Tag Archive: Television
Happy Valley : BBC One
No-one does grief and resentment like Sarah Lancashire. (See Last Tango in Halifax, BBC One 2012, series 3, episodes 3 & 4). After Happy Valley this sterling actor can add loathing, despair and massive disappointment to her CV. Indeed, no-one in Happy Valley experiences much of anything else. The West Yorkshire grit, damp, poverty, addiction, disease, treachery and crime with which they all live is made palpable and visceral in this most excellent 3 series show. The only person to escape the poverty bit at least, is the one rich man in the village (see The Vicar of Dibley) –…
Continue Reading →Eurovision 2023
Ah Eurovision! How we love you – always oozing zeitgeist. As the fashion of 2023 is virtue-signalling, so Eurovision 2023 is all woke and everything. But not even the po-faced killjoys of intersectionality politics can strip the time-honoured Eurovision Song Contest of its retro, delusional charm and Martian qualities. No! Though it nods to the real world, Eurovision will never be mainstream or proper. It is…Eurovision… So the 2023 Grand Final (in Liverpool, England because the 2022 winner Ukraine is at war) started true to form with an inexplicable number featuring Cousin-It ‘dancers’ in ghillie-suit-womble ensembles, a bit like those…
Continue Reading →Midsommar
(dir. Ari Aster) (2019) Midsommar performs poorly on The Babadook Horror Movie Scale. Rather than dark mansions and creepy children, Aster has set his nastiness in sunny meadows (although it still looks cold) peopled by beatifically-smiling blond Swedes. But the story is familiar. Nice, naive, clean, modern-day American kids are blindsided by evil, sophisticated old-worlde types. Maybe there’s witchcraft. (See Henry James, add The Lottery, stir with Rosemary’s Baby). While we’re at it, let’s get the rest of the obvious comparisons out of the way: The Wicker Man, Get Out, The Village and Hereditary (Aster’s previous feature). Our innocents, Christian…
Continue Reading →Never Let Me Go
Book written by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) Film directed by Mark Romanek (2010) Ishiguro, Romanek, please let us go, you heartless bastards. Not since Chris Lilley killed Pat Mullins (We Can Be Heroes: Finding the Australian of the Year of the Year, ABC TV, 2005) have we at TVC been rendered sleepless by an afflicted fictional character. And we could laugh at Pat. Laugh at any of the characters in Ishiguro’s book or Romanek’s film of the book and you will go straight to hell. It is best perhaps to watch Romanek’s realisation before reading Ishiguro’s pitiless novel. The film transforms…
Continue Reading →Mare of Easttown (Foxtel)
(Directed by Craig Zobel) (HBO; Foxtel, 2021) There are more sombre crime series on streaming services than a world-weary detective can poke a blood-stained stick at. How then to choose which to watch – and why watch at all? Pull up a rumpled armchair, push away the AA booklets; give this one a go. Mare of Easttown, a Foxtel series written by Brad Ingelsby, has held our grumpy, misanthropic attention for four of its seven episodes. Mary-Something ‘Mare’ Sheehan (Kate Winslet,) an unsmiling Philadelphia small-town detective, tramps along, bottom lip dragging on the muddy ground, six-inch-long dark roots (seriously?) pulled…
Continue Reading →