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AtA Instapundit

posted by [personal profile] purplecthulhu at 10:19pm on 28/02/2008
Wasn't that a little too... Edge of Darkness, right down to the tube station map? Of course Alex and Gene couldn't go down a nasty damp mine so they get to go through a maze of twisty little BBC service corridors, all alike because it's the same one from different camera angles.

And I'm sure their chronology is off... I don't think the real paranoia with the security services under Thatcher got going until 84 or 85 and the miners' strike. And while Greenham was started on 1st Sept 1981 (isn't Wikipedia useful?) the Neutron Bomb had only just restarted development at that point and the GLCMs didn't arrive until 1983.

As with the music they seem to be compressing the whole decade's history into the one year. Maybe they did this with LoM but I couldn't tell. I was paying more attention in the 80s so this time I can and I'm not entirely happy.

I guess you could say they're trying to recapitulate a whole decade's TV in one series and they're bound to pick the good stuff like EoD and pay homage but... You can't do justice to 6 hours that changed British television with one episode in an entirely different format. It just won't work so you shouldn't try.
Mood:: 'disappointed' disappointed
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There are 16 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
ext_58972: Mad! (Default)

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posted by [identity profile] autopope.livejournal.com at 10:49pm on 28/02/2008
The miner's strike was on from 1984-85, but the build-up preceded it; and Hilda Murrell's stinky death occurred in early 1984 and was widely believed at the time to be MI5 work. Questions were being asked about the missing log book of HMS Conqueror in open Parliament by November 1984 (Hansard). Edge of Darkness aired in late 1985 (but would have been in production for months, if not years, before then).

And Able Archer '83 was in, er, September/October 1983.

So I reckon the paranoia was probably building up by the beginning of 1984, if not earlier.

(NB: not seen AtoA. Or even Life on Mars.)
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posted by [identity profile] miss-s-b.livejournal.com at 10:52pm on 28/02/2008
AtoA is set in 1981.
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posted by [identity profile] purplecthulhu.livejournal.com at 10:57pm on 28/02/2008
So my 84 or 85 benchmark is about right...

AtA is set in 1981 with, in this episode, a mysterious death linked to a nuclear weapons plant, political agitators, worry about neutron bombs and the security services stealing evidence and bugging the police. That's 84 or 85 to me, but it isn't 81, unless I really wasn't paying attention. Reagan had only been in the White House for a matter of months!
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posted by [identity profile] miss-s-b.livejournal.com at 10:51pm on 28/02/2008
They've been doing this from the beginning; the Adam Ant posters in the very first episode were from about 7 months after the episode was set. And Alex ismy age; she should be FOUR. Why would she have a Jackie annual and a diary that she can write in? Those are teenage things.
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posted by [identity profile] purplecthulhu.livejournal.com at 11:00pm on 28/02/2008
Didn't pick up on those... Maybe it's because I've never been a girl :-)

With LoM they didn't mess around that much did they? Young Sam was the right age in all ways, IIRC, no anachronistic diaries, annuals or anything like that...
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posted by [identity profile] purplecthulhu.livejournal.com at 11:04pm on 28/02/2008
I thought Alex was meant to be 35, making her 8 in 1981... Don't know if this would change things like diaries or Jackie though...
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posted by [identity profile] miss-s-b.livejournal.com at 11:18pm on 28/02/2008
The actress is the same age as me, almost to the month.
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posted by [identity profile] del-c.livejournal.com at 02:37pm on 29/02/2008
Oh, you can't go by the actress's age! I think it's fair to add a few more years on to get her closer to a plausible age for a DI. Say 38 in 2008, and 11 in '81. Also, she's on a school trip to France, which would be a bit advanced for a four year old.

My sisters were 16 and 11 in '81, so I thought there was something off about the Adam Ant posters.
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posted by [identity profile] miss-s-b.livejournal.com at 10:28pm on 29/02/2008
tHE CHILD ACTRESS WHO PLAYS YOUNG aLEX LOOKS NO MORE THAN SIX.
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posted by [identity profile] celestialweasel.livejournal.com at 11:22pm on 28/02/2008
As someone who managed to watch about 5 minutes of one episode before getting too irritated, and who watched 1 episode of LoM shouting at the television constantly... the question is, I guess, are they being ironic and postmodern and knowing or just lazy? (or both, I thought with the episode of LoM I saw that they weren't quite sure how to pitch it, but were also being lazy).
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posted by [identity profile] cobrabay.livejournal.com at 11:32pm on 28/02/2008
I think the Edge of Darkness nods were deliberate. I noticed the dead guy was called Martin Kennedy, which could have been after Troy Kennedy Martin, writer of Edge of Darkness.
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posted by [identity profile] purplecthulhu.livejournal.com at 08:00am on 29/02/2008
Doh - should have spotted that!
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posted by (anonymous) at 09:33am on 29/02/2008
I thought Young Alex doesn't work the way Young Sam did in LoM (where it didn't, really, impinge very much - Sam just got on with it without being obsessed with his earlier self the way Alex seems to be when she's not enjoying temporarily not being a single mum, i.e. by drinking and shagging).

Also on the too-early-for the paranoia bit: I thought 'Hilda Murrell' as well and if that was '83 then it ties in with the Thatcher/Miners Strike bit. There was a fair bit of anti-Nuke stuff by 1981 though.

And there was some track (forgotten which it was) that was played towards the end that I'm pretty sure was vintage 1988, not 1981.
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posted by [identity profile] camies.livejournal.com at 09:36am on 29/02/2008
Sorry, that was me, forgot to log in!
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posted by [identity profile] nmg.livejournal.com at 10:49am on 29/02/2008
Am I missing something? I thought that Life on Mars was fairly conclusively all in Sam's head, and there wasn't any time travel.

If that's the case, then surely we're looking at an unreliable narrator who is conflating all her childhood memories of the early 1980s (which from the backstory we know to have been a traumatic time for her) and synthesising a dream world. It doesn't have to make sense or be historically accurate!
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posted by [identity profile] pennski.livejournal.com at 06:24pm on 02/03/2008
But then what will we talk about on lj?

I must admit I enjoyed Chris tieing himself in knots with his first encounters with feminism. I remember having those kind of strangled debates at the time ("so are they allowed to open the door for you if you open it for them next time?").
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