9 posts tagged “documentary”

There are numerous clips of Little Britain Down Under on YouTube, but David and Matt meeting Dame Edna has to be a highlight (from 3.28).

For those of you outside New Zealand, Radio New Zealand National has put up the episode of The Golden Tide that features yours truly. Sonia Yee, who produced the series, introduces it, and I have had a lot of good comments already about it. (It seems a lot of people, even in New Zealand, prefer to listen to the MP3 online than wait for the programme to air.) My comments seem to have struck a chord with other Chinese men about the media’s perception and treatment of our race. Here’s the MP3.

[Cross-posted] Half the country likes National Radio—or Radio New Zealand National, to give it its proper name these days—during the summer, and half the country dislikes it. The programming changes from the usual formula and I have often said that shows like Matinee Idle (not a misspelling) are among the highlights of the wireless year. While my loyalties still reside with Groove 107·7 here in Wellington, New Zealand for most of the day, National does some great stuff that’s worth tuning in to.
   This summer, there is a new highlight, and not just because I have been interviewed for it. The Golden Tide is a series by Sonia Yee beginning on Sunday, December 28 at 2.30 p.m., running to January 25 (weekly). It will appear on the RNZ website, I believe, after broadcast.
   Sonia wrote one article in issue 26 of Lucire (which also appears online) but our connection is that I was at school with her cousin; and, of course, we are both of Chinese ethnicity, which was one qualification for being a subject in her series.
   The Golden Tide ‘takes a fresh, contemporary look at the changing nature of the Chinese community in New Zealand,’ according to Sonia, and ‘interweaves interview material with poetry, short stories and scripted scenes to create a rich, textured documentary, with original composition by musician Riki Gooch (Fat Freddy’s Drop, Trinity Roots), and film and theatre composer Stephen Gallagher.’
   If we promote TV shows and film on occasion in Lucire, then why not radio? And good radio, too—things which you feel richer for having listened to. Based on the questions that Sonia asked me, I think it will be a very insightful series that tell a story common to so many of us who have travelled and settled in a new country, or those who have had ancestors who have done the same. Most of us got here from somewhere, and it’s an interesting cultural experience to share.

It surprises me that O. J.: the Untold Story, the BBC documentary about the likely murderer of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, has never aired in the US, though it has aired in other nations.
   I am no fan of O. J. Simpson (admittedly he was good in Capricorn One) and there was a lot that emerged in the 1995 trial that showed the guy was a slimeball.
   The latest Las Vegas incident shows a man who has flouted the law so many times for other acts that he has become arrogant and callous.
   However, the documentary convinced me that Jason Simpson was the real killer, as I have said on this blog before.
   Perceptions are very different among different groups of people. The majority of white Americans thought O. J. was guilty. The majority of black Americans thought O. J. was innocent.
   As it has come up a few times during the last few days, here is a link to the BBC preview on its website.
   I paste from that article and I admit to taking a lot more than what is reasonable below, but it’s only out of concern that the BBC won’t keep some of these older pieces online, especially as it bears the old layout. (I’ll remove the below on request and I ask readers to click on the above link for the original.)

Wednesday, 4 October, 2000, 11:46 GMT 12:46 UK
New clues in OJ Simpson murder mystery

By Malcolm Brinkworth, producer of a BBC programme which sheds new light on the case of former American football star OJ Simpson.

… OJ—The Untold Story reveals that clues that some believe pointed away from Simpson as the killer were dismissed or ignored …

Dr Lee: Crime scene was "contaminated"

Dr Henry Lee, one of the world’s most respected forensic scientists, states … that the crime scene was “out of control”, was contaminated and that the police had destroyed so much at the murder scene that it was impossible to reconstruct what happened that night.

Dr Lee also reveals that the police failed to take crucial blood samples from Nicole’s back which might have helped solve the case.

Who did kill Nicole Simpson?

It is their view that the evidence was seriously compromised and would have been rejected by the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service.

Potential new suspect

The film also explores new areas, which have not been fully investigated by the authorities. It features private investigator Bill Dear and follows his enquiries into Jason, Simpson’s son from his first marriage …

Jason: History of violence

The programme examines the evidence that shows that six months before her murder, Nicole was put under surveillance.

A man called Bill Wasz, who he says, had supplied cocaine to Simpson, Nicole and friends, had been hired by one of Simpson’s friends to follow her and take photographs of Nicole with any man she might meet.

