New posts

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 358858" data-attributes="member: 23">12 April - 22 May 1979 3132 - 3153 There’s a new family in the village. Miss Tatum has appeared to hand over the key of her shop to Cyril Watkins who - in addition to becoming fast friends with Doris Luke - has now been joined by his daughter Eira Turvey and her husband Harry. They’re three interesting characters. I warmed to Cyril immediately, but must confess I’ve grown to find him oozing with “nice” in every single scene a tad irritating. There’s something about the gushing sincerity and warmth that I find a bit too much, and I hope he gets into some conflict soon because he’s coming across like a caricature. If there is conflict, I suspect it will come from Harry, who appears to be something of a bad ‘un, clearly with some history that’s going to cause conflict. He’s a bit of a stirrer when it comes to his interactions in the village and has already got on the wrong side of Doris for his perceived idleness (I’m still not clear what the deal with his back is. Does he really have an invisible disability? I feel I shouldn’t assume either way). Harry is played quite unapologetically by Siôn Probert who seems best known playing a camp boutique owner in a film with Windsor Davies: Grand Slam (I’d never heard of it, but it looks fun and so is now on my radar).Balancing the two men out is Eira, played by Myfanwy Talog. Hers is a very familiar face and  IMDb tells me she’s appeared in numerous sitcoms I’ve watched - some quite recently. But she’s perhaps most familiar to me, I’d think, for her voice work in long-forgotten animations such as Alias The Jester, Will Cwac Cwac/Will Quack Quack and SuperTed. Search engines seem to indicate she’s best known for being David Jason’s long-term partner up until her death aged just 50. Anyway, she’s a lovely addition to the cast and I’m looking forward to watching while the family is around (which, sadly, doesn’t appear to be too long). As an aside, the family have been heard conversing in Welsh when alone. It’s only happened once, but I thought it added an interesting and slightly bold touch of diversity.The stories are coming thick and fast at the moment. Xrds has really nailed the art of balancing the pacing so that it feels mostly sedate, while rotating its stories and characters with enough frequency that none of them ever outstay their welcome. Watch two or three consecutive episodes and it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that it’s downright sluggish. Skip three times that number and the instant accessibility could create the illusion that nothing ever happens. But whenever I stop to reflect on a batch of episodes I realise that they’re invariably quite different from the batch before, something especially noticeable once it’s down in black and white.True, I’m flying through the series at the moment, but its bingeability© at even this speed is a testament to its structure. If it were too slow I’d lose the will to live. Too eventful and I’d feel burnt out.The previous batch’s main storylines are now long wrapped up. Jill’s gone off to New York. Adam may have as well. And Kathryn’s also returned to her East Coast home (consider, too, that Diane’s just flown off to Los Angeles to see Nicky, with Chris considering following, and one could easily envisage Xrds becoming a franchise like CSI. Even closer to home, characters have darted off to London and Geneva).If I have one complaint about the rotating stories, it’s the way in which they are sometimes hastily - and anti-climactically - wrapped up.Take the Tish/Ted/Kathryn affair. As I mentioned before, it was refreshing as these stories go and had some great moments for Tish especially. Then, once Kathryn is gone, Tish announces that  the feels special because Ted has been as sneaky with Tish as he usually is with all his other women, and off she goes to cook his supper. It left rather a bad taste in my mouth, because it undermined the strength and growth she’d shown during the affair.With Diane and Chris’s marriage, I accepted the somewhat choppy ending, because the whole point of the story was that it was destined to go nowhere. It’s to the credit of the writers that I didn’t feel there was an inevitable ending. While I was curious see where it would go, I wasn’t overly invested in all the twists and turns of the story, but it was just too much flipping fun to worry about that. I was fairly ambivalent towards Rosemary before this story, but she’s emerged as a highly entertaining and unpredictable character, and her catty, snobby side has been extremely amusing and watchable. The annulment does have a touch of the anti-climactic to it, but again, with this storyline that’s the point. continued…</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =