I kinda think that MOBLAND ended with a whimper. I don't want to spoil anything but the show seemed more intent on setting up a second season (which has not been greenlit yet) than delivering something that could possibly stand on its own. Also, the finale required the major opponent of the season being incredibly stupid, which is out of character considering how driven and 'one step ahead' he's been for the prior 9 episodes.
I'll probably watch a second season but it won't be a priority.
On the other end of the spectrum, DEPT Q (on Netflix) was excellent. This is new Edinburgh based iteration of the show starring Matthew Goode. This is written, acted, and directed at a higher level than is normally expected for a show like this, with Goode being in absolute prime form. The premise: Goode is Carl Morck, an Edinburgh detective (originally from London) who, due to events in the beginning of episode 1, gets put in charge of a cold case section called Dept Q. Nobody expects much of him as the department is more for publicity than anything else, but his assistant finds a case that's actually worth pursuing. As they start their investigation, interesting things happen.
Quite good. It's 9 episodes for season 1 and I never felt that anything presented was extraneous. The finale ties things up in a very satisfying way and sets up a second season nicely, should it be greenlit. If we don't get a second season, this first season stands on its own just fine...unlike MOBLAND.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 30,906Chief of Staff
I’m just a couple of episodes from the end of Mobland…you saying not to expect much could could, conversely, make it slightly less disappointing…🤔
Started Mobland last night, a good first episode. To be honest I’m getting a bit tired of graphic sex scenes and the overuse of the ‘c’ word in programmes today. They don’t further the plot and the sparse use of the ‘c’ word is much more effective than using it in every other sentence.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 30,906Chief of Staff
Trying to avoid spoilers and be vague, but the finale only happens the way it does because the main opponent acts stupidly, which is entirely and completely out of character for how he's been portrayed over the prior 9 episodes.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 30,906Chief of Staff
On the other end of the spectrum, DEPT Q (on Netflix) was excellent. This is new Edinburgh based iteration of the show starring Matthew Goode. This is written, acted, and directed at a higher level than is normally expected for a show like this, with Goode being in absolute prime form. The premise: Goode is Carl Morck, an Edinburgh detective (originally from London) who, due to events in the beginning of episode 1, gets put in charge of a cold case section called Dept Q. Nobody expects much of him as the department is more for publicity than anything else, but his assistant finds a case that's actually worth pursuing. As they start their investigation, interesting things happen.
Quite good. It's 9 episodes for season 1 and I never felt that anything presented was extraneous. The finale ties things up in a very satisfying way and sets up a second season nicely, should it be greenlit. If we don't get a second season, this first season stands on its own just fine...unlike MOBLAND.
I’m just over halfway through DEPT Q…it’s ok. There is absolutely nothing new here…standard fare…a sulky cop with a chip on his shoulder, a terrible home life and being shunted out of the way by his boss and being helped by ‘misfits’…
This is based on a book series by Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen who set the books in Copenhagen…Netflix we’re going to film the series in Boston, Massachusetts but decided on Edinburgh instead…
As I said - all fairly standard cop show stuff…but it is nice to see people from the tv series Still Game get some screen time 😁
Oh it's for sure a comfortable pair of shoes, but it's a well made comfortable pair of shoes. Great writing and acting go a long way to keeping me engaged in something that's fairly formulaic.
I watched the first episode of Shardlake, which had been out on Disney+ but it wasn't a good adaptation of CJ Samson's novel. It was all a bit amateur hour. The actor may have had physical things - what's the term now, not disabled, I don't know - but it almost made it worse because he wasn't much like our hero, simply Shardlake in name only played by an actor with a physical anomaly. It would be better with a young Timothy Spall albeit not fat like the young Spall was, he is entertaining in his Death Valley comedy whodunit. The character Barack wasn't in the first Shardlake book but he shows up here and isn't the lanky, physical, irreverent working class fellow of the book. Running hooves punctuate the drama along with sweeping aerial shots of misty CGI landscapes with a monastery in the distance and the interiors put you in mind of the Wine From the Devil's Cellar sponsored ad breaks.
Plenty of inappropriate diversity for medieval England of course but mainly they all looked too young. All a bit something of nothing but it made me want to see The Name of the Rose again, which is hardly ever shown on telly.
