Mass media impacts lives, and each generation adopts current technology for the sharing of information, communication and entertainment. Five years ago, during my last round of college, I realized how differently my younger colleagues in class were experiencing media than I had. I use the Internet, but I’m a different animal. I was part of the first television generation. During my formative years, it was only available in black and white, and there were no remote controls.
Sometimes I read opinions written by columnists and bloggers who state unequivocally that television can have no positive influence, especially on children who watch. I don’t care what the studies say. I am living proof that TV could influence in meaningful, positive ways. You may prefer to believe I was just lucky, but I learned many important things from watching TV. Here are three:read article
Thanks to a couple of comments on the last post, I’ve been thinking about some of the truly bizarre television shows that knock around in my memory. This is no attempt to be comprehensive. It’s just some links to oddities I watched at one time or other.read article
British TV shows are better than American ones. I’m sorry, there’s no other position to take. They don’t try to crank out 26 episodes a season, like we do here. When you do that, you are guaranteeing that at least 10 of the episodes will be “meh”, even if all the others are good. It takes a lot of work to make a superior hour of filmed television. Aside from the necessity of great scripts, the days are very long when in production, at least 12 hours, often longer. It’s too much of a grind to survive and still end up with a jewel at the end. The Brits have it figured out. Make 6-8 episodes/season, so they’ll all be good. Not only that, but it leaves the actors free to have a real life, or perform in plays or even to be in a different series at the same time if they wish. It’s civilized.
I’m totally hooked on another series about city folk moving to the country. It’s an ITV production called Doc Martin that’s shown here in Port Townsend but not where I used to live. You can, however, see three season’s worth of episodes (21 shows) in full 420p, 16×9 aspect ratio at hulu.com. Because I loved it from the moment I saw it, I went back to see it from the beginning. It fits what I wrote about in the previous article on Green Acres. The city guy is the fish out of water, in this case in the fictional coastal Cornish village of Portwenn.
The show is filmed in beautiful Port Isaac, and is about a once-successful surgeon from London who becomes a GP in a sleepy fishing village because he suddenly can’t stand the sight of blood. The Dr’s name is Martin Ellingham (Ellingham is an anagram of the last name of show creator Dominic Minghella), and the locals refuse to call him anything other than “Doc Martin”, which he finds disrespectful. The doc is a surly curmudgeon, has no bedside manner whatsoever, and is constantly in conflict with the villagers, except for his Auntie Joan (Waiting for God’s Stephanie Cole), a long-time resident. This is a dance of dominance between the doc and the locals, so in an inspired choice the show uses catchy tango music for its theme and underscore.read article
Oliver and Lisa Douglas, and their neighbor’s son Arnold Ziffel.
In transitioning from a big town to a small town, I’ve been thinking back on the rich history of television comedies about this topic. Comedy emerges from contrasts and conflicts. You can have stories where the main characters bring rural values to the city, like in The Beverly Hillbillies or Gomer Pyle, USMC, but it’s usually funnier the other way around. Better comedy comes from having city folks move to the country. The big-towners think they have life figured out, and they endure misadventures while being forced to readjust. Viewers can delight as the artificial assuredness of the new residents is upset, their pomposity is punctured, their snobbishness skewered.
The first show of this kind that I liked was Green Acres. In that show, which ran from 1965 to 1971, a couple from NYC buy a rundown farm in Hooterville. Jay Sommers, the main writer, re-tooled it from an earlier radio show he did called Granby’s Green Acres. At first it’s the husband’s idea to give up city life, and his wife doesn’t want to. Once they arrive in the country, she decides she will do whatever she can to bring grace and culture to their new surroundings. Eva Gabor played the wife as a glamorous ditz, sort of an upper-class, Hungarian version of Gracie Allen. Eddie Albert farms in three-piece suits and makes patriotic speeches that cause “Yankee Doodle” to be played as underscore. Other characters hear the music, but he can’t.
The show shared some aspects and characters from the world of Petticoat Junction, also set in the same fictional rural locales, but it was more absurd. The main joke around which variants were created is that the residents of the Hooterville Valley live lives that follow no logical rules, yet they are happily, comfortably bound by the bizarre traditions they’ve decided to follow. This irritates the lawyer from New York endlessly. He’s the only character who can’t live without logic or gamely accept this off-kilter alternate world. His daffy wife goes right along with it.read article
Mikey thinks this is the best of all the Robin Hood movies – Erroll Flynn, 1938. LB prefers the Richard Greene TV series (scroll down & you’ll find it)
I grew up loving stories about Robin Hood. Were these tales based on the exploits of a real outlaw? There might have been a number of Robin Hoods in the original region, including some women. It’s an open question if he really lived or not, but what an inspiring symbol. Each of us knows someone, or about someone who’s been dealt an injustice and had to go into some sort of hiding. Many of us become outlaws ourselves, as children or as adolescents.
From the safety of the dense woods, Robin and his band lived simply in Sherwood Forest, shared everything and redressed the crimes visited upon local peasants by an unjust elite who support an illegitimate ruler. That “rob from the rich, give to the poor” catchphrase isn’t entirely accurate. The rich in these stories got rich through unfair laws and taxes they alone benefit from. The serfs and villagers do all the work farming, maintaining the estates and manufacturing goods, and they are starved and thrown in jail if they object to the injustice. It’s a situation begging for revolt, and always relevant, especially in our age of Capitalism, Corporatism and heartless avarice.
