Tag Archive: Television
Dr Thorne by Anthony Trollope
Billy Preston says...
Spoiler alert – not that it really matters. The plot is an old one: boy meets girl, there is an insurmountable obstacle to their love, the obstacle is mounted by an incredible last minute stroke of luck. Ta dah!
Continue Reading →Impressions – Jon-Benet Ramsey, 20 years on.
The Ramsey Case Continues – the Burke Interview We recently wrote about the speculative case mounted in a CBS Special concerning the unsolved death of Jon Benét Ramsey. Since then we have had the opportunity to view the interview by Dr Phil McGraw with Burke Ramsey, now 29 years old. Recorded earlier this year and screened in September, the first half discloses no smoking pistol but by the same token, it adds fuel to the flame (pardon the mixed metaphors). Burke denies allegations of assaulting his sister, on the night she died or ever before. There will be some who find…
Continue Reading →The Case that Will Not Die
The Death of Jon Benét Ramsey We have spoken of the various imaginative, speculative and trashy treatments of this awful case before: See Perfect Murder, Perfect Town and Books About Jon Benét. Disclaimer: TVC has a keen interest in but no actual knowledge of, this matter. Apart from an individual who appears to have confessed to the crime in order to be extradited from a Thai jail, no one has admitted guilt nor been charged. Patsy Ramsey is now deceased and she always denied involvement in the killing, as have John and Burke Ramsey. We are discussing possible solutions on a…
Continue Reading →“Larry…this is real life now”
"The only reason I'm not running for President this year, I swear to God, is I'm afraid no woman would come forward and say she had sex with me."
(Garry Shandling: 29 November 1949 – 24 March, 2016) The American talk-show is one of the weirdest things about America. Canned jokes: a format straight from the days of the music hall: insipid monologues: dumb Q & A’s: dumber sketches: a conga line of actors and singers with a product to plug: barren interaction with the bandleader: in sum, one or two hours so insipid and un-cerebral that it is a miracle things don’t come to a full stop, well shy of schedule. Shandling was born in Chicago (comedy central) and developed an aversion to formulaic comedy. So why would…
Continue Reading →Molly: The Real Thing
Not dead yet
Channel 7 followed up its two-part drama Molly (reviewed here) with a short, oddly premature obituary-feel documentary about Ian “Molly” Meldrum the following week. Molly’s brother Brian tells us that Molly loved music from day one. He moved in with Ronnie Burns’ family when his just wouldn’t do, he was a journalist at GO SET magazine, then on the television music shows The go Show, Kommotion (1966). Uptight (1968) and Happening 1971. Again, like Vivienne Westwood, Ian Meldrum was a young person with nothing but passion and a lot of nerve who blazed a trail through a wood that no-one…
Continue Reading →