Category Archives: Film, TV, and Theatre

Film, TV, and Theatre

Patrick McGoohan as The Prisoner (1967)

Leave a comment

Although I was too young at the time to watch the original 1967 airing of this British TV series, I guess it must have been re-run in the eighties or perhaps my friend Alec had it on video and shared it with me? Whatever, at some point in the eighties I discovered The Prisoner and, hooked from episode one, I became, with Alec, a big fan. Here was a TV series that was not only entertaining but actually made you think. Nothing was ever what it seemed, no-one had a real name, you never knew who the good guys were and who the bad; it had a unique, surreal vibe, and it incorporated elements of science fiction, allegory, spy fiction and psychological drama.

The show was created while Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein were working on spy drama Danger Man (fun fact: Ian Fleming worked in the development stage of Danger Man, and its protagonist, played by McGoohan, announces himself as “Drake…John Drake”). The exact details of who created which aspects of The Prisoner are disputed though majority opinion credits McGoohan as the sole creator of the series, and it’s certainly true that it was McGoohan who pitched the idea verbally to station boss Lew Grade. One can only imagine the inner workings of Grade’s mind as the concept and plot were laid down for him; however, he went with it and the project was born.

So, what was that plot? An unnamed British intelligence agent is abducted and wakes up in a mysterious coastal location known to its residents as the Village. His captors designate him as Number Six and try to find out why he abruptly resigned from his job, something he steadfastly refuses to divulge. His chief antagonist is styled Number Two (and no, we never satisfactorily learn who is Number One), the identity of whom changes with nearly every episode, allowing a roster of well-known sixties’ actors, like Leo McKern, Anton Rodgers and Peter Wyngarde, to play their part.

Most of the residents are prisoners themselves, while others are embedded as spies or guards. The Village is surrounded by mountains on three sides and the sea on the other, and any would-be escapees who make it out to sea are tracked by CCTV and recaptured by Rover, a huge mobile translucent white balloon-thing. Everyone uses numbers for identification, and most of the villagers wear a standard outfit consisting of coloured blazers, multicoloured capes, striped sweaters, and a variety of headwear such as straw boaters. They are generally very polite, though that tends to make you very suspicious of them.

Catchphrases abound, and I remember Alec and I gleefully repeating them ad infinitum: “I’m not a number, I’m a free man!”, “Be seeing you” and the gloriously libertarian “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered!”. The latter phrase I had emblazoned on a t-shirt bought from the gift shop at Portmeirion in North Wales, where The Prisoner was filmed and which I visited on pilgrimage in 1987.

Let’s enjoy the opening credits, enhanced by the excellent soundtrack from Ron Grainer.

Number Six

 

Film, TV, and Theatre

Key and Peele’s Substitute Teacher sketches (2012)

1 Comment

I came across the comedy duo Key & Peele just prior to Jordan Peele’s directorial career blowing up with the release of his films Get Out (2017), Us (2019) and, just last month, Nope. I have seen the first two of those movies, and they are intriguing, slick psychological horror films, but it’s his comedy with partner Keegan-Michael Key that interests us here. The two first worked together on American sketch comedy series Mad TV but broke out with their own series on Comedy Central.

Key and Peele are black Americans and their sketches often focus on ethnic stereotypes and social awkwardness in race relations but they are very funny with it, and no more so than in their two Substitute Teacher sketches. In these, Key plays Mr Garvey, an angry and intimidating substitute teacher and veteran of inner-city schooling, who has come to teach a class of white, mild-mannered suburban students.

Since Mr Garvey is presumably used to teaching kids with first names having every spelling and pronunciation under the sun, he struggles with the regular spellings and pronunciations of these white kids’ names: when taking the class roll he pronounces Jacqueline as “Jay-kwellin”, Blake as “Balarkay”, Denise as “Dee-nice” and Aaron as “A-A-Ron”. Any attempted correction is seen as an affront and there’s no way he’s going to take it, so he forces them to acknowledge themselves by his incorrect pronunciations and threatens to send them to Principal O’Shaughnessy’s office (whose name he pronounces “O-Shag-hennessy”).

The concept of Substitute Teacher is very clever and Key absolutely nails his character. With excellent contributions from the supporting cast of students whose names are so amusingly mangled, it’s very, very funny. “You done messed up, A-A-Ron!”

