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AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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The Tourist (BBC1)

You need to chase a man in a nippy car across featureless terrain. Do you use
a) a small but nippier car
b) an off-roader of some description
c) a road train with a turning circle of about half a mile?

You are making a series for telly and need an arresting opening sequence that involves chasing a man in a small but nippy car across featureless terrain. Do you use
a) a small but nippier car
b) an off-roader of some description
c) a road train with a turning circle of about half a mile?

Do you have complete contempt for your audience because they're Australian
a) yes
b) yes
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Grant



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Plus it was a complete steal of Duel, the great Spielberg TV movie. And how the hell did the massive truck sneak out and broadside him?
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Mick Harper
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I was puzzled by a different plot gap. A bomb rips out the side of a café in a one-horse Australian town in the outback i.e. is the most dramatic event that has occurred for several hundred miles and several hundred years in all directions, yet as the ensuing hours unfold there is no evidence of the police attending the crime scene or having a word with the intended victim of the bomb. This dilatory approach to law'n'order rises to a climax when the victim has to tell a local policewoman that evening all about it. "Gosh!" she says, but in Australian.

We eventually hear the bomb blast mentioned on a radio news bulletin in the background so it's not as if Australians are completely blasé about these things. But they're a hardbitten lot, not over-impressed by outbreaks of wanton savagery. "Officer, I need to report World War Three has broken out." "Would you mind waiting your turn, this lady's got a koala stuck up a tree. What's the name? ... No, the koala's name."
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Hatty
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It's turning into the Coen Brothers, Aussie-style.
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Grant



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And the particularly stupid policeman who didn’t bother interviewing the target of the bomb was clearly of aboriginal origin. How the hell did that get past the diversity review? It even shocked an old racist like me
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Grant wrote:
Plus it was a complete steal of Duel, the great Spielberg TV movie. And how the hell did the massive truck sneak out and broadside him?


Yeah all the current stuff is just a montage of 70s and 80s films. Well at least they chose Spielberg's only good film. Got to give credit where it's due.
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Mick Harper
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I cannot let that pass. I defer to no man in my contempt for the sentimentalising populist but he made dozens of terrific films. Duel is not one of them, only the first of them.
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Wile E. Coyote


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I think Always has to be his worst.

I am trying to think of a good one, the best I can come up with is Minority Report, which was at least well worth the price of admission.
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Mick Harper
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A bloke I met in the pub sounded me out about investing in a company he was running. It sounded pretty hi-tec with all the bells and whistles but I'm a lot shrewder than people give me credit for so I told him to put it all in writing before I gave him pound one. He just has

We know a price rise is never welcome, but it’s essential we continue investing in our technology. It means you can keep doing the things you need to do – and love to do – on all your devices. To help us carry on with this work, the price of your package will go up by £8.50 a month from 1st March.
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Mick Harper
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Assassins (Sky Documentaries)

This is a two hour film about the killing of Kim Jong-Un's half-brother at Kuala Lumpur airport. It could be fascinating except the film-makers, having spent inordinate amounts of time and money making the film, have decided that all talking heads must, for reasons of journalistic authenticity, speak in either their own language without overdubbing or in incomprehensible broken English. The subtitles, where provided, are too small to read and half the time cannot be read anyway because they are against a white background.

As the whole film is essentially a talkathon -- and I can assure you a fascinating talkathon in so far as I can judge -- we are back on one of our old AE rants. Creative artists are their own worst enemy. And broadcasters are very close behind for not insisting a hap'orth of tar is applied before they spend inordinate sums etc etc
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Mick Harper
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Munich, The Edge of War (Netflix)

The novel Munich by Robert Harris has the unusual distinction of causing me to rewrite the ending of a chapter of one my books so I was intrigued to see that Netflix had to add the rider to the title because there already is a Spielberg Munich all about Black September's attack on the Olympic Games. Interesting what people find takes precedence in the collective unconscious.

Anyway to the film. I have watched the first ten minutes, set in an Oxford Summer Ball of 1932, and thus far cannot detect a single sign -- dialogue, hairstyles, anything -- that would indicate it is set nearly a hundred years ago. Now that is interesting.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window NetFlix (Spoiler)

It's getting panned by the critics.

In Rear Window, Jame Stewart plays an injured professional photographer in a wheelchair whose rear window looks out over other apartments. During a heat wave, everyone has their windows open, and so James can't help but see what is going on. A possible murder takes place. It's a Hitchcock masterpiece.

Fast forward, Kirsten Bell is now playing the James Stewart character, and indeed over the years the lead "trapped in the house character" has almost always been female. We are now set in suburbia. Kirsten is an artist. Having suffered a tragic loss of her child, our lead is on booze, therapy and pills, so when one day she witnesses a murder and reports it, no one believes her.

Did the murder really take place or did she imagine it?

Over the years this formula has given folks lots of suspenseful escapist fun. Kirsten and the Director of "The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window" have decided to satirise the genre. However, rather than make it a British farce or an American screwball from the start, they have opted it to play it straight and dry, and slowly draw you in. I was really enjoying the voyeurism and amateur detective dramatics before I belatedly had the Bingo moment.

It's spiced with moments of dark comedy genius.
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Mick Harper
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I too noticed this. Or rather Netflix kept bombarding me with advice that I should notice it. I watched the first five minutes, as I dutifully always do. I too did the Hitchcockian double-take. I too was quite enjoying it. But then something quite different happened to interrupt my viewing pleasure. I realised my first duty was to reduce my Virgin boxtop dubry from 100% to 100%. The limit of my ambition these days.

But now that I have decided, after a lot of agonising, not to record the three-hour daily Taggarts from Series One/Episode 1 to Series 24/Episode 7, I may have enough breathing space to turn once more to Netflix and take another bash with The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window. But, Wiley, if you have played me false and I have missed in vain Sky's seven hour production of The Player in the Club Across the Channel that Might have Gone to Arsenal In The Last Day Of The Transfer Window, you will be hearing from me.
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Mick Harper
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Here's an AE addendum to the above.

I am able, with a bit of discriminatory ferocity, to keep the 100% at or around 100% but it causes me no end of anxiety on a daily basis. If I can do this now why didn't I do it when it was hovering around 0% and I could have spent the whole day, every day, tripping around the flat in a glow of virtuous delight?
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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As a failed inventor himself, Wiley can appreciate the effort behind actually seeking out a Warholian tin of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup for your signature chicken casserole dish, only to then collapse and spill it whilst walking it across the road to the neighbours. She was lucky not to have been run over.....
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