Tag: TV Series

After the anger, the serenity

I wanted to write a bit about how my day was going, and then I got angry.  It was a slow fuse because most of what I was angry about I’d been reading this morning.

And, yes, it’s about political leaders, those in power and those in opposition, and how inept they are in a crisis.

Listening to our opposition leader, briefly before I turned him off to watch a rerun of McHale’s Navy, it annoyed me that he had no answers to offer, only criticism.

Unfortunately, he’s not alone in the world.

Political leaders tended to blame everyone else for problems of their own making, whether it was when they were once in power, which happens a lot, or once they’re in opposition, conveniently forgetting they, too, hoped that by ignoring the problem, it might go away.

Or that the long-suffering public will have forgotten.  That’s why we have pugnacious journalists who remember for us.

The incompetence of the people who are supposedly in charge beggars belief.

Oh, God, I’m back on my soapbox.

Forgive me.

I’ll shut up about it now.

I’m trying to imagine what it’s like in the cold because it’s the height of summer here.  It’s not helping my imagination,  so let’s try…

It’s cold today, about 14 degrees Celsius, when it’s usually 27 degrees Celsius.  The sun is letting us down, and I suppose I should be grateful that we are not suffering from an ice age.

To be honest, I was seriously considering lighting the log fire.  Instead, we have reverse cycle air-conditioning, which is probably, in the long run, cheaper.

Have you seen how much it costs to buy wood?

But…

That could have made it difficult to write.

Not to come up with inspiration, but literally write, because my office is colder than a chiller room.  My beer in storage out here is colder than it is in the fridge.  Well, that sounded better in my head than on paper, but you get what I mean.

So, instead of writing, I sat down and binge-watched Sweet Magnolias, a light-hearted series from Netflix, which is of the same vein as Chesapeake Shores, etc, and more the sort of program I’d expect from Hallmark.

It was good.  It hooked me.

Three sets of lives intertwined in a large town in middle America perhaps.  I heard Charleston mentioned so perhaps it was in South Carolina.

The good thing about it?  Not one mention of political stupidity.

Just good old-fashioned heartache and trials and tribulations of trying to live your life, bumping up against the obstacles life throws up at you.

The town was called Serenity, so there’s a pun in there somewhere.

Maybe I’ll get some writing done tomorrow.

Briarpatch: Another of those quirky USA network shows

I’m still reeling from the car bomb that exploded across the screen in the first few minutes, leaving not only two rather lowly tenants but the viewers shocked.

It’s an event that brings the older sister of the victim, both apparently a rent collector and a policewoman, of the bombing to a place called San Bonifacio, Texas, far from the suburbia she’s used to.

Two points to note, only small planes land at the airport, the town is deep in the heart of Texas, and it is very, very hot, even at night. How do we know this, there is always a sign showing the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. And was it the perpetual sweaty faces that didn’t give it away.

This is a slow burner, and has, for now, a recurrent theme of zoo animals on the loose, and, in particular, a tiger.

There is also a plate of uneaten food outside the room next to said sister’s room. It’s significance, in one respect, is at the end.

But, as I said, it’s slow to play out the nuances.

The sister is a senatorial investigator, though she doesn’t elaborate. This means she will get to kick some butt, and the first, a visiting senator who is also, well, a friend of sorts.

The Chief of Detectives and a Captain in charge of the investigation don’t seem to know very much, especially as to who had killed her, and the question has to be asked, does he really want to?

And no one can say how the dead sister came to be so wealthy, or where she really lived.

We meet a few old acquaintances, and there it sizzles in the late-night Texan heat till the end.

Yep, another running theme, someone getting blown up in a car bomb.

Let’s hope it doesn’t happen every week, or by the end of the series, San Bonifacio, Texas will become just another ghost town.

After the anger, the serenity

I wanted to write a bit about how my day was going, and then I got angry.  It was a slow fuse because most of what I was angry about I’d been reading this morning.

And, yes, it’s about COVID 19, it’s about political leaders, those in power and those in opposition.

Listening to our opposition leader, briefly before I turned him off to watch a rerun of McHale’s Navy, it annoyed me that he had no answers to offer, only criticism.

Unfortunately, he’s not alone in the world.

Political leaders tended to blame everyone else for a pandemic that they universally were not prepared for, was totally unexpected, and looking like it’s going to be a huge disaster, not just here but everywhere.

The point is, we’ve had movies that have shown us exactly what happens, and I cannot imagine that anyone would say, well, that’s just in someone’s imagination.  Not it’s not.  Yes, it’s very, very real, and someone, no everyone, better sit up and take notice.

