Bill Nighy, wooden, crinkled and oozing bus pass angst, meets up with earnest young woman (Rachel Weisz, born 1970!). Nighy, as per usual, autocues his lines in a monotone to nobody in particular, is hardly ever out of his overcoat and sacrifices his career and pension to flag up the evil Americans.
You’ve guessed it – “Page Eight” (BBC2 28/08/11) another glossy drama of beautiful people in NW1 (and weekend rural retreats) pumping out a subliminal version of the eternal and unchanging BBC philippic against capitalism, America (pre Obama, of course) and those vicious, conniving Je…whoops….Israelis.
Written by Richard Curtis David Hare, the storyline is as predictable as a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Public School/Oxbridge educated MI5 boss hands Public School/Oxbridge educated MI5 agent (Nighy) a file fingering UK PM as the The Evil One Covering Up US Rendition. Said agent discovers his next door neighbour had a boy friend killed by Israeli soldiers while innocently protecting defenceless Hamas protestors. This has also been covered up by the same UK PM.
Usual ending of any Nighy drama….he forces UK PM to publish the truth about the evil Israelis in return for remaining schtum about rendition. Nighy then heads off into the sunset until the next BBC drama.
Production values – AAA+
Characterisation – pure unadulterated cardboard
Message – BBC Goebbels TV at its most blatant
what a typical load of bollox from al beeb
keep up the bad work beeboids, it just means the licence fee gets abolished quicker
More facts that the BBC and the rest of Jersey’s state controlled media don’t want the public to know.
http://voiceforchildren.blogspot.com/2011/08/smelling-rat.html
Does BBC-NUJ Drama commission any political plays from non-‘leftists’, plays which do not propagandise ‘multiculturalism’, ‘political correctness’?
For example, BBC-NUJ Drama happily buys up works of Marxist and ‘Flotilla’ opponent of Israel, Henning Mankell’s ‘Wallander’ series; but BBC-NUJ would not touch Daniel Silva’s novels about Israel spy, Gabriel Allon
http://www.danielsilvabooks.com/content/index.asp
Anyway, too late, BBC-NUJ Drama:
Universal Snaps Up Daniel Silva’s Spy Novels
Rachel Weisz -according to Wikipedia “Her parents fled to England during the Holocaust and Second World War. Her father is Jewish and her mother is of Jewish, “Catholic Viennese”, and Italian descent. Her maternal grandfather, Alexander Teich, was a secretary of the World Union of Jewish Students “.
Shame on you Rachel Weisz.
Still hot though.
And for that matter, Sir David Hare (knighted by Labour), is married to a Jew, Nicole Farhi (now Lady Hare), a fashion designer, who opposes Israel.
More jugged Hare. But the same old recipe has grown tiresome, nauseating. He could have written it in his sleep. Perhaps he utilises the William Burroughs ‘cut up’ technique, snipping lines from copies of the New Statesman/Guardian then slapping them together to create a ‘plot’. Perhaps his wealthy wife, Nicole Farhi, bored with the fashion world, kept prodding him awake as he laboured over this corpse of a story. She shouldn’t have bothered. Nicole is of Turkish descent, & may well be a little indisposed to Israel. By the way, ‘July 2010 saw the acquisition of NICOLE FARHI by global private equity firm OPENGATE CAPITAL’. Now there’s something for you Davey, boy. Get your teeth into the fiscal fat cats, like the ones who bought your wife’s business. You posturing champagne socialist bore.
Not a great review here :
http://tvpixie.com/tv-news/2011/08/30/page-eight-blaring-tedium
Also, to great surprise, he doesn’t really think much of the Tories :
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/david-lister/david-lister-when-david-didnt-meet-david-ndash-and-why-he-should-have-done-2344726.html
One of his colleagues, Liam Tucker, lives in Truther territory, just like some at the BBC do.
Hare doesn’t seem to be very keen on PM Cameron:
‘Daily Mail’ question:-
“The crime you would commit knowing you could get away with it…”
David Hare answer:
“I’d put a pillow over David Cameron’s sleeping head. He seems to be exactly the kind of glib, shallow PR man that Conservatives are traditionally meant to disapprove of. Why he is the leader of their party, I have no idea.”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2030494/Sir-David-Hare-I-love-make-jam–Plum-best.html#ixzz1WX30IlF6stion:
I see where you’re coming from, but I can’t help agreeing with DH’s reasoning behind his choice of crime!
Hey, anyone remember when Ben Stephenson earned his place of honour on the list of quotes on the right of this site by claiming that the BBC needed to ‘foster peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking’?
More to the point, remember how Beeboids piled onto this site to claim it was just a slip of the tongue, and Benny really meant ‘left-of-centre’ in the sense of ‘innovative’ and ‘original’?
I guess that boat just sank.
Undiscovered civilisations on the far side of the galaxy coould have guessed where this show was going. It’s just the liberal equivalent of porno, but without the realism and rich characterisation. They may as well have just called it ‘Naughty Neocons’ and have done with it.
