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Post by johartuk on Jan 21, 2024 23:08:49 GMT
Wow. Just finished watching this. As a (family) lawyer, I’m absolutely speechless. I've not watched the tv series, so I am a bit puzzled by reactions like this one and many others all over social media and mainstream media. I was outraged and seething when I first read about these clear miscarriages of justice many, many years ago, and which have still have not been properly compensated and for which none of those culpable in the cover-up has been held to account. What exactly is in the tv drama that wasn't already widely reported years ago? For me, it was seeing some of the individual stories behind the media coverage. It hit home just how affected the lives of those innocent people were by being wrongly accused (and, in some cases, convicted).
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Post by johartuk on Dec 4, 2023 13:46:35 GMT
I’m still baffled why they did that wedding “acting challenge” last night. The videos from home and all the tears - as if it hasn’t just been a few weeks and they aren’t all constantly in touch with their friends/family anyway?! I’ll be very surprised if it’s not Stevie and Tobias as the winners. The wedding vows thing seemed really random. It’s not as if the eventual winners will have to write their own lines for the show! I also felt the slowing down of ‘Dancing Queen’ was…a choice! I was waiting for it to ramp up to full throttle, but it remained at a funereal pace* throughout, with the choreography mostly consisting of Esme standing on a chair, waving her arms about s…l…o…w…l…y! *The irony for me being that we actually chose ‘Dancing Queen’ as one of the songs for mum’s funeral (she loved ABBA and the MM musical) and it wasn’t as funereal as last night’s version - it was the original upbeat version!
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Post by johartuk on Dec 3, 2023 12:49:02 GMT
“The sound sweetening on the show is horrible.” Yes, quite. Anyone thats ever sat and watched questionable entertainment on a veranda in the med on their holidays knows that nobody sounds like that outdoors. It’s going to be interesting to hear what they sound like live in the final. So far, it all feels a bit like ‘let’s have a variety of people in the line-up, but let’s get rid of the ones we’d never cast in the roles in a million years before the public get to have their say!’ I get why TPTB have done it that way, but it does come across as a box ticking exercise rather than an attempt to do anything different with the casting. It also feels a bit lacking without the live/public vote/sing-off element.
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Post by johartuk on Oct 30, 2023 17:22:24 GMT
The Josephs being stripped of their coats by the other contestants was my favourite, especially when Seamus went rogue and changed the lyrics! (Slightly off topic but) do you know one of the Josephs ended up becoming a porn star! Yes! Something tells me that if they ever do a ‘Where are they now?’ thing on the Josephs, that won’t be mentioned 😂
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Post by johartuk on Oct 30, 2023 13:21:11 GMT
It sounded like a backing track, but there is a live band there playing, so I was a bit confused! I wonder whether the sound quality was a bit variable so they've done some touching up for the television? Desmonda appeared to have an entire orchestra backing her! I also found the dancers distracting. The girls were performing on a small stage, so the group of dancers filled it. I half expected someone to get an elbow in the face or a kick to the shin!
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Post by johartuk on Oct 30, 2023 13:19:38 GMT
There was one moment where the judges clearly winced and, while the singing at that point wasn't great, it didn't quite merit that response. I agree, they can't be hearing the same as us. That said, competition reality TV is my guilty pleasure so I will probably watch right till the end, no matter how awful! Alan Carr did an ALW gurn!😂 The problem is that because it was pre-recorded, what we’re seeing has been edited. So, the ‘reaction’ shots, might not have been from that performance. At least when ALW ‘reacted’ to a performance in the BBC casting shows, we knew he was reacting to that performance because it was live.
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Post by johartuk on Oct 25, 2023 11:52:27 GMT
Any Dream Will Do was my favourite TV casting show, and he was on the judging panel. Probably the first time that I was able to put a face to the name. He came across as a decent and likeable man on that show, and judging by the lovely tribute posted by Lee Mead (ADWD winner) last night, what we saw on TV was what he was like in real life.
RIP Mr Kenwright
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Post by johartuk on Oct 24, 2023 15:44:18 GMT
It’s still early days, but it all feels a bit too happy and cheerful. Will we see anyone who’s so competitive that they’ll happily sell their own granny (after forcing her to appear in a VT, obviously!) in order to win? Will we have Sophies and Skys with gimlet eyes as they tell us that they’ve wanted to be in Mamma Mia since they were foetuses? Will we have weeping and gnashing of teeth by departing Sophies and Skys as they belt out the farewell song? In fact will there even be a farewell song?