We live in a sophisticated world, where the bugs, viruses, sicknesses and getting smarter, and more resistant to the drugs we have.  Everyone knows it was inevitable, but who the hell is doing something about it?

The incompetence of the people who are supposedly in charge beggars belief.

Oh, God, I’m back on my soapbox.

Forgive me.

I’ll shut up about it now.

I’m trying to imagine what it’s like in the cold, because it’s the height of summer here.  IT’s not helping my imagination,  so let’s try…

It’s cold today, about 14 degrees Celsius, when it’s usually 27 degrees Celsius.  The sun is letting us down, and I suppose I should be grateful that we are not suffering from an ice age.

To be honest, I was seriously considering lighting the log fire.  Instead, we have reverse cycle air-conditioning, which is probably, in the long run, cheaper.

Have you seen how much it costs to buy wood?

But…

That could have made it difficult to write.

Not to come up with inspiration, but literally write, because my office is colder than a chiller room.  My beer in storage out here is colder than it is in the fridge.  Well, that sounded better in my head than on paper, but you get what I mean.

So, instead of writing, I sat down and binge-watched Sweet Magnolias, a light-hearted series from Netflix, and is of the same vein as Chesapeake Shores, etc, and more the sort of program I’d expect from Hallmark.

It was good.  It hooked me.

Three sets of lives intertwined in a largish town in middle America perhaps.  I heard Charleston mentioned so perhaps it was in South Carolina.

The good thing about it?  Not one mention of COVID 19.

Just good old-fashioned heartache, and trials and tribulations of trying to live your life, bumping up against the obstacles life throws up at you.

The town was called Serenity, so there’s a pun in there somewhere.

Maybe I’ll get some writing done tomorrow.

After the anger, the serenity

I wanted to write a bit about how my day was going, and then I got angry.  It was a slow fuse because most of what I was angry about I’d been reading this morning.

And, yes, it’s about COVID 19, it’s about political leaders, those in power and those in opposition.

Listing to our opposition leader, briefly before I turned him off to watch a rerun of McHale’s Navy, it annoyed me that he had no answers to offer, only criticism.

Unfortunately, he’s not alone in the world.

Political leaders tended to blame everyone else for a pandemic that was not prepared for, totally unexpected and looking like it’s going to be a huge disaster, not just here but everywhere.

Oh, God, I’m back on my soapbox.

Forgive me.

I’ll shut up about it now.

 

It’s cold today, about 14 degrees Celsius, when it’s usually 27 degrees Celsius.  The sun is letting us down, and I suppose I should be grateful that we are not suffering from an ice age.

To be honest, I was seriously considering lighting the log fire.  Instead, we have reverse cycle air-conditioning, which is probably, in the long run, cheaper.

Have you seen how much it costs to buy wood?

But…

That could have made it difficult to write.

Not to come up with inspiration, but literally write, because my office is colder than a chiller room.  My beer in storage out here is colder than it is in the fridge.  Well, that sounded better in my head than on paper, but you get what I mean.

So, instead of writing, we sat down and binge-watched Sweet Magnolias, a light-hearted series from Netflix, and is of the same vein as Chesapeake Shores, etc, and more the sort of program I’d expect from Hallmark.

It was good.  It hooked me.

Three sets of lives intertwined in a largeish town in middle America perhaps.  I heard Charleston mentions so perhaps it was in South Carolina.

The good thing about it?  Not one mention of COVID 19.

Just good old-fashioned heartache, and trials and tribulations of trying to live your life, bumping up against the obstacles life throws up at you.

The town was called serenity, so there’s a pun in there somewhere.

It’s going to be warmer tomorrow so maybe I’ll get some writing done then.

Reality television, just why am I watching this stuff?

If I was ever in doubt that there was one medium that could produce a thousand storylines, it’s watching reality television.

It is truly horrible, and is somewhat akin to a ‘train wreck’.  Why, then, do we watch it?  And why on earth am I watching it?

Currently, where I live, there was a show called ‘Married at first sight’.  Going by the title, you can guess the premise, two people are matched by ‘science’ (or perhaps by the number and size of the tattoos they have) and meet for the first time at the altar.  They then live together, with and without external influences for a number of weeks before deciding if they want to continue after the show ends.

As it happens, the experts here have yet to get it right in a number of series (or, I think they may have succeeded on one occasion).

Whilst the fact it looks to be scripted, a fact the Producers vehemently deny, it is impossible to wrap your head around some of the antics, and especially the words used by the ‘participants’.  Decent people do not ‘act’ in the manner of some of these people, and more often than not, several of the ‘participants’ are labeled by the public as ‘actors’.

I guess, in most reality television, ratings can only be achieved by controversy.

