No, we don't, telly's shit. If a TV show is worth talking about a thread should be made. It's not a one off thing like a song or a game you tried.

>>23449
Oh I'm watching that too, so I can then progress to Ashes. I've already read the ending for Ashes on Wikipedia, it's fucking nuts.

Tyler can be a moralising arse at times. He got especially preachy about Hillsborough at the end of that football episode.

>>23450
Bore off.

New season of The Expanse.

>>23451
Having seen the ending of Ashes To Ashes many times, I have so unbelievably many questions about it. It really does destroy the fiction of the world set up in both Life on Mars AND Ashes to Ashes. It feels to me like the writers were told at the 11th hour that this was their last series and that they had to wrap things up NOW.

Expanse is back on. Going by the first episode it's a bit shit this season but I'm curious how they're going to get rid of the Martian Texan given the actor has gotten himself unpersoned.

Other than that I watched the Real Adam Smith documentary series recently. I should read his books at some point.

I re-watched Auf Wiedersehen Pet recently. It has held up quite well, which isn't terribly surprising given that it was written by Clement and La Frenais.

I'm not sure if it makes for comforting or disquieting viewing in 2020. It feels completely familiar yet also totally alien, like re-visiting your old primary school as an adult. The eighties were absolutely shit for a lot of people, but they also felt hopeful in a way that seems naive now.

When we talk about it being an "aspirational" decade we tend to think of yuppies in the City, but we forget about all of the working-class people who believed that they could build a better life for themselves through hard work and determination. Those hopes were largely fulfilled through the boom years of the 90s and early 00s, but that kind of hope seems almost childlike today.

Even before COVID, there was a general sense that upward mobility is dead and the best you can manage is to grimly hold on to your rung on the ladder, especially for young people. Life is unarguably better today than it was in the past, but it doesn't feel like it's getting better, which makes all the difference.

Maybe I'm just being sentimental.

>>23455
I like your analysis very much.

>>23454

I'm not fully caught up on the TV version so they might lean on him more, but at least for the books, I think Alex is, serendipitously, the only crewmember you could really replace in the story without taking huge sidesteps around story beats - his only real plot points are that he's really attached to/good at flying the roci, is divorced with a kid and becomes really good friends and resistance co-conspirator with Bobbie - they can easily wave him away as moving back to Mars or MIA and find a new hotshot pilot to easily replace him. You could even shoehorn Filip in there, rather than him just never being mentioned again after being almost the entire point of one whole book, though that might be a bit too complicated.

I'd also not really give a shit if they just shoved some other brown bloke with an accent in there and pretended nothing happened.

You should definitely read the books, they're just as good as the show, if not better, as they get the sense of scale of the whole thing a bit better in text. I also highly recommend going the audiobook route if you're into that, the bloke that reads them is fantastic.

>>23457

Also forgot about Peaches who is/was an accomplished pinnace pilot. Alex is really fucking replaceable, and further supports my real life view that pilots are boring bus drivers.

>>23455

It's a great show. I watched it when I was younger after I heard it was really funny, and thinking it would be a sitcom like Only Fools and Horses or the like, I found it disappointing.

Watching it as an adult though, it really is great.

I like your analysis, and whilst I can't fully relate as I'm 29 so I wasn't around in the 80s, this show along with others does give off that sense of optimism. Barry's story sums it up the most; grafting away abroad for a bit, being sensible and sending money home each week, to then return, start your own business and buy a fairly large house all by yourself. Seems magical, or maybe I'm a lazy twat who knows.

I'm watching shitloads of South Park at the minute. I need a bit of background noise when I'm working but it has to be something I've seen so many times that I don't have to pay attention to it. Before this I worked my way through Futurama and Malcolm in the Middle, interspersed with films like The Mummy and Big Trouble in Little China for the same reason.

>>23449
The ending was so disappointing

>>23460
Can you tell me where the hell I can stream Malcolm in the Middle?

>>23462
All 4.

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/malcolm-in-the-middle

>>23453
>>23449
Ladchaps, theres a new series set in that universe on the way.
Will be set across the timelines and involve everyone.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/apr/03/life-on-mars-creator-third-final-series-in-works-bbc

>>23464
No I feel like I'm a timewarp. Or a flipping coma.

>>23464
It'll be interesting if they even try and resolve the stories of the characters, and of course they are all 10-15 years older now, so I wonder how they'll get around that.

That and the "mostly in an alternate present" -- they'll have to do some interesting writing if they want Simm and Hawes in that - they are both dead and in 'heaven' according to the ending of Ashes to Ashes.

>>23460

South Park is still a really fun watch, even the newer ones (although the format has changed quite a bit and it does suffer from being too topical). There is a really comfy charm to the older episodes though. One of my sort of autistic Winter traditions is to get warm and comfortable and boot up a PS1 emulator and have the first three seasons on in the background as I get good and drunk.

The earlier eps are surprisingly tame looking at them now.

Christ I've got fuck all to do.

Just finished Ashes to Ashes, and whilst I could ask dozens of questions about the ending, one thing I missed the first time I watched through was the fact they tried for a Miami Vice moment by using In The Air Tonight over a melancholy scene not once but twice, and it doesn't really work either time.

>>23451

He has a point this shitey bollocks general threads is the lead in our water supply.

>>23463
No good I'm afraid, I'm watching it with a non-native speaker and need subtitles, and Channel 4's are notoriously pisspoor.

