1. Earliest remembered television?
I Love Lucy. Which is still funny. But I also remember Gunsmoke, Roy Rogers, Sugarfoot, Bonanza, The Flintstones, Pick-A-Box (starring a very young Barry Jones, who frequently challenged the official correct answers and was always right), The Bugs Bunny Show, Channel Niners, the telecast of the John Martin's Christmas Pageant, and ditto the Anzac Day march, where we would always be able to spot our dad if we looked for the Navy's 'Corvettes' banner.
Pick-A-Box: that's Barry Jones on the right.2. TV series you would want on a desert island
Prime Suspect, if that counts as a series. All seven of them.
3. TV that made you laugh
The Games. John Clarke and Gina Riley are both brilliant; together they were stellar.
4. TV that made you cry
The Stuart Diver rescue.
5. TV crap that you enjoy
Funniest Home Videos. There, my secret is out.
6. TV you'll never forget.
Hamish Macbeth. Best. TV. Ever.
7. Favourite TV adaptation.
Middlemarch. Not even the ubiquitous Andrew Davies -- a screenwriter who still, after having totally cornered the market in Screen Adaptations of 19th Century Women's Fiction, does not understand that 19th century women's fiction is not about the male characters -- could wreck Middlemarch for me.
Besides, Rufus Sewell was in it.
Rufus the Breathtaking. What is it about a man at a piano?7. Favourite nerdish program
I don't like nerdish TV. I get enough nerdish in my head.
8. One TV program you are currently watching
The cricket.
9. One TV show/series you have been meaning to watch
I'm with Elsewhere on this one: I think I should at least try to see the point of Desperate Housewives. But oh Lord it's hard.
9 comments:
Andrew Davies has written new adaptations of Northanger Abbey and Sense & Sensibility. Hooray. And Elsewhere probably shouldn't hear this, but he is going to script a new adaptation of Brideshead next year.
I knew that, one with Jude Law in it. It'll pale beside our Centralian version.
I saw a lot of those TV programs you mention from your childhood, PC -- maybe half. I could add (tactlessly) that it might be because they were repeated a thousand times.
L -- oh, good, she said politely. Actually I think he is a not-bad screenwriter -- the dialogue is a bit unsnappy, but I like the narrative structuring -- but the gender-blindness floors me. It shouldn't be surprising, but it is.
E -- I saw the originals AND the repeats.
And no, not tactless. The older one gets, after about 45 (50 tops, at least for women) the less one hears 'old' as an insult. And if it is actually said as an insult, as the most unfortunate Steve Munn did to me on LP recently, then one is more amused than anything else, as though someone had viciously called one 'a girl'.
This is because one understands what an amazing achievement it has been to get to one's age (whatever it is) more or less intact, and to have finally learned what it is to see experience triumph over hope occasionally. Naturally this sense of achievement expands with every passing year for obvious reasons, as in OH MY GOD I GOT THROUGH ANOTHER ONE. (Christmas and birthdays both do this, which explains my current genial frame of mind.)
Blogs like that of the former Grannyvibe, now Lymphopo, who is (if only a matter of months) younger than me, tend to reinforce that.
As for Brideshead, I'd like to see someone do an adaptation starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Glad to hear you're in a genial mood (though it was clear from the email you sent a few days ago) and in that spirit, I will not go into my opinion of Davies' adaptation of Tipping the Velvet but instead say that there was a Davies-penned script of Northanger Abbey in circulation a while ago, and it's not a disaster. I liked the part where Catherine Morland is going home in the public coach and a strange man wearing two hats offers her a bite of his sausage.
Don't quite see why we need a new S & S, however.
And aren't those actors all a bit old for Charles & Sebastian?
Oh, I hadn't seen that Rufus man before. He's quite distracting, isn't he?
Laura -- yes, the advanced age of all the actors named occurred to me while I was thinking about it, too. But I think Irons and Andrews were also too old. I just liked the idea of the whammo subtext if you cast the Brokeback boys.
Zoe -- Oooooh yeah. He played the para-Bloomsbury artist Max Gertler in Carrington and Seth Starkadder in Cold Comfort Farm and he was absolutely stunning in both of them.
Being a SciFi fan I loved Rufus in Dark City. Some of those TV shows brought back memories and I bought Mum the DVD of 'Against the Wind' for Christmas. She's loving it and I don't think it's aged at all and Jon English is forever.
They should leave Brideshead where it is. PC, I once got late tickets to hear Ivo (Ivor?)Pogorelich play Chopin with my sister - we sat above teh piano. Fully sick. Probably the only goodlooking classical pianist I ever saw in the flesh too.
Dark City was very good - and widely underappreciated, IMO. Sewell also made an excellent Charles II in the recent series.
Very intrigued by your take on Davies' genderblindness, Pavvy - is there any chance of a longer post on this view?
More provocatively, isn't Northanger Abbey desperately boring, he asks of the audience at large?
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