Cyra McFad­den’s odd­ball satire of life in Marin Coun­ty, an afflu­ent sub­urb north of San Fran­cis­co, dur­ing the late 1970’s, was made into a film in 1980. I showed this won­der­ful lit­tle piece of cul­tur­al time-trav­el to a young friend. Noth­ing could bet­ter show how much a cul­ture can trans­form in a gen­er­a­tion or two. For him, it was a voy­age to anoth­er plan­et, with incom­pre­hen­si­ble val­ues, cus­toms and jar­gon. Even for me, who was exposed to Marin coun­ty not too many years after­ward, the movie seemed bizarre. A lot of water has passed under the bridge. The film, star­ring Mar­tin Mull in the lead role of a mid­dle-aged hus­band over­whelmed by incom­pre­hen­si­ble trends and psy­chob­a­b­ble, cap­tured the ambiance per­fect­ly. McFad­den’s work was noth­ing like the scor­pi­on vicious­ness of a New York­er’s satirist— it was pure Stephen Leacock.

I love all of the “Mid­Somer Mur­ders”. John Net­tles (as the Chief inspec­tor) and Daniel Casey (as his bone-head­ed side-kick). The pro­duc­tion val­ues are first-rate, the act­ing top-notch, the scripts are well-writ­ten. Every one of the tiny, pic­turesque vil­lages in the fic­tion­al Eng­lish coun­ty of Mid­Somer is seething with hate, jeal­ousy, secret sins, thwart­ed ambi­tions, star-crossed love, kinky sex, and mur­der, mur­der, mur­der. Detroit and South L.A. have noth­ing on Mid­Somer vil­lages like Bad­ger’s Drift, Ferne Bas­set, Aspern Tal­low, and Mid­somer Mal­low. Styl­is­ti­cal­ly, the def­i­nite­ly sits in the “cosy” tra­di­tion of Eng­lish mys­ter­ies, the her­itage of Agatha Christie. Net­tles cre­ates one of the most like­able fic­tion­al detec­tives on the screen. There are plen­ty of neat lit­er­ary ref­er­ences to catch (espe­cial­ly to Jacobean dra­ma) for those who take plea­sure in such things, and plen­ty of wit­ty jibes at con­tem­po­rary mores for those who are more present-ori­ent­ed. The mys­tery plots are absurd­ly improb­a­ble, in the best Agatha Christie tradition.

This is the final episode in Schama’s series, and the best. The “two Win­stons” of the title are Win­ston Churchill, and “Win­ston Smith”, the fic­tion­al hero of George Orwell’s 1984, which Schama uses to refer to Orwell him­self. Fol­low­ing the lives of these two obvi­ous­ly very dif­fer­ent men, Schama explores sev­er­al dimen­sions of Britain’s social and polit­i­cal his­to­ry in the 20th Cen­tu­ry. His nar­ra­tive is wit­ty, intel­li­gent, and orig­i­nal. His com­ments on both men are right on the mark. I can tell that Schama got to know Orwell through his remark­able diaries and jour­nal­ism, which were pub­lished in paper­back in the 1970s, and made a pro­found impres­sion on all sorts of peo­ple (myself included).

Schama is an aston­ish­ingly pro­lific Eng­lish his­to­rian who has pro­duced some of the most read­able his­tory books of this gen­er­a­tion. It turns out that he has a good per­son­al­ity to present his ideas on tele­vi­sion, and this series is extreme­ly enter­tain­ing. It also gets bet­ter as the series goes. Schama is most at home in “mod­ern” his­tory (i.e. six­teenth cen­tury onward). So he rush­es through through every­thing up to the Nor­man con­quest in the first episode. The next two episodes focus on the Nor­man and Angevin kings and their soap-oper­at­ic strug­gles (every­one hold up their hands who pic­ture Eleanor of Aquitaine as Kather­ine Hep­burn). The first three episodes are not as good as the ones that fol­low. When Schama gets into the areas of social and eco­nomic his­tory that he’s most com­fort­able in, the series becomes excellent.

