Update

[hazelk]

Indefensibly late but Happy (ex)Birthday counteragent!

TV I have watched:

A documentary about Factory records/Joy Division/New Order. Peter Hook (I think) had to say about Curtis (paraphrasing from memory) “we never really listened to the lyrics, thought it was just Ian being artistic.” Sad and utterly believable in such a matter-of-fact Northern-man way.

Ashes to Ashes both episodes now. Very different from Life on Mars, which I liked a lot. Sure it was flawed but it did manage to hit several nerves and the final episode came so close to making everything worth it. The new series seems completely meta in comparison, it’s not only about a woman spending her final moments trapped in her own “Gene” fanfic it keeps telling you in big stage whispers that that’s exactly what it is. It’s to admire at some intellectual level but the plausible deniability clause to every false seeming note (from the random way her ‘constructs’ sometimes behave or the lack of bemusement at what the new DI thinks counts as a working wardrobe for an officer in the Met) does feel like a cop-out.

This may be unfair, if I were to write LoM fanfic it would be Mary Sue/Sam not Gene (who always brought back too many memories of a particularly thuggish geography teacher) so the disconnect to DI Alex Drake could just be to her taste in fantasy men. Or it could be the time period, 1981 London just doesn’t have the nostalgic qualities that 1973 Manchester did. There’s never that sense of unexpected recognition that makes nostalgia fun - the early eighties were my locked away in college years so some of the cultural stuff I missed and the rest I remember without being reminded (and mostly rather I didn’t). It’s not a distant enough past to be another country and geographically it isn’t distant at all. This weeks episode had the additional weirdness factor of guest starring Rupert Graves who I know for a fact didn’t look or talk like that in 1981 because he was in the year below us at 6th form and already the star of numerous school assemblies.

Next Thursday the Sarah Connor Chronicles begin on Virgin.

Comments

[azdak.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen Ashes to Ashes yet, but so much of the pleasure of Life on Mars came from the sheer angstiness of Sam's situation. By the sounds of it Ashes to Ashes opts for a comedy route instead (which is fair enough, because a repetition of all that angst would have been rather tedious), so what I really want to know is, is it actually funny?

I think you're right that 1981 can't be nostalgic in the way 1973 was. One of the lovely things about LoM was discovering just how much of another country 1973 was, whereas the 1980s are basically us in bad clothes. That sense of total disconnect is missing, so I imagine it's quite hard to come up with stories that do more than laugh at 80s bad taste. But I'd be really happy to be proved wrong, because I want Gene Hunt's afterlife to be a worthwhile one.

Lucky you, getting to see baby Rupert Graves at school assemblies!

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

There are some very funny parts and the clothes/hair are horribly bad but it doesn't come across as meaning to be all comedy/parody, it's as if it hasn't quite decided what it is yet. The big problem may be the new Sam who is very much the anti-Sam, the Miss Marple to his Poirot but hard to sympathsise with so far. She's so confident she knows what's going on, there's not the sense of pure bewilderment Sam had. She's also supposed to be a psychological profiler, which in TV seems to involve out gene-ing Gene in the not-bothering-to-research department but backing up her hunches with a bunch of therapy-speak. Plus there's a class thing, she's from a much more privileged background than Hunt's lot which puts them in the underdog position so they have that as well as the fact we already know them to make them rootable for. It could all change, there are some cracks appearing in her veneer and if they do turn it around that would be impressive.

Baby Rupes was very cute :-)

[azdak.livejournal.com]

She's also supposed to be a psychological profiler

Urgh. I thought the psychological profiling bits in LoM were dreadful. One of the few elements that was pure TV cliche, and unconvincing cliche at that. Is she a profiler to compensate for the fact that she can't run down back alleys rugby-tackling villains with quite the same elan as Sam?

there are some cracks appearing in her veneer and if they do turn it around that would be impressive.


I shall keep my fingers crossed. I really want to like it...

[counteragent.livejournal.com]

Thanks, dear!

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Next Thursday the Sarah Connor Chronicles begin on Virgin.

Thanks v v v much, I might well not have noticed. Virgin is free, isn't it?

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

My pleasure :-) You can get Virgin1 on Freeview - according to the electronic programme guide on our TV the chronicles are on between 10 and 11pm (but said guide sometimes can't decide whether it's BST or GMT).