I\u2019ve been harping on about television\u2019s lack of new material lately, so much so that I\u2019m beginning to feel like a regular TV columnist. I tend to home in on the re-hashes of old, ostensibly \u2018safe\u2019 stories, though why 10 Rillington Place should have attract so many writers\/producers down the years I can\u2019t imagine. Can it be that the Brits are secretly proud of their serial killers! <\/p>\n
My aversion to drama remakes began in earnest in 2002 when some clown tried to better the BBC\u2019s 1967 version of The Forsye Saga, hacked it down to a precis of its former self, and stood back while it hit the deck, taking Damian Lewis and Gina McKee with it. (Have to say that BBC\u2019s Radio 4 version last year was pretty damn good – the pictures were better!) The most recent example of televisions\u2019s love of repeating itself is Roots. It\u2019s a shadow of the 1977 version and again its been pared down to a cliche from the novel by Alex Haley.<\/p>\n
The only stuff you can dramatise over and over again is cop shows, which means that the Nathan Hawk Murder Mysteries stand a fair chance of making it. Meantime, I must catch up with the remake of Maigret. It had better be good!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve been harping on about television\u2019s lack of new material lately, so much so that I\u2019m beginning to feel like a regular TV columnist. I tend to home in on the re-hashes of old, ostensibly \u2018safe\u2019 stories, though why 10 Rillington Place should have attract so many writers\/producers down the years I can\u2019t imagine. Can…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiffingwebsites.com\/douglaswatkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiffingwebsites.com\/douglaswatkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiffingwebsites.com\/douglaswatkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiffingwebsites.com\/douglaswatkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiffingwebsites.com\/douglaswatkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spiffingwebsites.com\/douglaswatkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiffingwebsites.com\/douglaswatkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiffingwebsites.com\/douglaswatkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiffingwebsites.com\/douglaswatkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}