![]() ![]() Poor Simon, who looked like a patient man who would love to sit you down and explain properly, had to bang away tasting and whisking things and passing over some crucial stages while the information flashed across our screens. REWIND TV CHANNEL PLUSIn fact it was, so the producers, plus their graphic artists, got round this by not letting him tell us what he was putting in the pot. He cooked some lovely-looking recipes, coq au vin, papardelle with porcini, though you might think five in one half-hour show was a lot to get through. ![]() There must have been high hopes, from anyone who'd ever picked up one of Simon Hopkinson's cookbooks – just to taste the thoughtful wisdoms of the prose, never mind cook with them, though you can pretty easily – for a series, prime-time Friday night BBC1, which had finally coaxed out Simon, known to most of his competitors as the cook's cook.Īmiable, placid, not mad, obviously in love with his food and foodery, Hopkinson was a perfectly fine host, and would have been even better had he been allowed to tell us what he was doing. ![]() If this programme was a revelation when it could have been a heart-heaving disappointment, The Good Cook functioned in diametrically opposite fashion. Learning this was qualitatively different from learning that Toto got safely home to Kansas. Turns out, although I think I happened to know this anyway, like a spod who's spent too much time in Scottish rain, that the reason all the patterns are different is so the islanders could more quickly identify the family of the fisherman who'd been drowned. Incidentally, Mireille does wear that, or a least a, Faroe Islands jersey. Once more, in this country, "Who killed Rosie Larsen?" is going to captivate, but this time, 21 years on, with faint transatlantic echoes of "Who killed Laura Palmer?": it's that good. The acting, particularly from Mireille Enos as Sarah Linden (Lund as was), and Brent Sexton as the loving but I suspect intriguingly back-story'd bereaved dad, with whole haunted canefields of woe ahead of him, is Emmy stuff. I don't think there are many – any? – more killings than there were in the original series, but as with the original I suspect the tale will seep out into being the real story of the damaging tidemarks the afterwash of such a death both leaves and engenders. There was a vital synergy between Tinseltown and Leytonstone's very own Hitchcock why not between them and all the terrifyingly good new Scandos? And, actually, if the Forbrydelsen/ Wallander stuff does first best suit the chill flat angsted lives of southern Scandos, it second best suits the wastelands of Washington state, where grunge was born, resentments are hoarded for warmth in the winter and there's no lack of dark Norsky/Teutonic guignol: as if Garrison Keillor had written many more stories for children who drink.Īlso, sue me, but I didn't catch the whole of the original Danish one here, and want to watch the whole of this one instead. But this is absurdly good, and I have absolutely no idea why the Americans shouldn't be allowed to show off, to redo absolute class. There might be valid criticism if this were a schlocky piece of yank cut'n'shut dredgery, unfaithful to a subtle plot and with a hot wisecracking babe, an alpha black dude and someone geeky or in a wheelchair who got a late hunch about identical historical slayings involving Peruvian nose flutes, but then we ourselves would have to re-remake it all, once again, except call it Luther, and it would all just get too too confusing. Let them cavil, I say, or rather I write. People have cavilled, not a word ever used outside print except perhaps by Brian Sewell, over why Americans have even bothered to remake the Danish Forbrydelsen, which became beloved in this country, if beloved's a word to use about a haunting claustrophobic 20-parter centred on a girl's murder. REWIND TV CHANNEL FULLThink of a full cow pissing on to a flat slate. I assume that, technically, all rain falls at the same pace (except in Glasgow, where it pauses mid-air for one miraculous second at a height of six feet, just to offer you a wee smack in the face) – but, somehow, here the constant rain had an extra desperate urgency to hurl itself to the grey streets, slamming back up with ill-spent anger. The Seattle waterfront, its soaring, hopeful, downtown spires, instead seemed somehow to crouch, to slump, like a grudge, under roiling clouds of intent. This was an altogether grimmer, more cloying, bleakswept city of tiny menaces, long-held lies, angry panic. But it wasn't even the Seattle of Kurt Cobain. These things were both to the good, in that we didn't have to watch coffee-house platitudes from a distressingly rightwing actor I'd once liked, or Danny Kaye in lederhosen. Well, this certainly wasn't the Seattle of Frasier any more than the Copenhagen of the original The Killing was that of Hans Christian Andersen. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |