A murder every week to a calypso beat. Sun, sand and jungle to a musical rumble. I see Death in Paradise as the spiritual sucessor to Doctor Who. Every time a quirky investigator dies (or gets a new series), he is replaced by the endless stream of British personalities from the MET. Set on fictional St Marie, filmed on Guadaloupe, this is a place I want to go to... but there are way too many murders for me to book a holiday. At home we call the show The Carribean Fashion show because we like the colourful clothes; also Music and Murder, for obvious reasons.
I simply cannot watch the 2003 Doctor Who. It is not that I hate new things, or want to live in the past; it is the Hollywood pace, the manipulative music, the incessant action.
Doctor Who (1963) on the other hand is all story based. My favourite Doctor is a tie between Peter Davidson (fifth Doctor) and Jon Pertwee (third Doctor). Runner up is Sylvester McCoy (seventh Doctor). Why not Tom Baker! Becasue he is too brash, almost a bully, so much self confidence and all the quirkiness is in the scarfe. I have based these opinions a re-watch of every episode from 1970 through to 1989. I am currently watching 1963 through 1969 and finding it is quite a good way to drift off to sleep.
Speaking of Doctors, Pete Capaldi in The Thick of It is, along with and contrasted to Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Veep, is the most accurate portrayal of the world of politics in recent TV. The Thick of It is the evil, dark manipulative side of politics; it is spin-doctoring, trickery and violence. Veep is the stupid side of politics; the self serving idiocy that somehow is allowed by us to continue.
The tie in between Thick and Veep: the UK's best and least regarded comic mind; Armando Iannucci.
British / Scottish humor at it's most revelatory. Self-deprecating and multi-layered, Armando describes the world from his inadequate view-point. In it, a man discovers the house his new family want to buy is made from paper; the local sports fans all turn out to be repeating scripts fed to them by a news service; and "piss-flaps" is written in the flowers.
Brilliant Jewish Canadian comic Nathan Fielder hosts a business renovation show where he helps struggling small businesses become all that they can be. Starting from simple tactics like creating a poo-flavoured yoghurt, he eventually turn in on himself and and creates "the most daring act on TV" and falls into a relationahip with an escort he hires for a promotion. Nathan's work in Nathan For You and subsequent efforts dig deep into the roots of the Jewish Canadian psyche and form a genre which I call "Lasagne Comedy"; because it has many layers is subtly and deeply delicious.
I like sci-fi. It might be accurate to say that I specialise in post WWII American meta-sci-fi. What is meta-sci-fi? It is sci-fi hiding social commentary behind technology; it is movies about technology that are really about post global war society. WWII radically changed the film genre, from Cowboys vs Indians to the Cognisant Ouroborous; from conflict against the other to conflict against the self. The genre reaches its height in the mid-1970s, and falls away again in the mid 1980s as the action thriller genre rises.
Phase IV (1974)
Humans in the desert are overrun by ants. The humans, posessing the height of research technology, fail to adapt as quickly as do the ants do in the escalating war.
A Boy and His Dog (1975)
The movie that the Fallout videogame series was based on. A young man and his dog explore and survive in a post-nuclear wasteland. Finding a vault (underground base) where 'civilisation' has retreated too, they gain entry - only to have to escape again.
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
David Bowie as an 'alien', wakes up on Earth one morning. With his advanced mind, he starts a company to create a space-ship to return home.
Demon Seed (1977)
A researcher in an Artificial Intelligence lab takes his work home - where it impregnates his wife - and gives birth to itself. Based on a Dean Koontz novel, it is not as scary as I had expected going in. It sticks to the sci-fi rather than horror genres.
Background Image:
'Bildnis Werner Miller ' by Hodler Ferdinand (1899).