garsonfarm

Repeated in May 2023 in an inconspicuous late night slot on BBC4, this was a sharp reminder of how 30 years ago the BBC would produce excellent dramas where the power of the story was amplified by subtlety and understatement rather than exaggeration and flamboyance. A simple plot about an elderly couple coming to terms with the imminent demise of one of them, and how together they realise what they've achieved with their lives, as they journey from their Skye croft to visit each of their five children around Britain. There's a lot of social commentary about the state of the nation in the early 1990s, but it's used as a backcloth for what is basically a love story. Superbly acted by the main characters to give a genuine warmth to the inevitable ending. Highly recommended.

At school I was taught a good story should have a beginning, a middle and an end. The problem with Season 1 is that the 8th and final episode does not bring any ending to the storylines. I spent ages trying to find more episodes to give a satisfying conclusion, but they don't exist.

If this is a device to set up a second season, it's too cynically engineered, and leaves a frustrating aftertaste for a journey which had been enjoyably addictive and exciting, but to then let it all dribble away like that is criminal and a big turn off for wanting to watch any sequel in case they pull the same stunt again.

Series 1 was good but Series 2 was a mess - they literally lost the plot - the unusual central saga of S1 is abruptly written out in ep 2.02 without being concluded, leaving a great big hole which they desperately try to fill with melodramatic romances between cardboard cut-out characters which even Eastenders would reject as too clunky. Meanwhile a nutter sets off homemade bombs around Dundee for no real reason, even on nutter-logic. It's all become very silly ...

Please either let it die now, or if anyone is desperate enough to commission a 3rd series, bring back the unfinished central plot from S1 and focus on that without trying to throw all the soap opera froth into the mix. And bring in a better director and scriptwriter who can give the cast something less wooden to work with.

As an enthusiastic St Etienne fan for both their music and their various associated film projects (concept films, documentary soundtracks, song videos etc) which are almost always worth watching and exquisitely produced, I was anticipating great things here.

But this one is pants. The album is pleasant but bland - they've done much better - and the film makes a token effort at being a road movie around scenic and industrial bits of Britain, so some nice shots and good cinematography. A few quirky bits, with an off-beat humour - for instance there's a beautifully composed bubble-blowing sequence

However the director seems to have a fascination for topless young male models, inserting several long slow-mo sequences of athletic bare-chested youths looking moody and lingeringly exhibiting their torsos for no real reason and without any connection to the music. So unless you share the director's fixation, it all becomes fairly boring and otherwise empty. Not worth seeking out..

My copy - from the limited edition CD/DVD package - did not play properly, and online forum comments elsewhere suggest this is a common experience.

The plot has been summarised as "The quaint village of Byway will be bulldozed to make way for a motorway until alien outcast Kadoyng arrives from Outer Space to help" and doesn't really need any further comment. It's dated badly for an audience today and has some very clunky progress through the plot, but it has some imaginative ideas.

The basic storyline underneath the space age froth reminded me of The Railway Children given a comedy remix, and it has the same affectionate tone. I described the plot summary above on an online forum somewhere else, which got a response wondering if it could have been an influence on Douglas Adams for "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", and there are enough similarities to suggest the link is valid.

Series of six 25-minute episodes originally broadcast on Channel 4 in UK in 1990, re-issued on DVD in 2007 and recently revised as an e-book through Elliott Bristow's own website. I stumbled across 4 of the 6 1990 episodes on youtube and enjoyed a wonderfully idiosyncratic journey across evocative and vast American landscapes. He had a good eye for interesting or quirky things (cars, trucks, trains, boats and ships, buildings etc) and seems to have captured whatever fascinated him. This in turn gives the viewer a delightfully varied selection of sequences to enjoy and gradually become drawn into that fascination today.. There is very little commentary or explanation, but an excellent music soundtrack instead (Leo Kottke, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Rick Wakeman etc).

Thoroughly recommended despite the muddy quality of now 50 year old Super 8 film. So sit back and enjoy the ride.

The "plot" for this load of total twaddle is - as hinted by the title - that all music has disappeared, so Bill Drummond gets in his trusty Land-Rover and drives from East to West across England, Wales and Ireland getting random groups of people (crop-pickers, workmen, taxi-drivers, nuns, kids in a classroom etc) to sing different notes for 3 minutes which he records, and then at the end of the film they are all mixed into one ensemble choral piece. He then listens to it once on an Irish cliff-top, but we are not allowed to hear it, and then he permanently deletes it. So it is never heard and the whole thing is a total pile of pointless self-indulgence.

The reason he denies us the chance to hear the piece is not really explained, but Drummond has as an eccentric track record of how he treats his music and restricts its availability, so pulling a stunt like this could perhaps be anticipated. Alternatively maybe there is a simpler explanation that the project failed and the results were too poor to let anyone hear them?

The film does have some merit for being well composed and photographed, the journey (which also contains a trip to Berlin for another bit of befuddled zaniness) and the encounters he has with his "choir" are interesting, and he talks a lot about his musical career and the various and sometimes notorious events which it contained. I'm not sure there were any new insights, but it was worth hearing his comments.

