Recommended Television Programmes

[LMcD]

I’m watching the new season of The Crown. The performances are great, but it’s basically played for laughs. I can’t help thinking that HMQ has lived to a ripe old age and kept her counsel (in contrast of course to the rest of her family) only to watch her life dramatised for posterity, and with a licence over which she has no control. I know that sounds a bit pious, but I can’t help see the irony. The Diana years are going to be cringeworthy.

Wait till they get to the Prince Andrew years!

[Richard Barrett]

Has the new War of the Worlds series been discussed here yet? Yesterday I watched the first episode. Here I have to come over all DracoM and ask why it wasn't possible (for once!) to steer a little closer to Wells's original, which made a deep impact on me at an early age and which still springs immediately to mind whenever I see or hear placenames in Surrey. Updating it to the Edwardian era, inserting the forbidden-love story as a way of bringing in "contemporary relevance", making the tripods (am I right about this? I haven't looked at the book for ages) much larger than they were originally described... all of this seemed unnecessary. I guess I'll get over it. What interests me most about the story is the way it depicts an alien invasion at a time when such a thing had never really been imagined. Is that aspect stressed sufficiently? Maybe. Interesting how the myopic politicians immediately blame "the Russians" when in the Edwardian period it would surely have been "the Germans" who'd be accused of mounting a deadly attack (as indeed they eventually did). Luckily they stopped short of mentioning Putin by name.

[Stunsworth]

[/B]
Wait till they get to the Prince Andrew years!

Madge will want a pizza de action.

[Richard Tarleton]

Has the new War of the Worlds series been discussed here yet? Yesterday I watched the first episode. Here I have to come over all DracoM and ask why it wasn't possible (for once!) to steer a little closer to Wells's original, which made a deep impact on me at an early age and which still springs immediately to mind whenever I see or hear placenames in Surrey. Updating it to the Edwardian era, inserting the forbidden-love story as a way of bringing in "contemporary relevance", making the tripods (am I right about this? I haven't looked at the book for ages) much larger than they were originally described... all of this seemed unnecessary. I guess I'll get over it. What interests me most about the story is the way it depicts an alien invasion at a time when such a thing had never really been imagined. Is that aspect stressed sufficiently? Maybe. Interesting how the myopic politicians immediately blame "the Russians" when in the Edwardian period it would surely have been "the Germans" who'd be accused of mounting a deadly attack (as indeed they eventually did). Luckily they stopped short of mentioning Putin by name.

The reason for the preoccupation with Russia - the Dogger Bank episode - was referred to early in the episode, wasn't it? - the Russian Baltic fleet sailed down through the North Sea en route to Japan in 1904 (on its way to being sunk by the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905) - so the reference to Russia here perfectly plausible.

Quite why the Russian would have thought there might be Japanese patrol boats in the North Sea has never been satisfactorily explained, to the best of my knowledge - stupidity, perhaps.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Never mind all that! I want to know how the Astronomer Royal had access to a recording of the Cockaigne Overture, 19 years before it was first recorded!

[Richard Tarleton]

Never mind all that! I want to know how the Astronomer Royal had access to a recording of the Cockaigne Overture, 19 years before it was first recorded!

There's a lot of it about - in the first episode of The Crown, Brenda and Philip were seen watching breakfast TV 11 years or so before it was invented....

[Nick Armstrong]

Never mind all that! I want to know how the Astronomer Royal had access to a recording of the Cockaigne Overture, 19 years before it was first recorded!

I was about to say I quite enjoyed the first episode but that the scene with the gramophone was ridiculous. You’ve just placed a nice juicy cherry on that trifle

Interesting points from RB and RT. I hadn’t twigged the updating point - only by 10 or 20 years from when the book was written surely? Either way, the idea of extraterrestrial invasion was a pretty radical one for the time, I agree, and this still comes across I thought.

