Sunday, 10 August 2008
Sunday night is...
A bunch of doctors. Avoid them. Keep your bones in order.
This is, of course, one the great sequences from the best television drama serial by the best writer for television, Dennis Potter. The Singing Detective, with Michael Gambon as Philip Marlowe (not that one.) It's over the top, but not by much, not by much at all. Any thoughts in the brainbox, old chap?
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5 comments:
I remember being shocked the first time I had surgery by that ‘helpless, pathetic condition of total dependency of a kind normally associated with infancy’. The second time wasn't much better. Both times I was in a foreign country of whose language I spoke only smattering, adding to the general sense of regression.
The doctor checking his watch at 6:05 is good.
God I love that. I bought someone the DVD of The Singing Detective for XMas last year (actually, one of my own kids) and then couldn't bear to part with it. It's MINE I tell you...
I remember the odd scenes from this show. I was about 19 and the most memorable scene was the boy seeing his mother (Alison Steadman) having sex in the woods with Raymond (Patrick Malahide)his father's friend, i am assuming whilst the dad was at the war.
I haven't watched much Potter and didn't see the Singing Detective. It must have been because of the hoo-ha in the press back when Mary Whitehouse was still operating in the name of Decency. Now this stuff is not even on the radar.
Though i was too young and caught up in seeking to enact the transgressions Whitehouse spent her life demanding should be kept off the telly, and considered her a quaint relic of a bygone age; today i would say she had a point.
The gradual erosion of sexually explicit visual (art?) and language since Quentin Tarantino and Mark Ravenhill kicked ff the In Yer Face brand with his smash play Shopping and F.cking, and which made transgressive locales and characters the new cardboard cutout s moving round the drawing room of our telly-life realities -- translates into a current mainstream of New Generation (who have never had it so good) desensitized, Grand Theft Auto, fmk, video-wars and a plethora of incremental envelopes pushed further and further until...
arghh...
My favourites in this golden age of genuine Risk taking telly, was Bleasdale's Blackstuff, as it was the first time real Liverpool people had been presented as they were and helped give voice to normal human lives of the mass of us, showing the rest of the UK, Liverpool wasn't all loony lefties like Derek Hatton, now a very successful businessman living in surburbia, who was probably never in the real cause to have sold out any part of himself when he dropped his act.
But now, the telly seems to have become a massive electronic sedative, and i barely watch anything, and as i see so little, detached i just think like Whitehouse did when i thought she was an old fart.
TV has legitimised cruely over the last 15 years. We have people like Ramsey, who basically goes to places and insults people, for millions, and treated as though a god. Simon Cowel, all this utter foolishness, and now arghh...
sorry to moan.
But the tv now, i think soon there will be no one left who knows what it is like pre-telly...
sorry to rant, have a listen to this one
Lindsey Lohan sining Dylan's Romona
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nHwILs8bdo
Relax with Lohan
this one should (hopefully) click there.
Poor kid.
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