(no subject)

[llywela]

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!

Comments

[llywela13.livejournal.com]

We only caught a quick glimpse of the hospital exterior - I'd need to see it again and probably pause to place it properly. The interior hospital scenes would have been filmed at the Cardiff Royal Infirmary - possibly a few in the tunnels up at the Heath, but mostly at the CRI because it is closed and therefore fully available for use as a set. The red building wasn't the frontage for the CRI, though - might have been a side angle (it's a huge sprawling building), or poss one of the smaller hospitals in the Vale like Llandough. I'd need to get a proper look though.

Annie taking Mitchell out for a walk from their house in Barry all the way to the Cardiff Bay barrage was highly amusing...

[sherrilina.livejournal.com]

Well I've heard that the red exterior was the same as the one used for Leadworth hospital in s5 DW, so maybe that's why it looked familiar to me...and lol, the M/A scene was Cardiff Bay then? But much further out than we went, right? B/c someone asked if that was the same pier where Tosh and Tommy walk on TW (aka by the Norwegian Church) and I didn't think so...

[llywela13.livejournal.com]

Where Mitchell and Annie were in that scene was out on the barrage itself, right out at the Penarth end on the spur that juts out into the Bristol Channel and shelters the sea locks (which would have been behind M/A where they were standing). If we'd had time for the boat ride across (or the walk around), I'd have taken you there as I love going over to the barrage to watch the sea locks in operation! The Norwegian Church is in Cardiff Bay proper, near the old dry docks (also near where the Beeb's new production studios are being built), but you can walk from the Norwegian Church to where M/A were, through the docks and along the barrage to Penarth. So it isn't the same place, no, but is near it.