Day 17 - "I've seen hell - and it's snow white"
Day 17 - Favourite mini-series. (I'm rebellious, I'm doing the days out of order. This post has to be done on a Sunday - classic period drama day. ;-D Besides, as pedanther pointed out, otherwise this meme ends on a really depressing note!)
This had to be a BBC period drama as I don’t watch many other self-contained serials (that, I take it is a mini-series, yes?), although Lost in Austen gets a definite honorable mention here. I also love very much the 1995 Persuasion, The Way We Live Now, Wives and Daughters, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit, among, well, just about all of them, but I choose North & South.
I hesitated over this, as I know the only two people I persuaded to watch in the virtual world didn’t like it and fair enough (that’s what makes life interesting!). However, this is why I do (or merely scratching the iceberg of that, possibly), and if my flist are kind and read the entry, I’ll explain something about what I really like in TV in relation to this. And I have some pretty and non-spoilerish pictures, too and links to the beautiful score by Martin Phipps. So, humour me here. You can ignore the other answers for all the other 29 days, but I want to share my love for the BBC's North & South.
1. The visuals. The creative team behind it, while not modernising any of the wrong things, took the decision, which was innovative at the time, to shoot it as a modern drama, so the camera moves around a lot, and we watch (as in Spooks S1, and Gosford Park, two other things I love very much) as if a character looking through things in the foreground. Also, almost every shot is a thing of beauty, plus the use of colour in telling the story. When it begins, Margaret is on the train north, so the opening events are in her memory and Helstone is a paradise indeed, too glorious and colourful to be real, contrasting with the grey, drabness of Milton. As Margaret grows and changes, Milton gradually becomes more colourful and Helstone when she revisits it, is now all too real and not an impossible dream of paradise.
2. I love the way that it’s so faithful to the book, even though it’s Elizabeth Gaskell in part making what was a contemporary moral crusade and important point 150 years ago, and not Jane Austen. Even though the characters (and because of this) are so flawed - in each case their own strengths are also their weakness. I am so grateful to them for simply presenting Mr and Mrs Hale and Mrs Thornton as human beings who live by values that we might find hard to understand, but they don’t try to update them, or explain them, but leave it to the actors to communicate that to the audience, without assuming that a modern audience can't cope with that. (And Tim Piggott-Smith and Sinead Cusack are both outstanding.) Having made the north-south move myself, while things have changed completely in 150 years, there are still issues in doing that originate in some of the problems seen here. There is still a north-south divide in this country, only now it’s the dying of these very industries, with all their cruelties that’s the issue. (And no, no one lives in the kind of mid-Victorian city poverty depicted here. Thank goodness.) I love it here, I should add. *cough*
3. The music. While I fail to notice music on a first watch (it may be hard to believe, but I never noticed Murray Gold was a bit loud until I was told), but I think I could watch this one with the dialogue off. It's a beautiful and largely melancholic, understated score from Martin Phipps, and some of the tracks are here:
Opening theme (From episode three - it’s slightly different each time.)
I’ve Seen hell (The line in the show is “I’ve seen hell… and it’s snow white.” Give it a little time, as it builds up.)
Northbound Train (This clip of it will spoiler the ending, and again builds up, but illustrates what I said about the visuals and music almost obliterating the need for dialogue. And this from a person who’s first need in a story is the writing and dialogue to be good.)
And the recurring piano theme, too: Come up smiling
4. Briefly, all right, this was the first time (when it was aired) that anyone seemed to have seen Richard Armitage on the screen in anything, and he did appear through a cloud of cotton snow and then beat up a worker. It was striking, to say the least. Now he’s been in everything (Robin Hood, Vicar of Dibley, Spooks) so it’s just an interesting aspect, but at the time, well, yes, let’s be shallow, it was hard to believe no one had noticed him before.
But I love things which have the courage to simply tell the story as it is, even if there’s reasons to think it might not be immediately popular with the viewers, I love beautful camera work, good composition, even if takes me forever to notice it. And this combined with Elizabeth Gaskell’s passion that something needed to be done to bring about better relations between masters and men and end the poverty that she saw all around her, having made much the same journey as Margaret does. I fluctuate with my opinion about her books (although I love Wives & Daughters), but I do like the way she values the relationship between parents and children (this one has an awful lot to say about fathers and daughters, and mothers and sons). It’s a beautiful realisation of the novel, and it’s been very thoughtfully adapted. I can understand people not liking it (it is Elizabeth Gaskell, so among other things there’s an incredibly high death toll!) but I love it.
