Happy Sunday everyone. This week I’ve got a recommendation for you if you liked Ludwig and need some comedy murder mystery in your life. I’m a bit behind because the series finished a few weeks back on TV in the UK, but hey I’ve been very busy and there’s been a lot of motosport to keep up with.
Death Valley features a detecting duo of an actual police detective and an actor best known for playing a TV detective. Janie is somewhat socially awkward, still lives with her mum and has never really got over the death of her best friend back when they were students. John Chapel has retired from acting after his big role as Caesar and is basically hiding out in his home in Wales after the death of his wife. It’s got a mystery of the week format with a few running threads across the series as well.
We really enjoyed this – the episodes are only 45 minutes so don’t expect them to be super complicated – they’re just a light confection that you can watch without engaging your brain too much or being too terrified to go to sleep! They definitely lean into the comedy side of things – so your mileage may vary, but I definitely found them a lot more fun than when Death in Paradise leans into the comedy. And the cast is great. Timothy Spall is always a lot of fun to watch and Gwyneth Keyworth is really engaging as Janie and their fractious relationship makes for a really fun watch. We actually saw Keyworth in Twelfth Night at Stratford back at the start of the year and she was a great Viola/Cesario as well. There are lots of other familiar faces in the cast as well, including Steffan Rhodri, Melanie Walters and Jim Howick in the regular cast and people like Patricia Hodge among the guest stars.
This one is on the iPlayer and if you’re not in the UK, it’s on Britbox. I don’t think there is any official word on a series two, but series one did well in the ratings and that production of Twelfth Night I mentioned has announced a run at The Barbican over Christmas where it’s mentioned that Sam West and Freema Agyeman are reprising their roles – but not Gwyneth Keyworth (yet at any rate) so it could be that’s because they’re filming season 2 in the autumn. We can hope anyway…
Back with a TV/streaming recommendation today, for those of you who like a murder mystery series at the gentle end of the spectrum.
Our set up is this: in episode one Sylvia Fox, a British spy, is off to Italy for her niece’s wedding. Then someone turns up dead and the groom goes missing so she starts to investigate. There’s a hot Carabinieri officer and by the end of the first episode she’s solved the crime, decided to take a career break and bought a house to do up. There are two more two hour mysteries for her to solve in series one and another three in series two. And I really do hope we get a series three.
For all that Sylvia is an ex spy, these are pretty chill mysteries – there’s not a lot of blood, no jump scares and until the last episode of series two not a lot of peril. And by the time you get to that final episode you’re fairly sure it will all work out ok in the end. There’s lots of beautiful scenery and I want Sylvia’s house, wardrobe and defensive driving skills. I’ve been watching Emilia Fox in things since she was Georgiana in Pride and Prejudice and she’s always very watchable and in this she makes a nice duo with Tara Fitzgerald as her sister.
There are a few occasions in series one why you wonder why the Italian characters are speaking English to each other rather than Italian, but that’s mostly sorted out in season two. The romantic strand is very slow moving – and more long looks and brooding stares than anything else (so far) but Capitano Riva does a very good brooding stares than anything so I forgive it and just hope that we get a bit of progress if we get a series three!
These have just been shown on U and Drama in the UK, and are on their streaming service at the moment, elsewhere in the world they are available through Britbox.
There have been a couple of documentaries recently about Elizabeth Taylor – and I’ve watched them and I have thoughts! Golden Age and Old Hollywood is one of the areas that I’m always interested in reading about (fiction and non fiction) and watching documentaries about and it was interesting that two big productions about the same person popped up so close to each other at a time when there was no obvious anniversary to explain it.
The two documentaries in question are Elizabeth Taylor: the Lost Tapes and Elizabeth Taylor – Rebel Superstar. The former is an HBO documentary, the latter a three part series executive produced by Kim Kardashian. And given that they’re both about the same person, who only had one life (duh) they both cover fairly similar ground.
Rebel Superstar has more about her later business career and it also has the better talking heads – among them Taylor’s son Chris and granddaughter Naomi, Sharon Stone, Margaret O’Brien, Kim K herself and Paris Jackson (Michael’s daughter) and Joan Collins. And oh my it needs Joan Collins – she’s the only sharp voice in a documentary that is working hard to gloss over a few things and is basically a hagiography, such is the lack of critical voices and mention of less than flattering aspects of Taylor’s personal life.
