Category Archives: TV series

Fawlty Towers – leave it alone!

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The current liberal/woke/SJW mission – they are in the tentative throes of an unofficial alliance these days – is their war on the past, their need to chop and change, to ‘fix’ that which does not conform to their present-day ‘world view’, to erase artefacts from another age which were celebrated in that age. Their fascistic ways are influential: we have it here with the latest act of cowardice by BBC-owned UKTV in their pulling of Fawlty Towers episode The Germans, an iconic staple of British TV originally aired in 1975 yet now derided by the aforementioned Axis of Intolerance. It has since been reinstated following counter-protests by what must be, and I hate to appropriate a Nixonian term, the Great Silent Majority.

Someone is offended! Phone the police! This war on … everything is the modus vivendi of hysteria culture. In the middle of a pandemic we now have folk trying to tear down statues of slave traders, these protesters (or whatever) wearing clobber made in Indonesia by slave children. The lack of self-awareness is almost funny.

I expect the following will soon appear on their proscriptions: anything Nazi-related, lauded TV series The Wire, the Crocodile Dundee movies, motion pictures featuring cross-dressing, The Silence of the Lambs (1991) because Buffalo Bill likes to put his willy between his legs, and Gone with the Wind (1939). Oh, wait a minute ….

What a horrible time to be alive. Plonkers.

Further reading/viewing:

https://news.sky.com/story/fawlty-towers-episode-pulled-over-racial-slurs-to-be-reinstated-by-uktv-12005814



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Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.

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I am fond of the cheese that is alliteration – the bombast of these doc titles grabs my attention. You are usually guaranteed a slice of the surreal, and Tiger King features some of the oddest (real-life) characters Netflix has ever plucked from the fringes. One baffling subplot after another shocks as it entertains, and there are moments that are so … frankly nuts one questions the verisimilitude of it all. The resultant memes have been off the scale.

And this song is an addiction:

Further reading:

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/tiger-king-netflix-joe-exotic-carole-baskin-theories-a9421711.html

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/a31925589/tiger-king-netflix-tweets-memes/

https://www.gamesradar.com/tiger-king-netflix-true-crime-documentary-joe-exotic/

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Safe – relishing the ridiculous.

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More highly addictive utter trash binged on Netflix again, this eight-episode thriller a cross between a ’90s peak Joe Eszterhas number and those seedy Hollyoaks specials that were broadcast after the watershed. The appeal of this kind of show is in its cliffhanger formula; every chapter has a spanner chucked in the works or a new revelation.

Unadulterated rubbish it may be, but the sordid spectacle is worth it for trying to pinpoint where the fuck in England Michael C. Hall’s ‘accent’ is meant to descend from. It’s eight different counties mixed in a verbal blender, Owen Hargreaves meets Gillian Anderson.

Bizarre.

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The Stranger – another wasted (Netflix) marathon.

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This started off so well. For seven episodes I was gripped. It was so intricately put together and had a masterful Breaking Bad cliffhanger quality to it. Like most contemporary dramas, though, it crumbled into the nonsensical at its denouement. The last episode was so dire it ruined the preceding madness. Depression kicked in and I was then reminded of how Lost completely … lost the plot.

Stay away from this rubbish. Anyway, there’s always a good doc about Nazis to help ease the melancholy.

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Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting An Internet Killer.

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Watching this was a regret – I hated every minute of it but was compelled to witness the ghastly proceedings unfold. I usually have a weekday curfew of 11:00 p.m. but here I was lucid way into the wee hours with a WhatsApp cat topic frenzy on the go. Lesson learned: Do not ever Netflix (verb) when it’s dark.

The Internet is the Digital Frontier and all that, and now it appears to be the case that the apotheosis of human endeavour is an outlet for almost every single looney with a vengeance; the World Wide Web and the sociopath are meant to be.

The online sleuths in the three-episode show are more competent than the cops meant to be doing the basics of their jobs as professionals, which says rather a lot. The only reason I kept on watching was how in the fuck they managed to uncover the things they did. It is must-see detective work.

Further reading/viewing:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/on-demand/0/luka-magnotta-dont-f-with-cats-netflix-documentary-true-story-killer/

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/dont-fuck-with-cats-netflix-luka-magnotta-baudi-moovan-documentary-a9259076.html

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New Year’s adventures in Germany – Flughafen München-Bad Bergzabern-Straubing-Flughafen München.

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Autobahn.

I’ve not been in a car this much ever, Munich Airport to Bad Bergzabern to Straubing to Munich Airport, a goodbye to the 2010s in a most chilly and mostly plastered Deutschland, with a soundtrack of the decade’s tackiest pop hits.

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Bad Bergzabern in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate took in the delights of this wooden bad boy, which I presume was an observation tower to view troop movements as its vistas overlook the border with France. I climbed up the fucker and left a wee mention at the top, carving ‘Nuuuuu’ into the floor with a pocket knife. I am very proud of that. One day some random will scratch their head at the … ‘word’ and then hit Google. A lovely wee town, it even had a heaving club which was visited just after midnight, where locals sparked up inside. Flashbacks kicked in to a pre-2006 Edinburgh when you could smoke a cigar and not get chased off the premises by their interior ministry.

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Midnight fireworks.

Straubing – not a lot happened in Straubing. I did my usual morning run/descent into death followed by a supermarket jaunt, and rounded off proceedings by watching Dragons’ Den clips for three hours off a tablet, contemplating the decade ahead and hoping that one day folk in airports will just fucking learn how to distinguish between the arrivals and departures screens (this also applies to the denizens of train stations).

Other delicacies included the outrageous wearing of Crocs and the sighting of that ‘big pile of shit’ from Jurassic Park (1993).

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All in all, quite the splendid wee trip. A civilised affair (for once).

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Cobra Kai is rather AWESOME.

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Nostalgia kicked in mega-heavy with this absolutely mental show; fuck knows how it even came into being. I have seen The Karate Kid (1984) 19 times and this somehow beats it. Through the complexity of the characters (they actually have three dimensions), the subtle middle fingers (plural) to the WOKE/SJW political correctness of this age, and the sheer hilarity of some of the scenes, it’s the best show for quite some time.

I always thought Johnny Lawrence got a bad rep; 35 years later he gets the treatment he deserves.

First episode here. It’s a corker:

Further reading/viewing:

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/cobra-kai-review-season-2-youtube-premium-1202127560/

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Mindhunter is a must-see.

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Mindhunter is cracking. Set within the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico when criminal psychology was in its infancy, the show’s FBI special agents interview the whole gamut of notorious serial killers in order to glean patterns of behaviour, applying this to ongoing cases. It’s got David Fincher all over it, the chap serving as executive producer and helming seven episodes.

It’s gripping stuff, as a time capsule and insight into a grisly world very few of us will thankfully ever even glimpse. Netflix addiction strikes again, though in my case generously bequeathed episodes from a questionable benefactor. I can’t help but picture the British spin-off were this to happen. In the show they remove the chains of the convicted mass murderers in order to make them feel more comfortable during questioning, to even help generate a bond for the ‘interrogation’. Imagine Scotland Yard doing that to Charles Bronson (not that he’s killed anyone).

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I also have a picture in my head of Lord Longford, absolute weirdo that he was, helping Myra Hindley escape through a window during their interview, the former wielding bolt cutters or a blowtorch, zany hair flying everywhere.

Interestingly (for me), I clocked the actor who plays Bill Tench straight away. Holt McCallany wound up in two of the best movies of the late ’90s in Three Kings (1999) and Fight Club (1999). He even initiated the whole ‘His name is Robert Paulson’ recital. I hadn’t seen him in anything else until this.

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