I watched Shardlake too and had similar mixed feelings. It feels a bit over produced. Too long winded. The CGI was rubbish - nowhere in England looks like that - the sets were too 'new' looking for 400 year old monasteries. Didn't like the voice over. And yes, the whole time I was thinking it was just a newer version of The Name of the Rose.
I caught up with James Bond contender Jacob Elordi in The Narrow Road to the Deep North which is about Australians in a Singapore PoW camp, it flashed forward to the 'present' day, well the 1980s I think, where Ciarian Hinds plays Elordi's character looking back. Not too dissimilar in format to another BBC showing Mix Tape, sort of pensive with dull visuals.
It's good, everything is okay, nicely shot not spectacular, nobody jests much, you don't see his mates at all, he and his love interest have very contemporary frantic pre-marital sex, Elordi is good but in the first episode doesn't have much to bounce off, and yeah, I mean at 6ft 5in he is tall, he does tower over everyone else, even if you had a six foot love interest he'd be a fair bit taller so I dunno.
Watched the documentary about Chloe Ayling, the Croydon lass who got kidnapped in Italy and organised her own escape by inadvertently manufacturing a reverse of Stockholm Syndrome - a bit like Elektra and Reynard in TWINE - only without a revenge motive and nuclear submarines. Interesting. They didn't delve much into her life pre-kidnap, nor a tremendous amount post-event, so it felt incomplete. I am not sure what the point was other than case of self justification, which she didn't need. The most interesting aspect was how social media turned her from heroic victim to lying opportunist in a matter of hours. The perpetrators are in prison, convicted of kidnap and extortion, so there is clear guilt. No, there is something else, something peculiarly British in finding fault in people's achievement, attutudes and demeanour. What's a pretty and naive 19yo going to do under the circumstances? Wail and scream? By not doing the obvious, and therefore giving herself the best possible chance of survival and escape, Chloe appears to have annoyed sone commentators. Paradoxicalky, couldn't be because she is / was naive and pretty? I dunno. Interesting, I suppose.
I've just realised I ballsed up on this - ChrisNo1 is right, the monasteries were built shortly after the Normans arrived so would have been 400 years old in the time of Henry VIII and not new.
Anyway, a thriller called Memory with Liam Neeson and Spectre's Monica Bulluci is on Film4 I think or one of the channels tonight at 9pm in the UK - it's a bit of a potboiler apparently but it's directed by our own Martin Campbell, it's from 2022 so he's had a fair run hasn't he? It's not great but some of us might be interested, I can't promise I'll watch it.
I've just finished watching the first season of "Ludwig", staring David Mitchel. I only knew him as a panelist on QI before this, and he's a revelation. He plays John, a reclusive puzzle designer. Crosswords and that sort of thing, and he pretty much never leaves his late mother's house. Then his sister-in-law phones. Her husband James who's John's twin brother and a police detective, has disappeared. She needs John to go to work at the police station just once posing as James, just to find an important clue to his twin brother's disappearance. The problem is he gets sent to crime scenes again and again, and John keeps solving crimes! He uses his puzzle solving skills and he just can't help finding out who the killers are.
The crime solving is the episodic part of the series while finding his twin brother James is the overarching theme of the series. The murder of the week aspect is really smart and at times funny in a classic crime fiction way. Many of the mysteries could have been from Miss Marple or Poirot. Barely any blood, violence or swearing and clever solutions. The fact that the detective doing the solving isn't really a police officer and pretending to be another person makes it special. Highly recommended!
Like much of the UK, I have been enthralled by Celebrity Traitors - but its final episode is on Thursday, so I am late in posting this.
I never watched Traitors - I have some kind of aversion to seeing the general public or civilians onscreen; I worry for them should they do something shameful or humiliating.
This, however, has been brilliant. The premise as ever is that you have a number of people in a castle or something and 2 or 3 is a traitor allowed to murder the others - this appears to be done either with some slight of hand or interaction, or simply with an envelope to the victim's room informing them of the fact.
The others - 'faithfuls' - have to guess who the traitors are and banish them via a vote each evening/episode.