Watching this show does make me long for Graham Norton with just enough snark to stop things getting too saccharin, ALW with his facial expressions during performance not matching his comments afterwards, and the epic farewell songs! The Josephs being stripped of their coats by the other contestants was my favourite, especially when Seamus went rogue and changed the lyrics!
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Post by johartuk on Oct 22, 2023 20:11:44 GMT
It was better than I thought it would be, but I wasn’t keen on it being pre-recorded. The vocals felt too polished (and beefed up with backing vocals).
The judging panel was OK, but I’d have swapped the popstar for one of the male TV casting show successes.
I agree about no-one really standing out yet.
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Post by johartuk on May 2, 2023 15:57:49 GMT
I’ll be watching as hey, it’s musicals and it’s Mamma Mia, but surely there’s more deserving actors who’ve trained for years, who should be being cast as Sky and Sophie? In the ALW ones I think quite a lot of them had trained hadn't they? A bit series dependent, because the ones in Over The Rainbow were mostly younger, but in the earlier ones some had definitely been to drama schools, and in shows before. Yes, they had pretty much all had training and some (e.g. Lee Mead, Daniel Boys, Rachel Tucker, Sarah Lark) were already working in the industry when they auditioned. The BBC played up the whole 'from Supermarket Checkout to Stage' idea, but the reality is that, particularly in the first two series ('How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?' and 'Any Dream Will Do') there was a few weeks between the final of the series and Press Night for the musical, so no time to train someone from scratch. If the audition process is anything like the previous casting shows, a lot of people already in the industry (and recent graduates) will probably audition. I just hope this new series follows the audition format of the BBC shows (i.e. two weeks following the audition process from initial auditions to the final announcement of who has been chosen to go on the live shows) rather than the usual ITV format (endless weeks of audition eps featuring no hopers who are just there for the viewers to point and laugh at). I'm not sure about the panel - Samantha and Amber seem like solid choices, but I'd prefer to have a male MT performer on the panel also, rather than Alan Carr (who I love, but seems like a random choice) and a vocal coach.
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Post by johartuk on Apr 14, 2023 14:24:20 GMT
That’s a lot of extrapolation from a simple statement about what appears to amount to some minor lyric changes. I’m not aware of any ‘woke left’ (who even is that?) uprising that demanded any of this - just the usual work involved in bringing a 35 year old film back to the screen in a different format. I can honestly say that I never got the vibe of Eric forcing himself on Ariel in 'Kiss The Girl' - it was her friends trying to help her by setting the scene for a romantic moment with music and visuals. It's also worth remembering that she was very much 'in on the plan', not a helpless victim. 'Poor Unfortunate Souls' is a villain song - Ursula is evil, and the song is about her filling Ariel's head with rubbish in order to get her to give up her voice.
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Post by johartuk on Jan 7, 2023 15:56:33 GMT
Several prominent military officers, nothing to do with Harry have said he should not have said what he did and the way it was said. He has been so poorly advised as to wording etc in areas of his book. Except they were not actually reacting to his wording in the book, they were reacting to press headlines. Which were based on the quickest possible translation of the Spanish-language edition they could make and then spun further to make him look as bad as possible. For the record, Peter Hunt has now gotten hold of the actual passage in the English edition: It's irrelevant what the actual passage says - the Taliban have seen the excerpts all over the media (both mainstream and social) which is all they need to take offence and possibly retaliate. Harry's 'kill tally' should never have appeared in the book!
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Post by johartuk on Jan 7, 2023 15:47:28 GMT
He gets worse, stories of having sex with an older woman in a ‘grassy field’, his drug adventures and spurious stories of him versus the Taliban and his head count (really? 😂): I take it back about comparing him to Kanye, he’s the missing link in Kevin and Perry Go Large. Is that Nazi uniform high jinks night out swept under the carpet? My only interest in this book is if there is suddenly a global shortage of toilet paper. He blames William and Kate for that! Seriously! There's also Meghan being a seal whisperer (apparently, some seals sang to her and she sang back)! Harry communicating with his dead mum via a medium! Harry being injured by a dog bowl and getting his necklace broken by big bruv! Meghan borrowing Kate's lip gloss and getting the hump because Kate looked at her funny! Harry's penis getting frostbitten (and both him and William being circumcised...because millions of complete strangers all over the world really needed to know that!) The whole thing comes across as a spoof - how can anyone take Harry and Meghan seriously after this?
