Burning Bright

I subscribed to Disney+ in the summer for a £1.99 per month (with adverts) offer for a simple reason. I wanted to watch Rivals, and I wanted to watch Shogun. At the end of the offer I succumbed to continuing a few months more for £3.49 per month to finish series 1 of Only Murders in the Building, and watch a few films I hadn't managed. It's been entertaining, but Disney definitely doesn't make enough of interest to keep me going beyond this calender year.

The adverts, surprisingly, aren't too bad, but then nothing is worse than Eurosport advertising, and Discovery+ has now made that £30.99 per month (it was that a year not so long ago) and removed the no-adverts for subscribers. But that is another rant.

Rivals You had to be there, I think, whenever it was that the latest Jilly Cooper bonkbuster from the library was the big thing. I was there, so I enjoyed this utterly ridiculous television, which due to timing, I watched with my parents. It had the sense not to make something serious out of this utter froth, but to let it be over the top 80s fun. The casting is terrific. I don't know whether they decided to make Cameron Cook African-American before or after the casting call, but it was an excellent choice, and not only for a strong performance from Nafessa Williams. Forty years on, it highlights Cameron's status as an outsider among this incestuous, privileged bunch to make her more than a ball-breaking bitch. There is an inevitable problem of casting David Tennant as Tony Baddingham, namely that his charisma is way ahead of everybody else. This helps make it plausible that he's got where he has, but really doesn't help Rupert's actor, who is perfectly adequate but not in the same league as Tennant on the acting or charisma front. It also doesn't help that Tony is 100% right about Rupert being a nasty piece of work whose politics are, shall we say, rather flattered by production. Cooper's transformation of the character was masterful, but she is good at characterisation and I found the politics easier to put aside on the page than on the television where they are somehow just not there except that for their uncommented-on pervasiveness. Rupert really cares about and sympathises with the underlying causes of football hooliganism. As a Thatcher minister in the 1980s, yes. It also pulls its punches on Declan and Maud a bit, whose parental failures are more explicit in the novel. Anyway, it's utter tosh, but sparkling tosh, recommended if you enjoyed the books back in the day and don't expect anything else. I will probably resubscribe for a month to watch series 2, especially given the different-from-the-book cliffhanger.

Shogun. Back to the 80s too with Shogun, a new adaptation of the 1975 doorstopper. The harsh way to put this would be that I would probably prefer Richard Chamberlain's character interpretation of seventeenth century ships' pilot John Blackthorn who finds himself washed up in Japan and caught in aristocratic power struggles (loosely based on real figure William Adams). That's not entirely fair. There's a lot to like here, from the outstanding performance of Sanada Hiroyuki as Lord Toronaga, to the visuals, and it tells its story pretty well. The weakest performances, unfortunately, seem to come from the two leads of Cosmo Jarvis and Anna Sawai, but the real problems are not so much the actors, as the presentation. Jarvis/Adams is written and played as far too much of a bolshy European/American audience everyman who has no patience with these backwards Japanese or realism about his position as a de facto captive, as opposed to a seventeenth century man with the prejudices of his time - but also his own experience of an extremely hierarchical society. The concept of bowing to a social superior is hardly going to be new to him, even if these particular bows are. As for Sawai/Mariko, it feels like the 1970s really show through the character's origins, with the background TV sexism of 2025 failing to dig into the character's potential. There's a lot to like about her, but it didn't feel adequately explored, not helped by the tendency to use the character to infodump. I'm sounding very grudging here, and I was disappointed in comparison to the glowing reviews, which I felt in retrospect were bowled over by the obvious successes (including the handling of the languages, which is done extremely well) and didn't look closely enough at other elements. It's decent TV that I can completely see why many people enjoyed, and there were some very strong performances, but one of those things where one just feels that there was the potential to be better with a more nuanced script. I may look out for some of the actors in other things, though.

Currently watching Only Murders in the Building, which is fun, but tenser than I had osmosed. Possibly I ought to have paid more attention to the title...