Substitute Teacher, Mr Garvey
Film, TV, and Theatre

Zack Snyder’s 300 (2006)

1 Comment

Frank Miller is an American artist and writer of comic books and graphic novels such as The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, and the inspiration for today’s blog, 300. I have not previously delved into the genre of the graphic novel, and actually I’m not today either because it’s the 2006 film of the same name by Zack Snyder, inspired by Miller’s story, that I am writing about. Nevertheless, the film is very much led by the graphic novel vibe and owes its stylistic rendering to Miller’s work.

300 is a fictional retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC between the invading Persian army and the Spartans during the Persian Wars. Some years ago, my family and I went on a driving holiday to Greece and along the way visited the sites of three ancient battles: Marathon, Plataea, and the mellifluously named Thermopylae, the “Hot Gates”. There’s a statue of the Spartan king Leonidas there, his fame resonating down the ages a full two and a half thousand years later (2502, at the time of writing, to be precise). The contemporaneous historian Herodotus wrote about Thermopylae in his Histories: how the Persian king Xerxes I and his army were held at the narrow pass at Thermopylae by a massively outnumbered unit of 300 Spartan soldiers. It’s history’s greatest last stand.

And boy, does the film take this idea and run with it! It is of course idealised out of any remote connection to reality, but this is its whole point: it is graphic novel in motion and is made specifically to be a feast for the eyes. It takes something that is the most brutal, pitiless conception imaginable – that of hand-to-hand, kill-or-be-killed combat with cold metal – and turns it into a ballet, a choreography of battle. Gerard Butler plays Leonidas and brings rousing leadership to its apex: the way he motivates his fighters to battle is up there with Braveheart and Henry V.

With a slight word of warning for those for whom mass battle is not their particular cup of tea, do otherwise watch this battle scene. It encapsulates the valour, the do-or-die spirit, the outright strength and discipline and fighting capability of these trained Spartan soldiers, and it does so, as I say, with a stylistically choreographed beauty that is equally wonderful and disturbing to behold. With the proviso that I would never wish myself in the midst of this scene in a million years (the blood runs cold at the thought), by God it’s thrilling to watch!

300
Film, TV, and Theatre

Leonard Rossiter as Rigsby in Rising Damp (1975)

Leave a comment

We tend to think of seventies’ comedy as having failed the test of time and something perhaps best forgotten, due to our modern-day sensitivities regarding outdated cultural norms such as those around gender roles and race relations. Our minds conjure up such stark examples as Love Thy Neighbour and Mind Your Language, and cringe at their naivety, whilst the sight of white actors “blacking up” in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum would cause notable discomfort these days. But to disregard all seventies sitcoms on such a premise is to throw baby out with the bathwater, because in amongst the comedy TV shows from that decade are some absolute gems, and the best of them in my view was Rising Damp.

Rising Damp was written by Eric Chappell on the back of his 1973 stage play The Banana Box and ran between 1974 and 1978, starring Leonard Rossiter, Frances de la Tour, Richard Beckinsale and Don Warrington. Rossiter plays Rigsby, the miserly landlord of a run-down Victorian townhouse who rents out his shabby bedsits to a variety of tenants: Beckinsale plays Alan, a long-haired and good-natured medical student; Frances de la Tour plays Ruth (Miss Jones), the whimsical spinster with whom Rigsby is in love; and Warrington plays the recent arrival Philip Smith, also a student and apparently the son of an African chief. As a black man, Philip initially brings out the knee-jerk suspicions of Rigsby; however, the landlord quickly accepts his new tenant and henceforth regards him with a wary respect borne of Philip’s intelligence and sophisticated manners (something not lost on Miss Jones either).

The characters were fully-formed from day one due to the fact that three of the principal actors had already honed their characters in the stage play (only Beckinsale was new to the role). The dialogue is brilliantly conceived and delivered by the actors with aplomb: their timing is superb, and in Rigsby, of course, we have one of the greatest comedy characters of all time. Watch him here as Alan and Philip tease him about women and the “erogenous zones”, that newly popularised term made possible by the rise of the “permissive society”. Priceless.

