callmemadam, posts by tag: tv - LiveJournal

I had a bad day yesterday, for various reasons too tedious to go into, but I was cheered up in the evening. First, I read a book I’d picked up at a charity stall earlier in the day; written for children, it’s one of the best books I’ve read for ages.* Then I watched a programme I’d recorded, Let’s have a party! The piano genius of Mrs Mills. How could Mrs Mills not cheer you up? Pre-Beatles, I was young enough to watch The Billy Cotton Band Show with my parents, which is how I remember Mrs Mills. I also liked Russ Conway, who I thought was lovely and greatly admired Winifred Atwell, another former star you never hear about nowadays. I was obviously too old for Bobby Crush when he came along; I had no idea who he was.

The theme of the programme is also a pet obsession of mine: that performers like Mrs Mills have been written out of musical history because they don’t fit with people’s idea of the sixties. She had albums in the charts for years! She recorded at Abbey Road, where she had a dedicated piano, specially tuned for her distinctive honky-tonk sound. It gives you a good idea of the musical overlap in those days to learn that The Beatles used the same piano on some of their tracks, notably Penny Lane. The piano is still preserved at the studios.

Most of the people interviewed were pianists themselves and they were all at pains to point out the technical difficulty of what Mrs Mills did and how well she did it. Typically, the BBC didn’t seem to have much footage left and we kept seeing the same old clips, mostly from The Morecambe and Wise Show. There are quite a few clips on YouTube and I picked this one because you can actually see her playing.



There was much talk of the decline of piano playing as pianos were banished from homes and pubs to make way for television sets. Nevertheless, Mrs Mills still has her fans. I found 113 singles/albums offered on eBay this morning. The album covers are so bad they’re good, collectable because they’re so kitsch. Click here to see young kingofthekeyboard playing the piano Mrs Mills style. How I’d love to be able to do that! I’d like to be the quiet, shy person at the party who can sit down at the piano and knock out any tune people ask for. We also saw young people reviving the pub singalong, with a vamping piano and customers roaring out Roll Out The Barrel like extras from In Which We Serve, then wondering how it is they know the words. Rick Wakeman pointed out that to someone of fifteen, this kind of music would be something quite new. Highly recommended and still available to view.

*Huck and her Time Machine by Gillian Avery

Query: why is poppy sporting unnecessary on HIGNFY but obligatory on Strictly even if you’re wearing little else? Let’s have some consistency here.

Tess Daly looked less good than usual on Saturday. Her dress or her bra was the wrong size, I couldn’t work out which, so she had a rumpled midriff. My boy Harry is still, I think, being let down by Aliona’s choreography. Let him show what he can do, woman! Holly and Chelsee, OTOH, had wonderful choreography to work with. This must be because they have *Russian partners*. What is it with Artem and Pasha; were they in ballet boot camp from the age of five, perhaps? Lulu’s out? Didn’t see that coming, even though I thought she was pretty useless.

Wrong about Downton, too, because I predicted that Cora and Lavinia would both die. Talk about double standards from his lordship! ‘I want you with every fibre of my being.’ Ha ha ha! Hugh Bonneville is such a good actor I wonder he can bring himself to deliver a line like that. Plenty of material left for series three!

‘Enjoy’ was not quite the right word for Paddy Ashdown’s programme about The Cockleshell Heroes last Tuesday. A letter from a young man to his sweetheart brought tears to my eyes. He knew he was unlikely to come back and wrote, ‘Cheerio and God bless.’ After he died the girl succumbed to TB. A good programme to have on near Remembrance Day. There’s a film about the same story. I saw it in the sixties in a double bill with - Yellow Submarine!

First the good news. I really enjoyed Tintin’s Adventure with Frank Gardner on BBC 2 yesterday evening. Frank Gardner followed Tintin’s journey from Brussels to Berlin and Moscow in search of Hergé’s inspiration for Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. He travelled in a number of trains, planes and fantastic old cars and obviously had a good time, even in a wheelchair. A great tribute to Hergé and to Frank Gardner. I’d feel sorry for him but he refuses to feel sorry for himself. Also he's rather cute.

The Everyone Must wear a Poppy rule came in last week on BBC channels. Can’t they wait until November?

Whatever was the gorgeous Alesha wearing on Saturday evening’s Strictly? November 5th is the day for guys, ducks. After weeks of thinking this a dull series full of people I’d never heard of I’ve decided that Harry is the one.

Downton: ha ha ha! It gets sillier every week. How I love it.

Quite a bookfest on the BBC at the moment and I’ve been joining in with some of it. All the programmes are mentioned on the linked page. I started with Faulks on Fiction, in which the curly-haired one began with ‘The Hero’. This plodded along on the lines of : "Faulks is a hero on account of his barnet, his ability to walk and talk at the same time and his excellent ‘noddies’." There was not an original or interesting thought in the whole programme and it was incredibly shallow (BBC2) compared with Birth of the British Novel (BBC4). I’d never heard of Henry Hitchings and he’s less easy on the eye than Faulks but his look at eighteenth century novels was very interesting, particularly on Richardson and Sterne.