The Lost Tapes has the advantage of recordings of Liz herself, made in the mid 1960s, which means that this focuses on that era and the time leading up to it and not later. You only get a very short section at the end on everything else – addiction and later marriages are skipped over, although her work in Aids activism at a time when there was a huge amount of stigma is given more of its due. You also get cine footage filmed on set with her by Roddie McDowell where you see her with James Dean, Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson. But the interviewer doesn’t give her a lot of pushback or press her on what she’s saying in the tapes, and again we’re in haigography territory.
Neither of these would have got me writing about them on their own, because it’s not really a recommendation – both lack a bite in slightly different ways. If you’re only going to watch one, I’d make it the Lost Tapes – because it has those recordings of Elizabeth talking about her life and the lovely home movie footage, but neither of them give you the full picture of Taylor’s life. If you go in not knowing anything about her, you could come out missing some of the details – like the fact that both Burton and Taylor were married to other people when they started their relationship, or the entirity of her marriage to Larry Fortensky. But if you’re interested in Hollywood history then they’re worth a watch, but if you are a newbie who wants a more complete picture, you’re probably better with a book – or even her Wikipedia!
If you’re in the UK, Rebel Superstar is on the BBC iPlayer and The Lost Tapes was shown on Sky Documentaries and is now on Now. If you’re elsewhere you’ll have to have a dig around and see which platform or streamer has bought them up.
Happy Sunday everyone, I’ve got a documentary recommendation for you this week, and I’ve bumped it to the top of the list because it was only on TV on Friday night – and so it’s on iPlayer now, and it’s important for arts documentaries to get viewing figures for us to get more of them. And this is a really good one.
Steven McRae is a Principal at the Royal Ballet – and in 2019 his Achilles tendon tore in the middle of a performance, leaving him lying on the stage in agony, thinking his career could be over. Dancing Back to the Light is the story of his rehabilitation and return to the stage in 2021. It’s a long and gruelling process, and as well as following him at work in the dance studio and the gym we also see him at home with his wife, herself a retired ballet dancer with the Royal Ballet, and their three young children.
I read a lot of books about ballet dancers when I was a child (and still re-read them now as an adult to be honest) and often wished that I had learned ballet. This will give you an unflinching portrait of the effort and sacrifice that goes into being at the top of your game in the modern ballet world, and how even the best dancers can have bad habits and be powering their way through in unhealthy ways. McRae is Australian and his childhood teacher always had the ambition for him to go to the Royal Ballet school – which seemed out of reach for a kid from a Sydney suburb on the other side of the world But 17 he flew to Switzerland to participate in the Prix de Lausanne and as he tells us in the documentary he won first prize – and a scholarship to the Royal Ballet. As that Instagram caption for the trailer says; he’s also a fabulous tap dancer – this is his tap solo from that competition:
McRae is very articulate and honest about what’s going on inside his head and how he’s had to rebuild the way that he dances and his every day routine as a result of the injury. He’s a dancer who has been incredibly acclaimed for his talent and dancing style – but it’s such hard work to be as good as he is. There are various jobs that I’ve seen described as being like a swan – serene on the surface but pedaling away madly underwater and ballet seems to be very like that – for the three hours of perfection you see on stage, there is untold dedication behind the scenes as well as whatever pain or injury the dancer might be carrying with them on stage at any given time. I think even if you’re not into ballet it’s worth a watch, because like so many documentaries about sports people it shows someone fighting to get back to the peak of their powers to try and make the most of their talent and passion while they can, but also about listening to your body and taking the time you need to do things properly.
If you’re in the UK, you can watch Steven McRae: Dancing Back to the Light on iPlayer here. It’s been broadcast as part of the Arena strand of documentaries. If you’re not in the UK, this has had a cinema release in France, and I’m sure it will be popping up on streaming platforms at some point.
Happy Sunday, this weekend I’m back with a post about another documentary series.