How about a play about young, hardworking Palestinian boys and girls denied travel scholarships to America for teenagers by ………..HAMAS. Young dreams cut-off. Years of hardwork and parental support…for what?
http://english.aljazeera.net/video/middleeast/2011/08/2011830104016489545.html
Thanks for the summary. I nearly watched it but realised it was just another BBC anti Israel tirade.
Thomas the Tank Engine is better drama and far more entertaining.
The whole libby left arts establishment is a busted flush.
WE could corrall them in a reservation around Hay on Wye but the landscape is beautiful and does not deserve that. Inner city Manchester sounds just fine.
It got a fabulous write up in The Daily Mail, of all papers. I stuck with it for nearly twenty minutes but by that time the usual anti Israel and anti America propaganda was overwhelming.
I’ve already commented elsewhere on this expensive, predictable, bigoted mess.
Don’t want to spend any more time thinking about it.
The limousine liberals with designer wives (see above) heap scorn on their betters with the aid of public money (the licence fee), rewriting history as they go, garnering praise at posh parties and – the ultimate irony – picking up knighthoods strewn across their paths. I don’t think I have ever forgiven David Hare for “Licking Hitler” a 1978 TV play about a black propaganda unit operating in England during WW2 and based on a book by master spy Sefton Delmer, who watched ‘Licking Hitler’ from his sickbed.
“He knew the BBC had optioned his book ‘Black Boomerang’ although it had not paid full fee for the adaptation, and now, as the drama unfolded and what was recognizably his work was disparaged, he wondered if Auntie was getting back at him for those old wartime humiliations” – Page 419, “Churchill’s Wizards – the British Genius for Deception” by Nicholas Rankin. Faber & Faber 2008.
It wasn’t revenge, the BBC was simply producing a self-serving David Hare version of reality in which wartime heroes were reduced in stature and an amazing and successful program of black propaganda was trashed.
So just another self-loathing leftie then. What better way to sneer at the best elements of the British character than to diminish their role in the most important triumph in modern history.
Sounds as though Bill Nighy ought to have stuck with narrating Meerkat Manor.
earnest young woman (Rachel Weisz, born 1970!)
When watching this show I thought it was filmed in the 90’s. Rachel Weisz is lookin good for someone her age. Lucky Mr Craig!
I posted this comment on another thread at about 09.50 this morning:
“The BBC’s antipathy towards Israel spills over from news & current events into drama as evidenced by the David Hare authored drama on Sunday night “Page 8”. The sympathetic character played by Rachel Weisz was campaigning because her brother had been “murdered” by the Israelis when waving a white flag in the “occupied territiories”. He was an activist protesting about the Israelis “building the Wall” through a house. It is now received wisdom that that’s what the IDF does. And there was a wicked Israeli govt cover-up which was the leverage in the deal the Bill Nighy character did with our own Govt.
And that’s what passes for Bank Holiday entertainment on the BBC.”
On further reflection, this nasty production just serves to reinforce ignorant and unfair prejudices about Israel & the IDF. Hare was regurgitating an inaccurate Arab narrative of the Hurndall & Corrie cases. In the latter, the driver was proved not to have been aware of Corrie’s presence. In the Hurndall case, an Israeli soldier was tried and imprisoned.
Did you notice that apart from the one occasion when the Prime Minister was in his dress suit at the dinner, he was always wearing a blue tie ?
A subtle little pointer there as I have never seen a Labour PM wear a blue tie.
I outlined in the Open Thread some pointers where they made it clear it was a Conservative PM, but I missed the tie reference. I agree that it would be no accident him wearing a blue one.
This twaddle is all part of the Left’s psychological recovery process after a Labour government invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, told a pack of lies and then bankrupted the country and were thrown out of power.
The answer of course is that a cabal of evil opportunistic weirdos, aka Tony and the Blairites, seized control of the Labour party and were all the time in bed with the global banking / US / Israeli conspiracy. Easier to believe that than to realise they were being naïve and thick all along when they believed Labour’s ‘ethical foreign policy’ nonsense.
They literally cannot understand how Iraq, rendition etc happened ‘on their watch’, just as they cannot cope with why in spite of a decade long ideological realigning and untold expenditure on the welfare state and its ‘services’ our educational achievements are sliding down every international ranking, unemployment is soaring and crime, social disorder and dependency have never been worse. Nor can they understand why anyone would oppose the Obamessiah and his administration handing out billions in ‘stimulus’ to the financial system that got everyone into the current mess, increasing open-ended, uncosted health entitlements while at the same time taxing the few people that could create some jobs and new businesses – this cannot be based on anything but simple-minded bible-thumping racism.
It’s easy to understand.
IDEOLOGY DOES NOT WORK
I couldn’t persist with this either. Although it was well filmed, and I quite like Bill Nighy, the casual assumption of bad Israelis covering up a murder, and an evil PM colluding with US torturors etc. was just too agit-prop.
Who knows what an Israeli (or Syrian) viewer would think of the BBC’s view of the Middle East.