Top of the Pops 12 October 1989

 

Words: Chris Arnsby

Gary Davies: “Hello. Good evening and welcome to Top of the Pops, we have a great show for you tonight. In the studio we have Cliff Richard, Sinitta, Belinda Carlisle, Living in a Box but first we start off with a guy who was last on Top of the Pops a year ago with On the Beach. Here's a new entry at twenty six with Road to Hell, here's Chris Rea.

 [26] CHRIS REA: the road to hell (part 2). Gary Davies gets the wrong caption. In fact, now I check, Steve Wright and Jakki Brambles also got the wrong format caption last week. Come on guys, a little consistency please. Or have the Powers That Be decided they hate the new-style target captions and gone back to the old-school asterisk ones? I hope they make up their mind soon because I keep spelling asterisk as asterix (damn you Goscinny and Uderzo) and I'll be glad to never mention this ***** topic again.

Meanwhile, Chris Rea is on the road to hell where I hear the paving is really nice. The album splits The Road to Hell into two tracks with a total running time around nine minutes, far too long for Top of the Pops. What we have here is Part 2, also released as a single, and shaved back from the single's running time of 4:35 to around three minutes. Part one, which is a study in atmosphere and synth groans and biblical lyrics, runs to another 4:52.

TV Review: The Rings of Power Season 2 Eps 7 & 8

 

Episode 7 Doomed to Die

 “True creation requires sacrifice” one of the characters in this episode says and this is something those extremely critical Tolkien lore fanatics might consider. An adaptation of a novel is always going to be a step away from the source being a different medium. What works on the page may not always translate literally on screen. In this case a dramatization of appendices surely needs additional material to turn notes into a story. Fans of anything are over possessive of course but reading some reviews of this show I feel as if I’ve been watching something different. At least viewers seem mostly aligned with this episode which even the haters have dubbed the best of the season. I’d say it’s the best episode of any tv show I’ve seen in some time.

 

Top of the Pops 5 October 1989

 

Words: Chris Arnsby

Steve Wright: “Hi!! Hello and good evening and welcome to another Top of the Pops!! This is Jakki Brambles!! I'm Steve Wright!!”

Jakki Brambles: “Okay we've got a brilliant show coming up for you. This is the second hit for Double Trouble and the Rebel MC. We are talking a wicked tune. A winning collaboration. This is Street Tuff.”

[12] REBEL MC DOUBLE TROUBLE: street tuff. The song which inspired one of the few bits of the Steve Wright in the Afternoon show that stick in my memory. “Is he a Yankee. No he's a pratt.” That was part of the jingle for Steve Wright's character Mr. Spoons. I have no idea what Mr. Spoons did but I'm sure he was wicked zany to the max.

TV Review- The Rings of Power Season 2 Eps 4 - 6

 

Episode Four - Eldest

This starts off on a whimsical note as the wandering Stranger comes across the legendary (to Tolkien readers at least) Tom Bombadil portrayed with a delightful lightness by Rory Kinnear. The actor is playing against type to some extent though there is some hint of  something steelier under the surface and in a lengthy sequence seems to reveal he is somewhat eternal. I don’t know much about his character except that Tolkien fans like him but that he’s been left out of any and all adaptations to date. He talks in a vague manner but seems to have great powers and by the end the Stranger is asking for help mastering his own gifts. If you’re wondering about the episode title it is something that Bombadil says when quizzed about his background. His reply is that he is literally the `eldest` and remembers a time even before there were stars. While its easy to see why his character was awkward to slot into previous versions there seems to be a place for him here, as a mentor to the stranger?

TV Review- Sweetpea

 

Billed as a dark comedy drama, Sweetpea certainly delivers on the former though not so much the latter. It is essentially about three women who for different reasons are frustrated at not being seen for who they are. Rhiannon is a quiet character who is ignored, taken for granted and generally not given her due. Julia is a successful estate agent hiding her abusive relationship under a glamorous confidence. Marina is a junior police officer who works hard but whose conclusions are routinely ignored by her boss. All three come into each other’s orbit when the local community is shocked by two savage murders. Only we, the viewers, know that Rhiannon is the killer – the tension of the series is whether or how this is discovered.

TV Review - Agatha All Along Eps 4- 6

 

The witchy spin off of a spin off continues to surprise...

