AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Wile E. Coyote]

Agatha Christie's Hjerson (More4)

This must surely be the last of the dying paradigm, the loner cerebral detective befriended by a more accessible amateur, story-telling partner. He is the brilliant disgraced ex cop, she, Klara, is a devious, frustrated, sugar snacking, TV producer of "MILF Hotel", a trashy TV runaway success, who now wants to do proper TV. If only she could get a celebrity detective to investigate murder cases that the police could not solve.

The title is a tease, as Agatha really did create within the Poirot stories a fictional female writer who had created a fictional detective called Hjerson, from these few mentions is drawn a modern new souped-up Scandi Hjerson, who happens to be a vegan, bi-sexual.

So it's OTT Christie meets gritty Noir. It's played out as comedy drama, if you like your Professor T and Anelisse Donkers, you most probably will love this. Still, it surely is the last of the paradigm. That is..... until yet another one comes along.....

[Mick Harper]

I'm under pressure to watch Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. What should I do?

[Mick Harper]

Treason (Netflix)

This was rollicking along quite nicely if you are a fan of the genre though I had reservations about Britain's premier spy agency being in the hands of a young shaver (who didn't, he had designer stubble) and a policier with a hero who had a stable home life. But both got a savage twist at the end of episode one so I must summon the sinews for episode two et probably seq.

I have the strong presentiment that this won't quite be worth watching but I will. What were called in the Boer War, the Bitter-Enders. If only one could hire body doubles to do this kind of thing, an Alt-Mick.

[Mick Harper]

Twelfth Night (BBC4)

This is the only non-history Shakespeare play I can bear to watch (because I did it for O-Level) and, as a bonus, it was a Globe production which forces innovation. However the laboured modernity, the extreme multicultural casting (though no Albanians, I note) and overlapping scenes to overcome the lack of a proscenium arch, is putting me to a severe test. I may stay to harrumph though. I don't suppose they will cast many transgender people in a comedy based on cross-dressing but one can live in hope.

[Mick Harper]

Digging for Britain (BBC4)

A rather pedestrian episode this week with the only bit of interest being Alice & the Panjandrum inspecting a giant dolmen in the Malvern Hills. "Oh, the capstone is broken in half," trilled our heroine. "Yes," said the Chief Druid, "probably when they were constructing it." Now call me old fashioned but when building a tomb to bury the Great Chief or to impress the other tribes (the two functions variously advanced as the reason for building the dolmen), a cracked capstone would be such a major disaster they would have discarded it and stuck on another one. St Paul's Cathedral with a split in the dome, anyone?

Though if the dolmen was for the strictly utilitarian needs of warehousing, as we argue in Megalithic Empire, a cracked roof would have served just as well as a non-cracked one.

[Grant]

I saw the first one in the series and was amused when they found the remains of a large building (well, lots of large blocks of stone anyway). Immediately they pronounced that it was a Roman temple. I don’t think there was any evidence apart from the fact that the blocks were impressively large

[Mick Harper]

Yes, I spotted that. The way I put it in Revisionist Historiography is

[Mick Harper]

The US & The Holocaust (BBC4)

[Mick Harper]

The Old Devils (BBC4)

Should be great -- novel by Kingsley Amis, adaptation by Andrew Davies -- but isn't. Why? Too Welsh. Reading the book you are aware that Amis lived in Wales (as an English lecturer at Swansea University), didn't get on that well with the Welsh (as he didn't with academics in Lucky Jim) and can enjoy his novelist's art in concealing this -- or even satirising into a general case his own anti-Welshness.

On the telly it's right in your face, all the time. It becomes rancidly anti-Welsh rather than mordantly anti-Welsh.

[Mick Harper]

You know how you can get trapped into watching entire 'box sets' of the Sopranos or whatever for hours (sometimes days) on end, to the great detriment of one's social and professional life? Well, I had to endure three one-hour episodes of Rob Roy by 'Sir' Walter Scott on the radio last night. I even had to put off my beddy-bies.

Not only was the plot wholly unbelievable involving people constantly turning up in the nick of time hundreds of miles from where you would expect them but the dialogue was frequently incomprehensible when educated English people were not speaking. Come on, BBC, haven't you heard of A Book at Bedtime?

[Mick Harper]

97% Owned (Netflix)

[Mick Harper]

Sharp! Women who made an art out of having an opinion (R4X)

This thunderously good programme https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b0skpx had me diving constantly into my own past. It was a collection of potted bio’s of five American women high-brow writers: Dorothy Parker, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sonntag, Pauline Kael and Norah Ephron. First, what past? I realised we just don’t possess anything like the village atmosphere of the New York intellectual scene. And haven’t done since Georgian England. The Bloomsbury Group, anyone? Not that I would have been in it but it would have been nice to have been able to watch.

Actually it’s probably because we lack Jews. All these were save Mary McCarthy (Dorothy Parker was née Rothschild). Maybe we lack Irish Catholics too. Well, no, not really, it is because we lack self-aware intellectuals. Everyone’s either the next rank down, intelligentsia, or the rank below that, academics. Oh sure, we’ve got our fair share of intellectuals (more per head than America, I would think) but because it’s a dirty word here, they don’t like to draw attention to themselves by coterising.

But back to my own recollections of this monstrous regiment...

[Mick Harper]

Algonquin was too early for me but I remember being presented with Mary McCarthy’s The Group during my first fresher undergraduate weeks and being ordered to read it. Which I did, and felt relieved I quite enjoyed it. And I promise you I wasn’t hanging round with anybody other than routine provincial swots. You had to be enrolled in the English department to be anything more than that.

I think we’d all agree that Susan Sonntag doesn’t export easily (a verdict she agreed with – after a few months as a junior faculty member at Oxford she hightailed it to Paris. But Pauline Kael is someone you’d run into in the ordinary course of becoming a pseud. I did when marooned in a New York hotel awaiting deportation and only the New Yorker to read. I was simply amazed. But the really familiar name is Norah Ephron. It says something about the severity of Sharp! that they didn’t even mention Sleepless in Seattle.

I was, at the end, left with a mild feeling of bereftness. Why couldn’t I have had all that rather than just having to sit through the endlessly strident politicising of feminists (from both genders)? But also, somehow, I couldn't help feeling it was a lucky break.

[Mick Harper]

Digging for Britain (BBC2)

Alice was in on something distinctly disturbing (for me) this week. An Anglo-Saxon cross in the middle of seventh century England. There goes that theory, then. Until the caveats started to pile up. The first was

[Mick Harper]

There's only one black person presently living in the north-east (they've got more sense) so why does he keep turning up on Vera? A more disgraceful example of police profiling it would be hard to imagine.