Now this is all very well - but it requires teamwork and conversation and the problem is a) You don't know who you are confiding in, it may be a traitor who can simply murder you that evening if they think you are too smart or onto them, and b) The other faithfuls may think you are a traitor acting in bad faith, and vote you out instead.
It's all very Agatha Christie - with the proviso, well, we all know that neither Proirot (sp @Barbel ) nor Marple would last 5 minutes poking their nose into an murderer's affairs, they'd both be bumped off pronto, with the possible exception of Murder on the Orient Express. (In fact, the Christie work it most resembles is And Then There Were None, in particular the best film version of that, the 1945 black and white one with Louis Haywood (look out for its first victim, it's the actor who plays Max in The Sound of Music). Likewise, 007 wouldn't last 5 mins in real life - any supervillain would say, oh, is he sniffing around? Shoot him. But we overlook this for the fun to be had.
You can't do the Marple or Poirot thing on Celebrity Traitors - if you ask questions or are on to them, you're dead. You'd have to play dumb - but if you do this, some might think, hmmm. they're not offering anything so let's bump them off anyway.
The money is for charity this time, not for individual gain, which makes it less stressful and you have to overlook some stuff; like surely it's the one with the best agent who is a traitor? What happens if they guess the traitors early doors, doesn't the show end too quickly?
Once someone is on the ropes at the 'round table' where they have it out with each other, everyone piles in and they have no chance. It's like some small-town community picking on a stranger - indeed, it seems most of the ones to go - all faithfuls it turns out - are minorities; two blacks, one gay, one Scot, three others get murdered; a gay guy and a Welsh woman, the only ones likely to be left could be propping up the bar in Wetherspoons.
On a lighter note, the last episode had two brilliant scenes, one with Jonathan Ross, and one with his fellow traitor Alan Carr cracking up. Some doom-laden Skyfall soundtrack sounds, it seemed as well.
I don't watch Traitors. It's a guessing game like that banking thing with the boxes that Noel Edmonds did for years.
GIRLBANDS FOREVER is interesting in a rough-and-tumble manner. The celebrity press comes in for a lot of criticism in this one. The women pop stars [ex-pop stars?] are both candid and candidly bitchy. The Spice Girls got off lightly it seems. Atomic Kitten and All Saints not so much. Mis-Teeq bafflingly under celebrated both musically and by the gossip columnists. It's my area of music existence when I could still go clubbing and pass myself off as young, so you'd think I'd remember a lot of it. But I don't so it's quite a good watch.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 30,906Chief of Staff
Celebrity Traitors has been excellent…I’ve seen only one of the other traitors series, which was enjoyable enough…but I much prefer this celebrity version…despite what @chrisno1 thinks - it’s about as far removed from the program he mentions (which is still going, btw)…
Yes, the merriment of Ross and Carr has made it - that said, I feel I must suppress suspicions of the format, I mean, they're not going to entrust their flagship show to lesser stars, are they? But maybe that's obvious to see now, with hindsight. And do they really return to their rooms in the evening, as implied? Likewise I do suspect that The Wheel game show is fixed, I could forgive it during lockdown but do wonder about the ethics of that, if true. I do prefer this to the non-Celebrity Traitors, where people are knifing each other to get their hands on life-changing amounts of money. As ChrisNo1 says, early on it's just guessing but there is a bit of analogy applied later on, a bit of sleuthing. But no real elephant traps have been laid for suspects.
Girlbands Forever was okay, I didn't enjoy it as much as the boy bands one, for various reasons. Blokes do a much better line in articulate self-pity, be it John Lennon or Robbie Williams, they also like to see themselves as 'truth sayers' a bit. The shock of what real life can be like is one they have to process, but I would argue finding out the world is tilted against you is less of a shock to women in a male-dominated world from the start.
In the boy bands doc, there was a story a member of Five told about a tabloid sting on him involving a Russian prostitute - that precipitated a split from his true love, fellow popstar Billie - but she didn't get to tell the story in this, at least not so far she hasn't. Having to have an abortion to avoid jeopardising a career is imo worse than anything that happened to the blokes, and it's said to the reason Geri left The Spice Girls, but none of them were interviewed here, not even the perpetually up for a gig Mel B, and you get the sense most of them are still on message anyway. It was left to one of the girls from from All Saints to tell such a story - and she was in bits even though she saved her child, while another didn't.