I am of the age that I lived through the peak of the early boyband era and so the crop of documentaries that have popped up about them recently have been a total boon for me – even if the reality that the members of the bands that I loved wasn’t the shiny happy experience that we thought they were having when we were watching them back in the day. And we have had a run of them – BBC Two had Boybands Forever just before Christmas which looked at the whole crop of bands that came through starting in the 90s and now Sky has done this three part look at Boyzone.
So if you are unfamiliar with Boyzone, they were five young men from Ireland – Ronan, Stephen, Mikey, Shane and Keith, who were formed a public auditions by Louis Walsh later went onto manage Westlife and also to be a judge on the X factor. They really came to prominence after the demise or split of Take That and had a clean cut, wholesome and youthful image – Ronan for example wasn’t even out of his teens when the band came through. What I didn’t realise at the time was that they were from very working class backgrounds and from quite a rough area of Dublin and that’s a big theme of how the experience affected them. When I went to the launch event for Reach for the Stars a couple of years ago, Nicola Robers from Girls Aloud was the special guest talking to Michael Wragg, and one of the things that she talked about was the fact that TV talent shows were a route into the music industry for working class kids and the challenges that that presented, and although Boyzone were not a TV talent show group, I think a lot of the things that she spoke about also applied to them – not really having lived away from their parents before, a lack of knowledge about how the industry worked, a dependence on the management companies who were in charge of them but who didn’t necessarily have the best interests of the band members at heart.
Unlike Take That who had the hit machine that was Gary Barlow, Boyzone had no real songwriter – they were put together by Louis Walsh, boyband svengali and future X Factor judge, who it should be noted very much gets the villain edit in this – although I don’t think it took much editing to do that – a clip that’s been doing the rounds since the show went out shows him admitting that he told the press that the boys had been in a plane crash (they hadn’t) and then didn’t tell their families, leaving them to find out in the press that their loved ones had supposedly cheated death. Anyway, Boyzone were best know for a string of hit cover version of songs by people like Tracy Chapman and the Bee Gees. If you’ve only heard of one Boyzone song, it will likely be No Matter What – an Andrew Lloyd Webber composition that came from his musical version of Whistle Down the Wind that they released as a single to coincide with the launch of the musical in the West End, or their Comic Relief single* When the Going Gets Tough
After a couple of hugely successful years, they went on hiatus “for a year”, Ronan went solo and one year turned into more – until a hugely successful first reunion tour and then the death of Stephen Gately at the age of just 33. I still remember exactly where I was when I heard that Stephen had died, and that loss of Stephen is the bit of their story that is obviously tragic, but it turns out what was going on behind the scenes was something that has clearly left all four remaining members with a lot of issues. Mikey – or Michael as he is captioned throughout – was always the member of the band that was the easiest to forget about, but in this documentary he probably has the most to say about the impact being on the band had – and still has on him and how hard he’s had to work to build himself into the person that he is now.
It’s not exactly a cheerful watch – but it is fascinating. And when combined with Boybands Forever, you get a real picture of the damage that fame can do to young people when they find themselves in the limelight and at the centre of a press scrum (particularly the sort of press scrum that was going on in the late 1990s and early 2000s) without people properly looking out for them. I wish I could say that lessons have been learned and that emerging stars are better looked after, but I’m not sure that the evidence suggests that they are.
Boyzone: No Matter What is available to stream on Now TV and they’re showing all three parts back to back on Sky Documentaries next weekend.
*Truly having the Comic Relief single was a massive deal in the 1990s – Boyzone came in a run that went Pet Shop Boys; Chrissie Hynde, Cher, Neneh CHerry and Eric Clapton; the Spice Girls; Boyzone; Westlife; Gareth Gates andbMcFly; and if you don’t remember the era of singles sales you may not quite understand and I feel so old just typing that.
I did go to the theatre this week, but given that I’m going again next week and that show is on a much shorter run that this week’s one, I suspect we may be back at the theatre again next weekend, so I thought I’d mix it up and go with a retro TV series this week. I have to say I did struggle to get a video for this post because my favourite era of the series is from the pre-YouTube era…
Jonathan Creek is a mystery drama series that started in the late 1990s on the BBC. The titular character played by comedian and current QI stalwart Alan Davis and is a designer of magical illusions who is dragged into solving crimes by pushy investigative journalist Maddie Magellen, played by Caroline Quentin. Maddie is willing to lie and be devious to get what she wants, Jonathan is not. Jonathan also works for stage magician Adam Klaus who is flamboyant and often provides comedy subplots. Over the course of the nearly 20 years covered by the original series and then the subsequent specials, Maddie is replaced by ambitious TV exec Carla Borego (Julia Swalha) and then Joey, a paranormal investigator played by Sheridan Smith and finally Sarah Alexander’s Polly.
