Category Archives: television

4 Classic US Mini Series from the Seventies and Eighties

Posted on by Steve Higgins

The late seventies and early eighties were the heyday of the TV ‘mini series’. What is a mini series I hear you asking? Well, they were short TV series with only a few episodes. You rarely hear the name ‘mini series’ these days but they are still about. I mentioned some time ago about the series ‘Until I Kill You’ about a girl, Delia Dahmer, who unwittingly invited her lover to move in with her, not knowing that he was actually a serial killer. I started off this post as usual writing from memory, firmly convinced that the mini series was an eighties phenomenon. So, imagine my surprise to find that the first series on my list was broadcast back in 1974. OK, hasty change of this week’s blog post title from Mini series of the Eighties to Seventies and Eighties and here we go.

QB VII

Image via listal.com

QB VII was one of those huge television mini series that really felt like a major event when it was broadcast. It was based on Leon Uris’s bestselling novel and came out in 1974, with Ben Gazzara and a young Anthony Hopkins in the starring roles. The story kicks off with a libel case brought by a very respected Polish-born doctor who insists he’s been wrongly accused of being a Nazi collaborator. Anthony Hopkins plays the doctor and Ben Gazzara plays author Abraham Cady who feels it’s time to write about the holocaust. Adam Kelno, the doctor played by Hopkins, is only mentioned in a short segment of Cady’s book but as he has already been cleared of any war crimes by an earlier court, he feels free to sue the author.

The story starts in the courtroom, in Queen’s Bench VII but as things go on, the story keeps slipping back into flashbacks of the Second World War and that’s where the real core of the story is to be found. Anthony Hopkins, still fairly early in his career at that point, is especially good, as is Ben Gazzara.

Ben Gazzara was a graduate of the Actors’ Studio, the New York acting school that taught ‘the method’ to actors like Brando, Dean and Montgomery Clift, although at the time I only knew him from the TV series Run For Your Life about a terminally ill man trying to get the best out of the last years of his life.

Anthony Hopkins went on to star in many classic films and is perhaps most well known for his portrayal of Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs.

QB VII had a big, serious, slightly grand feel that so many 1970s TV series lacked, like here was a  really important story to tell. It was the kind of show you’d settle in to watch properly, knowing you were in for some real epic TV and out of all the mini series here, I think this was my favourite.

Rich Man, Poor Man

Based on Irwin Shaw’s bestselling novel, it followed the very different fortunes of the Jordache brothers, Rudy and Tom, played by Peter Strauss and Nick Nolte. Set against the backdrop of post-war America, it had a bit of everything: ambition, money, family feuds, romance, betrayal and more than its fair share of trouble. Rudy becomes a wealthy, ambitious businessman and politician, while Tom is a rebellious, tough-minded drifter who pursues a career in boxing. Their rivalry, romances, family troubles and contrasting fortunes unfold over several decades, making it as much a story about family as it is about wealth, ambition and class.

Nick Nolte played Tom; rough around the edges, unpredictable and forever getting himself into scrapes while Peter Strauss’s Rudy took a rather more respectable route to success. What made the series so addictive was that it wasn’t simply about getting rich; it was about two brothers taking completely different paths through life and discovering, rather painfully, that money doesn’t necessarily buy happiness. It was classic 1970s television at its most gloriously melodramatic and millions of viewers were hooked. Fifty years later, I can still remember the sad ending which I won’t give away here.

The series was broadcast in nine parts in 1976.

Captains and the Kings

Captains and the Kings is another wonderfully grand example of the television mini series at its most ambitious. Based on Taylor Caldwell’s novel, this 1976 series follows the fortunes of the Armagh family, Irish immigrants who arrive in America with very little and gradually build a huge fortune and political influence. Perry King, Richard Jordan and Jane Seymour were among the impressive cast and the story has all the ingredients you could want from a sprawling family saga; poverty, ambition, romance, betrayal, politics and plenty of money. Like Rich Man, Poor Man, it’s really a story about the American dream, although here the journey from humble beginnings to wealth and power comes with a darker side.

I’m tempted to think the story was based on the Kennedy family or at least inspired by them. The parallels are pretty striking. The Armaghs are Irish immigrants who arrive in America with very little, build a huge fortune and then use their wealth to enter politics. The family eventually produces a charismatic young politician with presidential ambitions. That certainly sounds familiar. There are also elements involving political influence, wealth, family loyalty and the pursuit of the White House that inevitably bring the Kennedys to mind.

However, Caldwell’s story is much darker and more conspiratorial than the Kennedy saga.

I remember reading the book which was a very enjoyable read. The book opens with an introduction telling us about a meeting of very important people who get together to decide the political direction the USA is about to take. The members of the group are not politicians but a group of very rich men and the author mentioned they were a real group of people and they clearly inspired the story the author is about to tell.

Richard Jordan plays Rory Armagh, the ambitious Irish immigrant who claws his way from poverty to wealth and political power. The performance won him a Golden Globe and made him a familiar face to TV audiences.

He appeared in many films including Raise the Titanic and the sci-fi classic Logan’s Run. His career was cut short when he developed a brain tumour and he died aged only 39 in 1993.

Kane and Abel

Kane and Abel was another of those sprawling television dramas that seemed to arrive with the promise of several evenings of proper escapism. Based on Jeffrey Archer’s bestselling novel, this 1985 mini series starred Peter Strauss and Sam Neill as two men born on opposite sides of the world and into completely different circumstances, whose lives become increasingly intertwined through ambition, wealth and rivalry. Strauss plays William Kane, the privileged American banker, while Neill is Abel Rosnovski, a Polish immigrant who rises from poverty to build his own business empire. The two were born on the same day and their lives take dramatically different paths but an early encounter sets them on a lifelong collision course. As both men build powerful business empires, their rivalry becomes increasingly bitter, driven by ambition, pride, revenge and a determination to outdo the other.

It’s big, glossy and unabashedly melodramatic story, with fortunes made and lost, family feuds, business battles and enough twists and turns to keep you coming back for the next episode.

There is something wonderfully nostalgic about these old mini series; they knew how to tell a big story and more importantly, how to make you wait until the following week to find out what happened next. In today’s digital age, viewers would probably binge watch the whole series in one go.

Those are my four US mini series. There are probably more but they were the ones which have remained firmly stuck in my memory. All were adaptations of successful novels and perhaps their secret is that they were too long to be made into a film but not long enough for further seasons.

Which one is ripe for a re run on one of today’s many digital TV channels I wonder?

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Snips, Additions and (Directors’) Cuts

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I really do hate it when the TV people decide to cut out a scene from a film, especially one of my favourite films. On the other hand, it’s always interesting to see a director’s cut of a film when previously cut scenes have been added back. I think that explains the premise of this week’s post but stay with me and hopefully it should soon become clear.

I’m going to kick off with the film Young Winston. I’m a great fan of Winston Churchill and I’m not amused about current plans to remove him from UK banknotes, but getting back to the film, Young Winston is a wonderful dramatisation of Churchill’s own book, My Early Life. I read the book many years ago and first saw this film at the cinema where I greatly enjoyed it and I remember it coming to television some years later.

The film details Winston’s early life and we see him at school and later in the army and the rather cool relationship he had with his parents is gradually revealed. The film finishes with a poignant dream sequence which I remember reading somewhere was based on something Churchill either said or wrote. In the dream, a much older Winston meets his father, Randolph but Randolph is not the unwell man of his later years but restored to full health. He asks Winston about great events and Churchill answers telling of the two World Wars. ‘Did Joe Chamberlain ever become Prime Minister?’ asks Randolph. ‘No,’ answers Winston, ‘but one of his sons did, Neville’.