There is a sense that the boy bands are better at bitching, whereas the girl bands are better at getting bitched about. But ultimately, these docs are only as good as your contributors. If anyone's read The Last Party by John Harris they'll know that women from Britpop bands are pretty good at putting the boot in/revealing all.
The third part of GIRLBANDS FOREVER mystifingly omitted all mention of Girls Aloud, I assume because they could not get any of the four remaining members to contribute. Sarah Harding's unfortunate alcohol related death is probably too close to home for the others to comment on the impact celebrity, fame and scandal had on Girls Aloud. While I sympathise, that does rather leave a huge hole in the girl band story and neglects to embrace the ultimate dark side of success.
Was Sarah Harding's death alcohol-related? It was cancer, wasn't it - or are we saying that was precipitated by drink? That and the fact she didn't bother to get it checked out, possibly due to lockdown as well? I suppose I can research it.
I suppose that recent death of Liam from, I think, The Wanted - or was it another band - due to going on a drink and drugs bender and jumping off a balcony would be another boy band victim; it did seem to avoiding some of the talent show products.
I got that wrong. It was breast cancer. I was just thinking her alcoholism was a difficult subject to speak of as she wasn't there to defend herself in the same way Kerry Katona and Melanie Blatt were and shouldn't have linked it to her death. I assume the remaining Girls Aloud felt similarly. My apologies.
Comments
ADOLESCENCE on Netflix. This is going to win every award there is. Wow.
I’m four episodes into this now…Hardy is excellent…Brozza is taking a lot of stick for his accent - oddly I think Mirren’s is worse 👀
Hardy is doing a lot of the work in this, you can feel the strain his character is under…he does have a great supporting cast…
I kinda think that MOBLAND ended with a whimper. I don't want to spoil anything but the show seemed more intent on setting up a second season (which has not been greenlit yet) than delivering something that could possibly stand on its own. Also, the finale required the major opponent of the season being incredibly stupid, which is out of character considering how driven and 'one step ahead' he's been for the prior 9 episodes.
I'll probably watch a second season but it won't be a priority.
On the other end of the spectrum, DEPT Q (on Netflix) was excellent. This is new Edinburgh based iteration of the show starring Matthew Goode. This is written, acted, and directed at a higher level than is normally expected for a show like this, with Goode being in absolute prime form. The premise: Goode is Carl Morck, an Edinburgh detective (originally from London) who, due to events in the beginning of episode 1, gets put in charge of a cold case section called Dept Q. Nobody expects much of him as the department is more for publicity than anything else, but his assistant finds a case that's actually worth pursuing. As they start their investigation, interesting things happen.
Quite good. It's 9 episodes for season 1 and I never felt that anything presented was extraneous. The finale ties things up in a very satisfying way and sets up a second season nicely, should it be greenlit. If we don't get a second season, this first season stands on its own just fine...unlike MOBLAND.
I’m just a couple of episodes from the end of Mobland…you saying not to expect much could could, conversely, make it slightly less disappointing…🤔
Started Mobland last night, a good first episode. To be honest I’m getting a bit tired of graphic sex scenes and the overuse of the ‘c’ word in programmes today. They don’t further the plot and the sparse use of the ‘c’ word is much more effective than using it in every other sentence.
Yeah…Mobland is very ‘c’ word heavy 👀
I enjoyed the series immensely…and the theme tune is a banger…and some great outro tunes too 👏🏻
Hmmm….the ending is kinda what you are expecting…but I’ve no gripe with that…
Probably go onto DEPT Q next 😁
Trying to avoid spoilers and be vague, but the finale only happens the way it does because the main opponent acts stupidly, which is entirely and completely out of character for how he's been portrayed over the prior 9 episodes.
Yea, I get what you mean…but it’s a standard trope…
@HarryCanyon said…
On the other end of the spectrum, DEPT Q (on Netflix) was excellent. This is new Edinburgh based iteration of the show starring Matthew Goode. This is written, acted, and directed at a higher level than is normally expected for a show like this, with Goode being in absolute prime form. The premise: Goode is Carl Morck, an Edinburgh detective (originally from London) who, due to events in the beginning of episode 1, gets put in charge of a cold case section called Dept Q. Nobody expects much of him as the department is more for publicity than anything else, but his assistant finds a case that's actually worth pursuing. As they start their investigation, interesting things happen.
