vladimir-137

For anyone who is wondering, this movie is an attractively photographed film in still-crisp colour ("by Technicolor") that can be summed up as England's answer to "Life with Father".

That is to say, stuffy-character actor Cecil Parker plays the lovably opinionated, semi-tyrannical head of a household. He has only one child, a son, but has also to deal with his extended family's black sheep Uncle Willie, played by Donald Wolfit (who steals the picture, such as it is).

The film (set in 1902) benefits from lavish production detail, period costumes and sets, but suffers from the "fourth wall" breaking narration of 10 year old Peter Asher (fashion model and actress Jane Asher's brother). He isn't especially engaging as a performer, sad to say.

Episodic and not very funny, but also short enough to be possibly worth a look on a rainy weekend at home.

Let me say first that I agree with the commenter who found the "minimum" length restrictions - in commenting on a Beckett work - ironic here. I would have preferred the subject line of this comment to have stood as my entire comment.

There are several problems with this film, as with all of those in this series that I have seen. Firstly, and the main one, with all of these films, is very poor direction. Julianne Moore gives a ghastly "emotive" performance, entirely at odds with the work; as with much bad acting, the blame lies with the director who allowed it.

Second, the tricksy "cutting"; this is purely to show off and for effect; again, nothing could be less true to the work.

Third, what on earth was the idea of having Ms Moore walk on to the set at the start? Again, more "cleverness" for no purpose.

As Billie Whitelaw says in her memoirs (and who would dare contradict her!), if you scrap the Beckettian staging, you don't have Beckett.

Fourth, Julianne Moore's teeth are too perfect, too attractive for this work; they needed some making-up at least if she was to play this role. Seriously.

Finally, a general complaint that this work was filmed here at all. The 1970's version elicited from Beckett one of the (apparently) very few comments he ever made on a performance of his work. It was only a word or two, which I won't dare to quote from memory (my copy of Miss Whitelaw's memoirs is not at hand); but the substance of it was evidently (in my interpretation and memory) that he was astonished by how perfectly his vision for this work was realised.

At the risk of repeating myself, why then ever film it again?

Once again I regret that we're only allowed to go as low as "1 out of 10".

Zero out of ten; zero out of a hundred.

This series gets my vote as one of the two or three greatest televisions series ever made.

Dudley Moore and Sir Georg (pronounced "George") Solti, week by week take us through the orchestra, section by section.

There is also an episode dealing with the piano as an orchestral instrument, featuring Dudley and Georg at the keyboard together in a dazzling display of musicianship.

In another episode Dudley takes up the baton to explore the role of the conductor under the hawk-eye of the professional, Sir Georg.

Highly entertaining throughout and informative: this series shows what television can do at its best.