Month: March 2024

The 1980s Supermarket – Channel 5

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  I’d completely forgotten about Harvest Crunch bars!   I used to have one every day.  The idea was that I wouldn’t be fat because I was eating healthy “crunch” bars instead of chocolate biscuits … er, but it didn’t work.   And those ’80s food and drink adverts!   The annoying cartoon girl singing “I want a Trio and I want one now”.  And “Um Bongo, Um Bongo, they drink it in the Congo”, which would cause the woke brigade to have apoplexy if it were made now.

It’s funny how things change.   As the programme pointed out, before the ’80s, buying ready made food was something that only better-off people could afford to do.   Now, it’s gone the other way, and there’s quite a bit of snobbery about buying convenience foods – which I do all the time, because I am a useless cook and I haven’t got the time to cook things from scratch anyway.   I don’t buy supermarket sandwiches, though.  The cost of supermarket sandwiches for a week, never mind a year, versus making your own, is seriously horrendous.

It’s very weird when programmes about the ’80s appear on TV, as if “my” decade were some sort of historical period.  Which obviously it isn’t.   But it was a fun bit of nostalgia!

Letters from Yellowstone by Diane Smith

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I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to.  It’s about a female medical student whose real interest is botany, and who is accepted to join a field study in Yellowstone National Park, in 1898, by a team who mistakenly think she’s a man.   Once they’ve got used to the idea that she’s a woman, her gender isn’t a big deal, and the story- told, as the title suggests, through letters from various characters to relatives and friends – focuses on the plantlife within the park – which sounds boring, but it actually isn’t – and the issues arising from the increase in development, especially railways, and irresponsible tourism there, and also the relationships between the various members of the team.   It’s quite a short book, but it’s a good read, about something a bit different.

Royal Kill List – Sky Showcase

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  It’s always good to see historical programmes on Sky Showcase, and they did very well to get Joseph Fiennes to be one of the narrators for this one.   Could we just lose the constant swearing, though?   It’s very tiresome.  Having said which, Charles II probably *did* swear a lot, if only to prove that he wasn’t a Puritan!

The theme of this series is the quest to hunt down the regicides, i.e. the people involved in the trial and execution of Charles I, who were excluded from the general pardon given at the time of the Restoration.  Those already dead, including Oliver Cromwell, were dug up and executed posthumously.   Several others were executed, and others were sentenced to life imprisonment.  Some were pardoned, and a few escaped.

It’s not talked about very much, possibly because it doesn’t fit with Charles II’s image as “the Merry Monarch” – lover of many women, father of many illegitimate children, frequent visitor to the theatre and to Newmarket, etc etc.   The fact that he was engaged in secret deals with the French gets overlooked, as well.  I suppose we’re all willing to forgive him anything because the Restoration got rid of the horrendous rule of the Cromwells.   Why Oliver Cromwell so often scores so highly in “greatest ever Englishmen” polls is beyond me.   The man banned Sunday football.  And mince pies.   And closed the theatres.  He also fined people for swearing, so everyone involved in historical programmes on Sky TV would have been very poor if they’d been around in his time.   No wonder that Charles II’s reign is fondly remembered!

But Charles really did go after the regicides, which I suppose is understandable, and this was an interesting take on things.  It also showed the future James II doing a lot of moaning at his brother, and getting very narky about the influence of the infamous Barbara Villiers.   The reign of Charles, like the reign of his grandfather, tends to be overlooked, sandwiched in between the Civil War/Interregnum and the Glorious Revolution.   Despite the fact that half the aristocratic families in the country are descended from his various offspring by his various mistresses!

