have been watching the Stephen Poliakoff collection on BBC i-player, . Never watched anything of his before, (not even Gideon's Daughter) not until the series
Summer of Rockets came out this year. If any other Brits want to watch that, it's available on i-player as a box set for the next 10 months. I'm not a big fan of historical drama, but this was really special., closely based on Poliakoff's childhood and actual family, so the characters were very real, the history dead acccurate, and the strory very involving; very much more than just a yarn.
The rest finish their run on Wednesday. Of these, i especially liked
The Lost Prince, about King George V's little-known autistic/epileptic son, who was kept out of the public eye. This has the same underlying theme of siding with the less-than-conventional, which evidently runs through Poliakoff's work like Blackpool through the proverbial stick of rock. One of the reasons why i like it
And his portrayal of the strictures of upper class society makes you actually feel sorry for the buggers; though i've gotta admit, that's pretty much how i felt in the first place. A nice bit of self-affirmation for spazzes.
Finally,
Shooting the Past is awesome. Just awesome.
I don't know why BBC call
Shooting the Past a "period drama" It's set in 1999, the year it was made. At which point in time, I was living without a TV (mostly to save licence fees, besides the fact that i rarely watched the thing anyway) ; and was continually plagued by the licencing police, who would bang on my door claiming to have detected a TV in my house, with their silly little dummy "TV detector vans"; at which, i would invite them in to peer suspiciously at my PC monitor. It wasn't really worth the harassment , TBH, but I'd heard on the radio that most of the women in British prisons had been banged up for "watching TV without a licence" and i really didn't fancy being one of them ; nor did i fancy the prospect of diverting money for important stuff like rent, fuel, ISP into their grubby hands, just to avoid that fate.
Umm, yeah, that's totally beside the point, except that's probably why i missed that thing til now,.
Links:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p078h6l2/summer-of-rockets-series-1-episode-1https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0078zs3/the-lost-prince-episode-1https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0077p7l/shooting-the-past-episode-1