The Rotters' Club on TV

i'd forgotten about this. perhaps i'll get on bitorrent in a minute...

[is bitorrent related to bluetooth? what are these things???????]

Clement and La Frenais did the adapatation so expected it to be up to scratch. Thought I'd read the book but turned out I hadn't. Problem I had was it didn't feel like anything much happened. Maybe it was only scene setting for what's to come but I agree about the period detail being excellent. I could see what happened at the end coming but it was a real shame, had really got to like 'hairy' Malcolm.

The presence of Mark Williams complete with Brummie accent was a bit disconcerting: I kept expecting him to say 'we want to be together'.

malcolm and lois were terrific. miriam looked about 40, though, which was distracting.

A TV programme where one of the characters is in mourning because King Crimson have just split up and which has the dialogue, "Hatfield and the North are on next, they're a bit more accessible" should be compulsory viewing for ILM nerds

i haven't read the book and rather enjoyed it, despite missing the first ten mins. i like the fact that it's a bit of a "ooh look it's him/her" casting...

... the music was really well chosen, having Gary Shearston doing "I Get a Kick Out of You" over the romantic bit between Lois and her hairy boyfriend was perfection

Compulsory watching for me as it overlaps with my current 1974 obsession. Bit too heavy on the signifiers but so far, nicely done. Clever of them to get Clement and La Frenais, viz. people who were (a) Actually There and (b) Grown Up at the time to ensure period authenticity.

Now can someone rerun Just Another Saturday?

Mind you, "The Buddha of Suburbia" opened with a guy walking into a pub and saying "Are you going to the Kevin Ayers gig?" and it was all downhil from thereon in

There were a lot of kids dressed like Belle & Sebastian fans, weren't there?

It was perfectly fine, although, on a minor detail level, some of it didn't quite tally with my own experience of '70s Brum. I grew up on a B'ham council estate and had brothers ten years older and none of them, or any of their mates, ever listened to prog rock, never even heard of it. Unless you count Meat Loaf. Mind you none of us went to blummin' grammer school, and the kids in this are a bit 'top set'.
All I heard round our end at the time was Slade, Queen, Rod Stewart, Stevie Wonder and Jasper Carrot. (This series might be set too early for Jasper Carrot but everyone had his albums. Everyone).

If I see one chopper bike on this I'm outta here.

It is repeated on Saturday if you don't want to 'bit torrent' it. I don't know what 'bit torrent' means, I suppose it is like 'download' only telly.

In the book, I loved the way it slowly dawned on you/me/the reader what was going to happen at the end of The Chick and the Hairy Guy. It was quite chilling, and very sad. Poor Chick, poor Hairy Guy.

It is good, I suppose, and quite clever, that someone has made something romantic out of that event.

Did they recreate a Berni Inn?

I bet people had Mud LPs too.

Ah, Mud Rock was a big favourite of mine at the time!

If I see Stuart Maconie on this I'm outta here.

I'm amazed at some of the 70s TV footage they used - didn't the BBC wipe the 70s as a cost cutting exercise?

No, they wiped the '60s. IIRC the only thing from the '70s which the BBC purposely wiped was the shortlived Peter Cook chatshow Where Do I Sit?

I was very wary of this because it's probably my favourite novel of the last few years, but I thought it was quite a successful adaptation. They managed to set up all the plot angles without cramming too much in an hour's telly or losing too much subtlety. I thought the casting was great and the youngsters' performances excellent.

There were some pretty ropey attempts at 'Berrminnum' accents, but that's par for the course. I read the book because I went to the school that 'King William's' is a fictionalised version of, but htatturned out to be the least interesting part for me.
In my experience, growing up in Birmingham with older brothers, prog, heavy metal & Tolkien were as pervasive as joss-sticks & Party 7s

I grew up on a B'ham council estate and had brothers ten years older and none of them, or any of their mates, ever listened to prog rock, never even heard of it.

yeah, the kidz in this are at posh school, and coe does make the connection between this and their rockist (pseudo-classicist) mindset.

I loved the book, so I was a bit wary of this. I'd always imagined Lois having light brown hair, but I still thought her and Malcom were great. On the whole I enjoyed it, but I don't know how I'd feel if I'd not read it first. Ben comes off as being far more outgoing in the TV series, but then since he hardly says anything out loud in the book it would have made dull, dull TV. It also made me think that perhaps the West Mids got stuck in the seventies, as so much of it reminded me of growing up there in the mid-eighties.

it's the unbridgeable gap really: if you have read it, you can't imagine what the show is like without ref to what you know of the characters/situations from the book; if you haven't it may not make much sense or just seem 'meh', esp if the book is more about style (coe can do style *and* plot, the clever blighter). i haven't read 'white teeth', which is plot-packed, and i thought the tv version was dire -- presumably the treatment of said plot is what makes the book special (if indeed it is special).

White Teeth is not special.

I feel that Coe's 1970s Birmingham is bound to be quite accurate, insofar as that's possible. He knows what is writing about, in that instance.

