Bodyguard

 Bodyguard is the latest hit programme on Sunday night tv. It is a tad different to Poldark!
What surrises me are the comments on Twitter afterwards. After the first episode they centred  on the train being too old, too clean, too on time, too slow. Second to that the comments about women started to drift in. I almost joined in this one myself, because I had noticed the paucity of men, apart from the hero. I know a surprising number of Police chiefs appear to be women these days, but rarely do we see them holding assault weapons. In fact the only real policeman I have ever seen holding an assault rifle was outside the old US embassy in London.

Episode two and the attack on the Home Secretary's car was the thing that attracted the  attention. The driver, who never had a speaking part, was unceremoniously dumped on the street without a word of regret, on tv and on Twitter. He was deemed invisible. Our hero and heroine, after a near death experience, swiftly followed it with life-affirming sex, which has been a theme of literature  and film for generations. Twitter howled it down. Not again! they cried. Did they have to spoil it? Whitney will be bursting into song next, they said.

There may be glitches in the programme, there may be well-worn themes as well as new ones, but have these people any idea how hard it is to come up with comething new these days? Why not relax and enjoy what proved to be a very tense programme that has another four episodes to go?

It is nicely set up and can go in many directions from this point. Will he commit suicide, like his old comrade? Will he kill the Home Secretary? Will someone else do it? Will she have a change of heart - or rather, a change of policy? Will she somehow be forced to kill him? Will his kids/wife be kidnapped or held to ransom? Who has Vicky met recently who now stays overnight? Will another old comrade take the place of the scar-face one? With this many options, I think it is an excellent piece of writing by Jed Mercurio. (Hope I've spelled that correctly; now that I look at it, the surname seems very similar to that of the Home Secretary.

Disturbing tv

A lot of what I see on tv disturbs me.

What sort of things am I thinking of?

So many comedians who are not funny.

So called “Celebrities” who vie with each other to wear the least clothing in public and then put the photograph on social media. 

Reality programmes that use nastiness of one kind or another to grab an audience.

The way the media leads the public into thinking what they say is news when it is so often prefaced by the phrase “We understand that….we are told that…we think that…”

The way someone’s views are routinely shouted down, mocked, talked over or cut off in most tv interviews these days. The way interviewers ask questions that politicians can’t answer; politicians who won’t answer even if they can.

The cowardly people who use Twitter to annoy, vilify and abuse others.

Dramas, films and soaps where people are horribly tortured, mutilated, beated and raped.

The obscene amount of money that is bandied around in football and most other sports today.

Advertising on tv – and anywhere, for that matter - that tempts people into gambling.

The focus on food adverts and cookery programmes when a good percentage of the nation is already obese.

The endless cookery competitions where food is wasted and living creatures are killed – there will be a dearth of lobsters soon since so many are used in cookery competitions.

Blogger thinking I have spelling errors when I am using British English!

The Poldark argument

There is a lot of discussion at the moment on the so called “Rape scene” in the tv drama Poldark. There seems to be a split in the perception of the scene by viewers, with one segment of the comments disliking it and panning the BBC for showing it and others who thought it a fair depiction of the way in which long thwarted love between two people will suddenly erupt – especially when the woman is going to marry the man who has beggared you and is your greatest enemy.

The book, written in the sixties/seventies, has not been given the same treatment. Nor has the previous tv adaption which featured Robin Ellis. I feel sure there have been other rapes, some more violent – the Forsyth Saga, The Onedin Line, Daniel Deronda to name but a few. Watching historical drama with the mindset of modern times is never going to work. The lowly position of women in the 1790s has to be considered and understood. Men ruled, and that cannot be changed without changing history.

So many things are not pc now that it is difficult to say what we think without alienating somebody, somewhere. It strikes me as rather odd that the recent 50 Shades Books and films can be so popular when the subject matter is so close to rape (even if she did sign a consent form!) and that women now drool over pictures of half-naked men – exactly the behaviour they so hated when men drooled over pictures of half-naked women. Do as you would be done by seems a better maxim to follow.

The book was written in the era of the bodice ripper, which was once so popular and is now spoken of as trash. One of the themes of romance writing back then was that what began as rape could and often did transform into something better when the heroine realised that she could give in and enjoy what followed. Now it seems we are told that subjection, obedience and pain add to the delight of sex. The world is a weird place, but fortunately, most things pass away and are but as smoke on the wind.