It's Only Make Believe

I’m not sure if it’s the snow melting, that we’ve reached 2m+ vaccinations a day over here, the approval of the one-shot J&J vaccine, the arrival of two servings of ginger cake and three bags of Mini Eggs, a rather decent week at work, or more likely a combination of all of these…but I’m finding myself a little more optimistic this weekend.

It was also a great week for old television. Not only did I discover that somebody late last year uploaded the BBC’s 1975 drama State of Emergency, I also got hold of my illicit DVD-R containing Dennis Potter’s Angels Are So Few and Only Make Believe. I do wonder just where the originals came from; there’s timecodes burnt into both plays, and a physical VT countdown clock at the start of Only Make Believe, almost as if the video came direct from the BBC archive (there’s no evidence that they’re off-airs — it’d probably be a bit obvious if the were considering both plays are from the start of the 70s). Anyway, that mystery aside, who doesn’t love a play with an ‘angel’ and a frustrated housewife and another play about a frustrated writer writing the first play and trying very unsuccessfully to seduce his typist? With the actor playing not-Potter being the same actor who played not-Potter twice already in the earlier Wednesday Play strand? Now that’s what I call a Saturday night.

Finally for this week - a couple of updates to But This Was A Fantasy. Firstly, I’ve added all the episodes of Pandora’s Box, so you can now search for “RAND Corporation, Santa Monica” and see where I ended up sometime in October 2011 after walking all afternoon. Secondly, I added the re-ranking function I talked about last week, so it should filter out any images that occur within ten seconds of the higher-ranked images. More variety! The BBC has made a few more series available on iPlayer, so you’ll probably see some more series added in March (The Mayfair Set for sure).