I've always been a fan of medieval sword and sorcery numbers, so last night we had a themed evening of Middle Ages viewing. Unplanned I hasten to add, as the Wallander episode we were going to watch was a repeat from the over produced Brannagh version of the marvellous and moody Swedish original.
First off was Merlin, now an early Saturday night staple and great fun. Better than Dr Who in my 'umble (ducks under parapet to avoid flying brickbats). Yes, it has deux ex machina twists but unlike Dr Who they are not delivered by a bloke talkingsofastallhiswordsrunintooneanotherandyouhavenoideawhatisgoingon#*^&!##@@. Only criticisms are that Richard Wilson's comic acting talents are under used, at the expense of the somewhat wooden eye candy for the ladies, one Bradley James as Prince Arthur.
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Next up after discovering we had already seen the Wallander episode was Pillocks, sorry Pillars Of The Earth based on Ken Follett's novel. This load of old tosh is basically a Middle Ages version of that other historical romp Rome, and is a rambling soap opera centered around the construction of a cathedral in a fictional town in Medieval England and the political shenanigans surrounding it.
A good cast of Brit TV regulars is headed by Ian McShane camping it up by the shedload as Bishop Waleran Bigod (great name!), a man whose scheming ambition to be Archbishop of Canterbury is matched by his need to self-flagellate as a penance.
Sarah Parish stars as a scarred aging courtier Regan Hamleigh who schemes with Waleran on behalf of herself and her horrible son William, who is of course a coward and a bully and a misogynist to boot. She also kills her own husband after he has served his purpose, so that they all constantly remain on whichever is the current winning side in the ongoing civil war between factions of the royal family, and it's more than hinted at that William and his mum have some heavy Oedipal action going on.
The man charged with building the cathedral, the imaginatively named Tom Builder (Rufus Sewell) is constantly running off to a local cave where his lover Ellen, a witch on the lam played the rather sexy Natalia Wörner, whose clothes conveniently fall off every time her lover appears.
The female lead is Hayley Atwell as Aliena, a usurped princess whose brother Richard is the rightful heir to the throne of England. Both have to hide their identity, so she is working as the only female wool merchant in England, and the brother is a trusted knight in King Stephen's army. The same Stephen who is on the throne at Richard's expense. And of course Aliena has a doomed love affair with Ellen's son, who when he first appeared in the series seemed to be some kind of idiot savant, but then learned to express himself in more ways than verbally very quickly indeed.
It's full of holes and lurches about like a drunk peasant in a tavern, but it's fun!
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We rounded off the evening with the 1981 film Excalibur. What qualifies a film as a B movie? If it's awful acting, by a distinctly second division cast (with three "before they were famous" exceptions), and a script so pretentious it's funny, then this film certainly is.
Nigel Terry (?) plays an Arthur so wooden you could build a good fence out of him, and he is at the centre of the action, which for its 200 minutes largely consists of lots of blokes wearing half ton metal suits clanging and clanking into each other with swords, axes, cudgels, crowbars (possibly not).
Merlin is the laughably over acting Nicol Williamson, whose thespian pomposity is suggested by the fact he has two surnames. You can tell he's a proper ac-tor and he ain't afraid to give Merlin a Bard like flourish now and then. He wears a sort of sci-fi shiny metal head covering throughout the film for reasons known only to the scriptwriters.
Directed by John Boorman, who ropes in two of his kids in minor roles, you can't fault the scenery and cinematography. Every scene would make a good poster, but the leaden script would lead someone unfamiliar with the King Arthur legend to wonder what on earth is going on. Plot devices like Arthur's near instantaneous transformation from bumbling squire into regal fortitude once he had extracted Excalibur from the rock, and Morganna's (Helen Mirren wearing slightly more clothes than she did in Caligula) seduction of her half-brother Arthur leading to instant famine and pestilence across the land, are particularly clumsy, a bit like that last sentence! The Holy Grail quest is also clunky as it is not even partly explained why this relic of biblical times is in England, or why finding it will bring times of plenty back to Camelot and the Kingdom.
Guinevere is played with a twinkle in her eye by the lovely Cherie Lunghi. If Felicity Kendall in her prime was the epitome of the English Rose, then Cherie was certainly number two with a bullet. Her clothes fall off too - a brief redeeming feature of this overlong tedious portentous twaddle.
PS - the third "before they were famous" actor was Liam Neeson!
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So, it turns out that those f#ckers letting bangers off at half past midnight this morning were Eastern European - Phill must have been closer to them than me. They should all be blindfolded, tied to tress and have chavs set off bangers at their feet - see how they like it!
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