Quite good. It's 9 episodes for season 1 and I never felt that anything presented was extraneous. The finale ties things up in a very satisfying way and sets up a second season nicely, should it be greenlit. If we don't get a second season, this first season stands on its own just fine...unlike MOBLAND.
I’m just over halfway through DEPT Q…it’s ok. There is absolutely nothing new here…standard fare…a sulky cop with a chip on his shoulder, a terrible home life and being shunted out of the way by his boss and being helped by ‘misfits’…
This is based on a book series by Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen who set the books in Copenhagen…Netflix we’re going to film the series in Boston, Massachusetts but decided on Edinburgh instead…
As I said - all fairly standard cop show stuff…but it is nice to see people from the tv series Still Game get some screen time 😁
Oh it's for sure a comfortable pair of shoes, but it's a well made comfortable pair of shoes. Great writing and acting go a long way to keeping me engaged in something that's fairly formulaic.
I watched the first episode of Shardlake, which had been out on Disney+ but it wasn't a good adaptation of CJ Samson's novel. It was all a bit amateur hour. The actor may have had physical things - what's the term now, not disabled, I don't know - but it almost made it worse because he wasn't much like our hero, simply Shardlake in name only played by an actor with a physical anomaly. It would be better with a young Timothy Spall albeit not fat like the young Spall was, he is entertaining in his Death Valley comedy whodunit. The character Barack wasn't in the first Shardlake book but he shows up here and isn't the lanky, physical, irreverent working class fellow of the book. Running hooves punctuate the drama along with sweeping aerial shots of misty CGI landscapes with a monastery in the distance and the interiors put you in mind of the Wine From the Devil's Cellar sponsored ad breaks.
Plenty of inappropriate diversity for medieval England of course but mainly they all looked too young. All a bit something of nothing but it made me want to see The Name of the Rose again, which is hardly ever shown on telly.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I watched Shardlake too and had similar mixed feelings. It feels a bit over produced. Too long winded. The CGI was rubbish - nowhere in England looks like that - the sets were too 'new' looking for 400 year old monasteries. Didn't like the voice over. And yes, the whole time I was thinking it was just a newer version of The Name of the Rose.
'But back then those 400-year-old monasteries would have been new!'
Roger Moore 1927-2017
If you've never seen it, CADFAEL...with Derek Jacobi...is quite good and scratches that THE NAME OF THE ROSE itch.
I caught up with James Bond contender Jacob Elordi in The Narrow Road to the Deep North which is about Australians in a Singapore PoW camp, it flashed forward to the 'present' day, well the 1980s I think, where Ciarian Hinds plays Elordi's character looking back. Not too dissimilar in format to another BBC showing Mix Tape, sort of pensive with dull visuals.
It's good, everything is okay, nicely shot not spectacular, nobody jests much, you don't see his mates at all, he and his love interest have very contemporary frantic pre-marital sex, Elordi is good but in the first episode doesn't have much to bounce off, and yeah, I mean at 6ft 5in he is tall, he does tower over everyone else, even if you had a six foot love interest he'd be a fair bit taller so I dunno.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Watched the documentary about Chloe Ayling, the Croydon lass who got kidnapped in Italy and organised her own escape by inadvertently manufacturing a reverse of Stockholm Syndrome - a bit like Elektra and Reynard in TWINE - only without a revenge motive and nuclear submarines. Interesting. They didn't delve much into her life pre-kidnap, nor a tremendous amount post-event, so it felt incomplete. I am not sure what the point was other than case of self justification, which she didn't need. The most interesting aspect was how social media turned her from heroic victim to lying opportunist in a matter of hours. The perpetrators are in prison, convicted of kidnap and extortion, so there is clear guilt. No, there is something else, something peculiarly British in finding fault in people's achievement, attutudes and demeanour. What's a pretty and naive 19yo going to do under the circumstances? Wail and scream? By not doing the obvious, and therefore giving herself the best possible chance of survival and escape, Chloe appears to have annoyed sone commentators. Paradoxicalky, couldn't be because she is / was naive and pretty? I dunno. Interesting, I suppose.