However these are not enough to justify the cynical way we are taken on a journey and then cast adrift. There is an implicit trust when watching a filmed venture like this that its outcome will be shared instead of being confiscated. If Drummond's intention was to show the naivety or fragility of such a trust, he succeeded but it's little more than a slap in the face for the audience. This film has never had a proper release in Britain, and frankly does not deserve one.

I've no real idea what they were trying to achieve or how the claimed themes of land and countryside were held together. It's more like a supermarket trolley dash through the wealth of Bfi and other archives, grabbing whatever caught their attention and throwing it in. Then at the end of the dash, you look at your pile of loot and realise that the tins of sardines, boxes of pan scourers, replacement mop heads and whatever else are not really a memorable prize , but you still have to smile for the cameras and take them home.

Among the chaos, there also seems to be a bizarre fixation on grainy old black and white nudist clips, which keep re-emerging at several points during the film - to coin an old family saying "once a joke, twice a cabbage".

So despite the inclusion of several fascinating short clips, they hang in isolation, truncated from any context and with no thread linking them into a commentary. Which means these archives are still ripe for another attempt, hopefully one with a bit of structure and coherent planning for whatever direction it may choose to follow.

Unlike other reviewers, I failed to see any magic here. An over-contrived attempt at satirical comedy drama which can't decide if its target should be the political establishment, cliched detective dramas, or the internal machinations of the BBC so it takes aim at all three and fails to hit any of them successfully. The "plot" is stretched too far to retain even the slightest vestige of credibility or logical development, so relies on its satire and humour to plug the gaps. Unfortunately -despite some funny moments, a witty script and an excellent cast - these are not enough to save the day. And- without giving away a spoiler - the finale with its denouement exposing The Bad Guy fingers someone other than the shadowy character who is previously seen directing events, and there is no explanation for this jump from A to B or who A is.

Previous reviewers pleaded for a DVD release, which occurred in 2015 and can be easily found..

Like other reviewers, I was frustrated by a lot of half-baked elements of the film. The plot disappears about halfway through the film, leaving just an apparently random series of encounters with random people for no particular reason. And the fake documentary presentation style doesn't really work, partly because many people just crop up with no meaningful explanation to link them into what's left of the story and there is no proper conclusion when the film just stops.

But the people are fascinating with back stories which make you want to learn more, the atmosphere of wasted lives through the film is very powerful, some haunting scenery, and a superb music soundtrack by Jonas Munk. As a series of passive observations on "small people" who can't survive successfully in "the system", it is a very powerful portrait and stayed in my head for a long time. So worth watching if you can approach it with a blank canvas and can just let it unroll without looking for it to follow any particular direction or deliver something specific.

One of my favourite ever TV series from the days when Channel 4 (in UK) would present some of the quirkiest television dramas. It's a comedy-thriller which manages at times to be both very funny and at others very thrilling, but is very difficult to categorise in a way which does it justice. Perhaps its greatest strength is that it has a bizarre storyline which keeps taking unpredictable twists so that you can never anticipate what it's going to throw at you next. So you sit there and enjoy the ride.

Trying to describe the plot is a bit futile - basically 2 ordinary boring 40 year old (give or take) siblings get caught up in old- school gangster feuds in suburban London (or wherever it is) - because the switchback journey to its finale is what makes it great viewing.

Excellent acting and script, good character development for some very strange characters, lots of laugh-out-loud one-liners, other moments of carefully built high tension, some very poignant sub- plots - it all comes together very nicely. There are a couple of brutal scenes which now - nearly 20 years later - look fairly dated and unnecessary and some of the gender portrayals are a bit old- fashioned. But these are more reflections of what was acceptable in 1990s TV than anything else.

Never released on DVD as far as I know, but definitely worth revisiting if you can find it - I did, and it was just as good as I remembered from its original TV screening.

Trivia: it was produced by Hat Trick Productions, who also produce the BBC series "Have I Got News For You", which often features one of its founders - Andy Hamilton - as a panelist. Andy was one of the screenwriters for Underworld and makes a couple of uncredited cameo appearances as the neighbour with the flat cap. Some of Underworld's funniest and/or more surreal moments very much reflect the spirit of his contributions to Have I Got News For You.

A classic story which needs little description of context and plot - the other reviewer has covered this. Good fun today although early dream sequence is surprisingly scary for its intended audience of the time and the footage of Emil flying round iconic London locations was a clear inspiration for some Mary Poppins sequences.

Also very interesting to watch it back-to-back with the 1931 German original (as packaged together on the 2013 BFI DVD release). The UK version is much more than a relocated remake - it attempts to be a near exact replica of so many elements. The music is reused, the dialogue is exactly the same underneath the translation, all the studio sets are designed to look identical and are filmed from the same positions, the characters all perform the same actions in the same sequence and wear almost identical clothes. The relocation from Berlin to London for the main story clearly prevents much scenic replication (although street furniture such as news-stand, outdoor café etc are used in identical fashion), and the early sequences in Emil's village contain the same motifs (eg windmill, formal garden round statue in park) to reinforce the replication. But if you watch the UK version in its own right, none of this recreation looks forced or artificial - which is probably a tribute to how well the German original was produced.

