Twister

(It's a pre-New Year's resolution that I'm going to start regularly writing about the TV shows I watch. So, that in mind, here's the first of them...)

As a rule I normally avoid all those 'worthy' costume dramas that the BBC has been churning out on a regular basis ever since ---forever. But today not able to find anything else better to watch (oh where oh where is that 'Paint Drying' digital channel they've been promising us for so long?) I let the new Oliver Twist drama play on ambiently in the background... and oh, it was crap. Really, really oh so, very crap. Pretty much as I'd expected really. It was chocful of big name star acting talent, (these things always are) – not actually doing very much. Despite the big names - I didn't get any sense of drama or of any good characterisation – just people with faces I know from the Telly in period clothes saying their lines and not falling over the furniture -unless actually required to. (There was a scene where someone was repeatedly kicked in the arse by a nasty woman until he fell over knocking furniture over as he did so.) So – it being a classic novel – this is what passes as quality entertainment does it? Um OK. Thanks – but if you don't mind I'll stick to the absolutely magnificent musical 'Oliver!'. Because that was real entertainment. I certainly can watch that again and again.

Of course it being Dickens and the BBC -there are all these class issues playing away on multiple levels – and don't we British absolutely love to steep ourselves in obsessing over issues about class. We're never ever interested in moving towards fairer equality or anything even remotely like that. Oh no. Just the unending painstaking mind-numbing, soul-crushing obsession. It's a sickness deep in the heart of our culture and has been holding us back from making any sort of real advancements in -well, anything much for the past hundred years or so. But never mind. Just so long as we all know our place. (*eyeroll*)

So here's the BBC is in it's old fundamental patronage (that's interchangeable with patronising) remit of bringing 'quality drama' to the masses (so that's usually just Shakespeare, Dickens, Bronte, and Austin then) and here having the tortured tale of the underclasses and the upper middle class all doing their thing. Oh please give me a break.