TV Review – Holy Flying Circus

In 1979 Life of Brian released to a powerful backlash from religious groups who thought the Pythons were mocking their beliefs. Often those doing the attacking would not have seen the film and would presume, wrongly, that Brian was just a stand-in for Jesus, rather than a separate character.

Holy Flying Circus, a drama made for BBC4, captures the time between the film being finished and prepped for distribution through to the aftermath of the infamous ‘debate’ in which John Cleese and Micheal Palin came head to head with Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood.

The immediate thing that you notice is that the entire team – the writer, the director, the actors – clearly know the source material and how to make the sort of thing that is now labelled ‘pythonesque.’ The actors are terrific at delivering the characters and in the press shots you certainly have to look twice before you realize that it isn’t Python. None of the cast are perfect, but in both looks and sound they’re close enough that it’s never unimpressive.

The writing is, for the most part, very good. The story is delivered very well, dancing upon key points while at the same time completely exaggerating the smaller things, the annoying quirks of human existence. It works very well so long as you remember that it’s a very fictionalized account of events and very little of what we see in the film likely happened.

But that’s where things go a little off the tracks. The film is incredibly one sided, presenting the Pythons as intelligent, rational atheists and anybody religious as either physically or mentally deficient or a complete bastard. This sometimes comes at the expense of what actually happened and, in the penultimate scene, entire parts of the chat show – Friday Night, Saturday Morning – are edited to show reactions, either by the audience or by Palin/Cleese, that didn’t actually happen.

Not a problem, most of the film is entirely fictional, except that it is completely at odds with the “let people decide for themselves” moral that runs through much of Holy Flying Circus.

References to Python sketches or solo projects tend to hit the mark, the same can’t be said for the original surreal moments that are rather hit and miss. Overall there’s enough humour to keep you interested, my favourite being a brief cutaway to the ‘head of rude words’.

If you like straight drama it’s probably worth giving Holy Flying Circus a miss, rarely does it present itself too seriously. If you want to see excellent performances marred only occasionally by a slight drop in quality of the writing (and scenes that are a tad biased) you’ll love what’s presented.

7/10

Book Review: A Shorter History of Australia

After reading Bill Bryson’s Down Under (In a Sunburnt Country if you’re from America/Canada) I felt like I had no choice but to learn more about the only country in the world that is also a continent. Relatively young, Australia’s political and economic history has been boxed into only a couple of hundred years, yet Aborigines were there 50,000 years ago: far too early for a decent explanation of how they actually managed it.

It’s a country that’s hardly been explored, a vast land of ‘possibly’ extinct animals and prehistoric throwbacks; sometimes animals which are seen once and never seen again, lost in the sun and sand.

Geoffrey Blainey’s A Short History of Australia is the go-to text for people wanting to learn a little more about Australia in a casual and entertaining manner. In the 350 or so pages that make up the text I’ve learnt everything I need to know to have a basic understanding of Australian history and a list of things that I’d like to learn more about. It’s an excellent gateway (if you don’t count Bryson), well written from start to finish.

From the Aborigines to the early 1990s, Blainey covers key moments in his country’s history authoritatively and interestingly, rarely straying so in-depth that you feel overwhelmed by the information given to you.

Unfortunately, the book’s biggest asset is its greatest weakness. Skimming over the chapter on sport is easy if you lack real interest, but things you want to learn more about are over far too quickly and you feel the need to go searching for other sources. My only other real issue would be the fact that the book isn’t structured chronologically, but by themes. There’s still a general forward direction to the book, but it still jumps back and forth quite freely and it’s far too easy to lose your place.

A Shorter History of Australia may not be the perfect history book and experts really need not purchase, there’s little here that’ll surprise you unless you are a big fan of Blainey. For me though, the best thing about it is its simple delivery, its assumption that the person reading the book may not have even ever visited Australia. That alone makes this worth picking up, you’ll be guided kindly through one of the most fascinating histories of the world without being made to feel stupid for your previous lack of knowledge.

Without a doubt, an excellent read.

9/10

Film Review: The Lion King 3D

In 1994 I was amongst some of the kids who would see The Lion King for the first time. I remember nothing about seeing it for the first time, that experience has been dulled by repeated viewing on video and, later, DVD. Those repeated viewings have firmly glued the film into my mind, almost to the point that I could probably perform the film in its entirety with only a few prompts.

The chance to see it on the big screen is almost the biggest pull of this re-release, trumped only by the chance to see an animated film that I know so well be transferred to 3D – and it’s done very, very well.

Within the opening 20 seconds of the film, with Rowan Atkinson’s Zazu flying over an assortment of rather well behaved animals (the beauty of animation), your eyes are rewarded with a visual treat. The depth offered by the 3D is constantly there throughout the film, at some times more subtle than others but, nonetheless, constantly there.

