5 posts tagged “documentary”

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.’