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Post by johartuk on Jan 7, 2023 15:24:45 GMT
It's a terrible, terrible thing when a brother shouts at you. In other news, Harry also says he's killed 25 people. People’s reaction to this snippet have been doing my head in. He was an Apache helicopter gunner. His job as a gunner was to shoot and kill people on the missions that he was commanding. The gunner needs tactical control and so is in command. The people he was killing were the Taliban - who in return were trying to kill him. This has been public knowledge for years, and - as I’ve been saying since forever - one of the reasons why he has a heightened security risk. The Taliban are very well aware of his military service. And yet people are losing their minds now that he talks about the experience. As if this wasn’t already known - or, I don’t know, as if they never quite believed that he was an actual soldier who fought in an actual war and actually killed people while doing so. It's one thing actually going into a war zone and fighting/killing. But to openly talk about the number of people you've killed in a book that the whole world can read (and now that excerpts are all over the press, you don't even need to wait for the book to come out to read the relevant extract!)? Absolutely disgusting, not least because it puts a target on the backs of Harry and his family, and on the rest of us innocent Brits (and also Americans, since he's married to one and lives there now)! I don't suppose that crossed his mind when he was churning out his magnum opus!
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Post by johartuk on Sept 22, 2022 11:01:57 GMT
Such a big change just to stop us talking about how they'll stage the helicopter! They'll probably change it into a plane!
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Post by johartuk on Sept 20, 2022 11:42:32 GMT
I was in work, so only saw bits of it unfortunately, but I thought the procession was stunning. Not just for the huge number of marchers, but the amount of guards lining the route as well. Just extraordinary, though I’m going to have that Beethoven funeral march stuck in my head for days now. I don’t understand the decision to focus on the piper rather than the coffin lowering into the vault. I think that image with the music receding into the distance that would have been really powerful. Instead they cut back and the coffin’s gone. Weird choice. I have a vague memory from Phillip’s funeral of hearing that we wouldn’t see the moment the coffin disappeared. So I think perhaps this was intentional both times. It probably was, but then they showed a clip of the Queen's coffin being slowly lowered into the floor (presumably into the vault) on the news afterwards!
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Post by johartuk on Sept 20, 2022 11:38:38 GMT
I held it together right up to when I saw Emma the pony do a little bow and the corgis. That was too much for me. Also George and Charlotte, so well behaved and singing the national anthem and those pall bearers! they need to be awarded. I was very moved by the appearance of the corgis and the pony. I hadn’t realised but Emma the pony had the Queens headscarf placed on her saddle. Very poignant . A beautiful tribute. I didn't realise about the headscarf either. That sounds like what they did at Prince Philip's funeral, where they had his carriage and horses brought out to watch the cortege - his hat, gloves etc were laid out on the seat of the carriage.
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Post by johartuk on Sept 10, 2022 22:47:05 GMT
Yep. Exactly as expected. £20 saved. Ps. Part of your… Woooorrrr-huuuu-uuurllll-YAY-Yyeeeahhhh-mmmmmmmm-uhhhhh-uhhhhhhhuhhhhhh. The unnecessary riffing is jarring. It's a shame they went down that route because the actress' voice has a lovely tone to it. The riffing also takes away from the emotion of the song.
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Post by johartuk on Sept 8, 2022 20:17:34 GMT
Turned the TV on at lunchtime today and followed the news all afternoon and into the evening. It seems surreal. RIP Ma'am.
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Post by johartuk on Sept 8, 2022 12:49:06 GMT
Much as I enjoyed the BBC casting shows, ITV has never been able to get them right. The Grease one took an X Factor approach (weeks of audition eps full of no hopers to point and laugh at and a format that was so bad that they had to ditch it around half way through the series). Superstar also suffered from a poor format (live shows airing over a week, rather than the normal weekly eps, which allow viewers to 'get to know' the contestants and get into the show).