Winston mentions that he has resigned his commission in the army. Randolph looks about at the many paintings and asks Winston if this is what he does. Winston answers that painting occupies much of his time. Randolph thinks for a moment and then tells Winston to ‘do the best you can’ and we see the sleeping Churchill smile at the thought.

I’ve always liked this final sequence but when I bought my VHS copy back in the 1980s the scene was omitted. Likewise, every time in recent years, since I first watched the film on television, this scene has always been removed. I’d love to know why. Perhaps the producers thought the film too long or perhaps preferred the new ending in which Winston talks briefly about his marriage and living ‘happily ever after’. After a search on the internet, I came across a post which claimed that Carl Foreman, who wrote and produced the film, found that US audiences occasioned so little reaction to the scene that he promptly had it cut. What reaction was he expecting to see I wonder?

Another film I’ve always rather enjoyed is Notting Hill. It was written by Richard Curtis and stars Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. Grant plays William Thacker who owns and runs a bookshop in Notting Hill. Enter film star Anna Scott played by Julia Roberts who picks up some books in the bookshop. Not long after this she collides with Thacker in the street and he spills coffee all over her. They return to Thacker’s home only a few doors away where she cleans up and later Anna invites William to her hotel and consequently a romance ensues.

Thacker shares his home with Spike, a slightly oddball Welshman. In fact, Thacker describes Spike to a hotel receptionist by asking him to envisage the stupidest man he has ever met and then double it.

Anyway, I was watching this film not long ago. It was late evening and the film began at 9pm I think which of course is watershed time and we are all aware of things like bad language which of course is something which can be broadcast after 9.

In a really funny sequence Spike asks William to choose which T-shirt he should wear on a date and models about three shirts. William vetos them all due to rude or sexist phrases. He chooses a last one which says ‘LOVE’ on the front. Happy, Spike turns away but as he leaves we see written on the back of the t-shirt  the phrase ‘fancy a f#ck?’ Now I’ve always found that particular sequence rather funny but this time it was cut out. Why? It was after 9 (well, I think it was anyway) and although rude, it kills me every time. Do TV channels cut down films to fit their available time slots? If I was a director and that was my film I would be very upset indeed if some unknown TV editor had randomly chopped up my film just to fit it in a particular broadcast slot.

Let’s go the other way with this next example. I must have first seen Aliens on TV. I’ve always thought that it was as good, if not better than the Ridley Scott’s original Alien. In Aliens, astronaut Ripley played by Sigourney Weaver is adrift in a space lifeboat. I do love the opening of the film: The music gradually fades in as we come across a lifeboat drifting through space. Yes, the lifeboat holds astronaut Ripley, sleeping soundly in suspended animation after her adventures in the previous movie, Alien.

Later we see Ripley facing a committee where it is revealed that the spacecraft Nostromo, which Ripley self-destructed, caused a loss of over 64 million adjusted dollars. Another committee member advises that LV426, the planet where the Nostromo landed was ‘a rock’ with no indigenous life forms. I can feel Ripley’s frustration when she says, “Did IQ levels just drop while I was away?” She tries to tell the group about a derelict alien vessel containing alien eggs but the meeting ends and Ripley’s story is not believed.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that Ripley joins a motley crew of space commandos on a mission to help the colonists of LV426 with whom all contact has been lost. On the planet the soldiers gain entry to the colonist’s base camp and we meet one of the survivors, a young girl nicknamed Newt, to which Ripley goes to extraordinary lengths to rescue from the aliens.

Why is she so keen to rescue Newt? Well, that is explained in a later director’s cut of the film in which it is revealed that Ripley’s daughter has died of old age. I know that sounds confusing but remember, Ripley has been in suspended animation for 75 years. She is still saddened by the news of her daughter which she has only just been told about and it is this loss that spurs her on to help Newt.

Now for me, this director’s cut is a much better version of the film and in fact, every time I have seen Aliens on TV recently, it is this new version which seems to be the accepted ‘cut’.

Here’s one final example. Spartacus was made in 1960. It was produced by and starred Kirk Douglas and was directed by Stanley Kubrick, whom Douglas brought in to direct after becoming disenchanted with the original director, Anthony Mann. The film is the story of a revolution, or at least a near revolution in ancient Rome. Spartacus, played by Kirk Douglas, is a slave who starts off a rebellion in a gladiator camp; the rebellion gets bigger and bigger until it threatens the entire fabric of ancient Rome. Laurence Olivier played the part of the Roman general and politician Marcus Licinius Crassus who uses the rebellion to further his own dreams of dictatorship. Peter Ustinov plays the gladiator school owner and Charles Laughton plays Roman senator Gracchus. Ustinov, Olivier, and Laughton are a wonderful trio, their performances superb, so much so that other actors who share the screen with them seem to pale in comparison.
Tony Curtis plays another slave who calls out famously; ‘I am Spartacus’ towards the end of the film, heralding a chorus of similar calls.

The film was restored in 1991 and 37 minutes of cuts were restored to the film including a scene where Anthony Hopkins had to dub the sound for a sequence involving Laurence Olivier who had died two years previously.

Which film cuts do you love, or hate?

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5 Crime Fighting Duos

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Crime Fighting Duos? What’s that about you might be thinking? Well I thought I’d write about TV investigative couples so let’s go back to the 1960s and start with one of my favourite TV pairings, Steed and Mrs Peel.

Steed and Emma

Steed and Emma featured in The Avengers, no, not the Marvel comic book heroes but the TV sci-fi/espionage series. John Steed and Emma Peel were two secret agents working for an unnamed agency in a very quirky version of 1960s England. The series was first broadcast in 1961 and starred Patrick Macnee and Ian Hendry. Macnee played the debonair John Steed and when Ian Hendry left after the first series, Steed became the focus of the show with his new assistant Cathy Gale played by Honor Blackman.

Honor Blackman became a TV star with her portrayal of Cathy Gale as a leather wearing judo expert. She and Macnee even recorded a hit single together called ‘Kinky Boots’ which became a minor hit.

When Honor left to become a Bond girl in the film Goldfinger the TV production had something of a makeover. The series was sold to the US TV network ABC and moved from videotape to 35mm film. A new character was added, Mrs Emma Peel. The producers chose actress Elizabeth Shepherd to play the part. Shepherd shot the pilot film episode and part of the next one, but the producers decided to drop her, feeling she was not right for the role. With a two-million-dollar deal with the US network ABC hanging in the balance, they began searching for a new Emma Peel and chose unknown actress Diana Rigg.

Diana Rigg was perfect for the new crime fighter/agent Mrs Peel and wowed TV audiences with her intelligence, her judo and karate skills, her avant-garde fashion sense and her witty banter with Steed.

Diana Rigg became famous as Mrs Peel and played the part until 1967 when, like Honor Blackman before her, she left the to become a Bond girl in ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’. Patrick Macnee continued to play the bowler hatted John Steed and Linda Thorson was recruited to star as Steed’s partner. The series was rebooted in the 1970s as The New Avengers starring Macnee with Joanna Lumley and Gareth Hunt as his new colleagues.

Steed and Mrs Peel are surely the most fondly remembered characters in the series. My favourite episode is one called The House That Jack Built which was about a mad inventor who is fired from a company run by Mrs Peel’s father. He builds an electronically operated house in which to trap and kill Mrs Peel. She eventually escapes just as Steed arrives to save her!

A film version was made with Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman in 1998 but it was a resounding flop.

Napoleon and Illya

Robert Vaughn and David McCallum played two secret agents working for UNCLE (the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement) who try to foil the evil organisation THRUSH. (What that stood for I’ve never known.) Vaughn starred as Napoleon Solo and McCallum played Russian born Illya Kuryakin. UNCLE headquarters was in New York, accessed through a fake dry-cleaning store. Inside UNCLE HQ was a very hi-tech environment with steel corridors and sliding doors.