>>23464

Well that's bound to be shit, innit.

I've been binging Parks and Recreation lately. Light-hearted sitcoms have been keeping me going this year and I'm a bureaucrat by profession so it's fun.

Before that it was That 70s Show but I got annoyed when they continued the show after graduation and had to make all kind of dumbass reasons to keep the plot going. If there's one thing Americans can't do it's know when to stop.

I've been watching videos on YouTube of people melting metal stuff down. Particularly BigstackD in Australia.

So I barely even noticed a fifth series of pic related came out earlier this year, but I do seem to remember someone on here saying it was rubbish, which I really don't agree with. I think episode five was pretty rough going, but besides that and a single gag in episode two I enjoyed the whole thing. The whole show's all on iPlayer still if you're interested.

I'd have sworn blind there was already a Inside No. 9 thread on here, but I was clearly mistaken and my tiny review of the series five doesn't warrant one on it's own.

>>23475
Apart from the Misdirection episode I thought series five was a bit flat and below par. My favourite is probably Zanzibar.

Okay the first couple episodes of WandaVision were fun. Shame they couldn't just stick around for awhile longer in 1950s TVland as it's a fun setting and I hate Marvel capeshit.

>>23477
>1950s TVland

I have been rewatching the Twilight Zone. Every time I do it's just so jarring to see people chugging on cigs like chimneys and depictions of drinking and driving like nothing's wrong.

>>23478
It really is a tragically underused setting and I'd happily watch something that's self-aware with an underlying sinister tone. All the doctors being heavy smokers and separate beds for married couples are things that were deadly serious back then but hilarious now.

I'd like a VR game where you play as a 1950s tv family trying to climb to the top of the social totem pole (much of the charm of the original Sims I guess) without getting caught out and lot's of sidequests about savings cats from trees and other forms of non-danger. If you don't play along though the studio lights turn off, the music cuts and
all the townspeople come and rip you to shreds which turns it into a 'how long can I survive' horror with exploration elements.

>>23478
> I have been rewatching the Twilight Zone. Every time I do it's just so jarring to see people chugging on cigs like chimneys and depictions of drinking and driving like nothing's wrong.

I've been having a similar reaction when watching anything made pre-pandemic. Something in my head goes "no, that's wrong!" whenever someone shares a drink with someone or touches their mouth after picking something up off the floor and not washing their hands in between. We humans are a weird lot.

Also some bastard decided to release the new episodes of Disenchantment on Netflix at around 4am instead of 9am so I almost ended up in a very bad situation. Luckily I was able to turn the telly off after just the first episode otherwise I wouldn't have got any kip at all.

>>23479

Could it also have a psychobilly influenced soundtrack and be called "And None Of Them Knew They Were Robots"?

>>23479
There's a brief element of that in the intro to Saints Row IV, and I guess with a less American twinge, We Happy Few.

I would also wager that playing a VR game in B&W would also get very tiring very quickly.

>>23482
Now I Googled that and all I got was a short-lived thrash band from Leeds. Is it a quote from something or are you just trying to drum up attention to your old band?

>>23483

No, it was unrelated, I think it might be a song by some other band but it's just a phrase I somehow have stuck in my head knocking around. It's tied to images of like, 1950s housewives from those Trueman Show style adverts, only their eyes go red because they're robots. But they don't know they're robots.

As for psychobilly, it's just because my missus put The Meteors on the other day and I realised it's a genre of music I have a very strong stereotype idea of, mentally, when I think of 50s/60s Americana. But I can't think of any examples of contemporary 1950s music that actually sounds anything like it. I like stuff like that in period settings, kind of anachronistic but fitting.

We Brits are always slightly dour about it when people make un-subtle reductive pastiches of our culture (like We Happy Few) but I'd happily play the 50s American suburbia equivalent of that.

>>23477

Who's playing the blonde housewife in E2? She's the spitting image of Madeline Kahn.
I just realised she's Anya from Buffy. She really has the mannerisms of Madeline Kahn here, it's bizarre.

>>23482
My mental image was all the subtle light and lounge that the 1950s had multiple genres of - exactly like the Sims loading screens.

>>23483
I was thinking back to Fallout 3 where you go into a simulation of the 1950s in a child's body. It's touched upon everywhere but you rarely see anyone go all out on it like Pleasantville did.

>I would also wager that playing a VR game in B&W would also get very tiring very quickly.

Would be funny to see the reaction as people start dreaming and thinking in monochrome though.

>>23486
Funny you should say that - I played Tranquility Lane in VR when I played Fallout 3 using VorpX. I had to change it to colour because there's also a massive bloom effect with the tranquility lane 'weather' in Fallout 3; it's like your retinas are being stabbed with a poker.

Don't get me started on Vault 112 and what a massive missed opportunity it was. Hell, it could be a game all of itself.

Oh, there's also a 50s american TV pastiche in VR that I can't remember the name of, but it's an on-rails (literally) shooter because your hands are guns and in this world everyone's hands are guns. UpIsNotJump did a review on it.

>>23481
Clearly either the producer or Groening fucking loves mid-2000s British comedy, since we've got all the voices now. Matt Berry, Noel Fielding, and now Richard Ayoade. I'm just waiting for Mitchell and Webb and Simon Pegg.

>>23489

It's weird but other than Matt Berry I don't immediately recognise the others' voices despite being very much familiar with their bodies of work.