This went a a bit OTT for a docu-drama, but it was always entertaining – and, unlike the irritating stuff that the BBC churn out these days, made no references to current political events and didn’t include a load of woke drivel.   It was certainly colourful!   But I do think that it was a bit hard on Charles.  It made him look very bloodthirsty, whereas his actions were really quite mild under the circumstances.   Sky’s history programmes often seem designed more to shock than to do anything else.  But, hey, at least they don’t lecture you like the BBC’s do …

The Stranger Times by C K McDonnell

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  This month’s “reading challenge” was an “urban fantasy” book.   This is not my genre at all; but at least I managed to find an appropriate book set locally.  In this, a werewolf shoves someone off the top of a building in Cheetham Hill.   There are three more books in the series, which suggests that a lot of people actually enjoy reading books in which werewolves shove people off buildings in Cheetham Hill.   Each to their own ….

The other three books in this series are called This Charming Man, Love Will Tear Us Apart and Relight My Fire, which suggests that The Stranger Times should be the title of a song by a local group; but I can’t think of one.  Google came up with Strange Times by The Chameleons, but that’s pretty obscure compared to the other three.  Hmm.

Anyway.   The main characters in this book work for a Sunday Sport type newspaper called “The Stranger Times”, which publishes stories along the lines of “Zombie Elvis ate my hamster”.  You get the idea.   Then a man is found dead in the Castlefield area, and a witness reports that she saw some kind of monster attacking him.   One of the reporters goes to investigate, and he’s then also found dead, after apparently throwing himself off the top of a building in Cheetham Hill.   However, his wi-fi enabled camera has somehow picked up some wi-fi, to which it must have already been connected.   What luck!   And it’s set to back up automatically.   So they can see pictures of him being attacked by a werewolf.   Sorry, a “were”.  Apparently it’s a “were”, not a werewolf.

It turns out that there are a whole load of mysterious people called “the Folk”, dating from a time when a Prince Alexander wanted to save the life of a Princess Isabella.  All sorts of other people randomly turn up in one chapter only.   And then the werewolf is shot by a policeman who finds a gun.

I shall now get back to my historical fiction!   I mean, if you enjoy “urban fantasy”, then I suppose this book is OK; but it’s really *not* my thing!

 

Distant Music by Lee Langley

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This is set mostly in Portugal but partly in London, starting in 1429 and ending in the present day.   It’s a series of romances, but shows how both personal relationships and affairs of state can be destroyed by religious intolerance and extremism.   Unfortunately, almost 600 years after the year in which the book opens, we don’t seem to have learnt very much in either of those respects.

Esperanca and Emmanuel meet in Madeira in 1429.  She’s a Catholic peasant girl, and he’s a Jewish boy working on board one of Henry the Navigator’s sailing ships.   The relationship can never last – and, over the centuries, we see the two of them as different characters, in different periods of Portuguese history, but always a Catholic girl and a Jewish boy whose love is doomed to end in tears.   In their final incarnation, in London, they do marry and have children, but even then it doesn’t work out.

And we see how Portugal, where the so-called Voyages of Discovery began (before anyone tells me that the Vikings sailed to North America, I know!), created a great empire from a relatively small country … but how her power declined, due in no small part to the expulsion of the Jews and Moors, who’d contributed so much to Portugal’s maritime expertise – Vasco da Gama’s astrolabe, astronomical tables and maritime charts were the work of an astronomer who was also a rabbi – and to the suffocation of learning and culture by the Inquisition.

It’s a strange book, the same story retold in several different centuries, but it’s very interesting.   And it’s very sad that, 600 years on,  we’re still battling the same problems.

Linnet; a romance by Grant Allen

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This was published in 1900 – it’s remarkably difficult to find books set in Tyrol, other than the obvious – and I wondered if it was going to be a flowery/Gothic romance, but it wasn’t.  In fact, the Anglo-Canadian author poked a bit of gentle fun at British and American tourists who went off to Tyrol expecting to find nothing but simple-faced, traditionally-dressed peasants who’d never ventured beyond their own villages, and had more than a few remarks to make about commercialisation (some things never change).   Plenty of romance, though, and some lovely descriptions of Tyrol, of London theatres, and of various other places visited by our characters.  It was a really good read.  Recommended!

