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For those of us from across the pond that love Britcoms - it would be nice to know the names of the shows that these bloopers came from so we might find them on a yt channel. ty Sending love from Tx Hyacinth Bucket is a classic.
Thankyou for the kind thoughts and prayers. It is the first of a series of operations that I have got to have in the next couple of months due to an illness that has been getting progressively worse. I am going to be away next week for a few days to recuperate by the sea. Staying with a friend. There will still be uploads next week as they are set to upload on the regular Sunday upload for WATT ON EARTH, and a spooky mini series for HALLOWEEN.
It is a great show, isn't it.? Yes, I'd not thought about that before, but you're right, it is the forerunner to Tony Doyle's character in Between The Lines.
Is that twice now we've seen Keith apparently sleeping in his wig? Do the producers think we don't know that most men wore wigs then, and that anyone with white hair and improbable curls above the ears is certainly wearing one? (It would have been very funny if it had been pulled off at Slochd nan Eun by a Highlander who thought it was his own hair, as it was in the book, but no such luck.) Then again, timeline problem. There's a panel in the middle of the episode that reads, "two months later". But then Lord Loudon speaks of Ewen's sleep-talking episode, which happened before that break, being "a couple of weeks ago". The passage of time between Ewan's capture up on Beinn Laoigh and his eventual setting off for Fort William is a lot longer than it seems here, and something is lost by this. More importantly, I thought the business with Keith trying to give Ewen the knife was very badly handled. He would never have done such a thing. In the original, Ewen asked him to cut off a lock of his hair to enclose with the letter to Alison, saying that "women like such things", and also that the more he could cheat Carlisle gate (where rebels' severed heads were displayed) of the better. After Keith did that, he forgot to pick the knife up again and would have inadvertently left it there if Ewen hadn't drawn it to his attention. He told Ewen he wished he hadn't reminded him of it, and he'd have gone out without it, but as it was he was honour bound to take it. Ewen said he wouldn't make Keith into a traitor, and he'd certainly be searched anyway. Surely there was space for this little exchange, so in character for them both? As it was, this version made Keith out to be a deliberate traitor. The first meeting at Fort Augustus (the one which should have been in the upstairs room with the hole in the wall) seems to me to be at the heart of the book. This is where both men are at their most raw, and Ewen in utter despair, both about what he believes he has done, and because Guthrie has made him believe that Keith tricked him then betrayed him. It lasts much longer, and it takes Ewen a long time to come back to the belief that Keith was his friend all along. The change in him from prickly leave-me-alone to a craving for sympathy to entertaining the hope that Guthrie has indeed misled him is crucial to the drama. His need to believe that Keith was sincere that night in the shieling is crucial, as is Keith's desperate need for Ewen to believe that. This was all galloped through much too fast, and Keith barely seemed to care. "Good luck, Ardroy" indeed. Whoever wrote that line should be taken out and shot. Keith in particular is not doing stiff upper lip by that point. Surely more time could have been found for that, by cutting down a little elsewhere?
I'm so glad I saw that, thank you very much for putting it up. And in colour too, after only seeing part of it in black and white nearly 50 years ago. But the pacing did seem wrong in the end. If six episodes were all that were available, the first three should have been covered in two, leaving more air time for the heart of the story. In the second half it seemed that the director was hammering through the action with very little time to explore the characters' emotions and motivations. It's difficult, of course, to get over on film what can be expanded on in prose, but I don't think it really got there. It needed more time. The scene on the sands of Morar was obviously difficult given that so much of it is Keith's internal monologue, but it seemed to be over in a flash, with barely anything of that final conversation as Keith lies dying. Also, the ending seemed psychologically wrong, with Keith declaring himself a traitor, rather than the true situation, which was that Lachlan attacked him before he had made the decision as to whether to betray his military duty or his friend. But lots and lots there that was good. I liked the way they dealt with the fact that much of the dialogue should be regarded as being in Gaelic, and leaving enough of the Gaelic audible around the voice-overs to let the viewer hear that the characters were really saying what we were told they were saying. (When you just hear "Tha mi an dochas ... marbh" from Ewan, about Lachlan, it's chilling.) So thanks again, and now I'm going to watch some of it again, because if it goes past too fast, the best way to counter that is rewatching. But overall, this is a novel, and the only way to get to the heart of it is to read the original.
