Current Reading and Viewing

I'm currently reading 'The Story of Lucy Gault' by William Trevor. I studied another of his books for G.C.E. 'O'Level English Literature over 30 years ago. In fact it was the last year of G.C.E. 'O' Levels before they became G.C.S.E. The book was 'The Children of Dynmouth.' It's a good novel, I think I'll have to reread it. I have a volume of his short stories. I occasionally dip into it if I have nothing else to read (which is rarer, as I always have a stack of books to read. Not just novels, but also history books. Both Carol and I read a great deal and if we're passing either branches of Waterstone's in Milton Keynes shopping centre, it takes all our effort to not enter and browse and then come out laden with a load of books. Those tables they have near the entrance with 'Buy one, get one half price' or even 'Buy two, get one free' are far too tempting. We probably have more books than most people, also, more than we really have space for. Why cares? Reading is good for you. Expands your vocabulary, you learn something (generally) and it's often better than cinema or television. Adaptations of books as films or television series don't always meet expectations. They often fiddle around with plots and characters. ITV's series 'The Durrell's is good up to a point, but the latest series, which ended a few weeks ago, has veered off the track, away from the original Gerald Durrell books to such an extent I don't really recognise it. They have expanded the whole thing, no doubt so that they can extract as much as they can from the original material so as to allow more storylines and so develop as many series as possible.

We've had a good batch of television dramas on all channels. I've mentioned 'The Woman In White' in an earlier post. Then there's been 'A Very English Scandal,' about the Jeremy Thorpe scandal of the 1970's. Extremely well done. Hugh Grant showing a very different side to his acting ability from his usual 'floppy-haired' persona. Make-up and costume very convincing and no doubt he'll be in the running for a Best Actor award when the BAFTA nominations are announced.

We're not 'Poldark' fans. We've never seen it, so it's no good writing about something we haven't seen. Probably very good, but I for one am not a great fan of historic fiction, so a series based on such a series of novels doesn't really appeal.

'Car Share,' the comedy series written, directed and performed by Peter Kay has been a great success on BBC1. I for one have really enjoyed it. It's such a simple idea for comedy. A manager of a supermarket drives to and from work and the company he works for sets up a car-sharing scheme and the manager (played by Kay) takes an employee called Kayleigh (Sian Gibson), to work and then takes her home each day. Nothing like it has been attempted before. They chat as they travel. Very little happens, but it's done so well you can't fail to find the characters likeable. They build up a very close relationship. We never see their work-place. We hear about others they work with, but never get to meet them. Technically it must have been extremely difficult to film inside a car. It seems so natural. This simple show has taken traditional sitcom to new heights. There's no audience on the soundtrack. It doesn't need one. It's not 'laugh out loud' comedy. It doesn't need to be. It's about a really mundane subject, a lot like so much comedy, for example, the stuff the late great Victoria Wood wrote and performed. It's the sort of subject-matter we can all identify with, the every-day things that we all go through, the basics of life, getting to and from work. Think of what Alan Bennett wrote about. I remember with great affection his wonderful television plays. One-offs which we don't get anymore, unless you think of the daytime drama series which has run for several seasons on BBC1 at 2.15 during the winter months called 'Moving On.' There have been very few episodes of 'Car Share.' Much the same amount as 'Fawlty Towers.' Only two series and 12 episodes. It seems like there must have been more. It didn't over-stay it's welcome and then just limp along. Episode well-written and acted. So with 'Car Share.' The BBC even had the first series on iPlayer so you could watch the series in it's entirety if you so desired. I personally can't see the attraction of 'binge viewing.' If you wait for each weekly episode, as we would have done in the early days of television, it would be like enjoying something, savouring each episode as it was aired. Before we had V.H.S. cassette recorders, and the only way you could see something was when it was broadcast.

Why On Earth?

Why on earth do so many television gameshows have to have such garish sets? 'Tenable', one of the back-to-back gameshows on ITV in the afternoon, has the most garish set design, mostly green. The green is a sort of pea-soup, even mushy pea-colour or artificial pea-colour. It's not just the bright colours used, but a lot of horrible moving lights and then that awful plunky sound (not correct in any way to describe it as 'music') every time something happens? Perhaps the set designers have a sort of design-style handbook for television gameshows, which says that the colour has to be bright and over-the-top and the sound design have horrible plunky-plunk music on the soundtrack. Can't ITV be more imaginative in it's scheduling, make and produce something different instead of gameshows? Actually, all channels in the afternoon. BBC1 has Pointless at 5.15 (the slot that used to have 'The Weakest Link' hosted by Anne Robinson.) and which now has 'The Chase' on ITV. 'Impossible' on BBC and perhaps one of the oddest of the lost, 'Tipping Point' based loosely on the old 'Shove Penny' game machine from fanfares and seaside piers.  You get sort of hypnotised by that machine, the different levels moving backwards and forwards. But lets be honest, it's not exactly gripping television. The questions are generally so easy any primary-school child could answer them. I reckon the producers are using psychology to get people hooked on these shows, rather like Pavlov's Dogs, when a bell rang, they get a dog to do a certain trick, make it drool when there was any food about. A certain sound, or light, would make you want to buy a product or do something else. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with gameshows. But when they become the main source of scheduling it does show a complete lack of imagination.

