… And I was quite disappointed. Now, I find myself wondering if its worth my time to keep my eyes open looking for any other BBC productions of Terry Pratchett novels.
Can anyone tell me yes? Pretty please?
Not everything British is made by the BBC. That was done on Sky One.
Hogfather wasn’t great.
Going Postal is great.
I haven’t seen The Colour of Magic.
IMHO, the video adaptations of the TP works I’ve seen have tried to reproduce the books too faithfully, right down to the dialogue and scenes. This has seemed to me to make the productions very stiff and unwieldy.
I did NOT care for the adaptations of TCOM or Hogfather much at all. I wasn’t all that fond of the book TCOM either. Hogfather was okay but not top tier TP.
They got better as they went along. Colour of Magic, despite my misgivings about the casting choices, was actually pretty good. It’s not the best Discworld novel in the first place, it’s basically a series of disconnected vignettes tenuously linked together, and it was a satire of specific novels, that aspect being quite lost and obscured in this adaptation, putting it on a back foot. But, if I’m honest, taken at face value it’s not too shabby, really.
But, as Sage Rat said, they nailed it with Going Postal. There was talk of more with this cast, going on to do Making Money, but it never eventuated. The planned City Watch series also hasn’t moved along very quickly, though it’s apparently not dead yet.
Stiff is a good word for it. Hogfather had good moments but overall it felt stiff.
I have to watch Going Postal now. It was one of my favorite books in the series but I haven’t seen the adaption.
If they ever do the *City Watch * series I hope they find someone else to play Nobby. The only reason I hated that guy’s performance less than Teatime’s was because there was so much less of it.
Worse than stiff, I thought. It felt like they were going down a checklist and ticking off points from the book, one by one. The fact that they so often failed to do it well only made things worse, IMHO.
The best Nobby I can think of at the moment is Eddie Marsan*. I made a Pinterest board of some possibles, too, that I keep updating.
*Who is about to be Mr Norrell
I did like the beginning, with Sean Astin as the clueless tourist and Jeremy Irons with his tiny, tiny dog, and the ending once they returned to the city. The adventures in between were, yeah, episodic and kind of hit-or-miss.
I like Hogfather, but then I accept that it moves at a much slower pace than American productions.
My god, I loved Jeremy Irons as The Patrician (not, technically, Vetinari at this point), but I otherwise thought TCOM was…okay (Though I actually kinda liked Sean Astin too) And yes, a bit stiff. But actually, I don’t like the book either - I think Rincewind is funnier in concept than in execution - soooo…
I will see if I can find Going Postal.
I don’t watch Downton Abbey so whenever I see or hear something about Michelle Dockery I think Susan.
I had no quarrel with the pacing; in fact I would have loved it had it been a three-parter, so they could have included the “King Wenceslas” scene, the Cheerful Fairy, the bits in Biers, the erudite Raven, the disreputable Hogswatch “carolers”, the reversal of the link between Bilious and Bibulous, and the ultimate fate of the Johnson Ablutorium.
But just as a f’rinstance, Pratchett told us, right in the book, how to pronounce “Teatime” (“Teh-a-TIM-eh,” not “Tee-a-Time-ee”). And Teatime himself was portrayed as a skulking creep who could have passed for an older cousin of the girls in The Shining, with none of the demonic joie de vivre that Pratchett put into the book. As soon as I heard that Mel-Blanc-imitating-Peter-Lorre voice, I knew I was in for a rough ride.
Nobby Nobbs looked (and acted) like an animatronic version of Mortimer Snerd, as though the only salient characteristic about him is that he needs to carry around an official document certifying his species, and all the character has to do is say his lines on cue.
In truth, the interpretations of those two characters were the reason for my disappointment, and had they not been so dreadful I think I could have overlooked both the abbreviation of the gang invading the Tooth Fairy’s castle, and the cut-to-the-chase development of Bilious and Violet’s infatuation.
I liked Hogfather. Shows what Michelle Dockery can do, unlike her useless role on Downton. Marc Warren absolutely nailed Teatime. (It’s pronounced …)
Very well cast in general.
Going Postal was total crap. Wrong actor entirely. (Jeff Murdoch is not Moist Von Lipwig.) Changed too much of the story for no good reason, losing a lot of the original concept. Almost a completely different tale.
Just a generic filler cast.