Rising Damp cast
Film, TV, and Theatre

Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)

Leave a comment

Some months ago here at OGOTS Towers, in a piece on Walt Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain (see here), we looked at that wonderful role portrayed by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society: the uber-inspirational teacher, John Keating. Well, this week we’re looking at another stalwart of the fictional schoolroom, one Charles Edward Chipping AKA “Mr Chips”.

Goodbye, Mr. Chips is a 1939 romantic drama based on the 1934 novella of the same name by James Hilton. The film is about Mr Chipping (Robert Donat), a much-loved elderly school teacher at Brookfield public school, who looks back at his career and personal life over the decades. We learn about his rise through the teaching ranks, his friendship with German teacher Max Staefel (Paul Heinreid) and his tragically short marriage to Kathy (Greer Garson), who dies in childbirth along with their baby. From thereon in, Chips’ life is devoted exclusively to the school and he develops a rapport with generations of pupils, eventually teaching the sons and grandsons of many of his earlier pupils.

Although he ostensibly retires in 1914, Chips is soon enjoined to return as interim headmaster due to the shortage of teachers because of the Great War. During a bombing attack by a German Zeppelin, Chips insists that the boys keep on translating their Latin, and to the great amusement of his pupils, chooses the story of Julius Caesar’s battles against the Germanic tribes. Now there’s stiff upper lip!

As the war drags on though, every Sunday in chapel Chips reads aloud into the school’s Roll of Honour the names of the many former boys and teachers who have died in the war. It’s a poignant scene (that you can see below). Upon discovering that Max Staefel has died fighting on the German side, he reads out his name, too. “Funny reading his name out with the others, after all, he was an enemy”, says one schoolboy to another afterwards. “One of Chips’ ideas I suppose” his mate says, “he’s got lots of funny ideas like that”.

Chips retires permanently in 1918, but continues living nearby. He is on his deathbed in 1933 when he overhears his colleagues talking about him. He responds, “I thought I heard you say it was a pity – a pity I never had any children. But you’re wrong. I have! Thousands of them, thousands of them.. and all.. boys”.

Robert Donat as Mr Chips
Film, TV, and Theatre

Hugo Weaving in Bodyline (1984)

Leave a comment

A drama about cricket, at first sight, doesn’t smack too much of a great idea for television. The desperate pitching of ideas by Alan Partridge to that programming commissioner in I’m Alan Partridge springs to mind (“Monkey Tennis”?). Well, how about a brilliant, riveting TV drama about cricket that doesn’t even require you to be a cricket fan to enjoy? If that sounds oxymoronic, check out 1984’s Australian-made TV mini-series Bodyline, telling the story of the 1932/33 English Ashes cricket tour of Australia.

Stick with me.

First, the historical setting: in 1932, the England cricket team set sail to Australia to face an Australian team hugely bolstered by one Donald Bradman, who had come to England in the 1930 Ashes and scored 974 runs with a batting average of 139.14. The England cricket authorities felt that some new tactics were needed to curtail Bradman’s extraordinary batting ability which threatened to be even more prodigious in the upcoming tour on his home turf.

Enter Douglas Jardine. Oxford University-educated, and from the upper echelons of British society, Jardine had been moulded to be England captain from an early age. He had already toured Australia and had developed an antipathy to the crowds there who had jeered him. And now he was lead tactician on how to defuse Bradman. With his fast bowlers Harold Larwood and Bill Voce, he devised “fast leg theory” bowling – later called “bodyline” – which entailed delivering the ball short and fast so that it bounced dangerously towards the batsman’s body. When the batsman defended himself with his bat a resulting deflection could be caught by one of several fielders standing close by on the leg side.

The tactic turned out to be effective: it seriously discomfited the batsmen and England won by four Tests to one, but it created a furore that threatened to turn into a diplomatic incident. The watching crowds were outraged and most commentators thought the tactics unsportsmanlike, intimidating and downright dangerous (who thought that it would be the English to employ tactics that were “just not cricket”?).

In the TV series, Douglas Jardine is played mesmerizingly by a young Hugo Weaving (best known later for his portrayals of Agent Smith in The Matrix and Elrond in The Lord of the Rings), who admirably captures the arrogance and certainty of a born leader, and one who doggedly pursues his strategy against mounting criticism.

