Clarkson's Millionaire is just great telly.
Clarkson's Millionaire is just great telly.
All the contestants were shit today though. Maybe not the last one, that was bastard question about opening lines. Only two novels really merit inclusion in the pantheon of known for their first lines famedom, A Tale of Two Cities and The Catcher in the Rye.
I dunno, I knew it before the options came up. I would have thought either the contestant, their phone a friend or Jez would know the answer when one like that comes up. If she'd spent more than half a second thinking about the question at 1k she'd have got through the Knebworth question as well.
Ahab is the only name from Moby Dick that anyone who hasn't read it would know. Not an 8 grand question. The Lady Chatterley's one was similarly tough, although the lady saying she'd never read it or seen the film and then nailing the answer was a bit suss.
She was too young for Knebworth to make sense and the audience are generally retarded unless it's a soap question.
Props to Jeremy for knowing about the world economic forum. The absolute hallmark of someone who has been skiing in Europe and has been reduced to watching CNN.
I haven't read Moby Dick. :shrug:
I thought Belgrade being in Yugoslavia being worth 4 grand was extremely soft but then I'd have been completely lost on the Lady Chatterley one. Real shame she didn't go for Bellatrix after she'd sussed it, probably one of those that's hard to sell to yourself in the studio.
Big lol at the Doctor and his mate earlier on as well.
I think football knowledge gives you a disproportionate advantage with European geography questions like that. My wife thought it was between Yugoslavia and the USSR.
Bellatrix was a Harry Potter guess, surely, but she talked herself out of it. Also, Rigel 7 [/kodos and kang]. Don't call it 'wriggle'. Quite a lot of bad pronunciation. The junior doctor winced when Jeremy tried to say echinacea.
There's a clip going round at the moment of the US version where it's the $500k question and it's basic Pokémon knowledge. You don't know what you don't know, as the wankers say.
I'm a twit
I don't think my mum would get that one right, or she'd have to have a 1 in 4 guess. Anyone born after 1985 should get it easily though.
She doesn't know who Frodo is?
Old people are strange like that. She could tell you every character in Tolstoy, but she was unable when pushed to identify the French flag, despite having been there about 50 times in her life and speaking the language well.
There was an Irish guy on Millionaire who breezed his way to Ł250k cool as you like last week, he was great. The only question he struggled with before cashing out was a late one 'who is the only author to have more than one published novel?', as soon as Harper Lee came up I got it, seemed easy as it was in the news fairly recently but he used up his lifelines on it. Felt a little cocky until he then got a question about Greek terms for dinosaurs or something without even breaking a sweat.
I did exactly the same as he hid. I had no idea on the book, but I got the dinosaur one instantly. Having a 6 year old son was a bit of a cheat code there, mind.
In the same week I also got every question right on the 1% club. What a rush.
Did you phone a friend too?
I have no idea who Frodo is. I'm guessing Lord of the Rings, by process of elimination.
This.
Although anything with paleo in it was a bit of a giveaway with the ancient life Greek info.
The worst doing over anyone's had on that show recently was some poor non-English guy who just got bombarded with questions about idiomatic phrases. Think he got through two before a third one took him down.
It's such a good format that all you need is a host with a bit of a sense of humour so Clarkson was a good choice.
The tweaks to the rules are a rare example of good changes too. The Clarkson lifeline is so hit and miss unless you know for a fact that he knows about something that it's just a bit of a laugh and having them set their own second safety net adds an extra bit of jeopardy too.
The wife has just asked me about Succession, so the rewatch starts tonight!
Fucking hell, that loss on Millionaire.
I didn't realise. I hadn't seen it before.
X-Men '97 is pure nostalgia bait, but that damn theme song has me hooked so I don't care.
Been rinsing Constellation last night and today. Its both very enjoyable and utter trash, like all these things it doesn't really know what it is but it's filled with enough the fuck is that to make it fly by.
It's also yet another example that child actors need binning off. Just CGI the cunts.
24.
Just banging through the first series now. It’s not aged brilliantly and half the time seems to just be Kim and Terri finding numerous ways to get themselves abducted.
But, you can see why 20 years ago it was seen as so cutting edge.
The first two X-Men episodes were good and made me want to revisit the original series and the films, although I do think the close ups on the eyes unintentionally show off the simplicity of the animation compared to the original.