Head of UNCLE was Mr Waverly played by Leo G Carroll who every week gave his two agents their assignments and off they went into the world, armed with an array of secret gadgets like explosives hidden in their shoes and a communicator built into a pen. ‘Open channel D’ was something regular viewers like me would hear every week as well as the wonderful theme music by Jerry Goldsmith.

David McCallum had a big fan following especially with the ladies but Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo was my favourite.

Starsky and Hutch

I used to watch this show many years ago and to be honest, I liked it but I was never a firm fan. Starsky and Hutch were two California plain clothes cops played by Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul. They drove around Bay City, a fictional California town in a Ford Gran Torino in bright red with a white vector flash down the sides. Looking up the series on Wikipedia, I see that Paul Glaser actually hated the car, pointing out that a bright red car with a distinctive paint job was not the best idea for a pair of undercover cops. Oh well, the car was pretty popular with viewers and especially with a certain type of late seventies boy racers. (You know the type, young guys who painted or stuck white flashes on the sides of their souped up old bangers and tried to burn you off at traffic lights).

To sum up then, Starsky and Hutch is about two somewhat scruffy wisecracking cops, tearing around the city in a bright red car like they’ve got somewhere very important to be, even if half the time they’re just chasing some dodgy lead or getting into trouble. The whole vibe is full on ’70s; big collars and big flairs but then again, it was made in the mid 70s so you can’t get more 70s than that.

Starsky and Hutch was remade as a not particularly serious big screen film in 2004 starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. Glaser and Soul made a brief appearance at the end of the picture but I can’t help thinking the film might have worked out better if things were the other way round and Stiller and Wilson were the ones who only appeared at the end.

Randall and Hopkirk

Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) is one of those offbeat late 60s TV shows where the premise sounds completely ridiculous and yet somehow works perfectly: two private detectives, but one is a ghost. Marty Hopkirk gets run over and killed in episode one but returns as a ghost to help Jeff Randall solve his murder. After that, Marty decides to stay on and help out with other cases too. On one side you’ve got a fairly standard detective story unfolding, the next minute poor Jeff Randall is trying to explain clues that only he can see because his dead partner Marty Hopkirk is hovering nearby in an unmistakable white suit but invisible to anyone except Jeff. It’s quirky, a bit spooky, very tongue in cheek and exactly the sort of inventive television that the late sixties seemed to produce with effortless confidence.

In later years the show was rebooted with comedy duo Reeves and Mortimer. Personally, I’ve always found the 60s version starring Mike Pratt and Kenneth Cope with Annette Andre as Marty’s widow to be far superior.

Mulder and Scully

Mulder and Scully are the two FBI agents at the centre of the X Files, secret FBI files profiling unexplained and unsolved mysteries. Fox Mulder is convinced of the existence of the paranormal while Dana Scully is a practical scientist assigned to take a technical and analytic view of Mulder’s work.

The two argue and debate their way through various bizarre cases. One minute it’s some weird creature lurking in the woods, the next it’s shadowy government plots and secret labs. Somehow, despite all the paranoia and eerie moments, there’s a lot of dry humour and a really strong partnership between them that makes the whole thing strangely cosy to watch, even when the lights are off and the theme music is giving you goosebumps.

In my absolute favourite episode, the pair are monitoring a secret installation in area 51 and are confronted by government officers when a flying saucer flies overhead. When it passes over, it’s energy or radiation morphs Mulder’s mind into the mind of one of the area 51 staff and his mind into Mulder’s body. The other guy, the area 51 guy is quite happy at this incredible transformation. He and his wife are not getting on and suddenly finding himself in the body of a single man is clearly ok with him. Mulder on the other hand has to convince Scully that this incredible incident has actually happened.

The X Files was first shown in the late 1990’s and ran until 2002 spanning 9 seasons. The series returned in 2016 and then again in 2018. Plans are afoot, or so I have read, for another revival with new actors.

Remember, the truth is out there.

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Netflix and Me

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’m 69 years old and I come from a generation (the so-called baby boomers generation) that expects certain things. One of those is that for the most part, television is free. I say for the most part because of course one has to buy an actual TV set, set up an aerial and pay for a TV licence. Apart from those minor things TV is comparatively free.

Tv programmes of course cost money, quite a lot of money in fact. Back in the 1990s when I was fresh from a video production course and hoping to actually get a job in the TV industry (I never did) I was told an hour of television costs £100,000. What it costs nowadays is anyone’s guess but then again, it’s so easy to make a TV show in 2026. One of my favourite programmes is Canal Boat Diaries, an entirely self-shot show which has graduated from YouTube onto the BBC and can be seen quite regularly on the U-Yesterday channel. Does that mean an hour of TV is worth more or less than that 90’s figure of £100,000?

There was once a time when I could settle back and watch all the current F1 races live for free but sadly, those pesky money-making F1 managers combined forces with their like-minded TV producers and decided they could make a little extra dosh by setting up the Sky F1 Channel and charging people to watch live F1. No thanks. I’ll carry on putting up with the Channel Four highlights until I either get bored with F1 or win the lottery.

Perhaps it’s then a little mean of me to sit back and expect free television. Times move on and instead of the two or even three channels I remember from my youth, today we have hundreds of channels. Even so, there are many evenings when I scroll through my channel listings only to find nothing worth watching.

That brings me to Netflix. Not so long ago when Liz renewed her Sky package, some negotiation was involved and to sweeten the deal, Sky threw in a Netflix subscription. I have to say I haven’t looked at Netflix much but I always assumed it was just an ordinary channel like BBC1 for instance, in that there was a schedule and certain programmes were broadcast at certain times. Not so, Netflix is more like YouTube, you can watch programmes on demand but what to watch, that is the question.

Some time ago Liz wanted to watch The Crown which I can’t say I was really interested in at first but after a while I realised what a really excellent production it is. The actors are really good especially the portrayals of the Queen, Princess Margaret and Winston Churchill.

The younger Queen was played by Claire Foy and Princess Margaret by Vanessa Kirkby and Margaret’s situation as the Queen’s sister was explored in a few episodes. Her love affair with Peter Townsend was doomed because Townsend was a divorcee. The Queen was advised to ask Margaret to wait until she was 25 and then she could marry. When the time came the Queen’s advisors brought up more issues and then ultimately the two lovers had to separate which of course didn’t help the sisterly relationship between the Queen and Margaret.

Before watching The Crown, I had no idea of the background of Prince Phillip. I always assumed he was English and a member of some family which was eligible to marry into the royals. In actual fact he was Greek and aged only eighteen months old he and his family were exiled from their homeland which left him with a lifetime fear of revolution and anything that might threaten the royal family.

His and Charles’ school days at Gordonstoun was really well done especially the interplay and flashbacks between Philip’s and his son Charles’ time there. Philip apparently loved it but Charles hated it.

A real stand out story was the one about the retirement of Churchill which was cleverly linked to the famous, or infamous painting of a portrait of Churchill by Graham Sutherland. Churchill played by John Lithgow, was coming up to his 80th birthday and various people wanted him to retire but he was adamant that he would carry on. Churchill had various sittings for the painting and the two, both of whom were artists, tried to examine the other through their works. Churchill was hugely disappointed at the result and came to see at last, according to The Crown anyway, that the time had come for him to retire and hand over the leadership of the country to Anthony Eden. Everything was beautifully done.

The other thing about The Crown was, even the quick cutaway and establishing shots of cars driving up to the Palace or through London in the 50s and 60s, were expertly done. I’m sure there was an element of special effects involved especially in scenes of crowds in London but even so, everything looked so good.

Another episode dramatised was the broadcast made by the Duke of Windsor when he abdicated. The Duke flips in and out of various episodes. The Queen Mother detested him as he had forced the mantle of kingship onto her husband when he was ill-prepared for it. Prince Charles however, did strike up a sort of friendship with the Duke. I should imagine that a former King and a future one would have much in common although how much was fiction and how much was accurate, I don’t know.

