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Latest British (and Canadian) invasion of TV on DVD
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Modern Brit. 'tele'
Several British (and one Canadian) series that have been released on DVD since the beginning of the year seem wonderfully odd and some of them seem to have a nice additional sense of true bizarreness. There are also three that will be released in the next several weeks.
I plan to run a “Brit. Week” sometime this spring but wanted to share initial information about these shows; the hilarious “Slings and Arrows” from Canada is the only one that I have watched as of yet.
“Slings and Arrows” is a great hour-long comedy from Canada that tells the story of the artistic, technical, and administrative staffs of a Canadian Shakespeare festival struggling to produce plays despite numerous problems. Huge egos, funding problems, romantic entanglements, various mental disorders, and a meddlesome ghost of a deceased artistic director are only some of the problems.
I loved watching this show every Sunday night on the Sundance Channel and am eager to report back after watching the complete series set on DVD. I suspect that this will be another show that is much easier to follow by watching on DVD.
I am also vaguely aware of the British drama “Wild at Heart,” that aired on BBC America in 2007. This show is largely “The Brady Bunch in Africa.”
After a veterinarian who is a widower marries a divorced woman, he moves the entire family to Africa so that he can treat animals at a game preserve. This has great promise to be a nice family drama, and the scenery that is shot at a game reserve near Johannesburg, South Africa, should be spectacular.
The DVD set that was released last Tuesday has the six episodes from the first season (or series) of the show.
The 1970s British thriller series “Children of the Stones” tells the story of an astrophysicist and his son trying to make sense of the effect that a Stonehenge-style circle of megalithic stones has on the residents of a village. This show aired as part of the scifi program “The Third Eye” that Nickelodeon broadcast in the early 1980s.
Peter Davison, who has played The Doctor on the long-running British scifi series “Doctor Who,” stars in “The Last Detective.” This is a 2003–2007 comedy mystery series that tells the adventures of a police detective who always gets, and surprisingly only to his colleagues solves, the cases that no one else at his London police station wants.
The DVD set of this show, which has never aired in the United States, has all 17 episodes and a 1981 movie that is based on the same character and tells the same story as the pilot episode of the series.
The Beiderbecke Affair is another quirky light-hearted British mystery series that seems that it will be a great deal of fun. PBS ran this six-episode series in the 1990s. In this one, two schoolteachers get involved in odd mysteries that I suspect that they solve.
All of the series described above have been released; a few more that are scheduled for release in March are discussed below.
The DVD set of the complete series of “The Baron” is being released March 10. This 30-episode 1966 series depicts the adventures of an art and antiques dealer who works with British intelligence to recover valuable art that has been stolen.
Set 12 of the “Midsomer Murders,” which is very popular and has been airing since 1997, is being released on March 24. This is a very popular series about murders in a quiet British village. It also promises some wonderful dry British wit.
March 24 is also the release date of the DVD set of Set 1 of “Taggart,” which has been telling the stories of a team of Glasgow, Scotland, detectives for 25 years; this makes it the longest-running police drama series in the United Kingdom.
Watching the British programs also offers the chance to test a theory of a friend of mine; he has stated that every British actor has appeared in the “Harry Potter” films about a boy wizard and his friends at a school that teaches them to perform magic and control their magical abilities.
Please do share your comments as additions to this entry or as e-mail to tvdvdguy@gmail.com.
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The April 7 release of series one, my people call it the first season, of the hilarious britcom “The IT Crowd” provided a chance to speak …
