So another week where I'm drastically behind on actually posting these things on the day I promise myself that I will. It's good to see that I'm just as ridiculously inept at posting for this blog as I am for my other one, because if there's anything that the blog-reading public like, it's consistency. I'm up in Scotland as I write this. So, on the iPlayer this week:
TOLSTOY. Now, I've never read War and Peace, I dislike pacificsm and my Russian history isn't that great. So I don't actually know a great deal about Tolstoy, but my mother recommended that I watch 'The Last Station' last year (a film about his final days) and I didn't get the chance to see it, which annoyed me. So the BBC showed a two-part Imagine about his life. And then The Last Staion.
I recall not being allowed to go and see The Last Station at the cinema because I tried to get into an over-50's only showing, and not realising this, I was essentially told to bugger off. But that's a different and mildly annoying story, as I've said.
But now things are different. Now I am all learned up on my Tolstoy, still without ever having read one of his books. I shall try to give War And Peace a go, but it'll probably have to be when I'm locked up without any distractions, like an internet connection.
Basically, my brother suggested that War and Peace can be summed up in 'People find that life is rubbish, then they discover God and all is well'.
However, given its context with the Napoleonic wars, I think I'll have to check it out at some point, if only to say that I have in fact read it.
Tolstoy's life seemed to be a completely at-odds one, with this dosucmentary and movie trying to prove just that. He said one thing and lived another in many ways, he was a keen hypocrite (just like myself) and is regarded as one of the most controversial figures in Russian history, which sounds like an almost enviable position. He both loved and loathed his wife, he adored and disowned his children, he couldn't stop writing and he hated every word he put to paper.
In the end, he said that the only thing that is important to humans is love, for only love can bring us out of the darkness that is the human condition.
In Tolstoyan fashion, I completely agree with every word he says and know that I will never attempt to practice this. We are what we are, us flawed humans.
And writers.
SILK.
Tuned into Silk a few weeks ago when it started and I was almost instantly put off by the overwhelming sense of female empowerment, slow story plotting and difficult to understand referances. However, after the first fifteen minutes I found myself actually riveted by the story, no matter how slow it was.
By the second episode I was pretty damn keen to get to watching it, I began to feel that I hadn't been this enthusiastic about a BBC show since Luther, and that's frickin' saying something. The setting grew on me, a sort of serene observer's world where the actual reality of crime doesn't matter. This is the QC's world.
As for the characters, Maxine Peake's Martha Costello is obviously the glue that holds the show together, and I felt it appropriate that she was left out of the main subplot, but at the same time I felt that the pregnancy story was out of place (simply adding to the undesireable female empowerment angle). Rupert Penry-Jones' Clive Reader was great, I felt quite warm to his character, who is basically the high-priced barrister equivelent of the snivelling gutter-rat. Add in the pupils, Tom Hughes and Natalie Dormer (beyond hot), and you've got a pretty well rounded cast going on. The only thing I didn't really like was Billy's ridiculous pink tie. But then I've never liked ties.
That's not to say that the first series of this promising show didn't have problems. It took an age to get anywhere, why did Mark Draper appear for two different crimes? There's enough bureacracy in the Criminal Court world to simply have it as a related event. The character of Gary Rush was also criminally underused (pun intended), since he was the only thing in the show which actually had a dangerous edge to it. The resolution of the show could have used some serious work, as well. Naturally we get a decision on Martha's Silk application, but we didn't get to know which student survived the process or anything beyond 'sit down and shut up' for the secondary story.
So yes, I eagerly await the second season, if there is one, and hope that Peter Moffat has taken this onboard. Y'know, as if someone of his stature actually reads my blog.
Mext time I shall talk about: GARROW'S LAW.
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