I have to be the only per­son who went to this movie to see the scenery and the sheep. A long time ago, I was a shep­herd. I spent two and a half years work­ing var­i­ous sheep farms. So I’ll skip mak­ing the obvi­ous com­ments about this movie. The March­ing Morons, in their tens of mil­lions, are no doubt up in arms about this “gay west­ern”. But there’s no point in debat­ing with igno­rant sav­ages, so I won’t waste my time doing so. See the film. It’s not a mas­ter­piece, but it’s a well-craft­ed love sto­ry and char­ac­ter study with some superb act­ing. Now, I wasn’t par­tic­u­larly eager to see a sto­ry about true love mud­dled and thwart­ed by a dumb cul­ture. But Rodri­go Pri­eto is a good cin­e­matog­ra­pher, and I am home­sick for moun­tains. Well it didn’t take me more than a few min­utes to fig­ure out that it couldn’t have been filmed in Wyoming, where the sto­ry is set. A few of the estab­lish­ing shots were of the Tetons, but most of the time the moun­tains looked all wrong. Those huge diag­o­nal slabs with caste­late peaks, and unbro­ken mass­es of dou­glas fir and spruce sweep­ing down into crys­talline lakes in deep intra­mon­tane trench­es — well, that’s Cana­dian Rock­ies [see pho­to above]. Wyoming moun­tains have a dif­fer­ent look.

The bane of film authen­tic­i­ty: inac­cu­rate sheep.

The sheep. Well, there was some stuff that was right. The old Euskalduna with a beret is some­thing you would have seen in that time and place. Some of the work the main char­ac­ters where shown doing was cor­rect. But all the sheep were fresh­ly shorn and marked, and they were still fresh­ly shorn and marked after they had sup­pos­edly been pas­tur­ing up in the moun­tains for months! There wasn’t a din­gle­berry in sight. The main char­ac­ters where not shown inter­act­ing with the dogs, which were nowhere to be seen, most of the time. Take note, Ang Lee, I’ll be watch­ing… next time, get the sheep right.

None of the big med­ical shows on tele­vi­sion has suc­ceeded in gain­ing my seri­ous inter­est ― until now. I love this show. And what is most aston­ish­ing about it is that the grub­by, surly, sar­cas­tic, and extreme­ly Amer­i­can main char­ac­ter is played by Hugh Lau­rie, who played Bertie Woost­er in the Jeeves and Woost­er, and many hilar­i­ous char­ac­ters in the Black­ad­der series. Laurie’s Amer­i­can voice and man­ner are com­pletely con­vinc­ing. The series assumes the audi­ence has a rea­son­able knowl­edge of med­i­cine and phys­i­ol­ogy, and tack­les hard issues with­out slip­ping into the tire­some eva­sive­ness that Amer­i­can TV shows usu­ally get into when faced with real prob­lems. In this show, peo­ple decide things. Many thanks to Isaac White for bring­ing over four episodes of this show.

After about twen­ty min­utes of expe­ri­enc­ing Steven Spielberg’s “typ­i­cal Amer­i­can fam­i­ly”, which con­sists of an incred­i­bly bone-head­ed father, played by Tom Cruise, an annoy­ing, con­stant­ly screech­ing young daugh­ter, and a tire­some­ly surly son, I start­ed to root for the Mar­tians. I des­per­ate­ly hoped that the Mar­tians would turn them into blood slurpees. Actu­al­ly, the film doesn’t say they are Mar­tians; it would be impos­si­ble to log­i­cal­ly update Wells’ 1898 nov­el and have them com­ing from Mars. But wher­ev­er the aliens come from, they seem to have been able to build a tech­no­log­i­cal super-civ­i­liza­tion with­out know­ing the germ the­o­ry of dis­ease. The 1953 Byron Hask­ins adap­ta­tion, star­ring Gene Bar­ry, was a lot more fun.

The 1994–1996 tele­vi­sion movies based on Ellis Peters’ medieval mur­der mys­ter­ies are very well done. The pro­duc­tion val­ues are mod­est, but do their job. What makes it all work is the act­ing skill of Derek Jaco­bi, who becomes the char­ac­ter so thor­ough­ly that that when I read one of the nov­els I could­n’t help but hear his voice and see his face. He has cre­at­ed one of the most lik­able char­ac­ters on tele­vi­sion. Monk’s Hood has all the ele­ments that Ellis Peters likes to play with: the inter­play of local and king­dom pol­i­tics, the ambi­gu­i­ty of the Church being both inside and out­side the soci­ety, the no-man’s-land between the Welsh and Eng­lish, and, of course, flow­ers and herbs. The monk’s hood, by the way is a par­tic­u­lar­ly pret­ty flower.