I've just realised I ballsed up on this - ChrisNo1 is right, the monasteries were built shortly after the Normans arrived so would have been 400 years old in the time of Henry VIII and not new.
Anyway, a thriller called Memory with Liam Neeson and Spectre's Monica Bulluci is on Film4 I think or one of the channels tonight at 9pm in the UK - it's a bit of a potboiler apparently but it's directed by our own Martin Campbell, it's from 2022 so he's had a fair run hasn't he? It's not great but some of us might be interested, I can't promise I'll watch it.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I've just finished watching the first season of "Ludwig", staring David Mitchel. I only knew him as a panelist on QI before this, and he's a revelation. He plays John, a reclusive puzzle designer. Crosswords and that sort of thing, and he pretty much never leaves his late mother's house. Then his sister-in-law phones. Her husband James who's John's twin brother and a police detective, has disappeared. She needs John to go to work at the police station just once posing as James, just to find an important clue to his twin brother's disappearance. The problem is he gets sent to crime scenes again and again, and John keeps solving crimes! He uses his puzzle solving skills and he just can't help finding out who the killers are.
The crime solving is the episodic part of the series while finding his twin brother James is the overarching theme of the series. The murder of the week aspect is really smart and at times funny in a classic crime fiction way. Many of the mysteries could have been from Miss Marple or Poirot. Barely any blood, violence or swearing and clever solutions. The fact that the detective doing the solving isn't really a police officer and pretending to be another person makes it special. Highly recommended!
Ludwig was an excellent series 👍🏻👍🏻
Like much of the UK, I have been enthralled by Celebrity Traitors - but its final episode is on Thursday, so I am late in posting this.
I never watched Traitors - I have some kind of aversion to seeing the general public or civilians onscreen; I worry for them should they do something shameful or humiliating.
This, however, has been brilliant. The premise as ever is that you have a number of people in a castle or something and 2 or 3 is a traitor allowed to murder the others - this appears to be done either with some slight of hand or interaction, or simply with an envelope to the victim's room informing them of the fact.
The others - 'faithfuls' - have to guess who the traitors are and banish them via a vote each evening/episode.
Now this is all very well - but it requires teamwork and conversation and the problem is a) You don't know who you are confiding in, it may be a traitor who can simply murder you that evening if they think you are too smart or onto them, and b) The other faithfuls may think you are a traitor acting in bad faith, and vote you out instead.
It's all very Agatha Christie - with the proviso, well, we all know that neither Proirot (sp @Barbel ) nor Marple would last 5 minutes poking their nose into an murderer's affairs, they'd both be bumped off pronto, with the possible exception of Murder on the Orient Express. (In fact, the Christie work it most resembles is And Then There Were None, in particular the best film version of that, the 1945 black and white one with Louis Haywood (look out for its first victim, it's the actor who plays Max in The Sound of Music). Likewise, 007 wouldn't last 5 mins in real life - any supervillain would say, oh, is he sniffing around? Shoot him. But we overlook this for the fun to be had.
You can't do the Marple or Poirot thing on Celebrity Traitors - if you ask questions or are on to them, you're dead. You'd have to play dumb - but if you do this, some might think, hmmm. they're not offering anything so let's bump them off anyway.
The money is for charity this time, not for individual gain, which makes it less stressful and you have to overlook some stuff; like surely it's the one with the best agent who is a traitor? What happens if they guess the traitors early doors, doesn't the show end too quickly?
Once someone is on the ropes at the 'round table' where they have it out with each other, everyone piles in and they have no chance. It's like some small-town community picking on a stranger - indeed, it seems most of the ones to go - all faithfuls it turns out - are minorities; two blacks, one gay, one Scot, three others get murdered; a gay guy and a Welsh woman, the only ones likely to be left could be propping up the bar in Wetherspoons.
On a lighter note, the last episode had two brilliant scenes, one with Jonathan Ross, and one with his fellow traitor Alan Carr cracking up. Some doom-laden Skyfall soundtrack sounds, it seemed as well.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I don't watch Traitors. It's a guessing game like that banking thing with the boxes that Noel Edmonds did for years.
