BBC Showcase – a postscript
Well, screenings are over (again, we were the last people to leave the Brighton Centre before they kicked us out), but the wind, rain and cold have a new friend, snow, in the forecast. Lots of great finds, as always, during our five days in Brighton. I say this every year, but this has to be, without question, the absolute best meeting on the planet for one simple reason. You get to finally do what we do….screen great television for four days. Whether it’s comedy, drama, documentaries, factual or natural history, the British just make darn good television whether it’s BBC or the independent production companies making TV for the BBC.
Couple of final screening notes to leave you with –
– screened a brief clip of an upcoming documentary from executive producers, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Rolling Stones – Exile on Main Street looks great. It’s the story behind the legendary album of the same name and how the album came to be, mostly from 2a-5a in the basement of Keith’s house. Lots of archive footage, tour outtakes, photographs and interviews.
– Saw a portion of Hamlet from the Royal Shakespeare Company with David Tennant and Sir Patrick Stewart. All I can say is you need to see this when it airs on PBS and KERA, Wednesday, April 28, 2010.
– Saw a trailer for the new bio-pic, Lennon Naked with Christopher Eccleston as John Lennon. I take back everything I said in an earlier post questioning if he could pull this off. Great stuff.
– several one-off docs really stood out such as The Madoff Hustle, which, in a great twist, is narrated by Robert Vaughn from Hustle. Also, Apollo Wives about the women and wives who stood in the shadows of the Apollo astronauts and the Moon and Lonely Planet: Road Less Traveled, which looks at both the adventures and misadventures of travel writers.
– from a comedy standpoint, the newest offerings we saw this year were Roger & Val Have Just Got In, starring Dawn French and Alfred Molina, We Are Mongrels, billed as Family Guy, but everyone is furry (FYI, I don’t think so) and Big Top with Amanda Holden and Tony Robinson, mentioned earlier this week. Never got around to seeing Psychoville but I really wanted to as it comes from the creative greats behind The League of Gentleman.
There were 100’s of more hours screened, too numerous to mention, but look for many on public television stations nationwide, including KERA, in the coming year.