I thoroughly enjoyed this splendid series which I’m sure everyone has watched ages ago but for me, a latecomer to Netflix, is very new.

We watched The Crown last year while staying in the Loire valley even though we don’t normally watch much TV on holiday. This year in Lanzarote, we spent many an evening watching Emily in Paris, another Netflix show. I’d found it by searching on the internet for good TV shows to watch on Netflix and Emily came up so we thought we’d give it a go.

The series was created by producer Darren Star who was also the producer of Sex and the City and in some ways Emily in Paris is very similar to the early Sex and the City seasons. Emily was produced for the Paramount TV channel but made its way over to Netflix. It’s a light comedy show about a young girl, Emily, who is asked to move from Chicago to work in the Paris office of a marketing firm. The comedy comes about from highlighting the cultural differences between the USA and France and although the last season, season 5 was a little tame, the previous 4 seasons were excellent.

At the heart of the show is a love story. Emily falls for a young chef who has an apartment on the floor below her Paris flat. He falls for her too but he is engaged to another girl who befriends Emily. Later Emily gets involved with an British banker but then he falls for Emily’s other friend and then the chef’s girlfriend has a lesbian affair. See what I mean about Sex and the City?

According to Wikipedia, the show did get some criticism for stereotyping the French in general and Parisians in particular but for me I thought the depiction of the French was really quite good. Even though I speak only a little French, one of the things that is difficult for an Englishman in France is the speed at which the French speak. It’s not too bad in the Loire but especially noticeable in subtitled French films and TV shows.

What else have I watched on Netflix? Well, I did watch the film version of The Thursday Murder Club as I mentioned in another post a few weeks ago. Other than that, I haven’t watched much else. Netflix is a little overwhelming for me, I much prefer my TV in the old-fashioned way, regular broadcast times like they have on the traditional terrestrial channels.

Still, if Netflix is the TV of the future, I suppose I’d better get used to it!

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6 Christmas Films

Posted on by Steve Higgins

By the time you are reading this, Christmas and New Year will all be over. We’ll be fed up of turkey and sprouts and thinking about taking down the Christmas decorations. So before Christmas becomes a distant memory here’s a quick look at 6 Christmas films that were all shown, with perhaps just one exception, over the last few weeks.

It’s a Wonderful Life

It’s always surprised me that this film was apparently a box office flop but gained success in later life through numerous television showings. The film is a Christmas fantasy drama directed by Frank Capra and it’s about George Bailey, a small town business manager played by James Stewart who has ambitions to travel the world but due to various circumstances, never leaves the small town of Bedford Falls.

When George is first about to leave Bedford Falls he is shocked to find that his father has died. His father was the manager of the Bailey Building and Loan company and the company is about to be swallowed up by the town’s richest man, Mr Potter. George gives an impassioned speech to the assembled boardroom and they decide to keep the company going only if George stays on as manager. George of course stays on and all his dreams of travel seem to melt away. He supports his younger brother through college and employs his eccentric uncle Billy but on Christmas Eve 1945 everything goes wrong and George contemplates suicide. His guardian Angel arrives to help and decides to let George see what his life would be like if he had never been born.

The film tells the story in flashback as Clarence, the trainee angel, is shown what has happened to George and the secret of this film is, I think, the fact that despite the fantasy premise of the story everyone plays their parts as if they were in a serious drama. The result is that the drama and emotion of the situation rise to the surface and we are left with a vibrant and dramatic piece of cinema. It never fails to bring a tear to my eye.

A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol was published over a hundred and seventy years ago. It’s a wonderful story by that master storyteller Charles Dickens. Within six days the entire print run of 6,000 copies had sold out and within six weeks theatre adaptations had hit London’s theatres. In many ways the book is Dickens’ defining vision of a Victorian Christmas.

There are a whole lot of film and TV versions of a Christmas Carol, 73 in all according to a BBC news item I saw a while ago but the definitive version is the one with Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge. That film was released in 1951 and called Scrooge after the main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, who was played by that comedy master Alastair Sim. Various other familiar names appear in the cast such as Michael Hodern, Kathleen Harrison, George Cole, Jack Warner and Mervyn Johns.

Scrooge did well at the box office in the UK but gained popularity in later life through television.

One thing that I find rather annoying is that some years ago I picked up Scrooge on DVD only to find that it was a very poor quality version. Recently the film was remastered and the version shown on the BBC in 2024 had an image quality much superior to my copy. I think it might be time to clear that old DVD out and buy a new remastered version. Then again, films are shown and reshown on TV so many times, do I really need a DVD?

Home Alone

Home Alone is one of those films that has slipped into the TV cultural canon whether you personally asked for it or not, and yes, I get why; it’s engineered to delight kids while adults half-watch with a glass of something festive. Macaulay Culkin’s cherubic menace is undeniably effective, and the slapstick booby-trap ballet has a cartoonish precision that is likeable. Still, once the sugar rush fades, it’s hard not to notice how thin the whole thing is; a single joke stretched to feature length, padded out with shrieking villains and a weirdly sentimental shrug at the end. It’s not that Home Alone is bad, it’s just a film you accept as part of the holiday furniture, even if you’d never choose to sit on it for too long.

Die Hard

Around this time of year there are so many posts on social media about whether or not Die Hard is really a Christmas film. Well, we always like a good action film on the box at Christmas, don’t we?

Die Hard is set in the Nakatomi Tower in Los Angeles which is taken over by terrorists during the staff Christmas party. Bruce Willis plays New York cop John McClane who sorts out the bad guys with a smile on his face most of the time, unlike in the later follow up films where his face wears nothing but a grimace.

There’s a lot of shooting and blowing up stuff but I’ve always liked it. Like they say, it’s not Christmas until Hans Gruber falls off the Nakatomi tower!

Love Actually

I know some people love it, but this film has just never really done it for me.

The story follows the lives of eight different couples in the weeks leading up to Christmas, all slightly intertwined in a very cheesy way.

It’s got a great cast and I do actually like one or two of the stories but Hugh Grant as the Prime Minister? No, I’m just not having it. And as for the story about the guy who is best man at the wedding and actually secretly fancies the bride, well that’s just plain weird. The centrepiece of the film is probably the moment when Emma Thompson opens a Christmas present from hubby Alan Rickman in the sure knowledge that it’s a necklace that she knows he has bought but then finds its only a CD which means of course that he has bought the necklace for someone else. It’s a sad moment but to be honest, what happened after that I don’t really know, I was probably flicking through my emails towards the end of the film.

Overall, I’d give Love Actually 2 out of 5 stars and I know it’s a firm favourite with some people, just not me.

White Christmas

Time to finish off with what must surely be the ultimate Christmas film, at least it certainly is for me. I’m not sure how youngsters would view it these days but for me it just brings back memories of childhood Christmases in Manchester. I can just see myself now, lying on the rug in front of the fire. My father reading the newspaper but still watching the film and crooning along with Bing Crosby. My mother making tea and my brother and Bob, our dog, both wanting my place by the fire. Eventually I’d get up to drink tea or eat Christmas cake and my brother would nip into my spot and then Bob would usually squeeze in between him and the fire. Bob would adopt a thoughtful look and gaze into the coals until my mother would tell him off and drag him away. When she would go back to the kitchen Bob would slip back into his spot and resume station.

To get back to the film, Bing Crosby is joined by Danny Kaye and the two are theatrical producers and performers and they take off to Vermont following two girls that they have become romantically attached to. Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Allen are the girls in question and together they find that the hotel where they are staying is run by Danny and Bing’s wartime general. They decide to put on a show to help his ailing business and they all sing some wonderful songs, all penned by Irving Berlin.