>>23490

Maybe pay less attention to their bodies of work and more to their voices of work? Pervert.

>>23491

How dare you kink-shame me in this way.

Just watched this episode. I know attitudes were different back in the early 1960s but.... Christ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fugitive_(The_Twilight_Zone)

>>23493
The link includes the closing bracket. Thanks brian.

>>23493
Well he's not really an old nonce, he's a dashing young king from another planet, you bigot!.

>>23493
I didn't read any noncery there. Did you think Amidala was a nonce when she meets a boy Anakin Skywalker and ends up shagging him as an adult?

>>23496
Well I'm just guessing what otherlad was talking about. Maybe there was just lots of smoking.

>>23496
I've never seen a star war so I don't know.

There's a line at the beginning, though:
>"If you're so magic, why can't you fix my leg?"
"Then you'd be able to get a young boyfriend"

Also, the "handsome man" he's revealed to be is still about 30.

>>23496

Amidala was meant to be young teens too in the first one wasn't she?

Mind you I suppose it's tradition after the twincest in the originals.

>>23496
Amidala didn't kidnap Anakin and spend a decade grooming him to become the king of Naboo, in fairness. Indeed from what I recall the two basically seemed incompatible in every way and she was simply the first woman Anakin had seen who wasn't his mum. Why do you think C3PO was so heavily queer coded? Because that robot was literally coded queer. Think about it.

>>23500
I'm intrigued by your theory of the prequal trilogy being the story of Anakin's repressed homosexuality and his lashing out at the world. The dots all join up so well from the monastic anti-sexual repression of the Jedi to Palpatine being a bit of a noncey old man.

As for the Twilight Zone episode I just put it down to being a bad episode. There's different attitudes of the time at work but you can also see reflections of classic fairytale themes involving Prince Charming rescuing the Cinderella - and which young girls probably like (not that I would know of course). It might've been a stronger story if the original draft was in a half-hour format as I suspect what we have is two half-formed ideas stuck together.

>>23500
>kidnap
>spend a decade grooming him
Neither of which is implied in the plot summary, if you read the same one I did. Maybe you just wish there was noncery in it because that's what they were all like back then. Only a matter of time before fuckin' Rod Serling is exposed as worse than Jim'll eh.

Watching the Amazon show The Man In The High Castle, which has little to do with the original book other than setting and character names (although they don't match their book counterparts).

The most interesting thing is it was clearly edited as in Internet TV Show. Each episode is a) designed to be watched quite closely together -- there are no re-establishing shots, you get about 10 seconds of the last episode usually before it continues completely dry; and b) the intro sequence is the best part of 90 seconds long, which seems to be like it was intended to be skipped.

The intro sequence does need an award for slowest human performance of a song, though. Christ it drags. Also it's the Dad's Army intro, complete with triangle-headed lines moving across a map.

Simpsons quiz show with Nick Frost and some other 90's channel 4 people. It's quite good.

>>23798

Fuck me, how depressing.

>>23798

Something about seeing adverts I remember from my youth distinctly gives me the fear.

>>23798
My favourite part of these uploads is that they leave the adverts in so you can look at life in 2004 and how different things are. I don't remember all the advertising HMV did on albums - I bet we would've had a /101/.

>>23801

There are whole compilations of old ads on YouTube. I once spent a whole night with my missus going back in time a year at a time to see how far back we remember the adverts.

I think TV ads are a fascinating cultural snapshot, being on the pulse of what people are into at any given moment is what makes the most effective marketing, so they make for a pretty accurate reflection of society at the time. Just look at those ones, digital cameras were still a thing!

Of course due to not owning a TV, I haven't seen an advert since I moved out of my mum and dad's, meaning I have absolutely no idea what the last decade of TV advertising has been like.

>>23801
>I don't remember all the advertising HMV did on albums

Those Zutons songs weren't half as annoying as I remembered them to be.

>>23802
The best bit for me is seeing the old prices. Sure you could buy a house back then but white goods took the absolute piss.

>>23804
That reminds me, one of the buildings at my uni could only really be described as a "shit time machine" -- miles of corridors lined with unused lockers. Often I'd go to the nigh-abandoned upper floors and open random lockers. I found this offers pamphlet for a supermarket from 1977.

At inflation, it works out about a 7x multiplier ok the prices. Could you imagine a chocolate orange costing nearly £4? The cheapest bottle of shit wine being almost £8? The other pages were like that too, I'll post if people are interested. It's mad to think how much mass manufacturing has brought the prices of things down in relative terms.

>>23805

That's chocolate orange(s), plural. The weights of the other stuff seems pretty bulky for the price too, seing as most of it is a quid for a full pound of chocolate. I don't know how much pounds are in weight because I was born in colour, but they don't seem all that bad.

If current economic trends continue I think we're all going to have to get used to paying more for our shit anyway, because everyone is due ten years of backdated payrise and the EU slaves flexible workforce have fucked off.

>>23806

A pound is 453 grams.

£26 for a bottle of Gordons is wild, it's no wonder we're all binge drinking maniacs these days.

>>23806
>>23807
It being an old-fashioned style shop, do you reckon you could walk in and say "pound and half of chocolate orange, ta", and they'd measure it out for you, breaking one in half to satisfy the request if need be?

>>23805
>Prices subject to government change

Sign of the times right there.

Here's the rest of it.
Seems things were sold in bigger boxes back in't day.