I don't know whether they recreated a Berni Inn.

Coe can, when he's up for it and up to it, do plot as well as anyone. What A Carve Up! is an extraordinarily plotted book. And in a certain sense, yes, he can Do Style: that is, he can write pastiches. But he can't Do Style as Martin Amis, Geoff Dyer (maybe), Don DeLillo, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad, or whoever else can. (That list is embarrassing: it looks pretentious, masculinist, snobbish. But the point I am trying to get at remains true.) His 'own' style (the concept sounds dubious, but I think it's valid: the style that makes up most of the books) is functional when it's working well (WACU!), and when it's not (as in The Closed Circle) becomes downright slack. When he's off form, his prose is among the most prosaic of all Major Contemporary British Authors.

I think that the TV programme may have been a better TV programme than the book was a book, even if the book is better than the TV programme. I'm not sure which is better.

I agree about Lois and Malcolm. I like the line 'Freaky times on the event horizon'.

If I see George Steiner on this thread, I'm in there.

That's true he's not a stylist like THOSE writers. Coe can 'do' emotion I suppose, which distinguishes him from Amis and DeLillo (certainly) and Nabokov (arguably). His style is not 'style'. He is not a 'prose stylist'. This is just one of his merits. But on the other hand he can be a plodder (I think the second half of TRC plods a bit).
I think the union men-boss meal near the start is in a Berni Inn.

I agree that he can be a plodder.

I don't think that not being a stylist is a merit.

I like him.

it's good to have style. it's bad to be a stylist. i like him, though i'm upset 'the closed circle' is disliked by his fans. i await the paperback.

It also made me think that perhaps the West Mids got stuck in the seventies, as so much of it reminded me of growing up there in the mid-eighties.

When I look at old family photos from this period, apart from my brothers' hair (like Godber from Porridge but longer) and flary trousers, it may as well be 1961 by the look of it all. It's different now but outer/suburban B'ham was never one to keep step with the times. Many of the older men, like my dad who, now I think of it, was only just a bit older than I am now in '74, wore glasses with thick, black rims and had quiffs or vague equiv of.

But anyway, really liked the prog on the whole. The intercutting with contempory news footage (and the odd for-laughs naff TV advert) is a nice touch as is the depiction of the casually contemptuous teachers - I recognised the returning of excercise books by spinning them across the room and the throwing of board rubbers at pupils' heads, and the frequent clips round the ears, of course.
I never got round to reading the book for some reason, but as a programme it felt like a cross between Our Freinds in the North and The Grimleys.

i kind of want to bittorrent this, but when is the next book coming out? because I got to the end of that and I was pissed off!

oh I guess it did! but in the US, I think

Today is the first day that I have ever heard this word 'bittorrent'.

It's a good thing that PJM explained, what it means!

unfortunatley a lot of those sites have gone down, but uknova is still around (although they won't let anyone new sign up)

i rather liked this, it was a bit choppy and looked a bit too prettified and scrubbed for the mostly rather ugly 1970's but yeah, decent.

i thought last night's ep was GREAT. as i said above i haven't read the book, but i particularly liked THE BUNKER mention and, oh most of it frankly.

do you think they chose the girl who is playing cicily because she looks quite like joanna lumley?

i'm happy that there's a programme i really like on telly, this is the first one for ages...

yeah! at the end of last night i was like 'wah? more!' for the first time in ages.

i can't remember of the lumley comment is in the book, but my g/f said 'she looks like joanna lumley' minutes before the on-screen comparison.

her teeth are absolutely enormous!!

Hy-uge

I thought she looked more like Patsy Kensit in Luna.

It's true, how much she looks like Lumley.

I still like the programme a lot.

A boy (Philip Chase) last night said: 'Whatever', to (I think) his mother - meaning, let's say: 'OK, whatever you say, I don't care'.

I found this incongruous: I don't think that people in the UK said this, to meant this, in the mid-1970s. I think of it as an Americanism, a bit like (more extreme, infamously Friends-derived-type example:) 'That's, like, so not true!'. I have been trying to think of when people in Britain started saying 'whatever' in this way, and wondering whether Oasis's 45 'Whatever' (1994) is a clue.

i'm not familiar with the book at all, maybe this explains why i can't get into it much?

i agree that the 'whatever' remark seems odd for the reasons pinefox gives

the sex scene was funny (i am a perv)

Nothing pervy about it. It was a very nicely done sex scene. Instead of the usual romantic cliches this looked like they were having great fun.

it was inevitably cliched i thought. i thought all 'first times' were supposed to be rubbish tho?

Evidently not when it's with a posh Home Counties goer. "You're at school? What a scream!"

This went downhill fast after the first episode. I know I'm a hopeless ILM-nerd but the fact they got Punk all wrong AGAIN really put me off it. Wrong as in chronologically wrong, looking wrong and sounding wrong. Pah!

i only just realised that's Hugo Speer in it. hahaha.