I hope they do better with this one.
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Post by johartuk on Aug 27, 2022 15:56:15 GMT
Lea Michelle leaves me cold. She's very polished and slick and can belt her face off, but nothing about her feels genuine*. That clip of her singing doesn't help. The "Here she is! The Superstar!" nonsense, accompanied by arty farty black and white footage of Ms Michelle emoting to within an inch of her life while interacting with smiling, happy cast members. It really doesn't dispel the 'diva' image, and comes across as over-produced and pretentious.
*As I was typing this, the image that popped into my head was Carlotta from POTO!
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Post by johartuk on Aug 1, 2022 14:44:29 GMT
“our volunteers are a fundamental part of ensuring a successful and safe event” I’m sorry your volunteers are a fundamental part of ensuring a safe event? The volunteers who can be 18+ and will be briefed about the event the night before? 🤔 Also, will these volunteers be DBS checked? I'd hope so, because otherwise, there could be some seriously dodgy characters attracted to volunteering at an event that's going to be packed with youngsters.
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Post by johartuk on Jul 24, 2022 9:58:47 GMT
I must have missed the news on this one. Who is playing Celie? Fantasia Barrino (played Celie on Broadway).
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Post by johartuk on Jul 21, 2022 22:03:19 GMT
I found the trailer rather odd - for some reason, I found it a bit...downbeat? Except for the 'all singing, all dancing' bit at the end, which doesn't seem to fit with the rest.
Also - why is Joan Collins dressed as Peggy Mitchell from Eastenders?
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Post by johartuk on Jul 17, 2022 13:02:44 GMT
I was 18 at the time and can't remember it at all. I would have been 7, and I couldn't remember anything about that summer - until I realised that '76 must have been the year of our only holiday in a caravan. My younger sis was born late '75, so would have been a baby at the time. One of mum's relatives owned a caravan that was on a site near Morecambe (so was probably one of those static things) and that year offered it to mum for a week in the summer. Apart from the heat, I remember three things about that holiday. Firstly getting lost (those were the days when kids were allowed to roam free, and I took that opportunity, only to realise when I tried to return to 'our' caravan that they all looked the same!). Secondly, when we walked down to the beach, only to realise that baby sis had no sunhat, so mum improvised by putting a spare pair of knickers on her head (and taking photos for posterity!). Finally, the occasion when I realised for the first time that insects bite/sting (I was bitten on the arm by something, which resulted in a nasty 'spot'. Mum once again improvised, wrapping a disposable nappy filled with a mix of sugar and soap pieces around my arm, to 'draw out the poison'...which did actually work!).
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Post by johartuk on Jul 16, 2022 11:27:48 GMT
Will be fascinated if that's true because she is not a name that was mentioned when I was talking to someone in the casting team last week... They are really struggling to find a Fiyero Isn’t filming due to start next month (I might be wrong!)? Seems very late to still be searching for a Fiyero but I genuinely have no idea how these things work. I would imagine that they'd start filming scenes that don't involve Fiyero, if they really don't have an actor in place by then. But I'd also imagine that they, at least, have a few actors 'under consideration' by this point. I'd hope so. Unless they had someone in mind and were close to getting him to sign (or had signed him) then he dropped out at the last minute, leaving the casting bods struggling to find a replacement.
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Post by johartuk on May 31, 2022 11:41:00 GMT
Bad Romance, particularly the start, sounded bad and off key. The solo vocals sounded pretty ropey, which surprised me. It sounded better when the rest of the cast joined in, but I wasn't keen on the speed (felt too fast and frenetic) and the way the songs were spliced together. The whole thing came across as a bit of a mess, and the way Christian and Satine suddenly wandered into the group of performers was a bit random. He looked confused, like he'd accidentally got lost on the way to the toilets and ended up onstage!
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Post by johartuk on May 1, 2022 12:44:05 GMT
Prima Donna - Phantom Of The Opera
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Post by johartuk on Mar 29, 2022 17:29:45 GMT
Truly bonkers! What next? Katie Price as Norma Desmond?
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Post by johartuk on Mar 4, 2022 22:57:19 GMT
Some Of Us Belong To The Stars - Billy
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