Although at the start of the series Jonathan is pretty antisocial and reclusive, over the course of the early series he gains in confidence and social skills to become fairly witty and charming in an offbeat sort of way – which continues in the specials. However, there is not a lot of running plot strands in this – they’re basically murder of the weeks, where the emphasis is on the actual mechanics of the crime being investigated. There is a will they won’t they with Maddie in the early years, but it’s never anywhere near the main focus of the series.
There are a few bits that haven’t dated that well – and if you’re under 30 the fact that at least one of the plots involves a video recorder is going to be novel to you. But the mysteries are tightly plotted and very hard to work out when you watch the show first time around. But at this point I’ve seen all of the early series a couple of times and they still hold up even when you know the solution. And they have the advantage of having a lot of interesting guest stars – the writer is David Renwick who has as long and storied history in British comedy and that brought in people. And so there are a few Easter Eggs here if you’ve watched a lot of British TV over the years – but also if you watch the pilot episode you’ll see that Adam Klaus was originally played by Anthony Stuart Head – who couldn’t continue with the series as he got a role in a little American show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Jonathan Creek is on the iplayer if you’re in the UK, and if you’re abroad it’s also available on various streaming service.
Every year in the run up to Christmas, I need to clear space on the TiVo for all the new stuff that’s coming – and that means that I’ll delete a few of my favourite movies to clear space – knowing that they’ll be on again at some point over the 10 days of Christmas and if the TV happens to be on when they’re showing, I’ll probably switch over and watch too. So today, here are a few things that are on that list…
Some people say it’s not Christmas if the Wizard of Oz isn’t on TV, I say it isn’t Christmas if The Sound of Music isn’t on somewhere. It is in my top 10 favourite movies, if not my top five. But it’s also now a tradition to read this genius article from McSweeneys: I Regret to Inform You that My Wedding to Captain Von Trapp has been Cancelled. It’s thirteen years old now and it’s still as funny as the first time I read it. I think I like it more than I like their Decorative Gourd Season article. And that’s saying something!
I’m also a big Doris Day fan – and Christmas is often a time when her movies pop up on TV. This year as well as Pillow Talk (definitely in my top five) there’s Lover Come Back, Move Over Darling and Calamity Jane where you can also enjoy the wonder that is Howard Keele – star of the movie version of Kiss Me, Kate (which inexplicably isn’t on this Christmas damnit).
And then there’s the Agatha Christie adaptation situation. Unusually this year there are no repeats of the Joan Hickson Miss Marples (Alibi are repeating some of the Ngaio Marsh Alleyn adaptations this year though) but you can watch the Albert Finney Murder on the Orient Express, which is definitely a Christmas movie (snow!) and has an all star cast and amazing music and is much better than the recent remake – which isn’t bad, it’s just not that one!
Oh and Some Like it Hot is on too. Another from my all time my top five. My TiVo is going to be so, so full!
If you’re lucky, you might be finished for Christmas by now. If you’re me, it feels like you might never be finished. But I have my Christmas Radio Times, and I’ve been through it to work out what my highlights are this year.
You would have to have been out of the country to miss that it’s the final every (definitely, definitely, cross their hearts) episode of Gavin and Stacey on Christmas Day. Following in recent tradition of One Last Episode for Christmas (see also Detectorists and Ghosts) Ruth Jones and James Corden say that once you’ve seen it you’ll know why there’ll be no more. I do hope everyone lives. I’ll be watching to find out, but the last Christmas special was good so I sort of trust them.
I’m slightly more worried about Wallace and Gromit. But that’s more because the bar for them is so incredibly high. Lest we forget the duo have five Baftas and three Oscars. The train track chase in The Wrong Trousers remains one of the most perfect sequences in animation. But they’re back – and so is Feathers McGraw, easily one of the most sinister villains ever to grace a children’s programme. I really, really, hope it’s good.