@@archivemediavault I'm just having a Broster binge this month, and very happily came across your wonderful channel. Have you read "The Wounded Name", written a couple of years before "The Flight of the Heron"? It's almost as if she re-worked the earlier book into the best-seller. Napoleonic wars, again two young men (both on the same side this time) becoming friends as one of them goes through hell and beyond. What she puts Aymar de la Rocheterie through makes Ewen Cameron's sufferings look like a minor inconvenience, and whereas Keith only aspires to friendship with Ewen, Laurent de Courtomer is somewhere else entirely. 1922. My eyebrows disappeared into my hairline. I've just started to re-read "Sir Isumbras at the Ford" which I found in the bookshelf in my father's study when I was about fourteen. Going on the principle that Broster's earlier works are better, I have high hopes, although I only remember isolated passages.
That was very much condensed from the book, and probably lost something by it. The emotional impact was trivial compared to the original. Conflating the early evening episode when Keith prevented Ewan from being shot (during which Ewan was almost entirely unconscious) with the long night in the shieling when Keith went back to take him food and treat his wounds more or less excised "that night in the shieling" which meant so much to Ewan afterwards. And substituting about five minutes at the shieling the next day for the episode where Ewan is taken back to Guthrie's camp on the Corrie Yairack road and questioned and ill-treated by Guthrie for over 24 hours takes a lot of the sting out of what happened. As an aside, it's interesting to follow the movements of the characters on the map, as described by Broster. She never gives any reason for Keith riding along Loch Ness to take the Corrie Yairack pass to Perth rather than going the easy way through Aviemore, and the mad "short-cut" he takes from about Knockcarrach to intersect with the Corrie Yairack road, resulting in his stumbling across the firing party at the shielings, looks scarcely doable, but she hasn't fudged it much. I think she did it all from the OS maps of the time, then just added locations (like Loch na h-Iolaire and these shielings - Beinn Laoigh isn't anywhere near there, it's south of Tyndrum, and there's no Beinn Bhreac anywhere near Loch Arkaig) where she needed them for the story. I do wish some of these actors could ride better. Keith looks like someone who has only had a few lessons, and his orderly doesn't even know how to hold the reins. People in those days rode horses as naturally and instinctively as we would drive a car, and it's jarring to see such cack-handed incompetence.
@@archivemediavault It is nearly always thus. At least David Rintoul can ride, and looks natural on a horse. Clint Eastwood is the same. It doesn't take that long to learn, and I'll never understand why so many actors don't. (I once galloped beside a guy on our local Borders rideout who told me he had only been riding for about five months. When I looked more closely I could see he was a little inexpert, but he would have passed any film test. If he can do it, anyone can.)
A pretty faithful adaptation so far. But they haven't got very far along with the story and this is already the end of the second of only six episodes. What's getting left out, I wonder. I also wonder where they chose to film Loch na h-Iolaire, since the place doesn't actually exist.
I recognise " Loch na h-Iolaire" from elesewhere but cannot for the life of me remember where from. I should know the name of the place, but it's gone.
@@archivemediavault If you remember, please post it! I think it's clever the way Broster pasted the locations she wanted into the existing landscape. I think Loch na h-Iolaire is probably a bit further east than Loch Blàir, given that Ewan and Lachlan walk there from Loch OIch via Glen Garry in maybe only a couple of hours. (I note that in order to make this work she had to make Keith ride up the north-east shore of Loch OIch, past the Tobar nan Ceann, whereas the Wade's Road he would naturally have taken runs along the south-west side of the loch.) She also describes a steep descent to the loch, whereas Loch Blàir is more or less on the watershed. (It is more or less a "bleak mountain tarn" which Loch na h-Iolaire is specifically said not to be, but pretty nonetheless. I think it's too far west to see Beinn Tigh from there either.) I have wondered if she took another loch from somewhere for Loch na h-Iolaire, but I don't know how one would find out. Ardroy is actually a place on the shore of Loch Goil, there's an outdoor activities centre there now - a sea loch, so that doesn't work.