The BBC has had great success with drama in the early afternoon slot with things like 'Father Brown' and 'Moving On' which are very good considering they're made on minuscule budgets. I think 'Father Brown' has had around six series now (not sure of the exact number.) and it's built up a loyal following. It has humour at the heart of it, and the central characters are convincing. Also, the setting, a Cotswold village, also makes it worth watching. As with other television dramas, such as 'Doc Martin' and 'Morse' the setting almost becomes like another character and seems to define the show. In some ways it's difficult to separate the setting from the show. These shows wouldn't be the same if they were set elsewhere.

As for adverts on television. The current 'Mr Kipling' adverts drive me mad, the one where the daughter reveals that she has a tattoo to her father, and she only has to wave a plate of Mr Kipling cakes at him and he changes his mind.  Before he was totally against her having one, but suddenly- pow! He caves in. Ridiculous! He's an easy touch it would appear, swayed by pink and shiny confectionary. Does that mean if a robber comes into his house and threatens to steal the family silver, if they waved a plate of cakes at him, they could get away with the crime? How far could this go? I'm sure I could find plenty of other similar scenarios. Are people that easily swayed by a plateful of fancy cakes? If so, it's rather sad. The cakes look a good deal bigger than they are in real life. I've tried them, no better than any other brand. They do taste good but they are a real disappointment. You open the packet and are then disappointed by the fact that two bites and they're gone. Just small and pathetic. A bit of a con in my opinion. The way they shoot the ad they look much bigger, clever camera angles and close-ups and lighting make them appear larger than    they really are. Think of all the money they make out of this product and then add on the over-all cost of making these advertisements. A lot of adverts for food use a variety of tricks to make the food look appetising, using dry ice to create the appearance of steam, gelatine to give a shiny surface, clever lighting and other effects.

I've mentioned sofa adverts on these posts before now, but why do they think everyone is desperate to have a sofa for Christmas?  Companies such as D.F.S. and S.C.S. are two such sofa companies which comes to mind (by the way, what do D.F.S and S.C.S.. stand for?) It's the old advertising thing of getting people to buy something that they might not actually want or need, creating a sort of desperate need to have that something, and if it's in time for Christmas you can show the sofa off to friends and family. if you keep showing those ads for long enough, even if at first you didn't really feel you wanted the product, you'll sit and look around your living room (even more clever tactics, this, when you think the viewer will be sitting on a sofa or armchair which is probably past it's best, needs replacing or at least refurbishing. Shoving brand new, sparkling, fresh sofas on an ad on television, makes your tatty old cut-moquette three-piece suite look a little moth eaten, to say the least. So, you are compelled to order one and end up further in debt. But why on earth for Christmas? It doesn't actually have to be just Christmas, as it could be in the run-up to Easter, Mothering Sunday, or any holiday period where you're likely to have visitors. And when they see the lovely new sofa they feel they want one and have to go away and order their own. It's playing on the jealousy thing. If someone sees something and want it they have to go out and buy whatever it is.

Creative Writing

My writing is going well at the moment. I'm not sure whether I mentioned on here that I'd done a one-day creative writing course at Milton Keynes Art Centre one Saturday at the beginning of November and as a result of that I have got a good deal more confident as regards sharing my work with other people. From that course I'm signed up for a further 10-week evening  creative writing course, again at Milton Keynes Art Centre, and again lead by Deborah Fielding. I'm really looking forward to this and I'm absolutely sure that it will inspire me to write new material and also help with my writing in general.

I've been watching the series 'Moving On' which is a BBC 1 early afternoon drama series which must by now be in it's fourth or fifth series. It's shown each day for a week. I remember the BBC doing what are termed 'single dramas' when I was growing up in the 1960's, series of plays such as 'The Wednesday Play' which eventually became  'Play For Today. ' This series is very much in the same mold, and the plays feature subject-matter which is far more socially-aware than a lot of current, prime-time television drama. Writers such as  Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter, John Mortimer and Mike Leigh and wrote plays for these drama 'slots'. Mention of John Mortimer reminds me that he wrote ' A Voyage Round My Father' which I worked on at Greenwich Theatre in the early 1970's and started life as a Play For Today. 'Moving On' is produced and developed by Jimmy McGovern, a writer whose work I very much admire. My own writing is an attempt to produce more current material,  and has, hopefully a sort of depth to it. My current 'multi-strand' project was inspired by 'EastEnders.' I'm not actually a lover of this 'soap' and I wanted to attempt to create my own project much in the style of a soap in that it's set in a single location. I used Bedford as the location so that I could tie the various elements of the stories together (although it isn't actually set there.)  Some of the characters are based on people I observed while I lived there, not necessarily their real stories, but from making observations and visiting various places which I was familiar with was able to develop some of the characters and stories. Much as in the style of a soap, but I hope I am able to get away from the somewhat stifling restrictions which the average television soap has, such as the same old recycled story lines and the fact that the stock characters only live within such a restricted setting (i.e. a street, square or village such as Coronation Street, EastEnders and Emmerdale.) Some of the stories over-lap and characters cross between the various story elements. I had intended to have a single day as the time-frame, but having got so far with the project it seems that this will be too restricting and it now seems to cover a far longer time frame. As it has developed I am really surprised how the characters individual stories have grown and extended far beyond what I had at first envisioned and I'm more than pleased by how it has gone.