Bits and pieces…

I always liked Buffy, found it smart and fun and I’ve been rewatching it from the start over thnow and have sort of synchronised with Angel. I’m amazed how well it holds up still. I saw most of it when it first came out and haven’t seen it since, and I’ve rarely enjoyed television so much. Anyhow, here’s a curiosity which I only saw recently, the 25 minute unaired pilot. Different Willow, interesting how the actor who played her would have developed, but much else that is the same – though the more elaborate Library would have been a treat.

Meanwhile, did anyone else catch Secret State – the update of A Very British Coup.

Entertaining, but not great and in places downright… well… I want to be kind given its provenance (Chris Mullin is a lucky lucky man to get two adaptations from one book). There’s Gabriel Byrne playing a British PM (and with an accent of intriguingly unknown origin) surrounded by conspiracy, or who knows what, and if it’s all a bit predictable, red shirts are done away with abandon, well, so be it. There are some nice touches and it looks spot on from the Cabinet room to the place Byrne as Prime Minister gives press conferences. But it can’t quite decide if it is political drama, comedy, thriller or some combination of all three, and therefore falls between all those stools.

In a way it was telling how this is avowedly non-party political. Was Byrne’s government Labour or Tory? We can’t tell. And perhaps that was the point – though somehow it makes the stakes oddly enough seem lower. But in that it lacks the transgressive quality of the original where the PM was defiantly Labour and left Labour too. And then there’s the point that in his closing speech Byrne references a list of woes, banks, etc, etc, and then the… er… ‘unions’. Huh? So, A Very British Coup it ain’t.

The following is where Marty Willson-Piper of the Church proves he should have a show on music, or something…

And this. You’d never know with a Guardian spoof competition on posters to dissuade migrants from Britain, it could go one of any number of ways, but some of these were kind of funny.

And to conclude for now, the poll tax riots came up in discussion recently. So check out this from mises.org, a libertarian right view on the issue… interestingly they weren’t happy with it either, though not – perhaps predictably – for the reasons most of us would find fault with it.