General Purpose UK TV thread
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Can’t turn shite when you’ve always been shite
Hey! Stop bullying me!

You'll need to defend the current season of Line of Duty, as it is self evident to everyone that it has turned shite.
I'm enjoying it still :shrug:
OH
SHIT
SON

LINE OF DUTY SCUM

CAN AC-12 ROOT OUT THE BENT COPPERS?!
It's no The Rookie, that's for sure.
When did you turn Scottish?
Here's something good for you to watch, 'BACK TO LIFE' which is on BBC3 so available on iPlayer.

Lucy Mangan reviewed it thusly at The Guardian.

I did three of the six episodes back-to-back last night, it's great.

Quote:
If we have to mention the F-word – and I think it’s law now when something female-led appears, and doubly so here when the series was produced by the team behind Fleabag – then it will just be to say that they have in common only what all great dramas, comedies, mysteries and small-screen fiction of any genre have in common: perfect pacing, polished writing, intricately and carefully laid plots and payoffs, and an abiding sense that everyone involved knows this story and its people in their bones and has done their best – with talent to burn – to lay it before us. A surfeit of everything.


Attachment:
lifers.JPG


https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radi ... sy-haggard
Bamba wrote:
Hearthly wrote:
Finished Fleabag last night, what a perfect ending. Happy but bittersweet, satisfying without being twee.

So many great lines too.

'You know what a bassoon is? It's a cry for help!'


I don't think anything will ever beat her sister screaming "GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY MISCARRIAGE!" from the first episode. Mostly because it's a set of words I could've ever have imagined anyone stringing together in the same sentence.


I watched season 1 and thought it was good, but didn't blow me away. Gave episode 1 of season 2 a go earlier and thought it was amazing. I've just binged the whole lot and I'm struggling to think of a more perfect set of six episodes of anything. Utterly brilliant in all respects!
Odd that you didn't take to S1
Trooper wrote:
Bamba wrote:
Hearthly wrote:
Finished Fleabag last night, what a perfect ending. Happy but bittersweet, satisfying without being twee.

So many great lines too.

'You know what a bassoon is? It's a cry for help!'


I don't think anything will ever beat her sister screaming "GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY MISCARRIAGE!" from the first episode. Mostly because it's a set of words I could've ever have imagined anyone stringing together in the same sentence.


I watched season 1 and thought it was good, but didn't blow me away. Gave episode 1 of season 2 a go earlier and thought it was amazing. I've just binged the whole lot and I'm struggling to think of a more perfect set of six episodes of anything. Utterly brilliant in all respects!


I’m in agreement with Trooper here. Watched both series in the past couple of weeks.

Though Series 1 was very good, don’t get me wrong, but Series 2 was (IMO) significantly better and just absolutely brilliant.
I knew that blousy tart was setting Ted up. Mind, he is a bit of an eejit with the ladies.
Wasn’t impressed with how Line of Duty fizzled out this season.
It was shit after Stephen Graham got killed. Speaking of which there's a new Shane Meadows C4 thing with him in soon that sounds like it'll be decent.
Yeah, next Wednesday. The Virtues.
Really illuminating interview with Shane Meadows here.

NOTE - Gets rather dark.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/m ... ham-trauma

Attachment:
shaneo.JPG
Man, that series of LOD was insultingly stupid. That whole interview with Hastings in the last ep was dire. I guessed who it was likely to be in ep3.
Started watching LoD with Jem the other day, up to S1E2 now. It's quite gripping, but I can't get over just how bad the main character is at acting.

Actually, that might be being unfair - I suspect it's the direction and script rather than his ability, but he just seems to spend all his time standing around looking confused or pensive.
Excellent new Taskmaster tonight. I wasn't looking forward to it too much this time around due to Paul Sinha being on it. But if I managed to get through the series with Noel fucking Fielding in it, I can do this one too.
I saw him do stand-up once. He was shit.
Did anyone watch all of Catastrophe?

If so, in the very last scene:
ZOMG Spoiler! Click here to view!
Was Rob committing suicide?
No, that wasn't my read at all:

ZOMG Spoiler! Click here to view!
The "dangerous swimming" water was a metaphor for life in general. Choosing to stay with Sharon was like swimming into the dangerous water - fun but also risky. As opposed to the safe, but less fulfilling, option of taking the job in America and breaking up. I thought it was a nice comment on their relationship as portrayed in the show -- clearly in love with other, bur often not at ease with each other.
It seems even they don't know. Horgan agrees with me, Delaney agrees with you.
Hah! Well, that’s one way to write an ambiguous ending.
Hey! The Beeb has picked up the TV series of What We Do In The Shadows, surprisingly. On this Sunday evening. I've been enjoying it over the last 6 weeks. A worthy sequel to the flimum.
Dimrill wrote:
Hey! The Beeb has picked up the TV series of What We Do In The Shadows, surprisingly. On this Sunday evening. I've been enjoying it over the last 6 weeks. A worthy sequel to the flimum.