Our two well-to-do British chaps, Will and Florian, went off on holiday to Tyrol, where they met a “cow girl” (as in girl who looks after cows in a picturesque Heidi-ish kind of way, not as in Oklahoma!), called Lina (short for Carolina), known as Linnet, who had a beautiful singing voice.   Will and Linnet fell in love; but it would not do, partly because of the class difference and partly because she, as a Catholic, had reservations about the idea of marrying a Protestant heretic.   Due to a series of coincidences which somehow managed not to seem as unlikely as they actually were, they kept meeting up again.  Will and Florian also met a rich American widow called Rue (short for Jerusha).  Rue liked Will, but Florian was after her for her money.

Linnet was bullied into marrying a “wirth” (which seems to mean a man who owned his own home and had some status in society) who wanted to promote her as a singer … and the author, who evidently had a major issue with the Catholic Church, blamed this all on the influence of the Church!   Will was very put out, and so was an admirer of Linnet’s from her home village.

The years went on, and Will became a famous poet and playwright, Rue became a fixture on the London social scene, and Florian didn’t appear to do very much.  Then, who should turn up in London but both Linnet, now a successful singer, and her old admirer from home, now some sort of music hall turn.   Linnet’s husband was cruel and violent, and everyone urged her to leave him, but she couldn’t, because She Was A Catholic.  The author really didn’t like the Catholic Church!   Eventually, she did run away to Will.  But she went back to her husband, because … you get the idea.  And he took her back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where there was no divorce because of, natch, the Catholic Church.   The author seemed to think that divorce was completely socially acceptable in London in 1900.  Er, it wasn’t.

Linnet’s old admirer then decided that he could persuade her to leave her husband by winning a lot of money at Monte Carlo.  Not quite following his logic, but never mind.   But he got in a fight and stabbed someone to death.  As you do.  Then he decided that, as he was going to hang for murder anyway, he might as well murder Linnet’s husband as well.  So he did.

This left Linnet and Will free to live happily ever after.  Once they’d got a Papal dispensation, of course, seeing as Will was Not A Catholic.  Poor old Rue, who’d been incredibly kind to Linnet, was left heartbroken.  And Florian was presumably left still searching for a rich wife, because Rue wasn’t interested in him.  The book then ended with a stern reminder that poor Linnet’s unhappiness was all due to the malign influence of the Catholic Church.

If you can ignore all the anti-Catholic stuff – honestly, it was nearly as bad as the Elsie books! – then this is a very good book.  I know I’ve been a bit sarky about it, but it was a lovely book really!

Mary & George – Sky Atlantic

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  Hmm, the jury’s out on this one.  On the one hand, well done to Sky Atlantic for making a drama series set during the reign of James I and VI, rather than yet another series about the Tudors.   Although we all know about the Gunpowder Plot and the Mayflower, this period, despite being incredibly important in British, Irish and American history, does rather tend to get overlooked as people jump from the defeat of the Spanish Armada to the build-up to the Civil War.   On the other hand, why does every historical drama on Sky (and Netflix) have to be so overblown?   Is it really necessary for every other word to be a swear word?  It reminds me of when I was 11, and everyone used to swear all the time to show how cool and grown up they were now that they were at secondary school.  We’d got over it by the time we were about 13!   And would someone please tell that bloke from Shameless that his character was from Warwickshire, and would therefore *not* have spoken with a broad northern accent?

Our main man is George Villiers, the future Duke of Buckingham, who for some strange reason appears in The Three Musketeers as a rather heroic sort who is in love with Anne of Austria, but is best known in the UK for being the “favourite” of King James and for then being assassinated after making himself incredibly unpopular, due to a series of foreign policy cock-ups, during the reign of Charles I.   The series is based on a book, which I haven’t read, but which rather bizarrely claims that George poisoned James.   The other prominent character is George’s mother Mary, who pushed him to prominence … although both her ambition and her influence are being rather exaggerated here.

