Archive for September, 2007
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007
On a grey London bridge, the camera focuses on a series of pixellated images on posters. The posters change quickly enough to create the illusion of motion. Like a flip book. Or a music video.
In the background, commuters hunch against the rain and move in jerky fast-forward, blurred next to the silent, shifting pixels.
Yeah! Stick ‘em up, punk: it’s the fun lovin’ Pet Shop Boys!
When I said “Stick ‘em up punk, etc,” what I actually meant was “Stick ‘em up Home Office and other government departments involved in the design and implementation of the National Identity Scheme: it’s the disapproving Pet Shop Boys!” But it didn’t roll off the tongue so well.
Click here to the full deconstruction (with pictures!) of The Pet Shop Boys: Integral
Humour, Pickard of the pops |
Monday, September 24th, 2007
The tale of this supremely odd couple made for a terrific film - and a terrible chicken curry
[Main TV Review, Monday September 24, 2007, The Guardian, g2 section, 800 words]
BBC2 offered something to sink your teeth into this Sunday, as with a slur, a cough, and a seeming non-sequitur about the importance of boxes, the eponymous mumbler of Stuart: A Life Backwards bumbled into the life of campaigning young academic Alexander.
The pair live in the same Cambridge but entirely different worlds: Stuart is a violent, disabled, homeless addict, in and out of institutions since childhood. Upon his arrival, he quickly pulls the crumb tray out from under Alexander’s tidy life and sprinkles the burnt bits over everything around him.
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Television, Features |
Saturday, September 22nd, 2007
For whom the Beale tolls
[Main TV review, The Guardian, Saturday review page, 380 words]
EastEnders (BBC1)
You can go away from EastEnders for as long as you like, but dipping back in when the big stuff happens, like now, it’s always reassuringly familiar. They’re still shouting, it’s still raining, and everyone’s still having a really bad time. Especially if they’re Ian Beale.
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Television, Features |
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
Ian Brown adopts the Ian Brown position, stood stock still, head tilted back, as he spits angry lyrics denouncing the UK, the USA, decrying the “Illegal attacks upon Iraq, Iran (?), Afghanistan”, condemning the “Commercial crusade” fueled by the oil trade, and demanding the return of the soldiers in a plaintive chorus. It’s a powerful sentiment, undeniably direct, and clearly heartfelt.
And all the while, it’s almost impossible not to get led off by the fact that year on year, as Ian Brown inhabits his ‘King Monkey’ nickname all the more, he now looks unworldly in his oddness. You feel that he’d LIKE to play a larger part in the action of the video, but he can’t, because he’s currently locked up in a holding cell in Area 54 having been captured, sedated with soft drugs and correctly identified as the overlord of some kind of alien/simian race, and is therefore shortly due to be dissected.
Click here for the full deconstruction (with pictures!) of Ian Brown - Illegal Attacks
Humour, Pickard of the pops |
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007
Hear the word “cameo” and the phrase that immediately springs to mind is surely “Word up!” So why, you may ask, is the Cameo video being presented here not Word Up? And, you may ask yourself, “Why a classic video I’ve never heard of?” And you may ask yourself, “How did I get here?” And you may ask yourself, “Where is that large automobile?” To which I would say, “What? Isn’t that Talking Heads? What?” And then in order to stave off confusion, I would say, “Here is your large automobile!”
And then I would offer to explain to you exactly why this video is, in fact, the classic you may have never known it was. Or known existed at all. Ahem…
Click here to read the whole deconstruction (with pictures) of Cameo’s classic video: Attack Me With Your Love.
Humour, Pickard of the pops |
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007
[For The Guardian, 380 words, G2 television pages]
Trawlermen: Pick of the Catch
8pm, BBC1
Last year’s series exploring the lives of the trawlermen fishing the North Sea was epic and well-received; this takes the best bits and adds new footage, tying up loose ends and expanding on some relationships to make a complete version: “FISH: The Movie”. It’s a dramatic portrait of the men, their families, the storm-thrashed derring-do of the catch and the pressure to turn profit. Only finding out that farmers have to battle angry potato monsters and steal chips from their nests could make the plain old fish supper more exciting.
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Television |
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
[for The Guardian, 380 words, G2 television pages]
Great British Journeys
8pm, BBC2
In this week’s instalment of inland meanderings, Nicholas Crane follows the path of politician, farmer and radical thinker, William Cobbett, whose Rural Rides painted a picture of a rich and fertile England, and brought to light the farm workers disenfranchised as agriculture changed forever. Crane, a long, thin man who seems to be made entirely of noodles, takes a gentle ride from Sussex to Salisbury in search of Cobbett Country. So gentle, in fact, that he frequently seems to lapse into slow motion - if you can cycle in slo-mo without falling off, you’re a great man.
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Television |
Monday, September 3rd, 2007
[for The Guardian, 380 words, G2 television pages]
Grandad’s Back in Business
9pm, BBC2
Raymond is a man who knows his stuff. Or did, 40 years ago. Raymond’s “stuff” is hair, and he’s having to unlearn every snip he’s ever snup and start again. In the first of this reality series exploring employment and age, will experience triumph over youthful malleability? Celebrity stylist Daniel Galvin (Danny la Rue in disguise) and his son James (Russell Brand) take on the task of training Raymond and his teenage nemesis Becky (an angry weasel with earache). But who will get the job?
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Television |