An outré attempt at the recherché. That might read hifalutin, but considering this film tries to correspond the style of Novelist Barbara Pym's precisely quotidian fiction with aspects of her life in only 47 minutes, you have a sense of the mountain to be scaled.
From Bookmark, BBC TV's old literary-documentary strand - an even more recherché notion nowadays in that sunk corporation - this understands that tone is everything with Pym, and those mountains are domestic molehills. Thus a…
It's definitely not cricket, old fellow! There's curious self-referentiality at the start of this with a sly, undue, dig at Launder & Gilliat - they having refused use of the proprietary Charters & Caldicott names. Thus the umpteenth pairing of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne is here retitled, unoriginally, Messrs Bright & Early.
Their ensuing befuddlement between those famous canvas chairs, reminds me of when Morecambe & Wise went to Thames TV and made little jokes at the BBC's expense. Except, as here, the joke…
Essemus in arcadia.
When British television was being deregulated in the early 1990s it was this production that was most often referenced as evidence for what could soon be lost. Appropriately enough for a serial concerned with 'decline and fall', it soon was. Brute market forces came to the ugly fore and public service broadcasting has been marginalised ever since.
It’s not about an extended duration or large budget—these things endure to this day—but a level of taste, trust and…
Christianity and 5%.
Alongside Film Mogul, Devout Methodist is an occasional prefix for one Joseph Arthur Rank, and his extraordinary place in British cinema. I suspect that religious descriptor is also a quizzical ‘who’d have thought?’ After all, it's a seemingly contradictory position in otherwise secular Entertainment with its fixation upon mammon.
We can never wholly know what motivated Rank in this matter other than what he said - more in a moment - and what he financed. But I…
Richmond Hill liked Passion Burger’s review of Emilia Pérez
Richmond Hill commented on Sam Pending’s review of Gorky Park
Richmond Hill followed Chet Ozmun
Richmond Hill liked Chet Ozmun’s review of The Long Riders
Richmond Hill liked Chet Ozmun’s review of In the Heat of the Night
