam.

And now he's advertising for a wife so that his Mam can die happy. He gets one response and gets dressed up and goes to meet her. When he gets back he tells us "She was very emotional ... the emotion was mainly repulsion"

But soon after that, hia mother dies. It seems that she accidentally ate a lot of ergot infested bread. The doctor's OK with this and ascribes it to complications of her ongoing condition. It's the sort of accident that happens quite often in this sort of situation.

And Huw has decided to sell the farm and go travelling. He might even go to New Zealand and look up a certain Maori sheep shearer.


Another good monologue. A bit more moving around than with Sheila Hancock's one. But she was confined to a wheelchair. There was also more comedy in this one. But Rhys was very good. He has the power to hold your attention without needing to do much and he can convey his emotions with the smallest gesture.

Bob Hoskins tonight at 10:45

Steve

Steve Crook

The third and final monologue had Bob Hoskins as a hit man. The "enforcer" for a British gangster, a sort of British Luca Brasi

He had been assigned another job and while he waited in the public washroom for the appointed time, he told us his life story. How it was important to have a "family" or firm that you could trust. How it was important that everybody did what the boss man told them to do - or they had an appointment with "Mr Bogarde" (Bob's Dirk). He preferred using cold steel to apply his lessons.

He worked his way into the family and to the top of his profession and that was helped by marrying the boss's grand-daughter. Nobody realised that she was a lesbian. But it made the boss take him fully into the family.

When the big boss died and his son took over, Bob wasn't too happy with the way he was trying to modernise and make everything semi-legitimate. But he had been called upon to do this job so he made all his usual preparations and was prepared to do this job for the family. He had a few rituals that he went through before each hit and if these could be carried out properly then he knew the job would be OK.

But he's interrupted by a noise before he can complete the last one. He goes to see what it is. Two muffled shots ring out. It's the old boss's son cleaning up loose ends.


A good performance from Bob. His character obviously isn't the sharpest pencil in the box but he does a good job and is loyal to the family. Shame that I could guess the ending from about a third of the way in - although I also had a long shot bet on the boss's son being the victim

Single set, single static camera. Bob pacing around the washroom with most of the monologue spoken directly to us as if we were behind a two-way mirror.

A very good series

Steve

Steve Crook

Who Do You Think You Are? Jerry Springer

The BBC genealogy series had Jerry Springer tracing some of his ancestors.
Born in an air-raid shelter in London, Jerry's parents were Jewish middle-class Germans from Berlin. They ran a shoe shop in a small town just west of Berlin but when the Nazis came to power and the campaigns started they found it hard to run a business in a small town. They made their way to Berlin where Mrs Springer had some family and they carried on for a while there. But they eventually saw the writing on the wall and got out just in time.

Jerry and his sister knew most of this, but they didn't know much more about their family history. Except that their grandparents and most of their extended family seemed to have been killed in the holocaust. But they didn't know any details. Jerry and his sister just assumed that they'd been killed somewhere like Auschwitz. Their parents never spoke of it and never told them anything about their family.

A very moving show that had Jerry in tears at quite a few places.

Both grandfathers had died before it all started so he was really trying to find out about his grandmothers. One had been taken to the Łódź Ghetto and from there to Chelmno extermination camp where she almost certainly died in one of the gas vans that they used there before the gas chambers were fitted in the extermination camps. The other grandmother had been sent to Theresienstadt. That's the one where the Nazis made the propaganda film showing the world (particularly the Red Cross) what wonderful places these "resettlement camps" were. But everyone shown actinng like happy campers in that film was dead within the month and Jerry's grandmother along with her brother and sister-in-law all died in Theresienstadt, so they were spared the final horror of the extermination camp.

And a lovely bit at the end when he discovers that the brother of his granmother that died in Theresienstadt did have some family, and they managed to get out on the kindertransport. So there are some other branches of his family that he knew nothing about. An emotional meeting with a great-grandson of his grandmother's brother.

I was surprised at his lack of knowledge though. He said he'd never heard of Theresienstadt.