He recorded his surveillance in a notebook. In an interview from prison, where he is currently serving a jail term for armed robbery, Wasz explained that 10 days after handing over the photographs, he had been asked by Simpson's same friend to a meeting for a new assignment.

At that meeting, Wasz says, Simpson’s friend then hired him as a hitman to kill Nicole.

Police ignored ‘hitman’ claims

The programme reveals that the police were made aware of Wasz’s story just a few weeks after the murders and … the prosecution decided to dismiss it.…

There’s now a second video from the documentary The Saint Steps in … to Colour on YouTube, detailing how scriptwriter Terry Nation would rehash his scripts for different series. This would be fine years apart, but one week he got caught out on US television when The Saint was rerun with a new episode of The Baron.
   Goodness, de Vere before he met Audrey!
   Ian Ogilvy provides the narration.

Again, from YouTube poster ZillakYT, are the first few minutes from another documentary revisiting an ITC classic—in this case, the colour episodes of the Roger Moore series The Saint. Ian Ogilvy, who succeeded Moore in the 1970s in Return of the Saint, narrates.
   The pre-title bit is hilarious, with the title card reading ‘Monte Carlo / not Elstree’. This was a nod to the fact that almost all Saint episodes, despite being set in Roma, Paris and other exotic locations, were filmed in England. What is interesting is just how angry Saint creator Leslie Charteris got with the producer, Robert S. Baker, and script supervisor Harry W. Junkin. A memorandum is read out by Ogilvy—and Charteris was pretty pissed!
   Sadly, Mr Ogilvy is cut off in mid-speech but I assume he was nearing the end of Charteris’s letter.

   (In case anyone is wondering why this post is in the Asian and Chinese groups on Vox, Leslie Charteris was originally Singaporean Chinese.)

I found these two videos on YouTube and those who love those old ITC TV series may enjoy them. It’s a pity The Persuaders’ one is so short, but the full thing is on the new DVD set. Boy, octogenarian Tony Curtis looks like he’s smoked a bit too much pot over the years, but Sir Roger Moore looks remarkably good (he was 78 when the documentary was filmed). The clip from We Were the Champions, a reunion of the stars of The Champions, is a bit longer and shows Damon, Bastedo and Gaunt seeing each other for the first time since their series ended in the late 1960s.
   I wish these were available as on separate DVDs or even as a chargeable download, since I already have a set of The Persuaders.

[Cross-posted] Ironical that I can’t get C4 very clearly here and that I will probably be out, but yours truly will appear next on a TV documentary about the Cadbury Dream Model Search ’07 on Saturday 7 p.m. in New Zealand. And thank goodness it is in line with some of what I do, in this case publishing Lucire.
   I already have the first pic from the fashion shoot with Elle Gibson, the winner, here—Hannah Richards’ photography and Barry Betham’s styling are beautiful. But before all that happened, there was a lot of deliberation with the judges.
   I don’t know how the editing went, but I am betting that Duane Gazi from Trump Model Management, one of the more fluent and authoritative voices in modelling, will and should get a lot of coverage. And I hope to see Caroline Barley of Nova in the programme heaps—without her, there would be no competition.
   For those looking for controversy and bitchiness, you might not see much with us. We had very collegial judging sessions and from what the girls tell me, things went very well with the competition itself. But I am certain this will be watchable, especially among those who like reality TV, since it is, well, real. The backstage pressures, the need to deliver a verdict—that’s still there. What we didn’t have were phoney-baloney moments that could be cobbled together to make one person look bad.
   What the girls got up to, I don’t know: they were separate from us and chaperoned, and undoubtedly there will be moments there, since they are the real focus and were followed around by two TV crews for days. However, there has been no fallout from contestants moaning on blogs—unlike the many anonymous comments after Miss New Zealand that can be traced back to certain young “ladies”—as I think most of the final 12 I met realized that they were already winners, having been selected from 900 nationally.
   Elle has already had a great start and I am willing to bet that the others are already prospects for the agencies.

[Cross-posted] Thanks to the great folks at Autoblog, there’s a one-hour video on Aston Martin from the Victory by Design series posted there. I’m going back to watch it: the sound from the DBR1 that the programme opens with is musical. (The typography is crappy, but here, who cares?)
   Since it’s an hour long, I expect it to be twice as good as the Top Gear Aston special Jeremy Clarkson hosted back in the mid-1990s.
   ‘Cue the Elgar.’