Beyond the Roundels

Some of the things I've been watching in 2025 that I haven't really talked about so far, mainly because my chief feeling for all of them is that I need to rewatch them to make up my mind what I actually think of them, which is not necessarily a comment on the film(s) so much as it is the state of my focus and concentration re. watching anything, thanks to the CFS.

The Man Who Loved Redheads (1955) This was in fact the last thing I watched in 2024, so you can't believe a word I say, just like the hero of the piece. This film was a Christmas present, requested because it was part of my Watch All the Rattigan quest (harder than it ought to be), and this film is Rattigan's own adaptation of his play Who Is Sylvia?, starring Moira Shearer, John Justin, Roland Culver, Gladys Cooper, Kenneth Moore & Denholm Elliott.

It's pretty much pure candyfloss and mostly a showpiece for Moira Shearer to dance, but I will watch it again sometime, definitely, because sometimes candyfloss is needed. It would have been good to have a bit more of a comeuppance/stronger repentance for the lead, but then it is fair to say it's also rather a toss up as to whether or not he actually has been misbehaving as much as it appears or mostly fantasising all along, in addition to the very light tone. (This seems to be the main complaint of contemporary reviewers as well, who add that it is not the best Rattigan, with which I can also concur; it is very odd to be agreeing with contemporary reviewers.)

Mark, Lord Binfield (John Justin) is obsessed with Sylvia, a red-headed girl he met at a party when he was a teenager, and despite marrying Caroline, ends up living a double life with a flat in London where he pursues redheaded women who look like Sylvia. It's narrated by Kenneth More, Moira Shearer plays Sylvia and all the women who look like her, while Gladys Cooper swoops in at the end to steal the show as Caroline, who turns out to have known all about it all along, while his image of Sylvia is so far divorced from the reality, he doesn't even recognise her as she is now. (<-- technically a spoiler, but one that IMO totally would have benefitted the initial viewing experience to have known, because I don't trust the 1950s.)

Its tongue-in-cheek tone, narration and lightness saves it from being anywhere near as terrible as that summary sounds, as indeed does Caroline. It is quality fluff & nonsense, basically, and if you wanted to see a 1950s ballet performance of extracts from The Sleeping Beauty, this will deliver. It also provides a bit of a swift romp through the first half of the 20th C, which may have been the thing I enjoyed the most.

Some screencaps (mostly of Denholm Elliott) here. Oh, which reminds me: it's in colour!! It's always very exciting when that happens in a British film before 1960. (It's, like, that's a thing???? We can have colour???? *\o/*)



Angel (2007) is definitely an oddity. I watched it for Romola Garai, because I saw a clip of it with her in the fabulous red dress she wears in the middle - some tumblr gifs and pics of the film including the Dress - and I have to say the dress did not disappoint. The dress was worth it on its own, even without the also amazing green dress and the pretty wonderful blue dress that also happened. XD

Anyway, it was directed by François Ozon, so it is a French/Belgian film rather than a British one, despite the mostly British cast (Romola, Charlotte Rampling, Lucy Russell, Sam Neill, Jacqueline Tong & Michael Fassbender). Angel Deverell is an Edwardian romance writer, a monstrous narcissist who tries to live as if she were the heroine of one her novels and eventually crashes and burns, but it's an oddity in that she never really learns anything or grows, which made it unsatisfying to watch for me on first viewing as I didn't know to expect that. But it is more a study of her character and a commentary on art, with the rise and fall of Angel's populist romances vs the lack of success and then posthumus rise of her husband's avant-garde art over the course of the 1900s to the 1920s. I will definitely have to watch it again to see what I make of it, now I have a better idea of what it's doing. But it's very well made and played and, as I may have mentioned, costumed, and I did not grudge my £3.50 or whatever it was going on this, because if there is an audience for Romola wearing fabulous things in a period drama, I am definitely part of it.

Also bonus points for one of my favourite things in films/TV, ( Cut for gif of fake books )

I was going to bring this post up to date, but this got long enough already, so I might as well leave it here!

I continue to be tired/ill from Friday, but usually three days is the charm, so here's hoping for tomorrow! In the meantime, some things:

1. Someone has put together a complete timeline overview of OUaT here. (Well, I say here; it appears to be in four very long parts plus a Wishrealm edition, because OUaT. I've been looking at some bits of it when I can manage it & it's quite interesting to see, especially the chronology of the in-show mythology bits.)