A kilo of frozen green beans for £3.50 though? Ouch. I've just bought the same for £1. A ham joint is about £2.50/lb these days, and gammon the same.

>>23488
The American Dream

>>23805 Scotsmac?
That's something I'd never seen. A quick search suggests I've been lucky. Sounds like a fine drink.
https://www.goodfoodrevolution.com/scotsmac-aka-bams-dram/

>>23810
Top Deck Lemonade & Lager or Lager Shandy at eleven and a half pence per can, definitely brings back memories. Thought I was a proper hard lad at 10 years old (buying and) drinking it. Not that hard to wonder where my functional alcoholism started.

>>23810

The seam in the middle of this image is upsetting me immensely. I tried to fix it in photoshop, but there is a slight torque in it, so the seam isn't running exactly on the square. There also appears to be a couple of mm missing which is most apparent on the middle Santa.

Why did you do this to me lad?

>>23820
Oh, it's only the beginning. I've got a few more sneaky surprises for you.

>>23821
Oh you cunt.

>>23820
>>23822

I'm not >>23821, but unfortunately I made that image many a year ago and don't know if I still have the originals. Will have a look later.

Just watched The Tomorrow War, it's fun in a dumb blockbuster sense. You really have to turn your brain off through right from the start with its shots of Theresa May and Gordon Brown plus the infuriating military tactics but the aliens and combat gives it a nice 90s videogame style.

Though I'm not being funny but, fuck me this film has a lot of black people in it. Not in some racialist sense like there's just a wise-cracking black sidekick but almost every character in this movie is played by a black person outside of the protagonist and his family. There's an impossible amount of black people in this movie, no Asians or anything else even in the background, it's like they set an AI to run the diversity at Amazon and it's gone off the rails.

Hang on, we need a conclave to decide something NotARacistButLad just blundered into: is this thread for TV shows only or films as well? I had assumed the former and as of this moment I've never been wrong about anything ever.

>>23825
If we had a separate movie and tv show thread then it will just get confusing for the hidden gems thread.

>>23826
Be that as it may, if you'd read my post to its end you'd see I've never been wrong, so it seems we're at an impasse.

>>23824

It's pretty easy to forget that "black people" are only about 15% of the united states population.

I'm just waiting for the diversified Silmarillion series they're doing. What might be cool would be if they used the space granted by the sparse writing about Harad to explore the meetings of different cultures, considering it'll be about as canon to the setting as my arse they might as well make the most of it, but they'll probably turn half the numenoreans brown or something. Groan.

>>23824
>>23828
Maybe the aliens hit the majority-white areas first.

>>23828
I remember a small controversy a few months back where it was pointed out the LOTR casting had yet to show any East Asians. I hope it's just mistaken given, yeah, Harad would obviously be a bit of a crossroad with near and far being middle eastern to black by the respective description but would obviously also be more like the Eurasian steppe in my mind.

>>23829
It actually shows today and the future where the entire old world is gone. It would've been an interesting touch if they showed a subtly more "Latino" future rather the future being a carbon copy of the past but it's not the kind of movie to have detail.

Seriously, someone watch the movie and back me up on this, casting completely forgot what diversity means. Part of me suspects it was a deliberate decision because it was done to capitalise on the climate of last year and now looks outdated as Asians representation has become more vocal.

>>23829

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWO1pkHgrBM

>>23828

I know it's not really the same but the Witcher Netflix adaptation chucked in a few black people who clearly wouldn't have been black in a fictionalised fantasy eastern europe based world, but it felt fine and worked fine. I think if you're not actively looking to complain about it, a black elf isn't really as odd as, well, an elf in the first place.

Wait fuck this isn't the 1996 adaptation of the novel this is some American race bullshit. Thandiwe Newton hasn't aged a day in the past twenty years.

I found a French sci-fi series called Missions on iPlayer. All the episodes are on there with the plot heavily inspired by sci-fi like 2001 about a mission to Mars. It's pretty good so far despite being on a shoe-string budget.

>>23892
"You want me to pin a medal on a guy named Saddam! Give yourself a raise!"

>>23894
I liked that bit of characterisation as it was him who wanted to pin the medal, the other guy was talking him out of it. Well written and well played piece of characterisation.

This show appears to be an Aussie version of The Thick of It. It's definitely better than the American version.

>>23896
There's a follow-up series to that.

I watched the latest Clarkson/Grand Tour series; during the last episode they used this, reminding me how great it is, and now I have it on repeat all day.

>>23898
It's the sort of tune that makes you want to pick up a guitar and sing.

>>23899
Makes me want to drive through Las Venturas while listening to K-DST.

People like Jack Thompson decried the violence of the GTA games but they really should've been praising them for cultivating great musical taste in the kids that played them.

>>23950

Yeah if there's one thing the GTA games have always had, it's been an outstanding soundtrack. VC and SA were full of classic hits, but it really impressed me how IV and V had some impressive deep cuts you'd never expect to hear in a videogame.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIBa5vcDO6o

My jaw dropped when this came on driving around Liberty City the first time.

>>23951
Everyone forgets Chris Conner's original music for the first GTA, which was also exceptional.

>>23952
I can't forget the GTA 1 soundtrack, I used to listen to the CD with it all on including the police radio which, as far as I can tell, is just the full-length recording of police radio that every TV show made since uses clips from in any police scne.

It's on par with that one very specific hinge-creaking sound that every TV show also uses whenever someone opens a door.

