karldinnel

I'm currently watching the latest series on ITV1 in the UK. This show works for me because of its treatment of the 'everyman' character of Dangerous Davies.

This is a man who you'll usually find in every workplace: the chap who just doesn't fit in. But that doesn't mean that he's not good at his job, only that his colleagues assume that he can't be very good at it because he's not 'one of the lads' at work.

He doesn't have the 'nasty' qualities (nor the ambition) that would help him to rise above the rank of detective constable in the CID. And it's this niceness that seems to be the reason why his marriage has failed.

Peter Davison does a great job of showing that 'nice guys finish last' most of the time, but not all of the time. Meanwhile the script has an appropriate balance of humour and drama. Sean Hughes, as Mod, is also a good character, not only laying on the comedy, but also as a device that allows us to see a bit more of Dangerous's character through their conversations.

I plan to read the books (although they were published a long while back), and will have a look at the Bernard Cribbins film version from the early 80s. But please, please keep this version going for at least another series ITV!!

I only caught the last hour of this due to having to work late last night (boo hoo!), but both Rhys Ifans and Aidan McArdle were fantastic.

I remember Peter Cook from my youth and I thought it uncanny how Ifans reproduced the frustrated genius of the man. As for the production as a whole, it was a very insightful look into how Cook had difficulty coping with Moore's success away from him, and his own problems with matching his earlier career later on in life. (Personally I think he was extremely bright, but was handicapped by idleness.)

Now, I've seen a number of films that have featured Ifans. Perhaps I have been unlucky and only caught the bad ones, but this has to be the first I've seen him in that I've enjoyed. The films incidentally were: Love, Honour and Obey (where he was quite good as a bad-tempered gangster, but the film itself was pretty dire), Twin Town (awful), 51st State (a nightmare) and Notting Hill (sugary nonsense where Ifans was playing a sort of "Uncle Tom" slob of a Welshman to Hugh Grant's sophisticated Englishman - why does scriptwriter Richard "Blackadder" Curtis laugh at the Welsh so much?).

But until last night, the best thing I've seen Ifans in was on stage - in Accidental Death of an Anarchist (admittedly Dario Fo's play is one that an actor can have a lot of fun with) at the Donmar Warehouse a few years ago. Hopefully, he will be more discerning choosing his parts in future. If he does then I reckon he could be a future Guinness (but please don't get involved with Star Wars).

Britain's obsession with World War II goes on, with this latest TV series exploring Channel Island life under the Nazis.

When I saw the first episode, it reminded me of another how-a-community-invaded-by-Nazis-copes-during-The-War ITV series - Monsignor Renard - from a few years ago, and I wondered whether the same guys in charge of commissioning at ITV were responsible for this. At least, this series doesn't have the awful northern English accents (in place of French language) that Renard had (the community was based in a town in northern France, so they used northern English accents to reflect this, geddit?), so you would have dialogue like "Ay up, Monsieur Boulanger, I 'ope you 'av summit for me today. My little nipper loves a bit of your bread 'ee does"!!

But thankfully, unlike the late, great John Thaw in Monsignor Renard, there is no actor in Island at War whose career can be blighted by this lame duck of a series. Nearly all of the actors are unknown to me, although I have seen some of the faces (presumably in other weak televisual efforts) before. I found it very difficult to achieve any empathy for any of the characters from the fictional Channel island of St Gregory (why did they have to create a fictional island? most Brits who watch this know that there are only two Channel islands with big populations!!!).

The Nazis are, of course, cardboard cut-out Nazis. Yes, there is a pilot who reckons he doesn't really want to be at war, but most of the rest of the Germans could have come straight out of an Indiana Jones movie.

Then there's the obligatory war-time spiv character, who's been around since Private Walker in Dad's Army. He knows how to make a bob or two out of other people's misery, but does what he can to help out too... blah... blah! Bollocks!

I could go on, but what's the point? This TV series just should not have been made. It's a highly unoriginal idea, with poor, predictable script writing and uninspired acting.

No doubt most of the TV critics in British newspapers will applaud it, but then, in this country, we are never going to let the poor old Germans forget about the events of 60 years ago! Surely, it's time to move on chaps.

I first watched this film a few years ago, but only got about fifty minutes in (after the bit where the hero/antihero crushes the black guy's skull on the kerb) because I had taped it off the TV and the video tape ran out. I thought it looked like a pretty decent movie, but could wait until it was on the TV again.

I finally got to borrow the complete video a few weeks back and saw the rest of the movie and, unfortunately, I wasn't impressed.

This is a film that's got its head stuck so far up its backside that it completely misses the point. The message I took away was: "If you're a neo-Nazi then you're either going to be: a) buttf**ked by another, bigger, neo-Nazi, or b) shot by a black guy. So don't be a neo-Nazi."

This is crap! I bet plenty of narrow-minded white supremacist types are having a pretty good time. The real issue is how this kind of behaviour affects ethnics - an aspect of hate crime that this film totally fails to explore, except during the "sweetener" parts of the film - latino woman in the shop being physically abused by the Nazi thugs, the mouth-on-the-kerb thing, etc. These despicable scenes - presumably why all the closet racists out there rave about this film - are totally unnecessary, and if you have to have them at all, why not explore the effects of this violence on the victims?

The "revelatory" bit at the end, with the late father talking about "n!gger bullsh!t", didn't make sense to me. The guy makes one comment over the dinner table and so his son - years later - decides to become a Nazi?

Or was it supposed to suggest that the family were regularly getting this kind of crap from the head of the household, in which case perhaps it would have been a better film to have shown a racist dad bringing up a family and turning his children into a bunch of f**k-ups!

This film does nothing to improve race relations. Its message is clearly "don't be a racist for your own sake", which clearly appeals to many self-centred people who were brought up during the look-out-for-yourself Reagan-Thatcher years.

Nicely shot, yes. Good acting, yes. But a terrible script delivering the wrong message!