Glad Invincible is back and going hard as fuck still, not been as replused by animation since Akira.
It really was game changing. I remember watching Season 3 from start to finish with my brother over the course of about 18 hours and it remains one of the televisual highlights. Season 1 was peak mind - the first 12 hours of that remain top tv.
There's definitely an art to the weekly cliffhanger from that era which has been lost - and I say lost, because Lost was another great exponent of it. Every episode had to give the viewer something to bother coming back for the following week.
Nowadays, far too many of these shows have absolute fluff episodes with no value which only exist to drag the content out into more episodes and more hours of TV / hours spent on the streaming platform of choice, as that's how they keep the viewer thinking they need to keep paying for it.
Been watching Loudermilk on Netflix (haven't watched anything decent on there for ages) thinking it was new, turns out its from 2017. Still, a good watch and Ron Livingstone does the 'tough love' grump thing well.
David Morrissey the glue holding S3 of TWD together. Presumably it's all downhill from here?
The main problem with weekly cliffhangers now is the content farms that are social media outlets reveal/spoil/generally milk them to death.
It's been a long time because I watched them as they aired but actually I remember season's four through about six being my favourite of The Walking Dead. Rick just reaches peak "big lad" status at a certain point around then and it's a lot of fun to watch. He descends back into being a fanny at some point after that and it lost a lot of its appeal for me then.
I can't remember seasons now, it just became a steaming pile of turd that I actively hated for a while that it tainted the good bits of the show for me.
@Boydy (Or anyone else, I just remember talking about the book a little bit with you)
The Netflix adaptation of 3 Body Problem is out today. Have you watched any of it?
I've seen the first episode and it's alright to be fair. Obviously the characters and setting has changed quite considerably. But it was decent.
The flashback bits with young Ye Wenjie are the best bits by far from what I've seen. I still think they should have kept the whole thing set in China to be honest. I don't think it really needed "westernising". Although I know a Chinese television version of it does exist also, to I suppose that mitigates that to some extent.
Everything needs westernising. I've never 'ad sesame prawn toast and my 'ouse doesn't 'ave paper walls, TV's not relatable unless it's all about ME.
I liked the look of the trailer when I was scrolling Netflix last night and then I saw it was made by the GOT twats which has put me off a little.
Is the book series finished? Or will they be cobbling together some bullshit ending to ruin it all?
Is the whole trilogy being done in one series or are they doing a series per book, do you know @Alex?
Were you a big fan of the books?
I read the first one recently and it left me very, very cold. The central mystery just didn't hook me enough for the fact that most of the characters just went about announcing their character traits and blerping exposition. First book since Blood Meridien I considered just sacking off altogether. And I'm an absolute sucker for a series normally but have no interest in reading the follow ups to Three Body Problem so I can't decide whether to try the show or not.
I did laugh at seeing the GOT twats running the show and hearing 'So imagine the books but they rewrite all the main characters you liked and changed what happens'.
Absolute hacks.
I think the plan is that there will be more than one series of it, but also I read something saying the first season draws on elements of all three books. Do things happen in the different books that basically happen concurrently in the timeline though? I can't remember. I've not actually read the final one yet.
The main thing I want from season one isToggle Spoiler, give me a successful visual adaptation of that and I'll be happy.
I liked the first a book a lot, yeah. I know what you mean in that the writing wasn't always the most engaging (I think some of it is maybe lost in translation - this is a bigger problem with the second one I found) but the central plot and the idea of the whole thing was just fascinating to me, to the point where I couldn't put it down.
I did enjoy the second one to some extent too too but I found it a lot more clunky and difficult to get into the flow of. So book-wise you're definitely right giving the rest of them a wide berth if the first one didn't click with you.
The first episode definitely shows some promise though. I would say give it a go. I do worry that it might start to get a bit daft when they introduce "the game" on screen. There was like a "coming up this season" segment at the end of the first episode that had glimpses of it and it definitely looked like it had the potential to look a bit silly.
I'll maybe give it a go at some point. Having finished Mr and Mrs Smith (who was it asked about that in here? @Baz ? Whoever it was I really liked it overall) I've now gone onto Shogun so Three Body Problem will have to wait until at least after that.
First episode of Shogun was really good and yer man Cosmo Jarvis has a cracking voice.