Talking of Berlin. My dad always used to listen to White Christmas and inform me and my brother that the writer was that famous songwriter Ivan Berlin! No dad, it’s Irving, we would all say but he wouldn’t believe us. Did he know it was really Irving or was he just having fun?

What is your favourite Christmas film?

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The Richard Burton Centenary

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This week I’ve noticed quite a few items about Richard Burton on the BBC iPlayer. I wasn’t sure why at first but it turns out that this year, 2025, is the centenary of Burton’s birth. He was born Richard Jenkins on November 10th 1925.

Why did he change his name to Burton? Well one answer on the iPlayer was given in a wonderful film called Mr Burton. Harry Lawtey plays the young Burton and Toby Jones plays his mentor, Philip Burton. Burton came from a poor mining family in Pontrhydyfen in Wales. He had thoughts of becoming a teacher but things were not working in his favour. His mother died when he was young and his father was an alcoholic. Richard went to live with his sister and her husband but financial circumstances forced him to leave school and take up a job in the local Co-op. Enter teacher Philip Burton who urged Richard to rejoin school after promising to help with his finances.

The return to school caused some resentment from his brother in law and so with the consent of his father, Richard became Philip Burton’s legal ward and just aged eighteen, changed his surname on 26 November 1943 to Burton by means of a deed poll. Richard joined the Air Cadets and was able, with Burton’s help, to study at Oxford after applying for a six month RAF scholarship.

Philip Burton made Richard work on his voice and gradually the wonderful speaking voice we are familiar with today began to appear.

Mr Burton was an excellent film and full marks go to Harry Lawtey for his portrayal. In the early part of the film I did wonder how this youthful boy with the very Welsh accent could progress to the young confident actor but Harry’s performance and the way his own voice echoes that of the real Richard Burton was outstanding.

Another programme on iPlayer was a made for TV film called Burton and Taylor and it’s about, as if you hadn’t already guessed, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

Back in 1983 when this film is set, Burton and Taylor were probably the most famous celebrity couple in the world. The only other couple of a similar status that I can think of are Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, a couple from a completely different era. Let me see who else comes to mind; Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Posh and Becks. Hardly in the same class are they?

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor met on the set of the film Cleopatra in 1961, a movie that went down in history as one of the most expensive ever made. Taylor didn’t want to make the picture so decided to ask for a ridiculous amount of money, confident that 20th Century Fox would never pay it. However, pay it they did and the troubled movie went into production.

The Burton/Taylor TV film focusses on the later years of the pair when they had been married and divorced twice and for some reason decided to star together in a stage revival of Noël Coward’s witty play, Private Lives.

In the film, Taylor is played by Helena Bonham-Carter and Burton by Dominic West. West doesn’t really look much like Burton but captures his voice and persona well. Bonham-Carter as Liz Taylor does look surprisingly like the original and together they make a good reproduction of the famous couple.

The writer seems to believe, and whether it is true or not I don’t claim to know, that Liz Taylor engineered the theatre production of Private Lives as a way of bringing her and Burton back together again. As I mentioned earlier, they had already been married and divorced twice and the movie revealed that Liz clearly still had feelings towards Burton. On the first day of rehearsals she is surprised that Burton will not be lunching with her but spending time with his new girlfriend, Sally. Burton in turn is shocked that on the first read through it is clear that Taylor has not previously read the play. Burton of course knows it off by heart. He is the consummate professional actor and Taylor the consummate professional movie star. During the run when Taylor calls in sick, the production is halted rather than carry on with an understudy, as it becomes clear from the public reaction that the audience are not interested in the play without superstar Liz.

Burton and Taylor were clearly in love but love must have been difficult in the face of their superstar status, just as it was for Fairbanks and Pickford. I can imagine Burton’s upbringing in a mining community and Taylor, having been a star since childhood, were not personalities that could bend much for the other.

The film is interesting, enjoyable and gives the viewer a fascinating peek into the private lives of these two superstars of the past.

The Richard Burton Diaries edited by Chris Williams

Some years ago I read Melvyn Bragg’s biography of Richard Burton and that book was based partly on these diaries which have now been published and are available to everyone.

There is a lot I like about this book and a lot that I don’t like. I tend to prefer paperbacks but I bought this one from the internet and it’s a big heavy hardback and as I took the book to France to read on holiday it became a little more battered every day.

Moving on to the text and I see a lot of the big events in Burton’s life are missing as sometimes he stops writing for days and even months at a time. We don’t hear about the making of Cleopatra and his meeting and affair with Elizabeth Taylor but he does mention some of those events in retrospect.

The book starts with his schoolboy diaries which are rather like mine, brief and to the point. Later, the main diary starts in 1965 when Burton begins to write in more detail. He tells us of his immense love for Taylor and how he has given up womanising to be faithful to her but sometimes I get the feeling he isn’t being totally honest, after all Liz has free access to his diary and she frequently jots down her own comments too. Burton was rumoured to have had an affair with Genevieve Bujold during the filming of Anne of a Thousand Days but of course, gives no mention of that in his journal.

He does talk a lot about food and having lunch in places like Paris and Rome. He enjoys having money and delights in spending it on jewels for Liz, a new private jet plane and a yacht which he thinks might actually save him money as he can stay on the yacht rather than use hotels. Even so, he continues to use hotels. At one point he considers buying a barge, modernising it and touring the canals of France.

He doesn’t seem to enjoy his acting and in fact rather looks down on it as a profession, although unlike an actor like Brando who had similar thoughts, he did take pride in what he did, learning his part and his lines whereas Brando couldn’t even be bothered to learn the script for the film of Superman despite his million dollar fee.

Surprisingly there is also quite a lot of professional jealousy in the text, for instance he gives Robert Shaw a bit of a slagging off for his performance as Henry VIII in A Man for all Seasons which I thought was rather good, better or at least the equal of Burton’s Henry VIII in Anne of a Thousand Days.

A screengrab from the BBC iPlayer

Burton drinks a lot and frequently argues with Liz, sometimes he is banished to the spare bedroom and usually he regrets his drunken words and wonders why he did what he did or said what he said.

He was though a man who loved reading, devouring anything from the classics to detective novels. He even had ambitions of being a writer himself. His entries are peppered with quotations from authors and poets and of course Shakespeare.

I was really looking forward to reading this book but after the first few pages I thought it a little uninteresting. As the narrative moved from 1968 into 1970, Burton seemed to be putting more effort into his journalling and consequently it became more enjoyable to read. Later large gaps appear in the diaries and he doesn’t appear to have written anything about his breakup with Liz Taylor. The entries become less frequent and to be honest, I ended up skipping quite a few pages.

Verdict: A book that promised a lot but failed to deliver.

Still with the BBC iPlayer, there’s a great documentary about Burton titled Richard Burton: Wild Genius which is rather good and perhaps unlike the above post gives a good overall look at the great actor’s life. Burton died on 5 August 1984 at his home in Céligny, Switzerland, aged only 58. He was buried at the Old Cemetery in Céligny and his widow Sally placed a copy of Dylan Thomas’ collected poems in his coffin.

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F1, The Crown and Watching the Box on Holiday

Posted on by Steve Higgins

My original title for this post was Watching the Box in France. That however seemed to give the impression that this post was about French TV which it isn’t. Liz and I don’t normally watch much television on holiday, we are far more interested in swimming, going out for meals and barbecuing. On this holiday however, the weather was a little mixed and on quite a few evenings we settled down in the lounge of our rented house and decided to pop the TV on.

Just to backtrack a little, we rented this same house back in May and usually, the only time I put the TV on is to watch F1 racing. May is the usual month in the calendar for the Monaco grand prix, one of my favourite races of the year. There is actually plenty of talk recently about cancelling the race as nowadays, the F1 cars are faster and much bigger and so there is very little room left to overtake.