Let’s watch the self-assured Jardine discussing Bradman with his Surrey teammate Percy Fender and others prior to the tour. He’s great to watch, and note also the lovely camera work circling him as he talks. One last word for the writer of the theme music for the series; the music is so emotionally moving (see the second clip of the opening credits) that I thought at first they had borrowed a classical piece from someone like Pachelbel but not so: credit to Aussie composer Chris Neal.

Hugo Weaving as Douglas Jardine
Film, TV, and Theatre

Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette (1986)

1 Comment

Jean de Florette is a 1986 French comedy-drama film directed by Claude Berri and based on a novel by one of France’s greatest 20th century writers, Marcel Pagnol. The film takes place in rural Provence, where two local farmers (Yves Montand and Daniel Auteuil) plot to trick a newcomer (Gérard Depardieu) out of his newly inherited property. The film thus stars three of France’s most prominent actors, and this is a great place to see them all in action in one place.

The film was shot back to back with its sequel, Manon des Sources, over a period of seven months in and around the Vaucluse department of Provence, and whilst at the time it was the most expensive French film ever made, it was also a great commercial and critical success, both domestically and internationally, and was nominated for eight César awards, and ten BAFTAs. The success of the two films helped promote Provence as a tourist destination (a tendency that was cemented three years later when Peter Mayle’s best-selling memoir, A Year in Provence, was published ).

Anyway, I have my mate Jason’s wife Liz to thank for introducing me to Jean de Florette: whilst at their house several years ago, she thrust the DVD of the film into my hands, saying “you’ll love this”. I took it home and dutifully watched it…and she was right! What was at first sight an obscure French film with a dull name and an odd plot became a hugely enjoyable ride. The plot is indeed unusual, involving jealous designs on rural arable land, hare-brained plans and machinations around the blocking up of a natural spring. However, it is a joy to watch: the rural village scenes are so gloriously, authentically French, and the characters conjured up by these great actors, and a strong supporting cast, are tremendous.

This scene I have chosen is pretty representative, I think: we have Depardieu’s irrepressibly optimistic Jean, proselytising about his plans to breed rabbits and grow marrows, Auteuil’s Ugolin trying at every turn to dissuade and dispirit him, and Montand’s Le Papet (Ugolin’s uncle), a wily owl presiding over his and Ugolin’s schemes to drive the newcomer away and take the land for themselves.

Daniel Auteuil, Yves Montand, Gérard Depardieu
Film, TV, and Theatre

Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’s Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (1983)

Leave a comment

If you grew up in Britain in the seventies, you would be well-versed in the comedic TV output of writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais: Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? (1974-1976) and Porridge (1974-1977) were a staple of whichever night they were broadcast. I loved those shows of course, but in 1983 the pair launched a comedy-drama so replete with character and brilliant dialogue that it stands out for me as a masterpiece: Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

Seven English construction workers leave an unemployment-hit England to search for employment overseas and find themselves living and working together on a building site in Düsseldorf. The “magnificent seven” characters were Dennis (Tim Healy), Neville (Kevin Whately), Oz (Jimmy Nail), Barry (Timothy Spall), Moxy (Christopher Fairbank), Bomber (Pat Roach) and Wayne (Gary Holton). I don’t know how the casting process works, but they struck gold with this group of actors; they displayed an on-screen chemistry and authenticity that warmed the hearts of the viewing public.

The triumvirate of Dennis, Neville and Oz provide the core of the group due to their Geordie origins and shared trade as brickies, though the three couldn’t be more different: whilst Dennis provides the common sense and pragmatic leadership, Neville is an inexperienced and homesick fish out of water, and Oz…well, what can we say about Oz? No filters or self-consciousness, blunt and irascible, blatantly xenophobic tendencies, a serial absconder from his missus, Oz is no angel (and a constant source of angst to the others)…but hilarious nonetheless.

Barry, an electrician from the Black Country, loves to expound boringly but charmingly on the diverse range of topics he’s read about, which are usually of no interest to the others because they don’t involve beer or women. Wayne the Cockney womaniser of the group, Moxy the slightly odd and usually under-the-weather Scouser, and Bomber, the gentle Bristolian giant who nonetheless is well-capable of looking after himself, complete the group.

The key word for me about Auf Wiedersehen, Pet is “authentic” – the day-to-day banter on site, in “barracks”, and out on the town, feels real and it’s a joy to watch. Here’s a montage of typical Auf Wiedershen, Pet fare.