Certainly, the Twitterverse goes off after an episode, championing the good and railing into the bad.  Each will, good or bad, get their fifteen minutes of fame.

And, is it not surprising we have learned one of the participants is going to write a ‘no holds barred’ account of her time in the show, but given the fact all participants have to sign an NDA,  I don’t whether it will ever hit the bookstores.

I was considering doing the same, from an armchair perspective.   But, sadly, when I thought about it, it would never sell.  No one could believe or even identify with the antics these people get up to.

It’s the reason why Big Brother disappeared.

But, never fear, there’s a new disaster, I mean series, on TV called Love Island.  I’ve seen the promos.  Perhaps I should leave it at that!

Briarpatch: Another of those quirky USA network shows

I’m still reeling from the car bomb that exploded across the screen in the first few minutes, leaving not only two rather lowly tenants but the viewers shocked.

It’s an event that brings the older sister of the victim, both apparently a rent collector and a policewoman, of the bombing.

Two points to note, only small planes land at the airport, the town is deep in the heart of Texas, and it is very, very hot, even at night. How do we know this, there is always a sign showing the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. As it the sweaty faces didn’t give it away.

This is a slow burner, and has, for now, a recurrent theme of zoo animals on the loose, and, in particular, a tiger.

There is also a plate of uneaten food outside the room next to said sister’s room. It’s significance, in one respect, is at the end.

But, as I said, it’s slow to play out the nuances.

The sister is a senatorial investigator, though she doesn’t elaborate. This means she will get to kick some butts, and the first, a visiting senator who is also, well, a friend of sorts.

The Chief of Detectives and a Captain in charge of the investigation don’t seem to know very much, especially as to who had killed her.

And no one can say how the dead sister came to be so wealthy, or where she really lived.

We meet a few old acquaintances, and there it sizzles in the late-night Texan heat till the end.

Yep, another running theme, someone getting blown up in a car bomb.

Let’s hope it doesn’t happen every week, or by the end of the series, San Bonifacio, Texas will become just another ghost town.

NANOWRIMO Day Thirty

It’s the end.

The last day, but not the last of the story.

Yes, I have almost managed to complete novel in 30 days, but with a few side trips, and changes to the plan on the run, it is mostly written.

The good news?

I’m going to stick with it until I’ve finished, so there will be a few more journal entries to cover the last chapters.

Had it been the length I had originally planned, it would be finished.

I managed to get through the back chapters last night after some distractions, and now its just two, possibly three more, and then one or two for the epilogue, which will be epic.

At the moment the story is about 73,000 words long and will finish closer to 80,000,

It’s been at times a trial, a lot of hard work, but it has been worthwhile. Without the push that NaNoWriMo gives us, it might never have happened.

It’s now three from three, books that will eventually be published.

Reality television, just why am I watching this stuff?

If I was ever in doubt that there was one medium that could produce a thousand storylines, it’s watching reality television.

It is truly horrible, and is somewhat akin to a ‘train wreck’.  Why, then, do we watch it?  And why on earth am I watching it?

Currently, where I live, there was a show called ‘Married at first sight’.  Going by the title, you can guess the premise, two people are matched by ‘science’ and meet for the first time at the altar.  They then live together, with and without external influences for a number of weeks before deciding if they want to continue after the show ends.

As it happens, the experts here have yet to get it right in a number of series (or, I think they may have succeeded on one occasion).

Whilst the fact it looks to be scripted, a fact the Producers vehemently deny, it is impossible to wrap your head around some of the antics, and especially the words used by the ‘participants’.  Decent people do not ‘act’ in the manner of some of these people, and more often than not, several of the ‘participants’ are labeled by the public as ‘actors’.

I guess, in most reality television, ratings can only be achieved by controversy.

Certainly, the Twitterverse goes off after an episode, championing the good and railing into the bad.  Each will, good or bad, get their fifteen minutes of fame.

And, is it not surprising we have learned one of the participants is going to write a ‘no holds barred’ account of her time in the show, but given the fact all participants have to sign an NDA,  I don’t whether it will ever hit the bookstores.

I was considering doing the same, from an armchair perspective.   But, sadly, when I thought about it, it would never sell.  No one could believe or even identify with the antics these people get up to.

It’s the reason why Big Brother disappeared.

But, never fear, there’s a new disaster, I mean series, on TV called Love Island.  I’ve seen the promos.  Perhaps I should leave it at that!

Reality Television: outrageous plots abound

If I was ever in doubt that there was one medium that could produce a thousand storylines, it’s watching reality television.

It is truly horrible, and is somewhat akin to a ‘train wreck’.