2. I made more gifs and then I had to stop because it was too many gifs for my current state. They were all ( Colin and Matty gifs from Wish Me Luck )


3. If you can do reaction vids and like being cheered up, during the Writer's Strike, the channel Gallifrey Girls stopped doing all their usual shows and did Red Dwarf instead, and went from not having a clue what it was to it being their new favourite show, which was fun to see: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcEstOLrIdVVGpfu7hHebva1Osjzbim2K

/end random.

One day I will make a proper post again. Probably. I hear those may be a myth...

1. Big Finish have finally resolved the rights problem with the their Sapphire & Steel audios and are re-releasing them in download format. They're boxsets only, it looks like, which is a nuisance if you were wanting to fill some gaps or pick up a specific one, but they are available again!

They remain some of BF's best audios, whatever else they are, so that's really cool.

One other good thing is that they have helpful content warnings, which is thoughtful, especially as several of them are very dark indeed. (In a perfectly S&S sort of way, but definitely worthy of warnings for people who'd want them.)


2. I've already forgotten what my other things to say were just in the process of typing that up.

Probably only gifs. Have some more wee Jeremy Northam gifs, why not:

( Cut for gifs )

Anyway, these may not look like much, but you should see my source material.

(Somebody reblogged one of these last night! I cunningly put Julian Glover in it, and that did the trick. A Julian Glover person reblogged it and a Jeremy Northam person then saw it. tumblr is very hard work if you're creating posts for obscure things people aren't thinking of looking for but might like if they stumbled over; you don't have comms for that like we did on LJ.)

(I'm overtired, I'm babbling as per.)

Another crosspost for my Fave Eps of Old Telly tumblr sets, and one this time that is part of the reason I started making it, because sometimes you get something like this.

Original tumblr post.

---

Favourite Episodes of Old Telly: The Shadow of the Tower Episode 5 “The Serpent and the Comforter” (BBC 1972. Written by Hugh Whitemore; dir. Moira Armstrong.)
( What more unanswerable question is there than death? )

The Serpent and the Comforter (YouTube) | and on Daily Motion

I'm not sure what else to add here, but it does seem to be the one that everybody else who watches it really likes as well, so clearly this is not just about me and my weirdness or my James Maxwell fixation. (This is what gave me my JM fixation.)

I've been doing this series of gifsets on tumblr for a very long time now. I've been meaning to crosspost them ever since. I'd (ironically) just drafted up one such post shortly before I accidentally deleted my whole tumblr that time in 2018 or whenever it was, and if I'd been faster about it, I wouldn't have completely lost some of them. Anyway, I've been meaning to finally get around to it, and today I went out so am ill and was thinking that I want to magically have a post to post and it should be about James Maxwell in some way and also probably this episode because it is a go to tired-episode. And then, I realised, that that was entirely doable for once.

[These are no longer in the original order, because the whole deletion thing wrecked that anyway. Format = tumblr gifset + original blurb. This, as you can probably tell from the gifs, was one of the earlier ones - originally no. 5/?]

---

Original post here on tumblr.


Favourite Episodes of old telly: Enemy at the Door 1.10 "Treason" (London Weekend Television, 1978). (Written by Kenneth Clark; dir. Jonathan Alwyn.)

( We fought, he said, and you were not there; cut for gifs )

Perhaps more a favourite episode rather than best (but then ‘best’ in Enemy at the Door would include all the spoilery, continuity-heavy episodes, so let’s go with my odd choice here, why not). I just appreciate hugely an episode of TV that’s all about people feeling sidelined, bored, trapped, frustrated and despairing to varying degrees. Chiefly, it focuses on Major General Laidlaw (Joss Ackland), his spirit being slowly eaten away by inactivity and small humiliations and the visiting grandee, Generalmajor von Wittke (James Maxwell) - Laidlaw’s brother-in-law - who is, as it turns out, just as trapped as everyone else.

Enemy at the Door s1 on the Internet Archive | Treason at YouTube.

---

(I still love this episode. It is a strange one, and the writer's style is circular and repetetive, which I can see would not be everyone else's cup of tea, but it works for me. Jonathan Alwyn's direction is reliably great, and I like the constant understated background sound of the storm that underpins most of the episode. I still appreciate so much an episode of TV which explores the inability to do things, and revolves around something that doesn't and can't happen, and the unspoken implications of what consequences will follow. I wrote fic for this, and there is so much detail in the stated backstories of the two main guest characters that make them inverted mirrors of each other in ways that are fascinating and muddy the morality even further than is immediately apparent in the episode. Also James Maxwell wants to kill Hitler and Richter and Freidel finish up with a knowing Julius Caesar reference. ("He is an honourable man. They are both honourable men!") EatD knows how to make me happy, or certainly cathartically sad in all the right ways.)

