I don’t rely on TV for entertainment, rather it’s music for nourishment, but I did spend a bit of time in front of the box over the Christmas period. What limited scheduling (okay, the making of new programmes was no doubt restricted due to Covid) – BBC One had an overload of animated films and celebrity-obsessed stuff (including an abysmal remake of Blankety Blank – sorry to see Bradley ‘The Chase’ Walsh associated with this horror; original host Terry Wogan remains the master). Only Match of the Day saved the festive spirit. And not forgetting André Previn with Morecambe and Wise on BBC Two.
I know I missed BBC Four’s showing of the Royal Opera’s gala (Tony Pappano presiding) – didn’t realise it was on – but do some channel-hopping and you get more (usually tawdry/self-defeating) adverts & trailers than programmes (fifteen minutes’ worth in any one hour is absurd and yet another reason to ‘switch off’), but there was a highlight…
… namely Dempsey and Makepeace. From the mid-1980s, based in London, brash/gung-ho New York cop Lt James Dempsey (Michael Brandon) comes to the capital and is partnered with sophisticated Sgt Harriet (‘Harry’) Makepeace (the lovely Glynis Barber) on duty with the Metropolitan Police, bossed by the crusty/no-nonsense Spikings (the late Ray Smith) – a fraught relationship at times, but it’s also clear that the named pair respond to and care about each other. I never saw this series when first shown, but I have become an instant fan courtesy of Forces TV (Freeview, channel 96). Good stories and well-made fast-paced productions, I am pleased to have caught up, albeit thirty-five years later. There is a real chemistry between these actors, so it is no surprise to learn that they married soon after the series finished and today remain together. Good luck to them.
Tonight’s TV for me is Mastermind, Only Connect, and two episodes of … yes, you have guessed correctly.
Colin – private comment: Richard put me onto Only Connect which was the most mind-scratching (and boggling) show we’ve ever watched. I also fell madly in love with the smoky hostess! Will try to catch up again. I gather it’s still on? Or is it repeats?
Happy new year and the promise of a better one.
Eric
New, Eric. On tonight. And, yes, Victoria Coren Mitchell has much going for her.
Saw them when first transmitted and, yes, terrific – but for me best this holiday viewing-wise by far, aside from University Challenge, was via two superb films, Theodore Melfi’s uplifting (sorry about the near-pun) Hidden Figures, about African American female mathematicians who worked at NASA during the Space Race, and Stephen Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins with Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant, a film that’s both funny and extremely moving. If you don’t know them try and catch up with both.
Ah yes, FFJ, been meaning to see that since its release. iPlayer beckons… Col
Spooks, Drama Channel, is unmissable, high class acting and story lines as relevant today as they were a decade and more ago.
Feature films made for the cinema are usually leased out for television in ‘bundles’ of about 20, with a couple of really must-see films lumped in with a pile of junk – so that contractually all 20 have to be shown – but the BBC’s decision a month before Christmas to show Hitchcock’s ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’ twice in one week (!!), and then repeat it a week after Christmas is prima facie evidence for the abolition of the Corporation in its present state. Where were the other great Hitchcock films over Christmas? – the pre-war masterpieces: Sabotage (with a bus being blown up at Oxford Circus and a ten-year-old passenger alongside a babe in arms being blown to smithereens), Young and Innocent – with its staggering final scenes never before achieved in film-making, Murder (with the great Herbert Marshall – a superb actor), the early Hollywood masterpieces such as Saboteur (with its references to Delius in the dialogue and on the soundtrack) Strangers on a Train (my all-time Hitchcock favourite), Rear Window, Rope, Shadow of a Doubt, I Confess, Vertigo, Psycho? Especially Psycho which actually takes place entirely over the Christmas period (one of Hitchcock’s ‘little jokes’ Benny Herrmann told me) – and watch out for the brilliant joke in The Man Who Knew Too Much when it comes round in a few days’ time – when Doris Day gets out of the cab at the Albert Hall she passes a big poster advertising Bach’s Art of Fugue being played by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Richard Arnell (true! – another one of Hitchcock’s jokes at Tony’s expense) – these films are all masterpieces – but when was the last time they were shown? You can get old and die before the nerds at the BBC finish Halliwell’s Film Guide for their latest piece of work.