Sunday 20 June 2010

David Jason - Black magician

In this very odd episode of Childrens ITV Dramarama... David Jason assisted by David Rapaport attempts to earn a black-glove (!?)

Wednesday 2 June 2010

Wild Palms - 2 The Reader



From Wikipedia
...The Wild Palms Reader was published by St. Martin's Press before the series aired. It included time lines, secret letters, and character biographies. ABC, concerned that viewers might get "hopelessly lost in the tangled story line", arranged for the primer to be published. It also included writing supposedly from the “world of the series." Contributors included:

Wild Palms - 1

Mostly forgotten this little mini-series suffered from comparisons to Twin Peaks, but was a very different animal constructed by Oliver Stone in one of his few forays into TV.

From Wikipedia

Wild Palms is a six-hour mini-series, which first aired in May 1993 on the ABC network in the United States. Written by Bruce Wagner, who (with Oliver Stone) was also the executive producer, Wild Palms was a sci-fi drama about the dangers of brainwashing through technology and drugs. It was based on a comic strip written by Wagner and illustrated by Julian Allen first published in 1990 in Details magazine. The mini-series starred James Belushi, Dana Delany, Robert Loggia, and Angie Dickinson. The episodes were directed by four people known more for their feature films: Kathryn Bigelow, Keith Gordon, Peter Hewitt, and Phil Joanou.
And a great summary of the comic from Dot What
The strip version of the story is that Harry Wyckoff, an entertainment lawyer, sitting in a posh Hollywood eatery, sees a fellow patron dragged outside and beaten up, ignored by everyone else. He learns of and then goes to work for the mysterious talent agency Wild Palms, which turns out to be the public face of a conspiracy called The Fathers, whose aims are never really clear. Their leader is Senator Anton Kreutzer, who had founded the popular religion Synthiotics. He had also killed Harry's father in the late 1960s, the real inventor of virtual reality. In the present, 2008, Kreuzer and friends control Church Windows, a VR television network that immerses viewers who buy the home projector and take a drug called Mimezine, in their favorite programs.


The writer of Dot What also draws some nice PKD parallels... in the full article


The Creepy Marconi Deaths?

From Phoned Up and Shut Up
“You know those strange deaths of Marconi scientists? There’s been a helluva lot of those of TV technicians, but they never get into the papers. Really bizarre, really strange methods of committing suicide, you know?”

“Yeh, that book by Tony Collins an’ all that? 25 Mysterious Deaths In The Defence Industry?”

“Yeh, that’s right. Well, when I first started as a —- TV technician, they walked up to me, friendly as anything, saying, ‘Wait ’til you see what we can do with very low frequencies man! Absolutely fantastic, totally incredible!!! You’ll never believe it! It was like they were bursting to show something really big off to me, then when they found out I came from Ireland, they instantly clammed up, went funny on me, wouldn’t even tell me the time of day, ignoring me on the lift and everything. And in the 18 months since then, there’s been four or five of these mysterious deaths, like those Marconi deaths, of —- TV technicians, really weird flippin’ deaths man, never being reported in the papers. It seemed to happen every time after they were taken into some funny room and to do with some funny frequency.”


Maybe none of it's true... but read Phoned Up 'n' Shut Up in full and judge for yourself...