5 George K
5 George K

>>23952
Craig Conner.

Been watching the Sopranos.

One editing thing that REALLY stands out to me is the audio mix - they leave in Tony's laboured, heavy, breathing; the clanking of cutlery on plates, chewing noises.

The shot-shot editing is also really... primitive? I can't really explain it but it feels like there's very little exploration or flair in it, especially for a Prestige Drama .

>>24011
I like it. Especially when his breathing gets heavier, or he starts scarping plates faster as he gets more agitated.

>>24011
I dunno, I really like The Sopranos and it still stands up to being watched multiple times now - the audio is definitely intentional.

>>24012
>>24013

Oh yeah, I'm not saying it's an oversight; it's clearly intentional.

>>24011
Don't watch the movie they just put out.

>>24015
Fucking bygones is never bygones.

On recommendation by some guy in the street, I bought a 6 series box set of [i]Trailer Park Boys[i]. It's awful; bad acting, bad scripting and the characters are loathesome.
The only redeeming feature is it doesn't take itself seriously, but i can't tell if that's intended or simply the cast acting like it's being filmed at the back of someones garden.
The film quality noticably improves over the couse of the entire series and later there are some geuinely funny slapstick humours, but it's watered down by the empty scenes and disconnected dialog.

I have no idea how this was, apparently, so popular.

>>24020
I binged the first nine seasons a few years ago and loved it. Just easy watching, and a generally likeable cast. Reminds me a lot of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, degenerate dickheads doing dumb things, but it's probably a bit less intelligent. I have tried to watch the later series (I think they're animated nowadays), but I don't know if the jokes just stopped being funny.

>>24020

Probably has a lot to do with your real life experiences, either you've grown up around dickheads just like that, or you're a posho who doesn't understand what "the joke" really is.

Same reason I can't relate at all to stuff like The Office. Other people insist it's the funniest thing since farts were invented, but I've never had a boss like David Brent or colleagues like those other twats, and all I see in it is shite cringe humour.

I think the most successful sitcoms are the ones that have the most relatable everyman character, and a novel premise, that doesn't tie it to people's personal experiences. Everyone can get into Father Ted, for example.

>>24022
>I've never had a boss like David Brent or colleagues like those other twat

Plenty of us have though, and the shit cringe humour is literally the point of the show; most of the time you're laughing at Brent because of how uncomfortable he makes you.

Also, as a manager, early on in my career, I probably said or did some very Brent things. It's very well observed, but I accept that if you haven't seen those people/types in the workplace, it's all a bit mystifying.

>>24023

I mean yeah, that was my entire point. If I had have been forced to endure those people in my working life, it would be far more relatable to me.

>>24020

My flatmate at the time watched this a lot - I didn't get it at first, but it quite quickly grew on me, I can't really quantify why other than that I started to like the characters.

It was the same with Always Sunny - season 1 was pretty rough and I was taken aback that they were just sort of shouting at each other. But now it's one of my favourite yank shows.

>>24022
How do you feel about Peepshow?

>>24022
> Everyone can get into Father Ted, for example.
Hmm.

>>24026

Peep Show does a good job because the setting is mundane, but the two main characters are opposite ends of the spectrum, and it focused more on absurd and unlikely situations they'd get into than just "Oh you know what it's like working in an office, right? Haha!"

It is still very cringe humour based, so I can only really watch small doses of it, not binge on it, but I do like it.

The film Office Space is an example of one that manages to be pretty much universally relatable too I think. It's about office drudgery on the surface, but the main theme isn't specifically about offices. It's just about having a job you hate and don't want to go to, which everybody, everybody, has had experience of. In a way that film changed my life, actually. I just saw it before I'd ever got to the stage of the main character.

>>24027

You've got to have appalling taste not to like Father Ted.

[spoilers]Or be a terminally online Twitter wanker who hates it just because it's Linehan maybe, but I'm not going to count that.[/spoilers]

>>24029

>spoilers

[spoiler]Bastard.[/soiler]

>>24029
Never got into Father Ted. The performances of the actors were all good, but it just felt a bit artificial to me, whereas I could see the event of a lot of Peep Show episodes actually happening. Same thing as The IT Crowd, I felt like I was watching a sitcom rather than connecting with the events of the story on a deeper level. Also as a terminally online Twitter wank I have the notorious TERF Graham Linehan.

>>24031
Glinner, you mean Glinner. Graham's not the same man.

>>24031

I've always thought it's a bit absurd not to like something because of knowledge you have, with the benefit of hindsight, about its creator. Nobody even knew what a TERF was in the early 90s when that show first aired, and I'd argue the guy himself wasn't even one until the worms wriggled in through his ear holes and started munching on his grey matter.

I'd understand why you might not want to watch a new show that he came out with today, but as far as I can tell he's probably never going to work in telly in any serious capacity ever again.

>>24033

I know what you mean, but I don't think that people suddenly decide the work is bad, just that some people can't tune out the part of their brain that whispers "the bloke who wrote this is a proper cunt now" which probably dampens the fun.

Lostprophets first album is still an absolute banger, but when I listen to it, it's quite hard not to associate it with baby fucking, regardless of whether or not he had fucked any babies at the time of recording.

>>24033
Art is always subjective, even novels, even screeds, even tweets and the great thing about art is that the interpretation will matter more than the intention.

It's weird because it's only really seemingly an issue if the artist/creator in question is alive today and subject to today's moral standards.