(This is not the best one of these sets to begin with, because it's an episode that probably nobody but me would list as a favourite. Except maybe hyarrowen, but idk if that was just because I went on and on about and then wrote fic. But when I'm ill, I just want to talk online about "Treason" and this once, I actually can!)

Today Spooks (aka MI-5) is 20! I must now be officially old as this was my first grown-up, moved away, fannish TV love. Although maybe I shouldn't celebrate till next year because I hadn't quite made up my mind over S1 - it was S2 where I fell in love. It happened about the time that Ruth Evershed walked in, dropped all her files and wanted to bugger the Home Office.

Anyway, happy 20th to the show that was so great at angst and pain and killing all our favourites! (Top Spooks Death Scenes is definitely a list I should get to sometimes. I know what number one is. I can never even so much as think "Look at all the lovely cake and presents" without having to blink back tears. Yep, doing it again now...)

And in all seriousness, it was great, and it changed UK TV and how it was made. If you liked a UK drama of any sort made in the following 10 years, you need to thank Spooks for it. It has the record currently for most nominations for a BAFTA for a drama series. Later series might have been more variable, but it was always a ride, scarily good at predicting the news right from the off (S1 pitching and early production pre-dated 9/11), and a great big snarky tragedy in disguise as a case of the week spy show with an amazing cast. <3

Plus, if you're in the UK, the BBC currently has the whole 10 series up for mainlining on the iPlayer here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b006mf4b/spooks (Warnings for, like, everything ever... XD)

( MI5 don't do evil, just treachery treason and armageddon )


Anyway, also sorry about not posting again. I was not that bad, I was just very blah and it was very weird last week generally for a few reasons.

One day I will start posting properly again, but goodness knows when that will be. In the meantime, I have now completed the gifset request meme I did over on tumblr, and here is the list, (as requested by various people on tumblr) if anyone should be interested:

Shadow of the Tower + 4 most attractive character

Spooks + 1 favourite character

Sapphire & Steel + any category you feel like (opening titles)

Adam Adamant Lives! + 17 favourite costume(s)

Doctor Who + 9 favourite location

Spooks + 5 favourite romantic relationship

Public Eye + 3 favourite minor character

The Brothers + 7 favourite familial relationship

Sapphire & Steel + 13 most heartbreaking scene

Sapphire & Steel + 16 favourite scene

Spooks + 12 favourite [Ruth] look

"the smallest fandom you can gif" (The Power Game) + 10 favourite episode

Shadow of the Tower + 17 favourite costume

Anyway, it was fun.

As I said, I've made a lot of gifs over the last couple of months and I have not inflicted them on you shared them with you yet! (Part One of...??)

So, very importantly, even if tumblr did not care, I finally managed to make gifs of Anne and James Onedin from The Onedin Line, which I watched over half of via Drama a couple of years ago and which was a ride (in Devon) but you might recall that Anne was the best, and her marriage of convenience with James where they married for a ship and then were both too practical and northern to know how to deal with feelings was all the things. And here they are (played by Peter Gilmore & Anne Stallybrass):

( Cut for giffage )

Also I finally managed to gif Bram Stoker's Dracula for my Dracula adaptations I have watched series, so I am up to date with what I have watched so far. (It was much overdue because I was posting collected gifsets of the various versions of each character from each one and they had been sitting in my drafts for a year, awaiting one last gif for each set. Now I have hardly any drafts at all, it's amazing.)

But I thought I'd share this set, as it interests me. The 1992 film seems to share a lot of little things with the 1968 TV Dracula that aren't present in the others. It seems an unlikely influence on the face of it, but it does seem nevertheless to be lurking somewhere in BSD's DNA. (Mystery & Imagination was shown in the US, or certainly the 6 surviving Thames episodes, so it's certainly possible.)

( Cut for Dracula parallels part 3 )

So, I was feeling really flat and tired again yesterday and today, so yesterday I made a historical gifset with Copper and Silver (which I'd been talking about wanting to do to theseatheseatheopensea) here on tumblr.

( Cut for giffage )

And today I thought I would do another OC Element, and finally found the perfect one for Dennis Alaba Peters (who was in Department S and I've been wanting to use him, partly because he was actually an opera singer and has a splendid voice, which always helps) - here's Carbon, or a potential Carbon anyway:

( Cut for largish elemental graphic )

Anyway, maybe it's a bit too Sir Curtis-like, but imagining him as sort of senior element who wanders in and out vaguely and casually sorts things while being surprised other Elements found it difficult. ("Ah, Steel. Not still having trouble regulating your temperature, are you? I thought you fixed that half a century ago!")

