Now, if I'd drunk just a little less beer this afternoon, I'd have been able to get up from the settee when Lark Rise to Candleford came on. As it was, I was trapped, struggling feebly like an aquatic mollusc caught by low-tide.
For those who haven't seen it, Lark Rise and Candleford are, apparently, two villages set somewhere in Islington Script-writer's Generic PeasantShire, towards the end of the 19th century. These villages are inhabited by people who are deeply strange in at least three ways:
1. They're oddly clean for people living with no running water, electricity or indoor toilets.
2. They have the sort of interpersonal relational problems that nobody, in a bazillion years of evolution, had time for, before the widespread availability of running water, electricity and indoor toilets.
3. These relational problems will be dissected in tedious detail for about an hour before being solved with a smile, a graceful compromise, and a general feeling that everyone has been jolly English and well-behaved and frankly a lesson to us all.
4. Despite these villages being perpetually bathed in golden sunlight all the time, even indoors, nobody is dying of melanoma, or is seen to be applying sunscreen. You'd think the place was under arc-lights...
Before you get pedantic, by the way, scrupulously attentive readers will note that I said 'at least three ways' and this in no way precludes more.
So, let that be a lesson. If you're going to drink too much beer of a Sunday afternoon, make sure the TV isn't on BBC1. Nuff said.
Caption for the pic above:
''Ere missis, gi'e us four groats or we'll sing Hotel California again!'
'Cheap at the price, matey. Oh, and put some bloody sunscreen on, would you?'
This kind of TV is best summed up as "bubble-gum for the eyes" (thankyou Homer Simpson).
ReplyDeleteThey take a nice idea for a drama - I think the first few programmes were based on a real book (Flora Thompson was it?). Then the producers have a great idea - hey this is nice lets make a series out of it - a kind of early 19th century Eastenders but set in a mythical pastoral middle Engalnd that never existed save perhaps on chocolate boxes.
In a word - rubbish.
Yes, the 'noble savage' kind of nonsense. The reality of life then was - to borrow Hobbes's phrase - "poor, nasty, brutish, and short".
ReplyDeleteOn a tangential note, I've been called that. I resent the 'brutish' bit, though.