GIRLBANDS FOREVER is interesting in a rough-and-tumble manner. The celebrity press comes in for a lot of criticism in this one. The women pop stars [ex-pop stars?] are both candid and candidly bitchy. The Spice Girls got off lightly it seems. Atomic Kitten and All Saints not so much. Mis-Teeq bafflingly under celebrated both musically and by the gossip columnists. It's my area of music existence when I could still go clubbing and pass myself off as young, so you'd think I'd remember a lot of it. But I don't so it's quite a good watch.
Celebrity Traitors has been excellent…I’ve seen only one of the other traitors series, which was enjoyable enough…but I much prefer this celebrity version…despite what @chrisno1 thinks - it’s about as far removed from the program he mentions (which is still going, btw)…
Yes, the merriment of Ross and Carr has made it - that said, I feel I must suppress suspicions of the format, I mean, they're not going to entrust their flagship show to lesser stars, are they? But maybe that's obvious to see now, with hindsight. And do they really return to their rooms in the evening, as implied? Likewise I do suspect that The Wheel game show is fixed, I could forgive it during lockdown but do wonder about the ethics of that, if true. I do prefer this to the non-Celebrity Traitors, where people are knifing each other to get their hands on life-changing amounts of money. As ChrisNo1 says, early on it's just guessing but there is a bit of analogy applied later on, a bit of sleuthing. But no real elephant traps have been laid for suspects.
Girlbands Forever was okay, I didn't enjoy it as much as the boy bands one, for various reasons. Blokes do a much better line in articulate self-pity, be it John Lennon or Robbie Williams, they also like to see themselves as 'truth sayers' a bit. The shock of what real life can be like is one they have to process, but I would argue finding out the world is tilted against you is less of a shock to women in a male-dominated world from the start.
In the boy bands doc, there was a story a member of Five told about a tabloid sting on him involving a Russian prostitute - that precipitated a split from his true love, fellow popstar Billie - but she didn't get to tell the story in this, at least not so far she hasn't. Having to have an abortion to avoid jeopardising a career is imo worse than anything that happened to the blokes, and it's said to the reason Geri left The Spice Girls, but none of them were interviewed here, not even the perpetually up for a gig Mel B, and you get the sense most of them are still on message anyway. It was left to one of the girls from from All Saints to tell such a story - and she was in bits even though she saved her child, while another didn't.
There is a sense that the boy bands are better at bitching, whereas the girl bands are better at getting bitched about. But ultimately, these docs are only as good as your contributors. If anyone's read The Last Party by John Harris they'll know that women from Britpop bands are pretty good at putting the boot in/revealing all.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Re Celebrity Traitors, I do feel that @Sir Miles and @Barbel would be at home in the turret.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Oh yes, and we DO murder in plain sight 😉
They’ve released the cast list of this years I’m A “Celebrity” contestants - I’ve only heard of four out of the twelve, I must get out more!
I think that the word "celebrity" is used much more widely nowadays than it used to be in the past. 😉
The third part of GIRLBANDS FOREVER mystifingly omitted all mention of Girls Aloud, I assume because they could not get any of the four remaining members to contribute. Sarah Harding's unfortunate alcohol related death is probably too close to home for the others to comment on the impact celebrity, fame and scandal had on Girls Aloud. While I sympathise, that does rather leave a huge hole in the girl band story and neglects to embrace the ultimate dark side of success.
Was Sarah Harding's death alcohol-related? It was cancer, wasn't it - or are we saying that was precipitated by drink? That and the fact she didn't bother to get it checked out, possibly due to lockdown as well? I suppose I can research it.
I suppose that recent death of Liam from, I think, The Wanted - or was it another band - due to going on a drink and drugs bender and jumping off a balcony would be another boy band victim; it did seem to avoiding some of the talent show products.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I got that wrong. It was breast cancer. I was just thinking her alcoholism was a difficult subject to speak of as she wasn't there to defend herself in the same way Kerry Katona and Melanie Blatt were and shouldn't have linked it to her death. I assume the remaining Girls Aloud felt similarly. My apologies.