Edit: I think one of the things I'm trying to say is that there's something timeless (even though both are so rooted in a time) about writers like Dickens and Austen, but Gaskell, good as she is, is so very Victorian that dramatising her work while eliminating some of the dated aspects, yet remaining utterly faithful is a challenge that is so well done here. (If you read the book and watch the scenes, you can literally see the actors portraying the internalised dialogue from the book; also there's a focus on small domestic detail that's carried over into the dramatisation. You could watch this to learn the social history and not be much misled, barring only the kiss). (Not that Wives & Daughters and Cranford aren't both exceptionally well done, but they're both much more idealistic period pieces than North and South. Even if they still have high death tolls!)
I could write several essays, but I’ll finish with the pretty pictures, because that’s much more entertaining:
Impossible paradise of Helstone:
And Milton, with its initial drabness (the colour saturation increases through the episodes, and this is the first few minutes of ep1) and the snow white hell that Margaret discovers in the cotton factories:
And Richard Armitage, with and without cotton:
Days of Telly Meme:
Day 01 - A show that should never have been cancelled: Blake's 7
Day 02 - A show that you wish more people were watching
Day 03 - Your favorite new show (aired this TV season):
Day 04 - Your favorite show ever
Day 05 - A show you hate
Day 06 - Favorite episode of your favorite TV show
Day 07 - Least favorite episode of your favorite TV show
Day 08 - A show everyone should watch
Day 09 - Best scene ever
Day 10 - A show you thought you wouldn't like but ended up loving
Day 11 - A show that disappointed you
Day 12 - An episode you've watched more than 5 times
Day 13 - Favorite childhood show
Day 14 - Favorite male character
Day 15 - Favorite female character
Day 16 - Your guilty pleasure show
Day 17 - Favorite mini series: BBC North & South
Day 18 - Favorite title sequence
Day 19 - Best TV show cast
Day 20 - Favorite kiss
Day 21 - Favorite ship
Day 22 - Favorite series finale
Day 23 - Most annoying character
Day 24 - Best quote
Day 25 - A show you plan on watching (old or new)
Day 26 - OMG WTF? Season finale
Day 27 - Best pilot episode
Day 28 - First TV show obsession
Day 29 - Current TV show obsession
Day 30 - Saddest character death
This had to be a BBC period drama as I don’t watch many other self-contained serials (that, I take it is a mini-series, yes?), although Lost in Austen gets a definite honorable mention here. I also love very much the 1995 Persuasion, The Way We Live Now, Wives and Daughters, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit, among, well, just about all of them, but I choose North & South.
I hesitated over this, as I know the only two people I persuaded to watch in the virtual world didn’t like it and fair enough (that’s what makes life interesting!). However, this is why I do (or merely scratching the iceberg of that, possibly), and if my flist are kind and read the entry, I’ll explain something about what I really like in TV in relation to this. And I have some pretty and non-spoilerish pictures, too and links to the beautiful score by Martin Phipps. So, humour me here. You can ignore the other answers for all the other 29 days, but I want to share my love for the BBC's North & South.
1. The visuals. The creative team behind it, while not modernising any of the wrong things, took the decision, which was innovative at the time, to shoot it as a modern drama, so the camera moves around a lot, and we watch (as in Spooks S1, and Gosford Park, two other things I love very much) as if a character looking through things in the foreground. Also, almost every shot is a thing of beauty, plus the use of colour in telling the story. When it begins, Margaret is on the train north, so the opening events are in her memory and Helstone is a paradise indeed, too glorious and colourful to be real, contrasting with the grey, drabness of Milton. As Margaret grows and changes, Milton gradually becomes more colourful and Helstone when she revisits it, is now all too real and not an impossible dream of paradise.
