Further adventures in telly-watching

From 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. ( Read more... )

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. ( Read more... )