Scheduled well after my bedtime was In Their Own Words, a compilation of interviews with British novelists; I recorded it to watch the next day. If you click on the link to the programme it tells you exactly when each piece was recorded and how long it lasted. I disliked the narration but was fascinated by the subject matter. Several of the clips I had seen before, such as Evelyn Waugh being interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face. Many were quite new to me; I’d never seen or, more to the point heard, Elizabeth Bowen or Aldous Huxley. It was a wonderful glimpse not only of dead authors but of a different culture, one of clipped accents, no holds barred questions (ever seen Mark Lawson Talks To…?) and people smoking while being interviewed. There was no George Orwell, of course, because the BBC wiped all the tapes.

Where today is there a programme like Monitor? You’d think things had dumbed down, perish the thought! (OK, Arena puts out some good programmes.)

A curious feature of these three programmes was that Martin Amis popped up on each one with something to say. I don’t mind that at all; like his father he’s a good critic. Speaking of Dad, here he is. To save you even that trouble, see below for that same 1958 interview with Simon Raven. The presenter is Huw Weldon.

Yesterday evening I watched an interesting programme on BBC 4: 1960 The Year of the North. It turned out to be mostly about films, in particular Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life, A Taste of Honey and A Kind of Loving. Rita Tushingham starred in A Taste of Honey. Have you seen her in The Knack, with Michael Crawford and Ray Brooks? You should.
I could have done without cultural historians telling me what to think but I liked the comment that when we see Julie Christie skipping along swinging her bag in Billy Liar, ‘it’s the start of the sixties’. The theme was of grittiness; of working class anti-heroes and northern accents becoming acceptable to people in the south for whom ‘The North’ was an exotic location. According to one commentator, these films paved the way for The Beatles to be seen as quirky and amusing rather than people to be laughed at because of their funny accents. Much as I love the films I couldn’t help thinking of Harry Enfield’s spoofs It’s Grim up North and Poppet on a Swing.



After that was an old Monitor programme, Shelagh Delaney’s Salford. This was a complete turn-off for me and I gave up on it. Hearing her praise for the vibrancy of Salford’s markets and the wonderful character of its people, as though it were the only place in the world, just made me think, ‘Never been to London, then, have you ducks?’ Of course, looking at the old film you realize that being a child in Croydon, as I was in 1960, was very different from growing up in Salford. I just get fed up with northerners with large chips on their shoulders. Goes to show how tribal we can all be deep down.

Heads up, Kinks fans. This evening is designated Kinks' Night on BBC 4. It starts with Ray Davies' recent performance at Glastonbury. Next up is Brothers in Arms, not exclusively about the Kinks but bound to be interesting.

I wish they'd show some early film, with the band in hunting coats and Ray saying, "Come on, girls."

Sorry to hear that Alan Plater has died. He wrote so many brilliant TV scripts: just look at the list. I even remember Close the Coalhouse Door from way back. Hard to pick a favourite but it might be the funny, eccentric, confusing and of course *starring James Bolam*, The Beiderbecke Affair. Here’s a sample.



Edit: The IMDb link won't work at the moment, although it was fine just now. Just a glitch, I hope.

Not the book, but researching and making vintage knits for films. It must be quite an industry these days. There's some lovely examples in the TV film of Ballet Shoes.

Here's Posy in a cute and complicated sleeveless top:


( more vintage knitwearCollapse )

The Richard and Judy effect on book sales has been a phenomenon of recent years. Now here’s a new book chat show, The TV Book Club on More 4 (what a hideous web site!)
This evening’s programme kicks off with The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. Titles to follow are:
Blacklands, Belinda Bauer
Sacred Hearts, Sarah Dunant
Juliet, Naked, Nick Hornby
Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese
The Rapture, Liz Jensen
Brixton Beach, Roma Tearne
The Way Home, George Pelecanos
Wedlock, Wendy Moore
The Silver Linings Play Book, Matthew Quick

Presenters will be Nathaniel Parker, Dave Spikey (who he?), Gok Wan, Jo Brand and Laila Roass. These people are described as 'celebrity reviewers', which would be worrying if you didn't know that Jo Brand is very intelligent. Laila was asked what her favourite books were. She opted for To Kill a Mockingbird because her English teacher liked it and for The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Help! That was Elvis's favourite book! Here’s a little poll.

Yesterday I watched the 2007 TV series of The Diary of a Nobody. This is a brilliant one-man performance by Hugh Bonneville, one of the best interpretations I know. The interiors are a delight and watch out for the Pooters' yellow breakfast set: I have a part tea set in the very same pattern!



Or similar.

My copy was recorded off the TV but if you live in the UK you have to wait until March this year to get a DVD. Why such a well-kept secret? Americans can buy it on Amazon.com right now.
My reading and TV watching are linked at the moment. Watching the David Jason version made me re-read The Darling Buds of May; I re-read The Diary of a Nobody last month; the other evening I watched I Capture the Castle and now have a strong urge to read that again.

Note that everything I'm watching is a recording. This is because, just when the weather is at its worst and TV and knitting call, there is NOTHING ON in real time. Another treat has been to start watching my Christmas DVD: the complete series of Outnumbered. Utterly brilliant! And at one point the Hugh Dennis character is channel hopping (with rude remarks) and complains, '47 channels!' and he still can't find anything to watch. Back to the DVD then.