And the other new thing that I’m looking out for this year is a fresh adaptation of Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five. I’m always fascinated to see how childrens classics are reinvented. As some one who reads a lot of vintage childrens literature I would say that the Blyton cannon is one that stands up less well when rereading as an adult compared to some of the others but people have very fond memories of it from when they were small so it can go either way. I didn’t mind the reinvented Swallows and Amazons a few years back, but it wasn’t as good as the books. So lets see how this one does.
Given that I’ve already written posts about two series about home renovations and made a romance about a home renovation a book of the week, it should not be a surprise to you that I love a show about renovating houses – particularly American houses where it seems like it’s much easier to rip things up and reconfigure than it is here in the UK. And with autumn being all cosy and making me want to nest, this is the perfect time of year to be watching them!
Home Town is probably my current favourite of the HGTV series – and I’ve watched a lot, including several on my various long-haul flights over the last six months. Home Town is set in Laurel, Mississppi and features Ben and Erin Napier, a husband and wife duo (as do so many HGTV series) who restore historic homes. In the majority of episodes, Ben and Erin show their renovatees (is that a word?) a couple of housing choices, and present them with a painting of how the exterior would look after it’s been renovated and then once the hosue has been bought, they renovate it without the new purchasers seeing what is being done (or at least that’s what they say!) until the big reveal at the end,when they’re also presented with that painting from the start – now framed and with The *family name* house written underneath it. Coz every show has to have a thing right.
Ben is a carpenter and woodworker and Erin is a designer and artist. The series started in 2016 and having recently watched some of the earlier series you can see how both of them have got better at renovating things and also how prices in Laurel have gone up as more houses have been done up over the last eight seasons. I find Ben and Erin charming and I love that her decorating style isn’t black and white with shades of grey like some (Christina on the Coast I’m looking at you) but is all about colour and pattern. I also really like their commitment to improving their small town – which seems really genuine and backed up by the fact that they own and run businesses in the town. It’s all very low stakes, and low conflict and just perfect for watching while you’re doing the ironing!
Home Town is on HGTV and Discovery+ in the UK. Have a great Sunday
After being pleasantly surprised by the range of viewing options on the flights to and from Manila, I was hopeful about my options for the (much shorter) flights to and from Lagos. Sadly we were with a different airline and the options were… much less good. However there was a ray of sunlight – and that was that Abbott Elementary was on there so I was finally able to watch the first series of a show I’ve been hearing about for a while. And now you get to hear about it. Obviously this comes with the proviso that I’ve only seen the first season and it’s now made it to the end of season three (and is renewed for a fourth) but hey, I liked it and I’m writing about it.
This is a mockumentary about the teachers at an under-funded and predominantly black school in Philadelphia. It’s created and written by one of its stars – Quinta Brunson, who plays optimistic second grade teacher Janine Teagues. There are six other main characters in the show – including Eva, a new and unqualified school principal; Gregory, one of the candidates she beat to the job who is now working as a substitute teacher; Barbara, a no nonsense kindergarten teacher with decades of experience – played by the absolute legend that is Sheryl Lee Ralph aka the original Deena in Dreamgirls on Broadway and Lauryn Hill’s mum in Sister Act 2!
The first series has 13 episode and follows the trials and tribulations of one school year. It didn’t take me long to get really invested in all the characters and the school – but it’s really funny – although at times it’s a little bit too cringe for me, but that’s not too unusual with comedies. It’s also very easy to watch episode after episode back to back without getting fed up or finding a formula – I was actually annoyed when I ran out of time to watch more on the flight out, and made a point of finishing the series off on the way home before I went to sleep on the night flight home! The second series has 22 episodes (stupid American TV season lengths) which is a bit more of a commitment, but next time I get an offer for Disney+ I’ll be checking it out. I was going to say checking it out to see if they keep the quality going – but given that the second season won three Golden Globes, including Best Actress for Quinta Brunson, I think it did!
As I mentioned above, if oyu’re not on an airplane, Abbott Elementary is on Disney+ in the UK and on ABC and whereever ABC content gets streamed in the US. If you liked Parks and Recreation and haven’t checked this out yet, you really should.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 