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In my time on earth, I said too much, but not nearly, not nearly enough
Unless I lost track of one in the phone tree, I have just spent my afternoon calling five different doctor's offices, garnished with one bookstore and one library, and I would still like a refund on selected and considerable tracts of physical existence. In other news, while I have always had an inevitable affection for the mild-mannered character acting of Donald Meek, I have not seen him anywhere near recently enough to explain his appearance in last night's dreams, especially not the one with the used book store crumbling literally on the edge of some awful revelation. Over the last three days, I mainlined a rewatch of the first two seasons of Turn: Washington's Spies (2014–17) and just before bed had started re-reading Paul French's Midnight in Peking (2011), which in the years since I originally read and much later wrote about it has garnered at least one nonfiction rebuttal and more contextually interested explorations, because nothing engages the human instinct for rabbit holes like a cold murder case. No offense to Donald Meek, I'm not sure where he came in.
P.S. Stop the presses, Benny Safdie and Dwayne Johnson will be adapting Daniel Pinkwater's Lizard Music (1976)? They had better get the Surrealism.
P.S. Stop the presses, Benny Safdie and Dwayne Johnson will be adapting Daniel Pinkwater's Lizard Music (1976)? They had better get the Surrealism.
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May it last longer than you expect!
No, no, Year of the Sex Olympics was made in 1968, so it's the other way around. Also, I haven't seen anything else of his so I may have been unfair to him.
Sorry, for some reason I thought it was late Nigel Kneale! I have seen the 1954 Nineteen Eighty-Four because it starred Peter Cushing, the 1959 BBC Quatermass and the Pit rather than its much later film version because it kept turning up in discussions of indispensable weird fiction, The Abominable Snowman (1957) which he adapted from his own lost teleplay also starring Peter Cushing, and a couple of films I always forget he co-wrote, of which H.M.S. Defiant (1962) was memorable in its own right. And just earlier this year the pilot of Kinvig (1981), not recommended except for Colin Jeavons. I have no ability at this time to collate his handling of female characters except Jill would be miles ahead of any other I can recall.
The play winds up with the producers setting a murderer loose on the island to liven things up, who is very much in line with a particularly tiresome 60s/70s trope of the era of a sex serial killer or inevitable devolved brute where the cavemen always beat the astronauts & funnily enough the women almost never devolve into violence themselves - but obv the point here is the lengths they will go to for the viewers, which is indeed horribly prescient.
I know your resources need to be carefully parceled, but I would love to hear you sometime read this production against Vengeance on Varos.
That does seem quite appropriate really. 7000 years ago, maybe?
It is at least the sort of thing they would try and make available if it did! EVen aside from more Nigel Kneale hauntings, obviously I need more of James Maxwell in the absolutely inevitable terrible fake hair. But maybe with a cool 18th C coat!
One can but hope!
Seriously, I would also love to see it; I read the script years ago. Did you listen to the 2018 BBC Radio 4 version? I missed it completely at the time and then it never came back around while I still had access to BBC Sounds.
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I've only seen YotSO and Stone Tape, so I can comment even less. And, ha, I have had Kinvig very much not recommended to me before! Although Colin Jeavons is an understable draw.
I know your resources need to be carefully parceled, but I would love to hear you sometime read this production against Vengeance on Varos.
I would need to watch YotSO again, which no doubt I will do sometime. It's also difficult, because clearly VoV is in many ways DW's edition of YotSO, which is DW's wont, although it was also in relation to the video nasty scares of the 80s. VoV is very much a SF future colony where things have developed in that way because of its start as a prison colony; YotSO is a jump forward from now to a logical extreme of development & still watching the people taking the final steps during the course of the play. Plus, also, as I said, there's a lot about language and loss of verbal communication in favour of visual.
Btw, I expect I would have linked you this at the time, but one of the 60th anniversary Classic Who Tales of the TARDIS pieces was Six and Peri remembering Varos, bookending a specially edited edition of it. The Six and Peri bits are here if you didn't already see it. And if you can face them again, so soon after The Twin Dilemma, lol.
Did you listen to the 2018 BBC Radio 4 version? I missed it completely at the time and then it never came back around while I still had access to BBC Sounds.
No, or not yet anyway. Sometimes I like to listen to plays my faves have been in so I can do the imagining and sometimes I just can't face Mark Gatiss when I wanted James Maxwell. (I also hope eternally for returned things. I can't watch DW restorations because I am saving myself for the deeply improbable returned videotapes!!)
One day, no doubt, I will!
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I can strongly recommend the Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is impressively still on YouTube fifteen years after I wrote about it, and Quatermass and the Pit, which has been less surprisingly taken down and which now looks to me like his first foray into the kind of weird science folk horror that would produce both The Road and The Stone Tape. H.M.S. Defiant has the slight problem of visibly cribbing from Billy Budd for one of its plots, but since the other is about the Spithead and Nore mutinies, I really enjoyed it. The Abominable Snowman has pacing problems likely to do with its transfer from teleplay to film, but the ending is great and so is Peter Cushing.
Although Colin Jeavons is an understable draw.
He's wonderful. I would have totally watched a show about his encyclopedic ufologist.
I would need to watch YotSO again, which no doubt I will do sometime. It's also difficult, because clearly VoV is in many ways DW's edition of YotSO, which is DW's wont, although it was also in relation to the video nasty scares of the 80s. VoV is very much a SF future colony where things have developed in that way because of its start as a prison colony; YotSO is a jump forward from now to a logical extreme of development & still watching the people taking the final steps during the course of the play. Plus, also, as I said, there's a lot about language and loss of verbal communication in favour of visual.
I can wait patiently. Differences are as illuminating as likenesses.
Sometimes I like to listen to plays my faves have been in so I can do the imagining and sometimes I just can't face Mark Gatiss when I wanted James Maxwell. (I also hope eternally for returned things. I can't watch DW restorations because I am saving myself for the deeply improbable returned videotapes!!)
Understandable! I haven't watched the 1948 film of The Calendar because I'm holding out for the rediscovery of the 1930 version with Herbert Marshall and Edna Best. It is ridiculous that not yet century-old media should disappear at all.
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What's even more impressive is that the BBC have it up on the iPlayer & have done for a while. I keep thinking I should watch it every time I see it there because I am so impressed and curious, but the thing is I kicked off my second year A-Level History (the one where I did totalitarian states) with reading the book and then watching the 1984 Ninety-eighty Four with John Hurt, Suzanna Hamilton & John Cusack and I was so disturbed by the film version and John Cusack in particular that it turns out I'm still not ready to do it again, or at least, not until a very good day. Even though I DO want to see Peter Cushing in a miraculously available BBC iPlayer version. One of these days before it goes maybe!
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Perfect! I hope you feel like watching it before it evaporates again.
(I believe I saw the 1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four in high school when for some godforsaken reason the summer reading was Bradbury, Orwell, and Huxley, and my mother worked to amend the experience by showing me both that film and the 1966 Fahrenheit 451, which I did enjoy as movies and also I have never rewatched that Nineteen Eighty-Four again. I didn't realize until just now that Cyril Cusack was in both of them! I had to check he wasn't in a film of Brave New World, too.)