Back in the 1960s, cars were much smaller, in fact in those days there were three cars on the front row of the starting grid, the cars lining up in 3-2-3 formation. Fast forward to the present day and F1 cars and their aerodynamic fins and wings have spread out hoping to grab that extra bit of air in order to generate more downforce and push themselves down to the track so they can corner ever faster.

Many people have called for the race to be cancelled as bigger cars combined with a narrow track makes it virtually impossible to overtake which reduces the racing to just a procession of high speed cars and of course whoever is on pole position is pretty much guaranteed a win. Push that to one side and I must tell you that I happen to love the Monaco grand prix, I love the track, I love the exotic names of the corners: Saint Devote, Mirabeau and Rascasse. I love the run down to the Casino Square, the dash into the tunnel and the following tight chicane, the prize giving, the boats in the harbour, the glamour; in short, I love it all.

Back in May then I was disappointed to find that the Skybox in this lovely house did not seem to be working. I switched it on and off, rebooted it, checked the connections but all to no avail. I was forced to watch the 8 minute highlights on YouTube and quite frankly, I was gutted. OK back in England our own trusty Skybox had recorded the race but by then I knew the outcome, I knew the winners and the excitement had all been lost.

Anyway, we came here once again in September and I was looking forward to watching the Italian Grand Prix, another of my favourite races. The TV worked ok but the skybox was no more, lying abandoned and disconnected on one side. A new TV set up had been sorted with the TV connected to the internet. I quickly ascertained that in France, F1 was available on Canal+. Yes, Canal was there, ok so far. I clicked on the channel only to find that a subscription was required. I would have to pay and subscribe to Canal to watch the racing!

My inner tightwad kicked in and declined to open up my wallet so once again I had to make do with the 8 mins of YouTube highlights. Oh well, we didn’t come on holiday to watch TV but even so, I was disappointed.

The other thing we noticed on one rainy evening was that Netflix was available. Now just recently when Liz renewed her Sky package, some negotiation was involved and to sweeten the deal, Sky threw in a Netflix subscription. I have to say I haven’t looked at Netflix much but I always assumed it was just an ordinary channel like BBC1 for instance, in that there was a schedule and certain programmes were broadcast at certain times. Not so, Netflix is more like YouTube, you can watch programmes on demand but what to watch, that is the question.

Liz wanted to watch The Crown which I can’t say I was really interested in at first but after a while I realised what a really excellent production it is. The actors are really good especially the portrayals of the Queen, Princess Margaret and Winston Churchill.

The younger Queen was played by Claire Foy and Princess Margaret by Vanessa Kirkby and Margaret’s situation as the Queen’s sister was explored in a few episodes. Her love affair with Peter Townsend was doomed because Townsend was a divorcee. The Queen was advised to ask Margaret to wait until she was 25 and then she could marry. When the time came the Queen’s advisors brought up more issues and then ultimately the two lovers had to separate which of course didn’t help the sisterly relationship between the Queen and Margaret. Margaret actually could have married Townsend but that would have meant giving up her royal status so it seems to me that perhaps being a royal meant more to her than being with Peter Townsend.

Prince Philip courtesy creative commons

Before watching The Crown I had no idea of the background of Prince Philip. I always assumed he was English and a member of some family which was eligible to marry into the royals. In actual fact he was Greek and aged only eighteen months old he and his family were exiled from their homeland which left him with a lifetime fear of revolution and anything that might threaten the royal family.

His and Charles’ school days at Gordonstoun were really well done especially the interplay and flashbacks between Philip’s and his son Charles’ time there. Philip apparently loved it but Charles hated it.

A real stand out story was the one about the retirement of Churchill which was cleverly linked to the famous, or infamous painting of a portrait of Churchill by Graham Sutherland. Churchill, played by John Lithgow, was coming up to his 80th birthday and various people wanted him to retire but he was adamant that he would carry on. Churchill had various sittings for the painting with the artist and Churchill himself was an amateur painter of some merit. The two, one a professional and the other an amateur, tried to examine each other through their works. Churchill was hugely disappointed with the result which portrayed him as a very old man and came to see at last, according to The Crown anyway, that the time had come for him to retire and hand over the leadership of the country to Anthony Eden. Everything was beautifully done.

The other thing about The Crown was even the quick cutaway and establishing shots of cars driving up to the Palace or through London in the 50s and 60s, were expertly done. I’m sure there was an element of special effects involved especially in scenes of crowds in London but even so, everything looked so good.

An interesting episode concerned Lord Altrincham who was concerned enough to put forward a little criticism of her Majesty when she seemed to brand the workers at a car factory ‘ordinary’ instead of praising their work. He said himself that he didn’t blame the Queen but those who were writing her speeches and he added; “The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth is that of a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect and a recent candidate for Confirmation.”

In the show, Lord Altrincham is invited to the palace to meet the Queen’s secretary, however when he arrives, he finds himself face to face with the Queen.

I doubt that ever actually happened but if it did then full marks to the Queen for meeting criticism head on. Many of the Lord’s recommendations, such as making a Christmas TV broadcast, were accepted by the monarch and surely must have helped her feel not as remote from her people as she had up till then. Another broadcast which was dramatised was the one made by the Duke of Windsor when he abdicated. The Duke flips in and out of the story. The Queen Mother detested him as he had forced the mantle of kingship onto her husband when he was ill-prepared for it. Prince Charles however, did strike up a sort of friendship with the Duke. I should imagine that a former King and a future one would have much in common although how much was fiction and how much was accurate, I don’t know. Charles was played by Josh O’Connor extremely well and the Duke in his later incarnation by Derek Jacobi.

Our last evenings in our gite at Parçay-les-Pins were made all the more enjoyable by this splendid series which I’m sure everyone has watched ages ago but for me, a latecomer to Netflix, is very new.

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10 Classic TV Ads

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Don’t you just hate TV adverts? I certainly do. There are those times when a TV advert comes in useful I suppose. Perhaps when you are watching a good film and you need to make a cup of tea or pop to the toilet. These days in the hi tech world of TV, most people are able to pause live TV and do those things anyway. I wouldn’t mind if the TV adverts were actually worth watching but these days of course they aren’t. Anyway, here are 6 classic TV ads of yesteryear that I think are rather good. Here we go . .

1.

This is an advert for Strongbow cider featuring Johnny Vaughn, who you might remember as fronting the Channel 4 breakfast show many years ago, and Jerry Hall. Jerry was an American model and was once upon a time involved with Bryan Ferry and then Mick Jagger. It’s a fun advert that has always made me laugh.

2.

A particular favourite of mine is the Ford Puma advert from 1997 featuring Steve McQueen. McQueen of course passed away from cancer in 1969 so how did he feature in the ad? Well, filmmakers shot footage of the Ford Puma in modern San Francisco and digitally inserted McQueen into the driving seat using footage from his 1968 film Bullitt. The result was a stylish short TV ad recreating a scene from the original feature film.

3.

An old TV advert I always used to enjoy involved an old guy trying to trace a copy of a secondhand book; Fly Fishing by J R Hartley. He eventually finds a copy and the book seller asks his name. “J R Hartley” he replies. What were they advertising? Yellow Pages! Strangely enough some bright spark – actually author Michael Russell – produced a spoof book; Fly Fishing by J R Hartley which became a best seller and prompted two additional sequels.

4.

Probably the funniest classic TV ads are the ones with Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins which are promotions for Cinzano. They actually made 10 TV commercials between 1978 and 1983 which all ended with a glass of Cinzano getting spilled all over Joan.

Rossiter had a successful theatre career but is best remembered for his portrayal of the seedy landlord Rigsby in TV’s Rising Damp, still shown regularly on UK TV. Joan Collins has had a long career in TV and films including a spell in the USA starring in the TV series Dynasty. This year, 2025, she is due to portray Wallis Simpson in a new film production. Leonard Rossiter died in 1984 aged 57.