We probably don't know what Michealangelo or Da Vinci's politics were but I doubt they were exactly politically correct by today's standards, yet that's not stopping anyone flocking to see their works as great monuments of man's achievements. We can simply wave our hands and say "Well, it doesn't matter, those were different times, they were bound to have beleived things we'd find absurd today."

So I don't see why it's so much different to say "Ah, Father Ted. One of the best sitcoms ever made. Shame the writer eventually succumbed to crippling mindworms, but what can you do."

>>24036
I can overlook Chevy Chase being a horrible piece of shit, I can overlook Bowie potentially being a nonce, I can overlook Woody Allen dating his stepdaughter etc. I don't know if it's because Linehan is particularly vocal about his dodgy beliefs, but it really sours me on his work.

>>24036
People are toppling statues because they don't match today's social standards. Moan ticked because I can separate art and artist.

>>24037
>I can overlook Bowie potentially being a nonce

I thought this was pretty open knowledge? Honestly for a rockstar of the era I think the game of pretend he used to put on about being a Nazi aristocrat is more odd.

>>24036
>So I don't see why it's so much different to say "Ah, Father Ted. One of the best sitcoms ever made. Shame the writer eventually succumbed to crippling mindworms, but what can you do."

This is the grown-up view. I never really liked Glinner from his postings and views on various things - the trans stuff has just kind of washed over me a bit (and I'm probably more of a TERF than I want to admit). I don't expect anyone, let alone artists, to be perfect people.

Another great example of this is Eric Gill, creator of the font Gill Sans among other things. He was a proper, actual wrong'un, abusing his daughters, sisters, and dog. Should we cancel everyone who uses that font?

I can overlook Glinner being Glinner when I watch Father Ted but not when I watch the IT Crowd because it hasn't stood the test of time and I don't think it's very good.

>>24040
Never saw the appeal of The IT Crowd. Even as a cynical "geek" myself, it all felt kind of shit. The equivalent of one of those t-shirts that say "I'm fluent in sarcasm".

>>24041
Quite. It's not too different to that American "Bazinga" show.

>>24041
>>24040
>>24042
For me it's incredibly hit or miss. Some episodes are genuinely fantastic and have me laughing from start to finish, others are bizarrely awful. I was dumbfounded by how bad the grand finale was. It felt dated by the time of broadcast and on reflection maybe it was an early sign that Linehan was about to become a fullscale social media weirdo.

>>24040
>>24041
>>24042
>>24043

That one sketch about the smoking area will always stick with me, but other than that... Yeah, struggling to remember anything.

Oh, the Countdown one? That was good.

I've been watching Maid recently, I thought it was a good show. Well written. Quality of acting variable but never below average.

>>24043
Which ones are particularly good? I'm bored enough to give them a go.

>>24044
>>24045
"Italian for Beginners" is one that makes me laugh. Not watched it in years don't shout at me if it's not very good.

Also even it's not a great show it's not Big Bang Theory bad, Britain's not done anything that bad since the end of empire.

>>24038
>People are toppling statues because they don't match today's social standards.

This isn't really the thread for it, but I think a more charitable reading is that the statues are being topples because we don't think these people are to be honoured or emulated. I don't think anyone is wanting the people on the statues and their accomplishments to be erased from history, just that they shouldn't be celebrated. Sure it was a different time, but if there is a statue of someone who owned slaves, I can name one group of people who knew slavery was bad and wrong -- the slaves.

On a completely unrelated note, the Trailer Park Boys conversation. The first few seasons are great, because it's so rough and ready, and there are some truly fucking hilarious slapstick bits in there. As the seasons went on, it really did come off the rails a bit and the Netflix seasons are just a bit ridiculous. I watched their newest series called "Jail", which they entirely self-made and is funded by going to their own Swearnet site. IMO it's the closest to capturing the stupidity of the original few series as they've come in a while simply because they have no money but still have to make it work.

>>24047

>I don't think anyone is wanting the people on the statues and their accomplishments to be erased from history

Those people certainly do exist.

But that's really a different thing. The statues are active declarations that this was a great person, someone worthy of respect and remembrance- And, of course, a testament to the fact they were wealthy and influential enough in life to secure that kind of legacy for themselves. Removing the statues is simply saying "Nah, we've changed our minds about the level of renown this person should have."

Of course there's another conversation about whom the statue was of, and what, exactly, their historical wrongdoings were; during last year's statue-topple fever there were one or two instances of people jumping the gun a bit and going for otherwise pretty respectable people on the basis that durr muh white patriarchy bla bla bla, but like anything you're going to have a bit of stupidity bleed in around the edges.

Okay I'm being a bit more lenient than how I really feel here, in complete honesty I think most of it was stupid, but I do want to believe there was a decent and earnestly respectable idea behind some of it, at least.

Who knows though, the important thing to keep in mind to me is that values are relative, morals are social consensus, there is no true right or wrong. Some people thing that's hogwash but in my view those people are mentally deficient. It's plainly and obviously true. Some day in five hundred years after the climate apocalypse, humanity might think slavery is great again because it's the only way we can power our post-post-industrial survival economy, and put all those statues back up.

Swings and roundabouts in the end.

>>24048

I think the intent and the outcomes are at odds with each other. A statue of a slave trader is an opportunity to discuss, learn and teach in a way that an empty plinth isn't.