Talking of updating, there’s an interesting juxtaposition with the re-run of this documentary about the Welles Wells - some fascinating detail: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03f86lh

[vinteuil]

Has the new War of the Worlds series been discussed here yet? / ... / What interests me most about the story is the way it depicts an alien invasion at a time when such a thing had never really been imagined. Is that aspect stressed sufficiently? Maybe...

... but HG Wells's novel was based on an alien invasion that had actually occurred - the invasion of Tasmania by Europeans, with disastrous consequences for the indigenous populations -

https://anglosphericdisturbance.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/the-colonial-disaster-visited-upon-earth/

.

https://daily.jstor.org/what-the-war-of-the-world-had-to-do-with-tasmania/

.

[cloughie]

... but HG Well’s novel was based on an alien invasion that had actually occurred - the invasion of Tasmania by Europeans, with disastrous consequences for the indigenous populations -

https://anglosphericdisturbance.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/the-colonial-disaster-visited-upon-earth/

.

https://daily.jstor.org/what-the-war-of-the-world-had-to-do-with-tasmania/

.

Were you a greengrocer vints?

[Bryn]

... but HG Well's novel was based on an alien invasion that had actually occurred - the invasion of Tasmania by Europeans, with disastrous consequences for the indigenous populations -

https://anglosphericdisturbance.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/the-colonial-disaster-visited-upon-earth/

.

https://daily.jstor.org/what-the-war-of-the-world-had-to-do-with-tasmania/

.

And https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top...make-1-6376003

[Richard Barrett]

Either way, the idea of extraterrestrial invasion was a pretty radical one for the time, I agree, and this still comes across I thought.

It does - although, for 21st century viewers, the design of the tripods comes across as a variation on ways of presenting alien hardware that have become familiar since the 1970s (Star Wars, Alien etc.) so they don't look quite as strange as they might have.

I wasn't aware of the Dogger Bank episode. I guess I was placing the adaptation closer to 1914 than to 1904. (Nor did I recognise the Elgar but that won't surprise anyone!)

[jayne lee wilson]

Some confusing time-shifts and plot-stopping Sunday-evening-TV family matters apart (he's my baby brother! I'm carrying his child! etc...), I enjoyed this War of the Worlds rather more than the dreadful, worthy predictability of World on Fire or the endless explanatory/expository dialogue of Dark Materials (how I longed for someone to crack a joke; and as for the female characters, O-M-G....can't get on with those talking cuddly toy daemons either....qua TV drama, they seem oddly superfluous...as for human-urged animal-on-animal cruelty, well I'm outta there...)

I just hope WotW gets deeper into the bleakest, red-tinged apocalypse, before everyone gets a cold....
But it is up against that near insurmountable challenge of the Haskin and Spielberg films, both pretty compelling...

[gurnemanz]

Some confusing time-shifts and plot-stopping Sunday-evening-TV family matters apart (he's my baby brother! I'm carrying his child! etc...), I enjoyed this War of the Worlds rather more than the dreadful, worthy predictability of World on Fire or the endless explanatory/expository dialogue of Dark Materials (how I longed for someone to crack a joke; and as for the female characters, O-M-G....can't get on with those talking cuddly toy daemons either....qua TV drama, they seem oddly superfluous...as for human-urged animal-on-animal cruelty, well I'm outta there...)

I just hope WotW gets deeper into the bleakest, red-tinged apocalypse, before everyone gets a cold....
But it is up against that near insurmountable challenge of the Haskin and Spielberg films, both pretty compelling...

I think I'll stick with WotW. It took me back to Quatermass and the Pit which I have just located, to discover it was shown in 1958, making me nine at the time. It scared me stiff.

World on Fire - watched episode 1. OK. Recorded the rest but may not prioritise watching it all.

Dark M - may be a premature judgement but decided it was not for me.

[Serial_Apologist]

Dark M - may be a premature judgement but decided it was not for me.

Likewise.

[Serial_Apologist]

O-M-G....can't get on with those talking cuddly toy daemons either....qua TV drama, they seem oddly superfluous...

I was supposing them to be Jungian archetypal stand-ins - have I got that right, anybody? - Anyway.................