2. I love the way that it’s so faithful to the book, even though it’s Elizabeth Gaskell in part making what was a contemporary moral crusade and important point 150 years ago, and not Jane Austen. Even though the characters (and because of this) are so flawed - in each case their own strengths are also their weakness. I am so grateful to them for simply presenting Mr and Mrs Hale and Mrs Thornton as human beings who live by values that we might find hard to understand, but they don’t try to update them, or explain them, but leave it to the actors to communicate that to the audience, without assuming that a modern audience can't cope with that. (And Tim Piggott-Smith and Sinead Cusack are both outstanding.) Having made the north-south move myself, while things have changed completely in 150 years, there are still issues in doing that originate in some of the problems seen here. There is still a north-south divide in this country, only now it’s the dying of these very industries, with all their cruelties that’s the issue. (And no, no one lives in the kind of mid-Victorian city poverty depicted here. Thank goodness.) I love it here, I should add. *cough*
3. The music. While I fail to notice music on a first watch (it may be hard to believe, but I never noticed Murray Gold was a bit loud until I was told), but I think I could watch this one with the dialogue off. It's a beautiful and largely melancholic, understated score from Martin Phipps, and some of the tracks are here:
Opening theme (From episode three - it’s slightly different each time.)
I’ve Seen hell (The line in the show is “I’ve seen hell… and it’s snow white.” Give it a little time, as it builds up.)
Northbound Train (This clip of it will spoiler the ending, and again builds up, but illustrates what I said about the visuals and music almost obliterating the need for dialogue. And this from a person who’s first need in a story is the writing and dialogue to be good.)
And the recurring piano theme, too: Come up smiling
4. Briefly, all right, this was the first time (when it was aired) that anyone seemed to have seen Richard Armitage on the screen in anything, and he did appear through a cloud of cotton snow and then beat up a worker. It was striking, to say the least. Now he’s been in everything (Robin Hood, Vicar of Dibley, Spooks) so it’s just an interesting aspect, but at the time, well, yes, let’s be shallow, it was hard to believe no one had noticed him before.
But I love things which have the courage to simply tell the story as it is, even if there’s reasons to think it might not be immediately popular with the viewers, I love beautful camera work, good composition, even if takes me forever to notice it. And this combined with Elizabeth Gaskell’s passion that something needed to be done to bring about better relations between masters and men and end the poverty that she saw all around her, having made much the same journey as Margaret does. I fluctuate with my opinion about her books (although I love Wives & Daughters), but I do like the way she values the relationship between parents and children (this one has an awful lot to say about fathers and daughters, and mothers and sons). It’s a beautiful realisation of the novel, and it’s been very thoughtfully adapted. I can understand people not liking it (it is Elizabeth Gaskell, so among other things there’s an incredibly high death toll!) but I love it.
Edit: I think one of the things I'm trying to say is that there's something timeless (even though both are so rooted in a time) about writers like Dickens and Austen, but Gaskell, good as she is, is so very Victorian that dramatising her work while eliminating some of the dated aspects, yet remaining utterly faithful is a challenge that is so well done here. (If you read the book and watch the scenes, you can literally see the actors portraying the internalised dialogue from the book; also there's a focus on small domestic detail that's carried over into the dramatisation. You could watch this to learn the social history and not be much misled, barring only the kiss). (Not that Wives & Daughters and Cranford aren't both exceptionally well done, but they're both much more idealistic period pieces than North and South. Even if they still have high death tolls!)
I could write several essays, but I’ll finish with the pretty pictures, because that’s much more entertaining:
Impossible paradise of Helstone:
And Milton, with its initial drabness (the colour saturation increases through the episodes, and this is the first few minutes of ep1) and the snow white hell that Margaret discovers in the cotton factories:
And Richard Armitage, with and without cotton:
Days of Telly Meme:
Day 01 - A show that should never have been cancelled: Blake's 7
Day 02 - A show that you wish more people were watching
Day 03 - Your favorite new show (aired this TV season):
Day 04 - Your favorite show ever
Day 05 - A show you hate
Day 06 - Favorite episode of your favorite TV show
Day 07 - Least favorite episode of your favorite TV show
Day 08 - A show everyone should watch
Day 09 - Best scene ever
Day 10 - A show you thought you wouldn't like but ended up loving
Day 11 - A show that disappointed you
Day 12 - An episode you've watched more than 5 times
Day 13 - Favorite childhood show
Day 14 - Favorite male character
Day 15 - Favorite female character
Day 16 - Your guilty pleasure show
Day 17 - Favorite mini series: BBC North & South
Day 18 - Favorite title sequence
Day 19 - Best TV show cast
Day 20 - Favorite kiss
Day 21 - Favorite ship
Day 22 - Favorite series finale
Day 23 - Most annoying character
Day 24 - Best quote
Day 25 - A show you plan on watching (old or new)
Day 26 - OMG WTF? Season finale
Day 27 - Best pilot episode
Day 28 - First TV show obsession
Day 29 - Current TV show obsession
Day 30 - Saddest character death