Does it add or detract from the experience? That depends entirely on your opinion of 3D in general. I found it impressive and well worth the extra money to see, others are likely to not be as impressed. I will say this, I didn’t expect for a second that a 17 year old film could be nearly as well transformed using 3D as it was.

The base film itself, of course, is still absolutely faultless. The story, an anthropomorphic retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, has Simba suffering with the guilt of his father’s murder while the real murderer, his uncle, Jeremy Iron’s deliciously evil Scar, takes over the kingdom.

Add in a collection of comic characters, catchy songs, brilliant acting throughout and first-class animation and it’s easy to see why the Lion King became the global phenomenon that it did.

This 3D release was to tie-in with the release of the Blu-ray at the beginning of November, a 3d version is also available. It’s well worth the extra couple of quid if you’ve got the equipment to play the 3D version (or plan to get the equipment). It’s also worth noting that the success The Lion King 3D has seen has prompted Disney/Pixar to announce theatrical 3D releases of Beauty and the Beast, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo and Little Mermaid.

9/10

Book Review: Red Riding Hood

Red Riding Hood, written by Sarah Blakley-Cartright, is a story about changes, about a young woman who holds her ground as her world falls apart around her. Daggerhorn is a fairly normal village filled with normal people. Actually, this isn’t really the case as with every introduction of a new major character Blakley-Cartright feels the need to write some variation of the sentence “they never felt they were exactly like everybody else.”

And it is this sort of character introduction that you are slapped with even from the very first page. Each personality is described in intricate detail with little to no actions to back it up. We know that the main character, Valerie, is a bit of a black sheep, adventurous and not willing to settle – we know that because we are told repeatedly. Similarly, we know that Valerie’s sister, Lucie, is beautiful and pure because hardly a paragraph she is in goes by in which her saint-like qualities are not mentioned.

Despite the sometimes clustered writing, Red Riding Hood actually offers quite an interesting story. The village of Daggerhorn has long suffered at the hands of the Wolf and, once a month, the people must offer sacrifices to keep their friends and family safe. When the Wolf attacks and kills the beautiful and pure (it’s catching) Lucie days after the last sacrifice, the village is thrown into disarray. The Wolf is not a wolf, they soon learn, but a Werewolf and it could be any one of them.

But Valerie has more than a supernatural half-man-half-wolf to contend with, oh yes. She also has man trouble, having been betrothed to the rich and handsome Henry, she suddenly discovers that the man of her dreams, her childhood friend Peter has returned to the scene. Who will she pick and what sexual tension will be revealed as the plot progresses? It’s edge of your seat stuff.

Thankfully, the scenes featuring the Wolf turns what could have been, and for the most part is, a novel for teenage girls into a murder mystery,  a whodunit that leaves you guessing until beyond the last page. And I mean that quite literally, the last chapter of the book – in which the identity of the Wolf is revealed – is classed as a ‘bonus chapter’ and is only available online, a chapter which remained unreleased until the launch of the film.

The mystery elements of the plot are generally handled with the same sort of subtlety as the character development, with each character a suspect. As Valerie goes through the evidence against each character, Blakley-Cartright seems to plant far too many seeds of doubt in her characters, characters which you are certain cannot be the murderer. As a result, the few characters that aren’t constantly accused by Valerie and her allies are soon pretty obvious candidates for the guilt. And as each one of them is slowly picked off, it becomes more and more obvious who the killer is.

At its core, Red Riding Hood is a book for the Twilight crowd, for young girls who spend their evenings imagining themselves engrossed in some sort of romantic supernatural world where cannibalism and murder are nothing more than minor character flaws. Unfortunately, it’s also quite a good re-imagining of the original Riding Hood tale, forcing any semi-interested reader to work their way through pages of girlish doubt and over-emotion in order to get to any of the interesting parts.

6/10

Welcome Back to my World

If you’ve been following me since that eventful day some 7 years ago, the day on which I registered my first website to market the first episode of Bored of the Rings then you are one rather sad individual. Luckily, I am also a sad individual and I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome you back to a new MatGrowcott.co.uk.

Consider it a work in progress, I need to fill my writing CV with old work and the blog will no doubt become more and more nonsensical over time as well. As well as this, I’d like to formally announce the 2011 remaster collection, a complete overhaul of every single second of audio I ever produced.

This will include rerecorded material, higher quality audio and originally deleted scenes. Over the next 6 months I plan to entirely remix everything that I can get my hands on, perfecting it for an audience in a new decade. And, who knows, after all the effort, all the time, blood, sweat and tears, someone will actually come to this website and listen.

I can’t confirm a schedule as such, because I don’t even know for myself; just be sure to know that I’m putting every effort into it and, as soon as something is ready for release, you’ll be getting it.

 

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