Three part BBC TV series from 1991 which has vanished into obscurity. A pretty good thriller - vaguely Edge of Darkness themes about environmental conspiracies, plus local government corruption and freemasonry, and classic Scottish hardman clichés - loners, family rifts, impenetrable accents, black humour, and they only ever drink shots of whisky. Mostly filmed in Dundee (the city of 3 Js - jam, jute and journalism) and some scenes in and around Ullapool. Well worth tracking down, and an excellent soundtrack by Dave Stewart of Eurythmics which was released as a single and a full LP. Both can still be found cheaply on CD if you trawl through bin-ends on ebay or Amazon.

Deserves a reissue - never released on DVD and not sure if it even appeared on VHS.

Superb compilation of Scottish archive film broadcast in Scotland on BBC2 ahead of UK transmission and DVD release. As usual with these compilations it recycles footage from a huge selection of sources, but is very well selected and mixed together and full of references - I'm now on my 4th viewing and still finding stuff. Lots of scenery, boats, trains, trams, cars, people making things (ships, stockings, rifles, linoleum, whisky, mint humbugs and whatever else), people enjoying themselves (seaside, holidays, funfairs), people working hard (factories, farming, peat-cutting, fishing, schools), people protesting/marching for major causes, people just living their lives, and so on. No Scottish clichés, a good sense of humour, and never boring. Lots of insights - for instance how much until the 50s the home was just a place where people only really ate and slept - fun and entertainment were things done outside with your friends in pubs and dances and picnics and stupid beach competitions. Every so often something really poignant gets thrown in (wars, deserted crofts, emigrations) to jolt the mood back - one of the most powerful was a blink-and-miss-it moment in a sequence of kids running round and splashing on beaches on Arran, which cuts to a polio girl with leg braces unable to join in. Soundtrack by King Creosote - his music usually leaves me lukewarm, but this soundtrack is very effective and possibly his best stuff yet.

Very highly recommended for anyone interested in Scotland, and worth watching more than once.

I watched this eagerly when broadcast in 1987 and remember being hooked by it, so have wanted to see it again for a long time. Finally found a source this year, but revisiting was a huge disappointment. The plot does not make any sense - something about Irish terrorism in Glasgow being linked with a Scottish independence army and overseen by Brond (a ruthless shadowy spook played by Stratford Johns) with John Hannah as the innocent university student who accidentally becomes involved after seeing Brond push a child off a bridge (recognisable as the Gibson St road bridge over the River Kelvin in Glasgow's West End).

But the way the story unfolds is ludicrous - Brond must be clinically mad to do some of the things he does so there is no plot progression or rational explanation for the various incidents - nasty things happen without making any sense. Primo (played by James Cosmo) as Brond's side-kick and protective man-mountain keeps cropping up in John Hannah's life for no reason or purpose, and both Brond and Cosmo keep involving him in processes which would have been much simpler to resolve by themselves. Various minor characters surface within the main plot for no obvious reason, do something confusing, and then disappear. And the major scene near the end when Brond takes Hannah to a posh brothel is supposedly pivotal but crams too many plot threads together into a contrived resolution which becomes a nonsensical mess.

Filmed In Glasgow's West End (in and around the University campus) and South Side, plus a brief sequence in episode 3 at Harthill services on the M8 between Glagow and Edinburgh. The Bill Nelson/La Scala theme music is excellent (main theme easily found now on youtube).

So my recommendation is that it's not worth the effort of trying to find a copy now - it deserves its current forgotten obscurity.

Another series which I was enthralled by when it was first broadcast, but rediscovery nearly 40 years later on DVD is a huge disappointment. A capable cast badly used by clumsy scriptwriting, ludicrous plots, and inept characterisations which meant I lost any interest in what happened or whether the "good guys" won. As mentioned by other reviews this series was the launchpad for Don Henderson's Bulman character, but at this stage he was just a nasty policeman with some half-baked eccentricities, more of an irritating cardboard cutout than the interesting role which later emerged. Some 70s/80s television is still well worth watching today (for the sake of argument - Sweeney, Sandbaggers, Travelling Man, Edge of Darkness), but this is not.

Very disappointing - just did not work for me. Too self-conscious about Shetland location so lots of clunky dialogue to explain Shetland between characters who were supposed to be Shetlanders, formulaic plot with big holes and characters from a standard menu of clichés, wasted scenery opportunities in making everything grey-toned all the time, and too many Scottish mainland actors so there were almost no Shetland accents. Obviously trying to do a deep and meaningfully atmospheric Wallander, but ended up as Midsomer Murders (Shetland mix). The archaeological plot strand was ludicrous - lots of errors such as overnight C14 dating of human bone, and a dig would provide lots of excavation evidence about how and when a burial occurred which would have solved a lot of this "mystery" very quickly. If reports of plans to film more of the Shetland-based novels in this series are true, I hope the producers (1) rethink the approach and just portray Shetland more naturally without trying to mix in so many external trendy influences, and (2) are more prepared to cut loose from the books where those contain over-contrived characters and situations.