Entertainment For Lively Minds
'The Hour'
Posted by Remote Control on 19 July 2011 - 10:05pm.
What did you think?
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I enjoyed it
will watch next week.
Same here.
Foxy Towers fell silent for the duration; the Beeb does this sort of thing very well, so we hope it continues to engage us as well as the first episode did.
I liked it
A lot. The Series Link remains set...
Like it
Will watch again
Have recorded it
It's been heavily trailed so hope the hype is warranted.
Watched the BBC4 programme Britain Through A Lens and the story of John Grierson and the British Documentary Film Movement. Fascinating.
If you enjoyed that, may I suggest this DVD?
The Humphrey Jennings Collection - which is available from Amazon UK at less than twenty quid. It's a bargain.
I wasn't really
too engaged, though there was enough there to keep me intrigued for next week. Thought some of the dialogue was a bit clunky, didn't sound right for what I would have imagined for that era. On the bright side, Ben Wishaw's acting was top notch and really stood out.
Enjoyed it
Will watch next week.
Particularly enjoyed Ben Wishaw's performance.
Did they really have...
..pencils with attached rubbers in the late 50s?
I'm just old enough
to be able to confirm they did.
I quite liked it, although I dozed off for 10 minutes in the middle, thorugh tiredness not boredom.
Not really
A very ordinary noir plot with some stuff about sex and class thrown in to make it more like Mad Men.
And the script was rubbish: "I think we need to keep an eye on Mr Kennedy - he's running for vice president." And the dialogue in the newsroom just didn't ring true.
Not impressed really
I know they didn't want it compared with Mad Men but hard cheese. It wasn't as witty and clever and it didn't have the brave (slow) pace of the US series. Perhaps American accents haven't changed as much as ours but couldn't they even attempt the clipped 'posh' (to our ears) accents of the time?
There were moments in Mad Men, and not just the obvious sexism and the drinking and smoking to excess, that made you realised how society has changed in the last fifty years. Remember the daughter with the plastic bag over her head shooed into the other room, and the picnic with all the rubbish left on the grass? It was scenes like that that really made Mad Men stand out and I can't remember anything in The Hour that compared with this.
I'll watch the second part but I wasn't particuarly impressed. The writing just wasn't good enough in my opinion.
well here's hoping
The Hour doesn't have Mad Men's clunky exposition, meandering tesdiously soapy scripts and one dimensional characters (ooh look he's smoking sat on the edge of bed, he must be deep).
Promising
It certainly looked good. Apparently, an obsessive amount of attention was paid to details like the pencils used at the BBC at the time.
Slightly too stylised for my liking but maybe this impression will diminish as the series develops.
The 50s really was another world, just out of reach as a solid memory for most of us.
In idle moments I've often wondered how much more smelly life must have been in an era where people didn't shower every day, wash their hair regularly or go to the dry cleaners very often. The first impression of earlier eras is usually visual but I bet the first sense to be assailed would be smell.
It's impossible to know,
but I do remember as a nipper being occasionally distinctly surprised by how rank a person could smell.
The thing is, that was a very rare sensation, most of the time I don't recall finding anyone's personal odour distasteful. Even my Dad, returning from a long day at the office, only smelled slightly sweaty. Perhaps it's the fact that I recall finding him only 'slightly' sweaty that's the key.
Given the relative infrequency of full scale bathing (showers were impossibly rare), it must be assumed that either everyone knew much better how to wash themselves standing up at the wash basin, and kept themselves pretty much as clean as we do today, or our collective perceived sense of smell has been altered in some way by half a century of the onslaught of the products and persuasions of the pharmaceutical industry.
I rather think it's the latter.
I suspect you might be right,
When I was a boy in the 50s bathnight was once a week (Sunday) and it would have been considered very odd to have more than one bath a week. Showers were seen as the height of America film-star luxury.
When I went to stay with my gradmother in Liverpool it was a tin bath in front of the fire or a stand up wash in the kitchen; she had neither any sort of bathroom nor hot running water.
Eeeee... kids of today, etc etc.
Just catching up
We just episode 3. Good stuff! Julian Rhind Tutt is useless as usual, but it looks good and some of the other characters ( Freddie esp) as good.