5.

A great advertising series were those for Boddingtons beer. I used to love a pint of ‘Boddies’ as we used to call it but then the brewery was taken over by another company (Whitbread, I think) and the Boddingtons bitter they produced was really not like the original Boddingtons at all. Anyway, back in the 1990s a series of adverts were produced starring Melanie Sykes speaking in a broad Manchester accent.

6.

My particular favourite Boddingtons ad was this one that starts off in Venice but ends up somewhere in Manchester.

7.

Bolton comedian Peter Kaye featured in a series of ads for John Smiths beer. Can’t say I was that keen, then or now, on John Smiths beer but the adverts were good.

8.

A great favourite for many people were the puppet ‘aliens’ used in an advert for Smash which was a powdered version of mashed potatoes. You just added liquid I presume but personally, I’m happy peeling and boiling my potatoes to make mash just as I have always done.

9.

In 2018 Elton John featured in a Christmas commercial for top end store John Lewis. According to Wikipedia there is a regular Christmas ad for the store every year. I’ve clearly missed the others but I always thought the Elton John one was pretty special.

10.

I’m going to finish with this one advertising another beer, this time Heineken. Bryan Pringle plays a sort of latter day Professor Higgins trying to teach a very well spoken lady, the exotically named Sylvestra le Touzel, to speak cockney. Bryan Pringle featured in a number of films and numerous sitcoms from the 70s to the 90s. He died in 2002.

What were your favourite TV ads?

Those were my 10 TV ads but just before I go to press I thought I’d add one final one. I know I said earlier that modern ads are just not as good these days but I recently spotted this one in which Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal were asked to recreate that famous scene from When Harry met Sally. (I’ll have what she’s having!)

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8 Fictional Presidents

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Donald Trump, the 47th president of the US, has been in the news quite a lot recently. He’s cutting down on the number of federal employees. He has stopped federal help for electric cars, he’s made it known he wants the USA to take over Gaza and he is also negotiating with Russia to stop the war in the Ukraine. He doesn’t seem to have involved President Zelensky in these talks despite Zelensky being the president of the Ukraine. Trump has even cast doubt on Zelensky’s right to be the president as, because of the war, Ukraine hasn’t held any elections. This is quite rich really as Putin, the leader of Russia, has not only rigged the Russian elections but has changed the law in Russia so he can continue as president and has also allegedly bumped off Alexei Navalny, his major political opponent.

It’s a story that you couldn’t write and that got me thinking about fictional presidents so I thought I’d start with a book I’ve just read here in sunny Lanzarote.

President Duncan

The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson has been a good holiday read. A helter skelter fast paced read but moves along quickly and has nicely laid out short chapters to enable me to pause, jump in the pool to cool off and then resume reading.

President Duncan has a lot of problems on his hands. His wife has recently died of cancer and he is suffering from some sort of blood disease. On top of that the Speaker of the House has started hearings regarding rumours that the President spoke to a known terrorist on the phone and even helped him to escape capture.

Not only that but the President agrees to meet an unknown woman who knows a secret password known only to the President and his trusted advisors. She asks the President to meet her colleague at a football game without security and the President agrees and dismisses the Secret Service. Happily the Secret Service are hanging about closely and save the President from an assassin’s bullet but now he has to deal with a threat concerning a computer virus that will shut down every computer in the USA including those that deal with nuclear strikes.

One of the reviews on the back cover was from someone who likened the book to the film Airforce One, and to be honest, I felt the same way, even picturing the President as Harrison Ford, who played the President in that film.

The book was a great holiday read although I did wonder what part Bill Clinton played in the writing process. Did he just provide background to James Patterson or did he contribute towards the storyline too?

Anyway, the book was a great holiday read.

President James Marshall

Clearly I have to follow on with Airforce One, an action packed film starring Harrison Ford as President James Marshall. In this film the President leaves Russia in his aircraft, Airforce One after a joint US/Russian mission to capture a terrorist named General Ivan Radek. Unknown to the President, a group of Radek sympathisers have joined the aircraft posing as journalists. They take over the Airforce One but it looks as though the President has got away in an escape pod. However, the President was unwilling to leave his family behind and he has hidden himself in the cargo hold. The film then unfolds in the manner of a Die Hard film with the President bumping off the terrorists and managing to contact the White House and also to free his colleagues pretty much in the way that Bruce Willis might have done.

Not a great cinema experience but I kind of enjoyed it.

President Jordan Lyman

Seven Days in May was a political thriller released in 1964 and directed by John Frankenheimer. Kirk Douglas plays United States Marine Corps Colonel “Jiggs” Casey who works for Four Star General James Mattoon Scott, a highly-decorated officer played by Burt Lancaster. Jiggs thinks that Scott might be planning a coup to remove the President who has just signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, a deal which is highly unpopular with the military. Jiggs discovers that a military group known as ECOMCON has been assigned to seize radio and television networks. He manages to see the President and convince him of the threat. The President, still somewhat sceptical, organises a small group of staff to investigate.

Interestingly, President Kennedy authorised the producers to film scenes at the White House. He had read the book that the film was based on and as he had dealt with critical members of the military himself, was perhaps worried that the fictional scenario could be a real possibility.

The President was played by Frederic March who was one of the great cinema actors of the 1930s and 40s. He was the original Norman Maine in the first version of A Star is Born made in 1936 and even starred with Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina in 1935.

Presidents Palmer, Taylor and Logan

The TV series 24 first appeared in 2001 on US television. Each episode lasted for an hour and is told in real time with a digital clock on screen updating the viewer. The first series is set on the day of the US presidential primary in California. Jack Bauer, a maverick agent of the CTU Counter Terrorism Unit, is detailed to protect presidential hopeful David Palmer from an assassination attempt. Palmer was played by Dennis Haysbert as a potential black US president.

Season 2 details how Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, must prevent a nuclear bomb from exploding and assist David Palmer, now the US president, in finding the culprits. Jack is assisted by a team of agents at the CTU hi-tech control room who are adept at computer manipulation, taking over feeds from CCTV cameras, hacking into other public computers and researching various information to help Jack.

Allison Taylor is the first female president of the USA. She first appeared in the episode Redemption which was a bridging episode between series 6 and 7 as series 7 was delayed due to a writers’ strike in Hollywood. Taylor was played by actress Cherry Jones and almost seemed to be a precursor to a real life female president. As it happened, Hilary Clinton was defeated at the polls and Donald Trump became the president in 2017. (Personally, I always like President Taylor. She always reminded me a little of Captain Janeway from the TV series Star Trek Voyager.)

President Logan was played by Gregory Itzin and first appeared in season 4. He was the Vice President but was later sworn in as President when the previous President was injured in a terrorist attack. As President, Logan becomes involved in the murder of former President Palmer and is eventually forced to resign. Later, he tries to help President Taylor with a peace treaty with the Russians but again, some dodgy dealings lead him to commit suicide. Some thought the character was inspired by real life President Richard Nixon. Whether that was true or not I’m not sure but Logan was a very tricky President indeed.

I thoroughly enjoyed 24. Jack Bauer was an uncompromising agent who was convinced that the end justified the means and would shoot anyone, threaten anyone, good or bad who got in his way. The series was a very slick hi tech espionage show which combined spies, shoot outs and computer science in an exciting TV series.

Presidents Kane and Kennedy

Shall We Tell the President was a novel by Jeffrey Archer first published in 1977. In the book Edward Kennedy has become the US President and FBI agents become aware of a plot to kill the President.