The Auf Wiedersehen, Pet “Magnificent Seven”
Film, TV, and Theatre

Cosgrove Hall’s Pied Piper of Hamelin (1981)

Leave a comment

Alongside Aardman Animations, those brilliant stop-motion clay animators of Wallace and Gromit fame, another great favourite of the British public was Cosgrove Hall Films. Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall first met as students at Manchester’s College of Art and Design, and then worked together in television graphics at Granada Television. They left Granada in 1969 to form their first production company, Stop Frame Productions, making TV commercials, public information films and also the opening credits and graphics for TV classic Rainbow in 1972.

The Rainbow work led to Thames Television creating a subsidiary animation studio in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, in Manchester, with Cosgrove and Hall as its lead animators. Cosgrove Hall Films was born. Its first series, Chorlton and the Wheelies, was popular and ran from 1976 to 1979, but it was 1981’s Danger Mouse that spawned their greatest success, running throughout the rest of the eighties and being syndicated around the world. With familiar voiceovers from David Jason as Danger Mouse and Terry Scott as lovable sidekick Penfold, it remains a firm favourite with everyone who lived through that decade.

However, it is Cosgrove Hall’s magical 1981 TV special, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, that I’m looking at today. I remember stumbling across it and being mesmerised by its brilliant animation techniques. It takes the story of the Pied Piper as laid down in the words of the poem by Robert Browning (whose lines are used verbatim) and brilliantly illustrates the strange tale of Hamelin’s plague of rats, the enigmatic piper who offers to rid the town of them, and the dire consequences when the town fails to pay him the agreed amount later.

Here is a clip of the Pied Piper working his magic on the rats, with the narrator’s wonderfully rhythmic rendering of Browning’s poetry driving the story along. Incidentally, whilst you could be forgiven for thinking the Pied Piper story to have come from the imagination of the Grimm brothers (who did indeed tell the tale later), the first reference to the story was in a stained glass window in Hamelin itself, and contemporary accounts make reference to some actual event that led to the town’s children disappearing in the late 1200s. The stuff of legend!

Pied Piper of Hamelin
Film, TV, and Theatre

Robert Zemeckis’s Back To The Future (1985)

Leave a comment

Remember the times when a summer blockbuster could just be unashamed fun? In 1985 we got just that with the release of Robert Zemickis’s time-travelling masterpiece, Back To The Future. It’s about fate, destiny, love, bravery, rock ‘n’ roll, the past, present, and future, and all the philosophical conundrums the latter entails. Heavy on action, comedy and a myriad classic memorable scenes, the film delivers great sci-fi, adventure, romance, and sublime humour, all rolled into one. You all know it, unless you’re from another planet (and even then, having lived under a rock): Michael J Fox’s Marty McFly is catapulted thirty years back to 1955, thanks to Christopher Lloyd’s Emmett “Doc” Brown’s time-travelling DeLorean car retrofitted with a flux capacitor, and, well you know the rest…

The novelist L P Hartley (not to be confused with J R Hartley the amateur fly-fisherman) once said: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”. And indeed in Back To The Future, the numerous and fundamental ways in which the 1950s differed from the 1980s are explored to wonderfully comic and chaotic effect when Marty embarks on his great adventure.

A big part of the fun of watching Back to the Future is how much the first act of the movie informs the second. Practically every line of dialogue and character interaction from the 1980s has its 1950s counterpart, and usually as the set-up for a smart joke. Zemickis and his writing partner Bob Gale also have fun in subverting any rose-tinted view of the past we might have had. Their fifties may have looked like Happy Days but it’s far from being depicted as a golden age.

Marty’s mother Lorraine tells her daughter: “I think it’s terrible! Girls chasing boys. When I was your age I never chased a boy or called a boy or sat in a parked car with a boy.” Of course, as the movie progresses we come to realise that this is all fiction and the teenage (and boy-crazy) Lorraine is clearly up for all those things and more: she is neither Doris Day nor Joanie Cunningham. And as for the boys, well, Biff and his sociopathic friends are hardly beacons of respectability, are they? No wonder Lorraine falls for Marty and his before-his-time, un-toxic masculinity.

Anyway, here’s the trailer that must have whetted many an appetite (despite the naff voiceover) when it came out and makes me want to watch the film again now!

Marty McFly and Emmett “Doc” Brown