Steve

Shaun

I've been catching up on a few newly arrived films following my holiday and watched this one last night never having seen it previously.
This is well worth a look not least for the lead roles played by Michael Craig and Patrick McGoohan. Craig plays the father of an 8 yr old girl who is badly injured in an accident. Needing an urgent blood transfusion to save her life Craig stuns the hospital doctor (McGoohan) when he refuses to give his consent due to his religous beliefs. The girl dies and McGoohan, incensed at this apparent waste of life pursues the matter with the police who eventually charge Craig with offences of child neglect and the matter goes to court. Defending his religous beliefs and championed by a lawyer who believes in him Craig cuts an increasingly distraught figure. I won't let on how the verdict went but I wonder if anyone else seeing this film might agree that the ending would have been far more effective had it ended upon Craig's reaction to the verdict.

Chevyman

I too watched "Who Do You Think You Are" and found it to be very moving and the scenes at the railhead very eerie.

Soon after it opened I visited the Simon Wiesenthal Museum Of Tolerance in Los Angeles:-

About the Simon Wiesenthal Center - Simon Wiesenthal Center

I would recommend that to anyone who is ever in the vicinity. I believe the organisation has opened another centre in New York City.

Having recorded it, I finished off the evening with "Blood and Guts" a fascinating account of the, relatively short, history of cardiac surgery and extra-corporeal perfusion.

Top marks go to the BBC4 team for making such a subject so accessible

"One appears to have dropped one's monocle in the soufflee"

Why not visit the Festive Fayre section?

Colonel Blimp

Only just got round to watching Hell Drivers last night, no idea why it took me so long ... wish I hadn't bothered, a truly terrible film. Absolutely no story apart from a few ultra-predictable cliches to give a vague sort of beyond-basic 'plot', followed by interminable scenes of lorries going fast ... all topped off by one of the worst performances in cinema history, Patrick McGoohan as Red (how did his career continue after this?). At one point I cried 'Please STOP', and then it did: it just stopped stone dead!

I'm planning to watch Life For Ruth soon, which to be honest sounds much more like my sort of film, but I am very worried that McGoohan might ruin it ...

The other night I saw SLANDER with Van Johnson and an excellent performance by Steve Cochran, MUCH better ... all the film guides slate it, but I guess that's only to be expected ...

lupinpooter

David Hare's My Zinc Bed adapted from his stage play of the same name. It is good to see something unashamedly "literary" on the BBC, but unfortunately I found it pretentious and peopled with unconvincing, self-pitying, stupid characters. The glossily photographed London locations seem to be for the benefit of the Americans that will watch this (it is a BBC/HBO co-production): I thought they detracted from the production, which would have been better given more time to develop some sympathy for the characters (maybe Hare didn't want us to sympathise with them though?). Uma Thurman's celebrity status was a huge distraction (perhaps this was intentional too?), and Paddy Considine did not manage to inject anything likeable, or even magnetic, into his character to explain how he came to be in the situation described (and if Paddy Considine couldn't do it, nobody could), but Jonathan Pryce managed to inspire some sympathy with his portrayal of a lame-duck-collecting, poetry-loving internet entrepreneur. There were some interesting ideas in the play, and I enjoy a melodrama as much as the next man, but this needed more time, more intimacy and less of the location-porn. And - I'm sorry to say - someone else in the role of Elsa.

dremble wedge

Gainsborough's Jassy which sees Dennis Price gambling away his house to Basil Sydney whilst clairvoyant gypsy Margaret Lockwood sets about to get it back for Dermot Walsh.

What with Patricia Roc being expelled from school, Linden Travers having an affair with an architect, Torin Thatcher as a sadistic blacksmith and Esma Cannon recovering her powers of speech for a courtroom climax entertainment doesn't come any fuller than this.

CaptainWaggett

Esma Cannon, then in her 40s, must have been one of the oldest people ever to play a teenager on screen. Awesomely. Obviously.

Freddy

Looking forward to this but I too found it very disappointing.

FReddy

The world wags on.