Wow! I never actually thought I'd find this! And it's in colour! I suppose if I'd thought I'd have realised it must have been, but we only had a black and white TV at the time. So now I can see the producers omitted Ewan's red hair, so often remarked on in the book. The book was a prescribed home reader when I was at school, in about 1967, and I fell for it like a ton of bricks. Maybe a year later our class was taken to the Glasgow Citizen's Theatre to see Henry IV part 1, and David Rintoul was playing Hotspur, and the entire class fell for him like a ton of bricks. By the time this TV adaptation was made I was in my fourth or final year at Glasgow vet school, and I'm sure I saw this first episode (in black and white), but I have little memory of the rest. (I was working pretty hard towards my finals.) What I do remember is the controversy about that horse. One of our lecturers had agreed to knock the horse out with an equine anaesthetic ("Immobilon") to get that scene where it breaks its leg and Keith has to shoot it, and this was then roundly criticised as unethical by a number of his colleagues. (You can see in the footage that the horse isn't simply trained to act the part, but has actually been drugged.) I don't think anything much came of it, but it was quite the storm in a teacup at the time. Fast forward to last month, and I was looking for something to do while car camping in Lochaber, and I decided to climb up from Loch Arkaig to Loch Blàir, which isn't Loch na h-Iolaire but is in more or less the geographical position Broster describes for it (but much higher). It had been in my mind to do that since about 1967, and noting on the OS map that a track had been bulldozed up the hill almost to the loch since the last time I checked it, I decided to have a go. (Yes I made it.) So I dug out my old school book to re-read on the trip, and rather to my surprise found it packed just as much punch as it did back then. Then, just last night I think, I heard the Prokofiev piece used as the signature tune for this adaptation on Radio 3 [Romeo and Juliet indeed, but I'm damned if I can pinpoint which section*] and it reminded me of the TV show I barely remember seeing nearly 50 years ago. I wonder if that ever made it to RU-vid, I thought to myself. And here we are. Thank you so much for making it available. So far, I reckon it isn't really a patch on the book. The visuals are always better when you're reading. But hey, David Rintoul. Don't knock it. *The signature tune is bugging me. For almost 50 years, "Romeo and Juliet" has said "Flight of the Heron" to me. (So I imagine I saw more episodes back then than I remember.) I can't tell exactly which section, either because of the way Prokofiev re-uses the same thematic material, or because a special arrangement was made for this programme. But also, I could have sworn that the thing began with the theme known as "The Montagues and the Capulets" (or sometimes "Dance of the Knights") but it doesn't. So either I've confabulated this over the decades, or there are more music copyright issues involved there.
@@archivemediavault Thamks to you, and thank you! Somethiing well worth preserving and making available again. I suspect I have confabulated the bit about the "Dance of the Knights" theme being played at the beginning. I think, always hearing the music togather as part of the same work, has caused me to import the other theme in my memory. I thought the signature music was very appropriate, but although it was familiar I couldn't quite place it at first. Then I heard it as part of a concert and the menny dropped.
Great episode, but not much fun for the bar owner and the doctor, those that live or stay behind take all the risks. They really made it worse and destroyed their own network.
Listen to the script for a few seconds after 8:17. The couple have been sent to Harrods by their boss to get some eggs and the man says, "What does the old duffer want anyway?" and the woman says, "Two dozen size one free range eggs" and he says, "We could have got those from the pakis on the corner". Priceless. I'm surprised that even though this was as long ago as 1984, it managed to slip through without someone at the beeb censoring it! Ha ha ha!
It is, isn't it. A bit like Big Breadwinner Hog, a show with Peter Egan from around the same time that was surprisingly harsh for the time, and caused many complaints.
Very nuanced writing indeed. It's probably my favourite episode along with episode 1. I can't thank you enough for these uploads and for introducing me to Captain Percival as well. Great treats one and all for a chair bound cold warrior
@@archivemediavault one advantage of being in my LOTSW years, is the inevitable fading memory…well, one has to look on the bright side of life, reruns I’ll look forward to…you’ve plenty of content for me whilst I languish in my hotel in Malta of an evening…flying 07.30 (hate flying) from LBA…
Just returned from Leeds, and a lovey surprise waiting for me in the form of a new episode of SPY TRAP “April Sixty-Seven”..a good year for me that was! Thank you for the upload!
My pleasure. I found them on a link several years ago, in a very low quality. I restored them as much as possible, without the recording distorting too much.
My pleasure. Glad you enjoyed it. There is another Classic Bloopers Compilation in the works, but it's had to have a bit of revamp due to a coule of clebrities featured now being 'persona non grata'.