Good knowledge! Thanks Dimrill.
Fuck, is this the right thread? Buggered if I know.

Good Omens is fucking brilliant. David Tennant and Michael Sheen are absolutely superb. It's on Amazon Prime currently and coming to BBC2 'soon'.
It was indeed good. However I found Mr Ten was chewing quite a lot of scenery throughout. Michael Sheen was a good Aziraphale.
TheVision wrote:
Dimrill wrote:
Hey! The Beeb has picked up the TV series of What We Do In The Shadows, surprisingly. On this Sunday evening. I've been enjoying it over the last 6 weeks. A worthy sequel to the flimum.


Good knowledge! Thanks Dimrill.



It’s brill. Laszlo’s cursed witch skin hat had me giggling out loud, but I’m really enjoying the whole thing.
Dimrill wrote:
However I found Mr Ten was chewing quite a lot of scenery throughout.
yes, it is great
Cras wrote:
Fuck, is this the right thread? Buggered if I know.

Good Omens is fucking brilliant. David Tennant and Michael Sheen are absolutely superb. It's on Amazon Prime currently and coming to BBC2 'soon'.

I think the performances of almost everyone are great, but Tennant seems too desperate to out-act and outshine Sheen, and Sheen's own performance is so perfectly pitched that Tennant is coming over like some kind of gurning lunatic. Some of his movements are so overly flamboyant that it looks as if he's channelling Kenny Everett.
You don't Tennant for subtle.
Which is fine if he’s the obvious lead up front in a piece, but where there’s a balance between two characters and one is giving such a great understated performance, it rather looks a bit clumsy and desperate
I can't agree. Tennant's wildly overblown demon versus Sheen's timid angel does a great job of showing the vital differences between the two. The angel is all about following the rules and not making a fuss, the demon is all about being brash and letting emotion make decisions. They're not meant to be the same and it makes their relationship and interplay more meaningful.
Cras wrote:
I can't agree. Tennant's wildly overblown demon versus Sheen's timid angel does a great job of showing the vital differences between the two. The angel is all about following the rules and not making a fuss, the demon is all about being brash and letting emotion make decisions. They're not meant to be the same and it makes their relationship and interplay more meaningful.


No, I disagree with that. It’s not a difference in the flamboyance of their character, but the flamboyance of their acting. They are both, in each their own ways, quite camp as characters, so it’s not a straight up A vs B in character traits. It’s not a brashness of character motivation and mannerism, it’s a brashness of performance. It keeps making me think of the time that Johnny Depp learned to do that one impression of Keith Richards and then decided that he had to play every role in that same drunken, wavering character ever since.
I'm not convinced I see a difference. If you're playing a brash, flamboyant character versus a straightlaced timid one, that's where the performance comes from, surely?
Cras wrote:
I'm not convinced I see a difference. If you're playing a brash, flamboyant character versus a straightlaced timid one, that's where the performance comes from, surely?

I don’t think so. Look at Robin Williams, Gene Wilder, and any number of actors who were known for portrayals of flamboyant characters that didn’t have to rely on melodramatic cliché to hammer every line home. There is no rhythm to Tennant’s performance. It’s sulk, grooooaaan and twirl. Without the balance of subtlety of performance he doesn’t have the human characteristics that the ethereal beings are struggling with, that Sheen portrays so well, so he’s not meeting him in the middle to give that balanced angel/demon/all too human trinity where they are all a bit of each other. He’s too much of one with no pause for the rest of nature.
What we do in the shadows (TV) is just as good as the film.
Years and Years first episode is very good. Go in cold.
So The Virtues. That was something. I'm exhausted.

Shane Meadows and Stephen Graham are true national treasures, an epithet they would no doubt tell to fucking do one.
Just did the first three episodes back-to-back and it's brilliant but rather draining, I'll save the final episode until tomorrow.

I think I'll go for a drive round the TT course and listen to a Chernobyl podcast to round the evening off with more merriment. (In fairness the Chernobyl podcasts are easy to listen to and quite 'nice' in a weird sort of way, despite the subject matter. It's like having a couple of pleasant folks in the car with you. (I've been listening to them all in the car.))
Crikey that was one of the most relentlessly gruelling things I've ever watched, but given the subject matter, it probably should be.