I've said this before, but of all the cities in Britain, Liverpool has by far the most visible legacy of slavery and by far the greatest understanding of slavery.

Many of the most prominent streets in Liverpool are named after slave traders and most of the locals know at least a few of them. After the summer of statue toppling, the City Council decided not to rename those streets, but to erect plaques explaining who those people are and what they did. Notably, that decision was made in close collaboration with both the Liverpool black community and the International Slavery Museum; the plaques will be named in honour of Eric Lynch, a local historian who for decades provided slavery walking tours.

Whether the people responsible realise it or not, toppling statues just serves to brush history under the carpet and perpetuate a false and simplistic understanding of the transatlantic slave trade. I'm reminded of how poppywashing has gradually replaced the horrors of the First World War with trite cliches about valour and sacrifice; denouncing slavery is just empty rhetoric if we don't actually understand and engage with the history.

>>24048
>But that's really a different thing. The statues are active declarations that this was a great person, someone worthy of respect and remembrance- And, of course, a testament to the fact they were wealthy and influential enough in life to secure that kind of legacy for themselves. Removing the statues is simply saying "Nah, we've changed our minds about the level of renown this person should have."

I'm not sure about that, I don't think there's an overt link to worship and I think people perceiving ones are simple. The monuments of a culture are reflective of the values of that culture, and these things change over time. They're not active worship, they're incidental references. It's kind of you to give the benefit of the doubt, but the people tearing these things down can't conceive of the idea that someone can look at this and go "I wonder what this piece of history is about" rather than "Wow, that person must have been good and I should emulate them". Fuck, I hate those people.

>>24049
Right so the thing here is, has Bridgerton got it right? I'd really prefer it if it hadn't, but it's only fair to consider the idea that pretending everyone got along and Nothing Ever Happened might actually lead to more harmony?

>>24050
>the people tearing these things down can't conceive of the idea that someone can look at this and go "I wonder what this piece of history is about" rather than "Wow, that person must have been good and I should emulate them".
I don't think many people think either of those things when they look at statues, 99% of the time they're just objects in the landscape, street furniture. But they're still going to make the place feel actively hostile to the people whose family and ancestors were raped, murdered, enslaved or generally exploited by them. How many statues of Thatcher are there up north? Pretending statues are there for educational purposes is just pretending.

>>24050
What's Bridgerton got to do with anything? Its alternate universe where racism faded out amongst the Regency gentry is not to pretend it didn't exist in reality, but to open the casting of gentry characters to people of colour. It's fiction. There was no Bridgerton family or Lady Whistledown either, y'know, but that doesn't seem to be as important when suspending your disbelief?

>>24050

>has Bridgerton got it right?

I don't think it has, no. The real history is just too interesting and too enlightening.

The facile "slavery is bad" narrative imagines that Africa was a place of peace and harmony until the Bad Awful Europeans showed up and tricked the naive natives onto boats with beads and trinkets. This is, on reflection, quite obviously based on racist tropes.

The truth is that long before the Europeans turned up, most of Africa was ruled by an assortment of powerful African empires. By some accounts, Mansa Musa (ruler of the Mali Empire from 1312 to 1337) was the wealthiest man ever to have lived. These empires had an established trade in slaves, mainly of people captured in war. When European explorers arrived in Africa, they found existing slave markets. African empires traded slaves with the Europeans for useful and valuable goods - primarily steel, guns, cloth and rum.

There was a significant slave trade in the opposite direction, led by the Berbers of North Africa. They used their powerful navies to raid coastal cities and capture slaves from as far north as Scandinavia and as far west as America. This trade led to the Barbary Wars of 1801 and 1815, fought between America and the Ottoman Empire in an effort to end attacks by Berber pirates.

Africa hasn't existed in a permanent state of victimhood, it was a competitive global power until African empires were undermined by European military and naval technology in the latter part of the industrial revolution. European empires that colonised Africa were brutal and exploitative, but that was pretty much par for the course. Africa suffered a humiliating couple of centuries, but it is rapidly catching up and the European-American dominance of the current global order is being rapidly brought to an end by a resurgent China.

In short: we're all bastards, all of our forefathers have got someone's blood on their hands, nobody stays at the top for long and every dog has his day.

>>24053

We can take down all our statues of Mansa Musa too if that's important.

>>24054

My point is that we should be adding rather than subtracting, learning rather than forgetting. Nobody learns anything from an empty plinth, but people can learn from a plaque or a memorial or a museum.

>>24055

I don't think any of the people who want to take the statues down have objected to them being relocated to museums. They've even been suggesting it. Putting up plaques that explain who the person was and why they're no longer celebrated has also been accepted as a compromise in some places.

>>24051
Rome isn't taking down its statues to appease the Jews. At some point you need to write these things off and move on. America has a huge problem with this as it's basically unique, being a 400 year old nation and a 250 year old state, almost exclusively built off slave labour of a specific ethnicity (forgetting the Irish and the Ities for the moment). Its entire context has been based on exploitation and segregation of race, whereas we can all look back a few thousand years and see everyone murdering and enslaving everyone else in an equal opportunity conquest.

>>24052
Because it's /v/, and let's consider why someone might have raised a show which presents a sanitised version of history where everyone was chummy regardless of race. Considering the damage that Baz Luhrmann did with his masterpiece R+J, it's quite clear that for the average punter, the most popular adaptation of something (regardless of whether or not it's real) is basically how it happened.

