Further adventures in telly-watching
Sep. 4th, 2017 09:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerFrom The Mentalist we went on to Mulberry. This is a very strange and utterly adorable British fantasy sitcom, starring Karl Howman, who was flavour of the month for a time and now languishes on Eastenders, and Geraldine McEwan, who was wonderful and should have played Athena White if that stupid production company had ever actually wanted to make a series of the Merrily Watkins books.
Howman plays Mulberry, who turns up out of the blue at a crumbling old manor house owned by Miss Farnaby, played by McEwan. Her only company in the house is a discontented couple of servants, Bert and Alice Finch (Tony Selby and (series 1) Lill Roughley, (series 2) Mary Healey); she occasionally tries to hire a companion but nobody will put up with her for long. Mulberry invites himself into the job and at once sets out to bring the reclusive, cantankerous spinster out of herself and out of the ruts of "family tradition" and "self-reliance" in which she has worn herself to a shadow.
But that is not what Mulberry is supposed to be there for. A terrible gaunt old man, played by the ever wonderful John Bennett, is dogging his footsteps, and he turns out to be Mulberry's father, Death, trying to teach his son the family business. Mulberry's job is to oversee Miss Farnaby's death; but Mulberry, whose mother is Springtime (shades of Greek mythology here) does not have his heart in the job, and wants to teach Miss Farnaby to enjoy life while she still has it.
The series was supposed to run for three years, but a change of management at the BBC put the kybosh on it a year early. I found a video just the other week in which Bob Larbey, who created and wrote the show with John Esmonde, described the final episode they had planned but never made, and two things struck me at once about this; first, that in describing the final scene he was practically in tears, which does not seem usual for a telly writer, and second, that Jan had already described to me this same final scene, which she is convinced she watched on the telly, before I knew of the existence of the video. I'm prepared to swear she didn't know about it either. My wife is spooky sometimes.
Anyway, it's a lovely, gentle comedy, Karl Howman looks very dashing in a black shirt and a gorgeously embroidered waistcoat (I would have loved to wear waistcoats, but every one I have ever known stopped just short of my navel, which is more of a chestcoat really) and I smile ruefully at people who rave about Martin Freeman being able to show two separate thoughts on his face at the same time, when I can see Geraldine McEwan effortlessly managing about six.
SO then we moved on to less delicate emotional ground with Remington Steele. This was a very popular series in the eighties and made Pierce Brosnan a star, which was not very fair on Stephanie Zimbalist who was actually the protagonist; but that was part of the point. In those days we thought that by being funny about sexism while drawing attention to it we could make a difference. (Now, of course, we know that the only way to fight hate is with more hate, and the only way to defeat bigotry is to make ourselves extinct.)
Zimbalist plays Laura Holt, a smart, competent and talented detective in Los Angeles. Finding that "Laura Holt Investigations" is not attracting clients, she invents an imaginary superior, and names him Remington Steele. This works like a charm, and the renamed firm attracts a lot of clients. All this before the pilot episode opens. In said pilot, a mysterious stranger appears, representing himself as a government agent, and involves himself in Laura's current case, complicating it beyond all measure. When the case is concluded, and the real government agent has gone away happy, the stranger, who has no past on record, has somehow wormed his way into Remington Steele's identity and Laura's heart at the same time, and the series becomes a sort of precursor of Moonlighting; there's no will-they-won't-they tension, because we know perfectly well they will, but there is a lot of friction between Laura's by-the-book, pedestrian approach to detective work and "Steele"'s approach, which is to think of an old movie that somehow corresponds to the current case and proceed along those lines till something happens.
I don't know about you, but I find this premise charming. My own headcanon was that "Steele" literally had not existed before Laura invented him, and simply took on the characteristics that "Remington Steele" would have to have to be a proper foil for Laura. He is, definitely and without question, a major influence on the Nyronds for me; he hates guns and never kills anyone, he has a chameleonlike ability to assume different characters, and his past, when it emerges, is that of a con artist par excellence. (And, just as the Nyronds have forgotten their home world, he himself cannot remember which if any of the many names he has used was his real one.)
We're into season two now, in which season one's rather plodding spoken introduction by Zimbalist, which definitely gets old when binge-watching, is replaced by a sequence involving Laura and Steele sitting in a cinema watching clips of themselves taken from the show. I have a feeling that this may have been one of the things that sparked my all-consuming love for all things meta.