It's hard to 'recommend' as such, I like this summary from Guardian's review of the final episode - 'Giving The Virtues a rating out of five feels like trying to pin a rosette on a tornado.'

For those who are prepared to invest themselves in of it though, this is a three hour gut punch of monumentally powerful proportions, with stunning performances from the cast across the board.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radi ... ng-for-air

And then, a reckoning. The accumulation of emotional truths had lifted The Virtues up to a peak where the air was barely breathable … then it plummeted, taking us with it, strapped in and helpless as one scene led with dread inevitability to the next, and the next, and the next, each of them a devastatingly intimate two-hander exploring a new aspect of the horror pouring out.

...

Such masterful handling of such painful material: The Virtues is a miracle.
I thought that review in the Guardian was a tremendously well written piece.

For all the bleakness I thought there were a few laughs to be had too. And the phrase "youth club tits" will stay with me.
Findus Fop wrote:
I thought that review in the Guardian was a tremendously well written piece.

For all the bleakness I thought there were a few laughs to be had too. And the phrase "youth club tits" will stay with me.


Yes there was a lot of light and laughter in there, Anna's family in particular I thought worked really well in that regard. Apparently there was a lot of improv in there too.

It even managed to get a laugh out of me in the final, crushing twenty minutes.

ZOMG Spoiler! Click here to view!
When Anna stops by the building site desperately trying to find Michael, and all the guys are just sat around drinking tea as usual, totally unfazed by her obvious frantic state.


Overall it's as powerful an examination of childhood pain and trauma, and how it can leave wounds that endure terribly into adulthood - as I've ever seen committed to film.

Wouldn't have worked at all without such an incredible cast, and the assured writing and direction of Meadows. And an extra shout out is well deserved for PJ Harvey's score.

Oh yes and to rather lower the tone somewhat, I totally fancied Niamh Algar.
MaliA wrote:
Years and Years first episode is very good. Go in cold.


Hmmm... I'm 3 episodes in and enjoying it despite the way it has been characterised and written, rather than because of it.

I like the premise, I like the actors, I like the story, I like the way the premise has been handled. However it's very very Russell T, it would slot into any Dr Who series and you would hardly notice. That isn't a compliment :D However, it just doesn't feel real in any way, the family is overly representative, the writing is stilted, it even has a fucking Dr Who style man in a robot suit.

3/5 could do better.

Emma Thompson is bloody great in it though :D
Trooper wrote:
MaliA wrote:
Years and Years first episode is very good. Go in cold.


Hmmm... I'm 3 episodes in and enjoying it despite the way it has been characterised and written, rather than because of it.

I like the premise, I like the actors, I like the story, I like the way the premise has been handled. However it's very very Russell T, it would slot into any Dr Who series and you would hardly notice. That isn't a compliment :D However, it just doesn't feel real in any way, the family is overly representative, the writing is stilted, it even has a fucking Dr Who style man in a robot suit.

3/5 could do better.

Emma Thompson is bloody great in it though :D

I can't decide whether I like it or not. It niggles me in an annoying way, but I'm not sure why.
Findus Fop wrote:
So The Virtues. That was something. I'm exhausted.

Shane Meadows and Stephen Graham are true national treasures, an epithet they would no doubt tell to fucking do one.

:this: I found the improvised chatting difficult to follow in places, but that didn't really detract from the story. From the interview with Steven Graham that I saw on the one show, the plot didn't develop in a direction I was expecting, but it was still rivetting and difficult to watch at the same time. And very relevant in these days of investigations into abuse in the past that are finally exposed and leading to prosecutions. I did find the twist at the end, with Dinah and her mother, a bit out of place, but maybe it could lead to a further series.
FFS. I just saw BBC 3's 'Hot Property.' What a dire, dire show it is. I'm not against swearing in particular, but when it's just used gratuitously, followed with ending a lot of sentences with 'innit' it just annoys me. I know I'm not within their target demographic, but even so, it's still shitty TV.

And if I hear Yung Filly shout 'OH. MY. DAYYYYYYS' one more time, I might have to crowd fund a contract to take him out.

/Exit Mary Whitehouse Mode
Series 2 of Killing Eve isn’t doing anything for me at all.

Millionaire bad guy doing bad stuff is trite and better off left in a James Patterson book.
Finished. Hannibal did the same thing they’re trying to accomplish in this season but better.
Finished The Virtues last night.

Jesus Christ, heavy watch but so so good. Hats off to Stephen Graham and Shane Meadows, the whole cast were perfect though to be fair.
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