Another brilliant Eggtoon from Andy Wyatt: this time about Labour’s politics during the Blair era, in the style of South Park. I think it’s funnier than the Windsors one I posted earlier tonight, though the death of Robin Cook in the cartoon might be considered bad taste given that the man has passed away.
My colleague Jen Hamilton and I were browsing YouTube after working on a site for a client, and stumbled across a bit of royal humour. What if the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburgs, I mean, the Mountbatten-Windsors, were a Simpsons-style cartoon (featuring Mohammed al-Fayed and the Rt Hon Tony Blair)?
Note to self: do not mention this blog post next time I see the Governor-General and his wife.
It’s understandable that TV One in New Zealand has to cut around 13 minutes out of each Life on Mars episode to fit commercials in, but why did it have to be the Camberwick Green sequence from episode five of series two? It was the best bit! (Sam still says he comes out of a box when he gets to the nick, and local viewers will be wondering what on earth he was on about.)
For Kiwi Lifers, here is the missing bit.
Spotted in Waikanae (an hour north of our office) last week while we were heading to a beauty spa for a story: a lovely and well maintained Austin Ten.
Torchwood finally premières on TV2, 10.30 p.m. tonight. So how many years behind the British are we? And has anyone seen a single promo for this show?
]]>
British TV fans cited how ABC ruined Cracker when it remade it with the late Robert Pastorelli taking Robbie Coltrane’s role of Fitz, especially when news of a US remake of Life on Mars surfaced. (No twitters, meanwhile, on news that the Spanish are remaking the show; also the critics seem to be silent on the botched British remakes of Married with Children, Who’s the Boss? and Outrageous Fortune).
Get ready for more mud-slinging heading westward across the Atlantic. The Americans are having another crack at Cracker, executive-produced by Robert Duvall (who isn’t called Robert in this?), as a TNT original production. No whispers yet in the article about whom will play Fitz. I actually hope it could be Coltrane himself, who has faked an American accent often enough.
I know Britain is as youth-obsessed as America sometimes, and an article in The Daily Telegraph, about cop show New Tricks, reminded me of that fact.
Amanda Redman, the star of the show, and doing better here than in Honest, the remake of the New Zealand series Outrageous Fortune, says in the newspaper, ‘I find it extraordinary, because we are repeated more than any BBC drama ever, and for our repeats alone we get more viewings than the first showings of, for instance, Life on Mars.’
She may be 48 but the other three principal actors in the series, Dennis Waterman, Alun Armstrong and James Bolan, are between 60 and 73.
And for some reason, promoting this age group isn’t “cool”.
The BBC needs to get itself sor’ed.
With an ageing population in the west, the over-60s is one of the most desirable demographics and it would make a lot of sense to promote shows like New Tricks alongside its other hits such as Doctor Who and Ashes to Ashes.
It’s why I think the US networks’ opposition to a last Columbo story, on the basis that Peter Falk, in his 80s, is too old to attract advertisers, is bollocks.
And who is to say that being over 60 isn’t cool? Ask Tom Jones, who still draws in the crowds, including young ’uns, regularly.
In the US every weeknight, David Letterman, 61, isn’t letting up.
Interestingly, few seem to think that excluding people based on maturity is politically incorrect—yet we go around advancing the causes of the young.
Dennis Waterman says in the article, ‘Apparently children are very impressed when their parents point me out and say, “That’s Dennis Waterman”. … They go, “What? Is there a real Dennis Waterman?” So maybe I’ve got a new audience there.’
The west’s youth obsession hasn’t exactly moved the world on in too many ways: young, inexperienced leaders in politics have not proved visionary in many cases.
I am not saying we should be like Saudi Arabia where old folks run the show without any idea of advancing human rights.
But we owe baby boomers and those even older a great debt, and we should be championing their wisdom and experience, just as many great civilized societies have done. Older is cool, but we need to begin having a more accommodating mindset.
TV Scoop has some hints about the next series of Ashes to Ashes, to début February 2009 on BBC One: ‘We’ve just handed in episode one. It’s set in 1982, so the Falklands have just happened. We’re taking it slightly darker this time …’ Read the rest of the quotation from co-creator Ashley Pharoah at TV Scoop. This does mean the VO at the beginning of the show has to change, as Keeley Hawes currently makes a reference to 1981.
Whatever the case, it’s going far more smoothly than the US Life on Mars—which the Los Angeles Times reported on back in early June (and this blog followed on June 5). The British press only caught up with the news this past week but it did reveal one extra tidbit that we didn’t already know: Matthew Graham said in The Guardian, ‘At the time we thought [US pilot writer and executive producer David E. Kelley] took what we said on board, but I don’t think he did in the end. I think they should go further away from us; otherwise the danger is you look like an imitation.’
[Cross-posted] A very established New Zealand designer, Margarita Robertson of Nom D, and a newer label, Fly Guys, are profiled on the Lucire site this week. Sam Mitchell’s Q&A with Margi is probably the most in-depth that has ever been published. And we’re running another ex-print piece: my interview with Design Museum senior curator Donna Loveday, who curated When Philip Met Isabella, the exhibition about milliner Philip Treacy and his designs for the late Tatler editor Isabella Blow. That was one of those interviews that went very smoothly, since Donna and I share tastes in modernism and music. Beyond Treacy and Blow, she has rubbed shoulders with designers such as Pablo Ferro and the daughter of Robert Brownjohn, Eliza—and, on a more trivial note, she banks at the same place as Ashes to Ashes’ Philip Glenister—TV’s Gene Hunt. I hope you enjoy this trio of articles.
I searched for this online years ago and could not find it. Finally, it’s on YouTube. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the British version of ‘You’re the One that I Want’, written by John Farrar, but lyrics slightly modified from the original. (I could have lied and said I travelled to the future and found a video of Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta from 2050 in a Grease remake.)