We are "suffering" through a cold spell. It did not get above 70 today. And the rain is dumping down on us in huge downpours. Well, we have to have enough of it to reach our 120 inches of normal yearly precipitation.
This circumstance is causing us to drink hot tea and watch a lot more videos than we usually do. We are engrossed in the Wallender series, the one in Swedish, which we really like, although I must say the carnage in the last episode we watched was a little much. It did upset me in that episode, Arvet, when the woman brained her sister with a poker.
A program I won't watch is Downton Abbey. One episode was enough. It's because I'm an anglophobe, at least where upper middle class Brits are concerned (I never knew any of the out of sight aristocrats) after being patronized once too often by these ex-pat twits in Switzerland. "Oh, you have to get to Pompeii early, before the Americans get there." I think it was the clever high-class anti-Semitism I hated the most, though. "Tom Stoppard, that Jew," said one upward striving matron to me once. Such stuff is not really forgivable.
Stately homes and naughty doings. Closeted gays and saucy maidservants. Why does anyone think that's interesting? The last BBC drama production I really liked was the first version of Galsworthy's Forsythe Saga. It came out in the late 60's and was a masterpiece. Looks like it's free on Amazon Instant Video. Think I'll watch it and see if it holds up as being as good as I thought it was then. I think it will. Isn't the Internet the most amazing new thing since the automobile, or maybe the jet plane!? I guess not new to the young people, but I remember how hard it was to find things and how you had to collect books and records and so on, and now it's just all out there on the 'net.
I also loved the video productions based on Catherine Cookson's novels. Some of these are available on Netflix. Her heroines are lower class women: housemaids, farmgirls, daughters of small shopkeepers and so on, who rise through their own efforts. There is a good deal of class tension and domestic strife, which is always resolved to everyone's satisfaction. And the charm of the people of northern England is great. Love those accents. In these dramas I see people in somewhat romanticized everyday situations which draw me in and where women are firmly in the center of their own lives. And they always get the man of their dreams, too, much as Catherine Cookson herself did. Here she is with her beloved husband, Tom.
Dame Catherine Cookson DBE (née McMullen) (27 June 1906 – 11 June 1998) was a British author. She became the United Kingdom's most widely read novelist, with sales topping 100 million, while retaining a relatively low profile in the world of celebrity writers. Her books were inspired by her deprived youth in South Tyneside, North East England, the setting for her novels.
Despite its popularity with almost everybody I know, I didn't get into Downton because it's a soap opera and I did those as a young woman and vowed to never get into another one. I did watch the first season on DVD and it was enough for me. I read a review today on the writer of it that said he puts characters in boxes which is a lot of why it's been so popular and it certainly is that; so he's doing something right-- besides the great cast.
Posted by: Rain Trueax | February 18, 2013 at 08:37 AM
Where do you find the Wallender series in Swedish? I'm assuming that you are streaming? I love the English version but would like to see the direction and videography of the Swedish versionW
Posted by: jaykaym | February 18, 2013 at 08:57 AM
Rain: I don't quite understand about "character boxes." Would these be like stereotypes?
Jaykam: We stream it on Netflix, and it is subtitled. These are all new stories.
Posted by: Hattie | February 18, 2013 at 10:26 AM
Downton Abbey got all of 15 minutes of my attention and I called it quits. Yes, it is a soap with drab aristocrats. Why do so many PBS English specials glorify the wealthy???? Oh well I could go on but I won't -- never saw any of the Cookson stories -- will give it a try. Her stories sound more realistic.
Posted by: barbara | February 18, 2013 at 11:11 AM
Barbara: a friend of mine who grew up in Newcastle in England got me interested in Cookson's work. And I like the dramatizations.
Posted by: Hattie | February 18, 2013 at 11:24 AM
the boxes mean that they always do the expected which the critic thought was probably part of the appeal. The characters don't grow and the critic felt that was a factor in the actors who wanted out of it. Dialogue, actions were all predictable and repeated over and over.
Posted by: Rain Trueax | February 18, 2013 at 02:55 PM
Rain: I see. Well, that strikes me as boring!
Posted by: Hattie | February 18, 2013 at 05:50 PM