Whatcha Watchin'?

“Tales of Masked Men” just popped up on Netflix and I’d forgotten just how good it was.
Well worth an hour of your time if you’ve even got the slightest interest in Lucha Libre or have ever watched an El Santo movie.

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Might be watching this next week…

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“The Comic Strip Presents” television series features

The Comic Strip Presents… core members are Adrian Edmondson, Dawn French, Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer, Peter Richardson, Jennifer Saunders and Alexei Sayle, with frequent appearances by Keith Allen, Robbie Coltrane and others.

Tonight I’m watching the “Jealousy” (1993) episode, with Miranda Richardson, Jennifer Saunders, Robbie Coltrane and Peter Capaldi. ETA: Peter’s in drag for some of this.

If you’re not an Enid Blyton purist, a good place to start is “Five Go Mad in Dorset” (1982)
in which Peter Richardson, Adrian Edmondson, Dawn French & Jennifer Saunders fill four of the Famous Five roles.

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https://youtu.be/ddFvjfvPnqk 24/7 Live stream from the ISS.

For a somewhat different British comedy, have you watched Raised By Wolves?


There are plenty of clips on YouTube, but whole episodes are hard to find. CBC had it online for a while, then realized what they were doing.:grin:

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The cold open leads into ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down” and the tots are reading Ted Hughes and Tove Jansson. I love it already. Didn’t see it until now. Fire up the p2p file share app!

Are you old enough to remember CBC showing “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4”? Good times!

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The story of a single mother letting her kids (Germaine, Aretha, Yoko, and Wyatt :smiley:) raise themselves. I’m usually okay with British accents, but I need subtitles for this show or I miss two lines out of three.

I didn’t see the TV production of Adrian Mole, but as far as I know I’ve read all the books. They just get more poignant as he ages. It’s hard to imagine how TV or a movie could do them justice.

The first two books were adapted into miniseries, and were more or less faithful. I preferred Julie Walters’ Pauline (Secret Diary) to Lulu’s (Growing Pains). Ian Dury composed and performed the show’s theme.

The Cappuccino Years was filmed too, with Stephen Mangan (Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, before Elijah Wood) playing grownup Adrian.

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I started watching Prime Japan on amazon. Got through part of the first episode, and there were some great shots of beautiful scenery and delicious-looking food, but… the narrator dude just killed it for me. Just… nope.

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Just binged series one of The Expanse.

Dang…respectably hard SF on TV. Never thought I’d see such a thing. No fantasy-with-rayguns nonsense, no mystical bullshit, no Trek-style technobabble cheesiness.

Beyond that, it’s also just a plain good show. Well cast, well acted, well written, well directed.

Highly recommended.

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I ate that one up. Looking forward to season 2.

Currently Penny Dreadful has my eyeballs. I’d dismissed it until reading some comment up thread. I could do without the GoT levels of nudity (of course I watched it on the flight…eep)

Looks it up… Oh, SyFy. Or Netflix, but not if you live here. Dang.

Edit: looks like the library has it. Guess I’ll be borrowing this.

Agreed. My only problem with it was the searching for asteroidal water in a ship the size of an Imperial Battle Cruiser. Niven told us in the 1960’s belt mining was done efficiently in tiny ships. The set up a scarcity based economy then shoot holes in it. For that matter where was the water in the colonies going? Surely they recycled it.

BTW: Season 3 of Mozart in the Jungle is out!!! Finally there’s a few clever sitcoms like this and Braindead that aren’t based on idiotic people doing insanely embarrassing things.

Cool. [quote=“Wanderfound, post:274, topic:84100”]
No fantasy-with-rayguns nonsense, no mystical bullshit, no Trek-style technobabble cheesiness.
[/quote]

Well, despite that, I’ll still give it a go. Might make a nice change of pace from my usual. :wink:

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There are nits to be picked, to be sure. The treatment of microgravity is a bit inconsistent, the biology and economics are questionable and they sure as hell aren’t using conventional chemical rockets.

But, compared to pretty much every other bit of televised SF, it’s as hard as nails.

Don’t get too invested; as much as I adore Eva Green and Billie Piper, that show was not executed nearly as well as it could have been, on many levels.

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That’s true, sadly 99% of that competition is time travel or “people not what they seem” (androids, clones, evil twins, body snatchers etc). Watched E1 of an exception: ‘Mars’. It was pretty bad.No! Don’t try climbing that tall compartment under heavy g’s rather than just lay down at the bottom!

Is anyone watching Berlin Station? Old school spying, very well written & acted. My late dad, who would read any thriller with a hammer and sickle or swastika on the cover, would have loved it.

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Holy crap; do I actually need to start watching SNL again?

Thanks for the tip. I’ll look for it.

What’s your take on Orphan Black? Not your traditional hard SF, but they make an effort to make the science believable. They spend a lot more time on character and relationships than hard SF usually does, but that’s a plus as far as I’m concerned.

Would you compare it to The Americans? If so, I’m in.

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Orphan Black is an excellent if sometimes implausible series.

Tatiana Maslany’s acting skills are truly something to behold.

And yeah, I know you weren’t asking me, but is my thread.

:slight_smile:

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