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I have officially become a curmudgeon
Jul. 26th, 2012 12:27 amTonight I watched Bert and Dickie, and all I could think was "they would have made this so much better in the 1970s." (Well, that and "Matt Smith is surprisingly muscular.")
It wasn't bad, exactly, apart from the Unsubtle Swelling Music to Tell You What To Feel. But it was all shorthand, all sketched-in, nothing detailed, no depth of backstory or characterization. I honestly do think it would have been better as an old-school BBC miniseries told in six parts. I wanted to know more about everyone's lives, and what they did in the war, and what exactly was at stake for the government ministers in making the 1948 Olympics a (profitable) success, and the real day-to-day struggle of training while holding down a job and not getting enough calories because food is rationed, and whether there was controversy over hosting the Olympics in the midst of Austerity Britain with its housing etc. shortages. I'd also hve liked some genuine exploration of the class conflict between Bert and Dickie rather than timid little gestures towards it.
If there can be a Slow Food movement, why not a Slow Television movement? No more narratives pandering to the Twittered attention span and thus reduced to the simplest available clichés! Let's have proper old-fashioned storytelling!
It wasn't bad, exactly, apart from the Unsubtle Swelling Music to Tell You What To Feel. But it was all shorthand, all sketched-in, nothing detailed, no depth of backstory or characterization. I honestly do think it would have been better as an old-school BBC miniseries told in six parts. I wanted to know more about everyone's lives, and what they did in the war, and what exactly was at stake for the government ministers in making the 1948 Olympics a (profitable) success, and the real day-to-day struggle of training while holding down a job and not getting enough calories because food is rationed, and whether there was controversy over hosting the Olympics in the midst of Austerity Britain with its housing etc. shortages. I'd also hve liked some genuine exploration of the class conflict between Bert and Dickie rather than timid little gestures towards it.
If there can be a Slow Food movement, why not a Slow Television movement? No more narratives pandering to the Twittered attention span and thus reduced to the simplest available clichés! Let's have proper old-fashioned storytelling!
