Thursday 15 July 2010

TV

Dragons' Den
8x01 Episode 1
Why have they changed the theme tune? Now it sounds like an '80s American action series.
[Watch it (again) in HD on iPlayer.]

Wallander [Swedish]
2x09 Dödsängeln (aka The Angel of Death)
It's rare that mystery dramas can pull off a genuinely unforeseen twist that works these days (as much as anything because often everyone's a potential suspect), but it's pretty late in the game that one gets an inkling in this Wallander. A strong episode on the whole, in fact.

Fiction

A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Part 1, Chapters 2 - 7
Couldn't resist continuing -- Conan Doyle's tales are so addictive. Plus A Study in Scarlet is actually quite a short book, so I rattled through to the end of Part 1 in all of an hour.
I've read various Sherlock Holmes tales down the years -- I know I've got through Hound of the Baskervilles at least twice, for example, and read The Sussex Vampire many times because it a) always sounds interesting/unusual and b) is really short -- but it's been a long time since the last time (last I remember was the second (or third) time I read Baskervilles, just before the Richard Roxburgh/Ian Hart TV version... in 2002). So it's no surprise I can't definitively remember which I've read and which I haven't, and among this number is A Study in Scarlet. "It's the first, surely I've read it?", I think... and yet I can't remember when, or having to get through the Holmes-less second half, so maybe I haven't after all? And as I've seen a couple of TV adaptations of it (most recently, this one), it's impossible to tell just from knowing the plot.

Articles

If Movie Titles Were Honest
(from Cracked.com)
Photoshop-based hilarity ensues.