Why, then, do we watch it?

Where I live, among a few with dubious titles, we have a show called ‘Married at first sight’.  Going by the title, you can guess the premise, two people are matched by ‘science’ and meet for the first time at the altar.  They then live together, with and without external influences for a number of weeks before deciding if they want to continue after the show ends.

As it happens, the experts here have yet to get it right in a number of series (or, I think they may have succeeded on one occasion).

Whilst the fact it looks to be scripted, a fact the Producers vehemently deny, it is impossible to wrap your head around some of the antics, and especially the words used by the ‘participants’.  Decent people do not ‘act’ in the manner of some of these people, and more often than not, several of the ‘participants’ are labelled by the public as ‘actors’.

I guess, in most reality television, ratings can only be achieved by controversy.

Certainly, the Twitterverse goes off after an episode, championing the good and railing into the bad.  Each will, good or bad, get their fifteen minutes of fame.

And, is it not surprising we have learned one of the participants is going to write a ‘no holds barred’ account of her time in the show.  That, I suspect, will be canned very quickly by the NDA that’s signed by all participants, so we’ll never get to know the truth.

I was considering doing the same, from an armchair perspective.  Damn, missed my opportunity!

There’s others, like Love Island, The Bachelor, and The Bachelorette.  Where they find the participants is anyone’s guess, but there couldn’t be such people in reality, could there?

For a change, I thought I’d watch some TV

It’s always a testing time because just about everywhere it’s not really a rating season so therefore the shows are rather terrible.

So, to counterbalance the rubbish we have here at the moment, I managed to find a few shows that are on TV overseas.

I’m always interested in any offering from the UK.  The BBC and ITV make very interesting shows, sometimes quite offbeat, sometimes steeped in history.

The latest from the BBC is a show called ‘The Capture’.

It raises some very interesting questions, like

How far has big brother technology gone in London with a CCTV camera just about on every corner

Can we believe what we see on a television screen that is supposedly streaming live pictures

Are the characters being portrayed believably?

Basically, it’s about a man who is seen on CCTV attacking a woman.  When he’s shown the video, he acknowledges that the man and woman on the tape, are him and the victim, but then goes on to deny he did what the tape displays, the assault.

Forensic evidence tends to disprove that he was the perpetrator, except there are anomalies.

Do we believe what we see, just about everyone in this does.  Such is the power of visual messages.  The question might also be, was it him that did it?  The thing is, he says he didn’t, and the only clear shot of him was at the start when no crime had been committed, and after, his image is not as clear as at the start.

What the hell went on?

This is a piece about the value of CCTV evidence, and it’s admissibility.  That same perpetrator got off on a murder charge simply because the video and sound feed was not aligned, ie, there is a fault in the evidence.

We’re also confronted with a police detective thrown into a high profile case, and who needs a resounding wein to further her career.  She is being fast-tracked, and not everyone is happy about it.  I’m not sure if I like the way she’s being portrayed, or whether that is a problem with the casting.

I only say that because I’m a Keely Hawes fan, and I know she could pull this role off in her sleep.

We also have MI5 somewhere in the mix, pulling all sorts of dubious strings.  Those words, National Interest’ get bandied around a lot in shows like this.

And like any good show, it’s got me guessing if he is guilty or not.

But this show is in stark contrast to a little light entertainment know as “The Reef” and American based show that is shot at the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia.

It’s near where we live, and I find rather than taking notice of the throwaway plotline and characters, I’m watching it for the locations.

To be honest, I was surprised it was not shot in Hawaii or somewhere like that.

Still, I can think of worse ways to spend the on average 42 minutes of light-hearted entertainment.

This is in direct contrast to a show called ‘Pennyworth’, about the rise to fame for the Batman’s Bruce Wayne’s eventual butler.

A SAS hard-nut, it’s quite an interesting portrayal, but sometimes drifts off track on peripheral issues like tonight, where we dwelled upon the possibility that the devil is alive and well somewhere in London, and in particular, Thomas Wayne.

There was a light bulb moment when I finally got the impression that Thomas Wayne and Martha Kane might just end up as Thomas and Martha Wayne patents of Bruce.

I know, a bit slow on the uptake.

And they dwelled, or should I say it was Martha that dwelled, on three missing days, in which it might be that she met the devil of a different sort, and ending up stark naked on Hampstead Heath.  The problem is, she cant remember.

I also looked at Pandora, a sort of space opera, but I’m still trying to wrap my head around portals.

The lesson learned for the night, nothing is what it seems, and everyone has an ulterior motive.  When they’re not trying to take over the world.

Maybe tomorrow night might throw up something a little more realistic.