Undemanding fun from a time when such a thing was possible without sacrificing intelligence.
Howman plays Mulberry, who turns up out of the blue at a crumbling old manor house owned by Miss Farnaby, played by McEwan. Her only company in the house is a discontented couple of servants, Bert and Alice Finch (Tony Selby and (series 1) Lill Roughley, (series 2) Mary Healey); she occasionally tries to hire a companion but nobody will put up with her for long. Mulberry invites himself into the job and at once sets out to bring the reclusive, cantankerous spinster out of herself and out of the ruts of "family tradition" and "self-reliance" in which she has worn herself to a shadow.
But that is not what Mulberry is supposed to be there for. A terrible gaunt old man, played by the ever wonderful John Bennett, is dogging his footsteps, and he turns out to be Mulberry's father, Death, trying to teach his son the family business. Mulberry's job is to oversee Miss Farnaby's death; but Mulberry, whose mother is Springtime (shades of Greek mythology here) does not have his heart in the job, and wants to teach Miss Farnaby to enjoy life while she still has it.
The series was supposed to run for three years, but a change of management at the BBC put the kybosh on it a year early. I found a video just the other week in which Bob Larbey, who created and wrote the show with John Esmonde, described the final episode they had planned but never made, and two things struck me at once about this; first, that in describing the final scene he was practically in tears, which does not seem usual for a telly writer, and second, that Jan had already described to me this same final scene, which she is convinced she watched on the telly, before I knew of the existence of the video. I'm prepared to swear she didn't know about it either. My wife is spooky sometimes.
Anyway, it's a lovely, gentle comedy, Karl Howman looks very dashing in a black shirt and a gorgeously embroidered waistcoat (I would have loved to wear waistcoats, but every one I have ever known stopped just short of my navel, which is more of a chestcoat really) and I smile ruefully at people who rave about Martin Freeman being able to show two separate thoughts on his face at the same time, when I can see Geraldine McEwan effortlessly managing about six.
SO then we moved on to less delicate emotional ground with Remington Steele. This was a very popular series in the eighties and made Pierce Brosnan a star, which was not very fair on Stephanie Zimbalist who was actually the protagonist; but that was part of the point. In those days we thought that by being funny about sexism while drawing attention to it we could make a difference. (Now, of course, we know that the only way to fight hate is with more hate, and the only way to defeat bigotry is to make ourselves extinct.)
Zimbalist plays Laura Holt, a smart, competent and talented detective in Los Angeles. Finding that "Laura Holt Investigations" is not attracting clients, she invents an imaginary superior, and names him Remington Steele. This works like a charm, and the renamed firm attracts a lot of clients. All this before the pilot episode opens. In said pilot, a mysterious stranger appears, representing himself as a government agent, and involves himself in Laura's current case, complicating it beyond all measure. When the case is concluded, and the real government agent has gone away happy, the stranger, who has no past on record, has somehow wormed his way into Remington Steele's identity and Laura's heart at the same time, and the series becomes a sort of precursor of Moonlighting; there's no will-they-won't-they tension, because we know perfectly well they will, but there is a lot of friction between Laura's by-the-book, pedestrian approach to detective work and "Steele"'s approach, which is to think of an old movie that somehow corresponds to the current case and proceed along those lines till something happens.
I don't know about you, but I find this premise charming. My own headcanon was that "Steele" literally had not existed before Laura invented him, and simply took on the characteristics that "Remington Steele" would have to have to be a proper foil for Laura. He is, definitely and without question, a major influence on the Nyronds for me; he hates guns and never kills anyone, he has a chameleonlike ability to assume different characters, and his past, when it emerges, is that of a con artist par excellence. (And, just as the Nyronds have forgotten their home world, he himself cannot remember which if any of the many names he has used was his real one.)
We're into season two now, in which season one's rather plodding spoken introduction by Zimbalist, which definitely gets old when binge-watching, is replaced by a sequence involving Laura and Steele sitting in a cinema watching clips of themselves taken from the show. I have a feeling that this may have been one of the things that sparked my all-consuming love for all things meta.
Undemanding fun from a time when such a thing was possible without sacrificing intelligence.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-05 10:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-05 03:20 pm (UTC)