(no subject)

1. It was a good night for actor Mark Lewis Jones last night – on BBC1 he was an upright, hard-working pillar-of-the-community in Baker Boys (which I haven’t seen yet – that’ll be an iPlayer job) and at exactly the same time he could also be found over on BBC3 as a depraved, evil vampire on Being Human! Not bad going.

2. The location-spotting in the new season of Being Human is awesome. I love that they’ve moved to South Wales. *G*

3. I have somehow managed to volunteer to do some transcribing for the FreeCEN online census project and am now learning how to navigate the systems in place for that (and how to decipher illegible 19th century handwriting!)

4. Finally got around to watching the Dirk Gently adaptation that aired on one of the BBC’s digital channels a couple of months back. I was in two minds before I watched it, and I remain in two minds now! On the one hand, taken at face value, it was a fun, light-hearted hour’s entertainment, with a suitably convoluted, brain-twister of a plot. But on the other hand…it bore little or no resemblance whatsoever to the book on which it is based and therefore it just felt wrong. The names of the characters were pretty much the only thing the show had in common with the book – and even their personalities and/or back stories had been changed. They hadn’t just modernised the plot, they re-wrote the entire story and gave it a completely different plot. And Dirk Gently himself was hopelessly miscast. So I remain in two minds. Half of me thinks it was a decent, fun hour of bubblegum entertainment, which is clearly all it was intended to be, but the other half of me resents it deeply for not being faithful to Douglas Adams' original vision. Ah, TV adaptations of much-loved books are always so contentious!

(no subject)

1. It was a good night for actor Mark Lewis Jones last night – on BBC1 he was an upright, hard-working pillar-of-the-community in Baker Boys (which I haven’t seen yet – that’ll be an iPlayer job) and at exactly the same time he could also be found over on BBC3 as a depraved, evil vampire on Being Human! Not bad going.

2. The location-spotting in the new season of Being Human is awesome. I love that they’ve moved to South Wales. *G*

3. I have somehow managed to volunteer to do some transcribing for the FreeCEN online census project and am now learning how to navigate the systems in place for that (and how to decipher illegible 19th century handwriting!)

4. Finally got around to watching the Dirk Gently adaptation that aired on one of the BBC’s digital channels a couple of months back. I was in two minds before I watched it, and I remain in two minds now! On the one hand, taken at face value, it was a fun, light-hearted hour’s entertainment, with a suitably convoluted, brain-twister of a plot. But on the other hand…it bore little or no resemblance whatsoever to the book on which it is based and therefore it just felt wrong. The names of the characters were pretty much the only thing the show had in common with the book – and even their personalities and/or back stories had been changed. They hadn’t just modernised the plot, they re-wrote the entire story and gave it a completely different plot. And Dirk Gently himself was hopelessly miscast. So I remain in two minds. Half of me thinks it was a decent, fun hour of bubblegum entertainment, which is clearly all it was intended to be, but the other half of me resents it deeply for not being faithful to Douglas Adams' original vision. Ah, TV adaptations of much-loved books are always so contentious!