I read this book many years ago but recently came across this new edition, rewritten by the author himself. In real life Ted Kennedy never made it to the White House, his challenge cut short by the ghost of what happened to Mary Jo Kopechene at Chappaquiddick. In this rewrite then, the author puts his own fictional president, President Kane in charge at the White House.

The FBI learn of a plot to murder the President. A Greek waiter, an illegal immigrant, learns of the plot whilst working as a waiter at a restaurant in Washington DC. He calls the FBI and the two agents assigned to the case report quickly to their superior. Soon, one of the agents and their boss, as well as the informant are dead leaving only one agent who by chance has survived a murder attempt. He has six days to track down the assassins.

The book kept me interested but I can’t say it was a great read and I thought some of the dialogue was a little poor, in particular the FBI agent who kept referring to his new girlfriend constantly as ‘pretty lady’ was a little cringeworthy to say the least. Sorry Mr Archer but I’d have to give this one a five out of ten.

Just off the top of my head without using Google, that’s about all the fictional presidents I can come up with for now. Which was your favourite?

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Underwater Adventures

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This week’s theme is about underwater adventures. I’m come up with a few films, TV shows and books on the subject so, to start, I’ll have to cast my mind back to my childhood and remember what underwater TV series caught my imagination back then.

Stingray

Stingray was a puppet TV series created by producer Gerry Anderson and his wife Sylvia and it was the first of their shows to be filmed in colour. Stingray was a submarine in the service of the WASP, the World Aquanaut Security Patrol and was captained by Troy Tempest and his colleague ‘Phones’ who was a master at using sonar equipment. The duo discover an undersea kingdom where King Titan holds sway over his people, the Aquaphibians. Troy and Phones rescue the mute undersea girl Marina who joins them onboard Stingray. Most of the characters had sea related names like, Marina, Commander Sam Shore and his daughter, Atlanta. Atlanta was voiced by Lois Maxwell who played the original Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond films.

Stingray was probably my favourite of Anderson’s TV shows. I particularly loved the opening sequence in which commander Shore exclaims ‘Anything can happen in the next half hour!’ As a child I used to own quite a few Stingray models. One was a plastic kit I had to put together and another was a plastic Stingray shaped water pistol.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Voyage started out as a film made in 1961. It had some big stars including Peter Lorre, Walter Pidgeon and Joan Fontaine. I actually saw the film after the TV series so I was never impressed with seeing the submarine Seaview without what was to me, its regular crew of actors. The film and the series were produced by Irwin Allen. The film version is about an amazing new submarine, the Seaview, which travels to the Arctic and finds that the sky is on fire! It turns out that a flaming meteor has set the Van Allen belt on fire and Seaview must fire a nuclear rocket into space to blow out the flames.

That has always seemed a bit silly to me but the TV series was much superior. Richard Baseheart played Admiral Nelson and David Hedison was Captain Crane. The crew met with various undersea aliens as well as sea monsters and many of the episodes had espionage and cold war themes.

In the TV series, the Seaview was equipped with a mini submarine which could also fly and was dubbed the Flying Sub. Looking over on Wikipedia, I see the flying sub only appeared in the later seasons but like Stingray, I also had a plastic model kit of it.

The show lasted for four seasons from 1964 to 1968 and in many ways was a sort of undersea forerunner to Star Trek. Producer Irwin Allen went on to make three other TV sci-fi shows, Lost in Space, Land of the Giants and The Time Tunnel.

The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau

This was a documentary series about the undersea research done by Jacques Cousteau and he travelled the world’s oceans in his research vessel the Calypso. I remember it from the late 1960’s although over on the internet I see that the series ran from 1968 to 1976. Jacques and his team studied underwater things like sea turtles and coral reefs and I always found it very fascinating. The series was narrated by Jacques himself as I remember it but over on Wikipedia they claim that Richard Johnson narrated the BBC version. Perhaps it was a mix of the two with Jacques stepping in to talk about particular elements.

Thunderball

Thunderball was a novel by Ian Fleming and was one of the adventures of his hero, James Bond 007. The novel and the film were subject to litigation as it was based on a film script on which Fleming had collaborated with Kevin McClory. McClory wasn’t happy that Fleming had used the screenplay for the basis of his novel and the result was that after suing Fleming, McClory won certain rights to the story which is how a rival Bond film came to be made in 1983. Never Say Never Again appeared as a rival to the official Eon production Bond films.

Anyway, in Thunderball, a Vulcan bomber with two atomic bombs on board is stolen by SPECTRE and they blackmail the UK government for their safe return. Bond finds the Vulcan underwater in the Caribbean. SPECTRE agent Emilio Largo has a wonderful boat with an underwater hatch through which an army of frogmen descend on various underwater vehicles to hide the bombs. 007 and his colleagues engage in an underwater battle with Largo and eventually get the upper hand.

The Spy Who Loved Me

This film was the one that appeared in competition to Never Say Never Again. Numerous legal issues surrounded the film as producer Harry Saltzman was in financial trouble. Various issues arose with his fellow producer Cubby Broccoli but eventually the two owners of the Bond franchise managed to come to agreement and Broccoli bought out Saltzman.

Another issue with the production was that Fleming was so disappointed with his original novel he had stipulated that the film producers could use only the title and not the story. Various writers were employed to come up with a new story which eventually revolved around villain Karl Stromberg who wants to create a new civilisation under the sea and at the same time destroy all terrestrial life.

To film this, Pinewood studios created a new stage, the 007 stage in which to accommodate the interior of Stromberg’s super tanker which manages to swallow numerous submarines.

Another interesting element was Bond’s car, a Lotus Elite which was able to travel underwater. This was achieved by the special effects team using various mock ups as well as models. One version was towed out of the water using hidden ropes when Bond, played by Roger Moore, calmly opens a window and drops out an errant fish.

Ice Station Zebra

I’ve written a few posts in the past about the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes and it just so happens that his favourite film was Ice Station Zebra. Hughes had a projector and watched the film, presumably on 16mm, many times in his blacked out suite in Las Vegas. The film is a cold war story based on a novel by Alastair MacLean about a satellite which crashes in the Arctic and has photographed various secret sites in the Soviet Union as well as the USA and both the Americans and the Russians want the film from the satellite. A major storm has locked in the Arctic so a submarine is sent under the ice ostensibly to rescue anyone stranded at the eponymous research station. Rock Hudson starred as the submarine captain and Patrick McGoohan as an agent whose secret mission is to retrieve the film from the satelite.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

This was a novel by the celebrated author Jules Verne, first published in serial form in a French magazine in 1869 and published in book form in 1871. The book is highly regarded as one of Verne’s greatest works and features a futuristic submarine, the Nautilus, years ahead of its time. The story concerns an American expedition to capture or destroy a huge sea monster terrorising shipping. The expedition meets the monster but professor Aronnax, a French marine biologist and master harpooner Ned Land are thrown overboard only to find the monster is actually a submarine. They are taken aboard and meet the ship’s commander, Captain Nemo.

The novel was made into a film in 1954 starring James Mason as Captain Nemo.

Finally

Many years ago, I decided to try and become a certified scuba diver. I joined a club and went for lessons at Warrington baths in Cheshire. I completed the course and it was a lot of fun, pottering about underwater with oxygen tanks in the baths. The final part however involved taking your mask off underwater, filling it with air and replacing it back on your face. I tried and tried but I could not do it; every time I ended up thrashing about having swallowed half of the water in the swimming pool. I even tried it a few inches under the water in the shallow end but sadly I always managed to inhale water so unfortunately I failed and never managed to gain certification.

Years later I bought one of those little action cams with an underwater housing and managed to make a short film about me swimming, not in a beautiful underwater coral reef location as I would have liked but up and down in a French swimming pool.

I’ve probably only scratched the surface on this fascinating subject. I could have mentioned the films Titanic and Raise the Titanic or even The Abyss. What was your favourite underwater film?

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