>>24055
I second this, it's the Mein Kampf approach. Don't censor it from circulation or make it a black market thing, flood the market with annotated copies that break down the content and turn it into a learning tool *against* the views espoused, so the content exists entwined with a rebuttal. Then you just need a good enough education system so people can understand the rebuttals.

We could go the Roman route instead, and pretend these people never existed by recarving statues and repurposing monuments, but then the rebuttal is lost with the content.

If people are uncomfortable with the fact that modern society was built on thousands of years of bloody conquest and enslavement, to the extent that they try to deny it happened by pretending we never held these figures up, then their opinion isn't worth much. While there are a sizeable amount who want to put these things in museums, as we've seen with Edward Colston, there's also a sizeable contingent who simply want to erase this stuff.

>>24057
>Rome isn't taking down its statues to appease the Jews.
Nah but Germany did.

Surprised we've not had a cunt-off over this yet. Why did you do it, lads, Gordon was good boy who just wanted to tear down Blair's legacy and paralyse government with indecision.

>>24047
I hate how this conversation automatically goes to the slavery issue. Like >>24050 statues have a permeance that often leads to them being pulled down by changing circumstances - with the former Soviet Bloc being instead probably the biggest example in history. I've seen it theorised that statues are one of the key things that has led to permeance of groups and with the printing press propped up the formation of nationalism, in Europe we went from tribal confederations that lasted a generation or two at the fall of Rome to nation states that are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Obviously that didn't work for communism but the pyramids are a focal point of Egyptian identity even if they were periodically robbed and restored across dynasties much as we will bury and unearth old VHS tapes of Father Ted in future.

Anyway, unlike stories, statues can't just be changed when they clash with our modern circumstances which infuriates people. Media is like this as well as it's a permanent narrative but unlike statues we can care more about the sculptor behind it. And for Star Wars, the sculptor tore all the statues down and replaced them with slightly worse versions.

>>24031

Father Ted in my mind does feel artificial but also a bit uncanny in it's surreal reflection of rural life, which is why I find to so funny. Just a lot of characters you could imagine finding in a rural community cranked up to 11.
Probably helps that I live in Ireland too.

>>24059
The documentary hasn't bothered me as much as I expected (I suspect because it omits rather than misrepresents most of what I care deeply about), but I suddenly noticed why Labour is completely and utterly doomed while watching it: It's mostly old men reminiscing about when they were young and thought they were cool, or how cool they thought other people were. The bulk of the media landscape is set up in a way that supports them in doing this, plenty of publications are full of people who are themselves sad old nostalgists or who were brought up under the tutelage of sad old nostalgists and wish they could've been there and felt the buzz to see scary grin man point out that dawn had broken. Even those who don't tend to be incurious politics knowers who've never bothered to look much before 1992 when skimreading the Wikipedia articles about general elections. So we're trapped going back over Blair/Brown again and again and again. It's like if Labour were still obsessing over learning the lessons of Wilson c. 1974 in 1990. Worse, it's like if Marcia Williams and Bernard Donoughue were still regularly giving advice to the leadership in 1990. Advice with a quality like: What is Labour's way out of the crisis? the last time we won an election, it was because we offered a better way out of the crisis...

I'm going to watch The Man Who Wasn't There in a bit. A friend recommended it, supposed to be some kind of film noir thriller. And it's by the Coen Brothers, so it should be good.

>>24062
It is. Make sure you don't watch the colour version, it's not that kind of movie.

>>24063

I'm about halfway in now, and I'm kind of struggling to like the movie. I'm a fan of classic film noir and of the Coen brothers as well, but this feels more like a pastiche of the genre where someone has ticked off a list of the usual elements but missed the mark and essentially created a colour-desaturated period piece instead of a kind of film that is on par with some of classic noir's legendary films.

>>24064

That said, having watched the whole of it now, the aliens in Fargo series 2 kind of make more sense now. As does Lorne Malvo's hook knife in series 1.

>>24061
I have really been fascinated by the parallels drawn to the current situation. Everyone thought Labour would win in 1992, then somehow they didn't. Then, the party had internal battles that seem to have been identical to the ones currently being had. All in all, this series seems to be very pro-Keir Starmer, explaining how plenty of people didn't want Tony Blair to do what Keir Starmer's doing now, but he was totally right and it worked. I've said a few times that Keir Starmer is going to win the next election, and I really can't see how he is going to do that from his current position, but the New Labour BBC documentary feels like it agrees with me.

>>24066
I think the documentary has that sort of slant as well, but the parallels seem tenuous to me. Starmer feels closer to Kinnock in 1987-92 than to Blair in 94. Blair made a big show of "taking on" the party in the 1990s, but it was more showmanship than serious. (For example, the "Clause IV" moment. Very stylish, but what substance? It's not like Blair and Brown would've been committed nationalisers had it not gone through.) The real fighting was in the 1980s and by the 1988 leadership election the left was well and truly cowed. Little things like that tend to be omitted, or in the case of Black Wednesday be glossed over, but they make all the analogies quite confusing when you throw them back into the mix.
If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend "Labour - the Wilderness Years", which is up on YouTube. It's from the mid 1990s when it was reasonably clear Blair was going to win the next election and gives the pretty standard story on Labour in the 1980s and early 1990s, but because the 1997 landslide hadn't happened yet a lot was still in contention and you get dissenting voices and hints of the long forgotten paths Labour could've taken beyond Bennism and Blairism.