You’re welcome.
Let Us Now Praise British Comedies
We seem to be enjoying a mini golden age of British comedy series at the moment. In ascending or from good to superb current shows include:
Motherland (BBC – all available to stream on demand). I‘ve never been a parent to a young child, let alone a mother, so the school gate politics of this are outside my area of experience. Nevertheless, everyone will recognise the struggle for one-upmanship, and the social awkwardness that comes from worrying about what other people think of you more than what you think of them. In the pilot it seemed to me as if Anna Maxwell Martin had been parachuted in from a different programme, but now her character is more embedded (particularly in her friendship with the wonderful Diane Morgan’s character) she seems much more at home, even when every nerve in her being is screaming that she wishes she could be anywhere other than where she has found herself.
The Detectorists (BBC) kicked off its third series last night with more understated observations of middle aged male friendship, beautifully scripted, acted and filmed. It’s almost an opposite to Motherland in that there are no monsters here, just real people getting along or » Continue Reading.
Detectorists DVD query
I was wanting to buy a Detectorists DVD for a friend who would almost certainly enjoy but I was put off by some seriously negative online comments on the technical quality of the visual aspect (from sharp to washed out and murky).
Does anyone have the official DVD versions? Is it really that bad?
What a crying shame that a brand new cinematically filmed, lovingly crafted TV series can be bunged out in some crappy transfer (if indeed that is the case)… Just get it right…
Detectorists!
Just a heads up that Series 2 of this fabulous (and to my mind very AW-esque) BBC4 comedy drama series (fear not, no laugh track) starts this Thursday. Four episodes of Series 1 still on iPlayer.
That said, the conceit of the trailer for Series 2 is ghastly: a faux-Hollywood Blockbuster voiceover which is not only wrongheaded (even in the context of being ‘ironic’) but actually makes the speech in the clips hard to hear. Have they learnt nothing from that ‘mumblegate’ thing last year?
