Monday 12 January 2015

TV

Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled
2x01 Simple People Eating Complex Carbohydrates
[Watch it (again) on Dave OD.]

Broadchurch
2x01 Episode 1
Has it really been almost two years? (Yes.) Interesting new direction -- an area rarely (if ever) explored in TV dramas before -- but a bit less of the obvious "we both know secrets about the past, but let's not tell the audience"-type dialogue, please.
[Watch it (again) on ITV Player.]

Outnumbered
1x05 The Mystery Illness [3rd watch]

Fiction

The Adventures of Tintin: The Calculus Affair by Hergé

I recently bought a box set of three animated Tintin movies from the '60s and '70s. One of them is an original story and one a faithful adaptation of The Seven Crystal Balls/Prisoners of the Sun, but the first is a version of The Calculus Affair that reportedly bears no resemblance to the book whatsoever... so I thought I ought to read the original first, especially as "some, such as Benoit Peeters in his book Tintin and the World of Hergé, consider this as the greatest and most "detective-like" of the whole series" (so says Wikipedia).

And it is a very good one, actually; a kind of Cold War spy thriller, but through a Tintin filter of course -- there's still plenty of slapstick and so on. Considering the next Spielberg/Jackson film is being scripted by Anthony Horowitz, of Alex Rider and Foyle's War and the next Bond novel, this would seem to be a good candidate to base it around...