The tumblr post is somewhere in the queue, but it'll turn up here in time.

So, I've been meaning to share some of this here for ages, and here goes. I've been giffing my way through the Dracula adaptations I've seen so far (6 currently) and have completed five, with Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) still to go. (I got stopped by people spoiling my fun by suddenly making a new Dracula in the middle of all this, which meant people were taking notice of my posts and it was too much. Also now I'm not up to date! Damn them. Couldn't they have waited? ;-p)

Anyway, I'm not a visual person, or not without prompting, which is one of the things I really enjoy about screencapping, iconing and giffing, because it makes me look at visual media in ways I never do otherwise. So this isn't anything profound, but in the process, I noticed some interesting visual nods from one production to one or more of the others, so here is a post about that.

( Cut for giffage and vampires feat. 1931, Hammer, TV 1968, TV 1977 & TV 2006 )

It's going to be interesting doing BSD in this light, because, though this blows my mind, the previous version it seems to be most obviously referencing is... my much-loved shaky old 1968 TV version. How very dare. 0_o

1. Commentfest with a fairy tale/fae theme spotted around and about: November Nymphs & Nixies.


2. I have my Yuletide assignment and it's a nice one, so fingers crossed, I can do something with it! (I haven't yet, though.)


3. In my Dracula giffing, I have now achieved Dracula (1958), although most of the gifs are still pending in my queue or hanging about in my drafts over at tumblr. In the meantime, have a Peter Cushing or two:

( Cut for a Van Helsing or two )


4. I also did these gifs from Spiders (2000) an SFF/Horror film starring a young Lana Parrilla as UFO-obsessed college reporter Marci Eyre. It promised to be terrible in exactly the right enjoyable way and it was. I would say have some gifs of a young, geeky Lana vs a giant mutant spider from space, but I'm sorry, I edited out the spider. I have priorities. They don't have eight legs.

( Cut for Lana Parrilla in glasses shooting things )

Other than that, I've been pretty tired and had an appointment, hence gifs. Tragically no James Maxwell ones, though. This year is very short on James Maxwell and it's an unfair thing, but OTOH, it had Lana vs a Giant Spider, so I suppose that is something.

I am being bad at posting and I am actually really enjoying the Stuff I Love meme, both seeing other people's posts and self-indulgently going on about things I love. I am tired, though, so let me be obvious tonight.

Anyone who's been following me for more than about two minutes will have gathered that as well as obscure old telly I love obscure old actors who appear in it. It was an inevitable consequence, really. David Collings, Barbara Murray, Alfred Burke, Suzanne Neve, Gemma Jones and a bunch of others. David Collings is the person whose fault it was, and who dies improbably and entertainingly a lot. But my current favourite is James Maxwell. I would explain myself, and there is a sort of explanation in there somewhere that started with David Collings and BBC period drama but it passed through Sapphire and Steel fancasting and theatrical ghost stories and a nice obit, to "I just like your face, sir" and then what can you do?

Anyway, James Maxwell was a character actor who was one of the founding artistic directors of Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre, which he is now reputed to haunt. He was actually American, but came to the UK to study at the Old Vic Theatre School in 1950 and stayed here till he died in 1995.

Things I like about him:

1. He crossed an ocean because of Dame Edith Evans. (Literally: he went to see her in the theatre and no less than two days later he was on board a ship for the UK, arriving in Southampton with no forwarding address.)

2. The ghost story about him can basically be boiled down to "his colleagues wanted to have him still around." Bonus for the ghost story: he is said to have made an appearance on TV from beyond the grave on Most Haunted. Not something everyone can claim.

( And now I will just illustrate my point with gifs )


I was prompted to post this particular entry today because someone on tumblr had found a new source of theatrical pics for him, which I shall now share, watermarks notwithstanding.

( Ah, yes, the one in the short skirt holding someone's hand... )

I was going to write a sensible post about JM and do him justice (because actually he was a pretty interesting person and it has been fun trying to find out more about him and there is a lot to say) but I am tired. So you got the gifs that survived my tumblr-pocalypse.

But this list could have been a lot longer and had more gifs, so you can't complain too much. ;-p


ETA: oh, also THIS LIST. <3

swordznsorcery, who is very kind, giffed the bit where the Brigadier walked in and hugged Inspector Kate! And here it is:

( Cut for Brigly hugging of lady police inspectors in the 1980s )

(I am writing/editing stuff, so there will be something here soon that has nothing to do with Juliet Bravo, I promise. I just did not expect the Brig. Nobody expects the Brig! ;-D)