It’d probably be better if Sky didn’t seem so determined to make everything “outrageous”, but it’s certainly not bad, and it’s always good to see a historical series set at a time which doesn’t receive enough attention.

 

Pretty Woman – Palace Theatre, Manchester

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OK, not bad.  I have to admit that, with Bryan Adams writing the music, I was expecting the songs to be better.  It’s a shame that some of the original songs weren’t used, because It Must Have Been Love, Wild Women Do and King of Wishful Thinking were all classics, whereas the songs in this … well, they weren’t exactly Summer of ’69 or Heaven.  But it’s entertaining enough.  And it sticks pretty closely to the story of the film … which I’ve got on DVD somewhere, although I’ve seen it umpteen times already.   “Big mistake” is one of my favourite lines from films.   It might only be two words, but they’re two very good words 🙂 .

The one bit which was obviously changed was the scene in which Edward’s friend hits Vivian.  In the musical, she knocks him to the ground.   Sign of the times?   There’s been quite a big of whingeing about how the plot hasn’t been “updated”.   Can we get over this “updating” thing, please?   I mean, what else would the whingers like to update?  Les Miserables?  The Sound of Music?   Oh, hang on, we actually know the answer to this.  It’s My Fair Lady, because the Leeds Playhouse is now warning theatregoers that they might find the “classism” traumatic.   FFS.  Give us a break!    But, OK, I do get that a man hitting a woman on stage might have been a bit much.

Speaking of Bryan Adams, why on earth has he decided to do “forest concerts” rather than arena concerts this year?!   One of them’s at Delamere Forest, and I did think about it for quite a while … but regretfully had to conclude that I was way too old and way too fat for “the ideal concert experience taking place in beautiful natural woodland arenas”.   Bryan, love, you are not 21 any more, and neither are we.   And neither’s Pretty Woman.  We were told that it was “the ’80s”, but the film was actually released in the summer of 1990 … that glorious summer of Wimbledon and Italia ’90.   How was that 34 years ago?   Well, it was.  So this is a bit of a nostalgia fest.   And there’s comedy, and there’s romance, and there’s music.   The songs are a bit of a let down, but it’s still worth seeing.  Give it a go.

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G B Edwards

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  I thought I’d really enjoy Toilers of the Sea, but not so much this one.  It turned out to be the other way round.   Very little actually happens in this long book – nobody fights with an octopus – but it’s really good!  Ebenezer is born in Guernsey in the late 19th century, and lives there all his life, with the book ending in the late 1960s.   He only leaves the island once, to go to a football match in Jersey.  During the First World War, he joins the Guernsey Militia, but isn’t posted outside the island.  The Occupation doesn’t really affect him that much: he continues growing tomatoes, and doing very nicely out of doing so.

 

Most of the book is gossip about his numerous relations, his friends and acquaintances, and yet we see Guernsey changing.  We see Guernsey French dying out, we see a level of industrialisation and urbanisation, and we see a growth in immigration and tourism.    But we still see the same families, the same names.  It’s strangely fascinating.   I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy it, but I loved it.

Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo

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  On the plus side, this was a novel about Guernsey which *wasn’t* about the Occupation.  It was published in 1866, so it would have been pretty hard for it to’ve been about the Occupation, admittedly.   It was set just after the Napoleonic Wars.   It sounded promising, but it wasn’t actually very interesting.   There were pages and pages about how people didn’t like steamships.   Then a steamship was wrecked, and a man went to retrieve the engine.   And had a fight with an octopus – shades of Jules Verne there, although this book actually preceded Twenty Thousands Leagues under the Sea by a few years.   The shipowner’s niece had promised to marry the man who retrieved the engine, but he turned her down because he knew that she really loved someone else.   Then he drowned.   Er, and that was it.   Wikipedia says that this is “drama of the highest calibre”.   I must have missed something!  But, hey, at least it was set in Guernsey and *not* during the Occupation!