Reviews contain spoilers 

Top of the Pops 28 September 1989

 

Words: Chris Arnsby

Sybil Ruscoe: “Good evening and welcome to Britain's best pop music show, in brilliant stereo on lead-free Radio 1. Tonight we're making history.”

Jenny Powell: “Yeah Sybil. We must be the only two girls to present Top of the Pops, mustn't we? Well to start the show we've got Sydney Youngblood he's number four with If Only I Could.”

[4] SYDNEY YOUNGBLOOD: if only i could. Lead-free? Sybil's topical reference refers to EU legislation which required unleaded petrol to be widely available from October 1989. And the week of 25 September to 1 October was named as National Lead-Free Petrol Week by CLEAR (the Campaign for LEad free AiR -who designed that acronym?). There was a lot of excitement and confusion about what this would mean for the man on the Clapham omnibus, besides lower levels of lead in his blood. The result was reports like this from Top Gear “on the mysteries of going green.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bngMZhYgYg.

TV Review- The Rings of Power Season 2 Eps 1 -3

 

Spoilers are everywhere these days. In the past I have been spoilered just overhearing a conversation on a bus. They are online, especially in the first few hours after something drops. And I’ve now discovered they are on Wikipedia too whose character breakdowns for this series do not always stop at what has already been shown but go on to explain the ultimate fictional destination of many of the characters. To those who have read the novels- and by the looks of it the appendices- this will be no issue but if you’re chronicling an ongoing television series the most lore you should include is what has already been released. I only looked up to find out some actor’s names!

 

He knows that there are spoilers past here...

Film Review - Joker: Folie a Deux

 

The title translates as “madness for two” and appropriately most reviews I’ve seen fall on one of two sides- this is either `utter rubbish` or its a work of `genius`. As ever the truth sits somewhere else though its fair to say this is not the film you might be expecting if you saw the first one.  

 

Spoilers beyond this point

 

TV Review- Heartstopper Season 3

 

If the phrase “why are we like this?” became the mantra for season one you may well ask of season three- why are they still like this? Let’s face it, Heartstopper is never going to develop into a series anything other than the life affirming, positive drama that it is. While this third season nudges the characters a little further into self doubt and strife measured against other shows it is still featherlight and that’s fine. Enough series play the trauma or dystopia cards so surely something different is a good thing? I do feel though that with these plots the show might benefit from the approach of centring each episode around a particular character. Here the production crams everyone’s plots into most of the episodes which means some are underserved. However when they alter the format it produces the best episode of the season.  

 

Top of the Pops 21 September 1989

 

Nicky Campbell: “Woah. Welcome to indisputably the nation's top pop show. What an opener we've got for you tonight. They're frenetic, flamboyant, fun loving, the lot. You can tell from their name that they come from Germany. They're here tonight with Harlem Desire. The one and only, the two and only, London Boys.”

[21] LONDON BOYS: harlem desire. Stanley Appel doesn't like starting Top of the Pops with the host in the crow's nest. What's that all about? My best guess, he doesn't want to deal with the slight additional crowd wrangling involved in starting the show on the audience, panning the crane up to the hosts (while the Floor Manager shuffles the audience off the stage as quickly and quietly as possible), and then back down to the main stage.

TV Review- The Rings of Power Season 1

 

Prequels can be awkward things; on the one hand we all have this fascination with delving deeper into people and places we’ve seen yet this can also offer fewer surprises and far less jeopardy. After all we already know how matters turn out, a lot of things are set in stone before we start watching.  Back in 2022 when this was first released I never got round to seeing it so now that the second season is out, I thought I should catch up and I’m glad I did. Being set so long before the familiar events of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings films allows The Rings of Power some breathing space. Based largely on appendices from the original books as well I would think that only the most churlish Ringer would chafe at what is presented here. It is one of the best prequels I’ve seen but more than that it is also its own animal.

Film Review - Megalopolis

 

The reviews have been savage. “the worst film ever made”, “The worst film I’ve ever seen”, “I beg you not to see this movie” are just some of the reactions to Francis Ford Coppola’s first film in twelve years. Can it really be that bad? Only one way to find out. Well, it is not the worst film I’ve ever seen – believe me I’ve seen far worse- rather it’s an ambitious if flawed work that feels like it is still in progress despite the time spent on it. Maybe that’s the issue; perhaps too much time was spent on it? If we see it as a movie that attempts to comment on the US and more widely the use and abuse of power then it works to some extent. It is more in the delivery of that message that it becomes an uneven watch.