Photo from Celebrity Watchdog
I had a meeting this evening with a friend who runs a production company with regards to some of the filming projects I have in the pipeline and it all went swimmingly. Dates have been sorted and it looks (fingers crossed) as if at least a couple of ideas will come to fruition at long last. We had a moan about the Nottingham music scene and the idiots who seem to be held in high regard for their armchair commentary and absence at gigs unless it's a big one with media coverage, and then I went home. My task now is to knock the final draft of a script into shape and very quickly scout for a handful of locations. The whole thing can be filmed in one day, stretching to a weekend if necessary, so time is very much of the essence.
After what seems like years, we watched the last ever episode of Frasier tonight. I am glad this is out of the way now so I am free to crack on with the Bottom box set (crack, Bottom - that wasn't even intentional, sometimes the puns write themselves) when I get the chance to watch it.
It would seem that American sitcoms have a better thought out game plan than British ones when it comes to delivering a finale. Only Ricky Gervais seems able to write a series with a beginning, middle, and end as seen in the Christmas specials of his sitcoms. Everything just seems to stop or get axed without a goodbye, only The Young Ones managed to finish in style by killing the main characters. Even the beloved Only Fools and Horses fucked it up by wrapping up with Del and Rodney becoming millionaires at last and walking off into the sunset only to go and make three more extended episodes with the 'sit' being the loss of their fortune resulting in a return to the flat they conveniently didn't get rid of, sadly there was very little in the way of 'com'.
The final episode of Frasier was the best sitcom finale since Friends came to an end. A clever touch was that the whole thing was staged as a flashback told by Frasier Crane to a fellow passenger on an aeroplane bound for a new life with all the loose ends being tied up; Martin got married, Niles and Daphne had their baby, Roz was promoted to boss of the radio station, and Frasier realised that the peace and quiet he had spent eleven years comically yearning for was in fact too lonely, and decided to relocate once again to San Francisco to work for another radio station. I personally would have liked to have known what happened to Daphne's mother (played brilliantly by British comedy veteran Millicent Martin), even if to explain exactly what part of Manchester her family hailed from considering her three sons were cockney (Australian actor Anthony LaPaglia), Scottish (Robbie Coltrane) and posh (Richard E Grant).
Listen to this week's edition of The Sunday Alternative here.
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March housekeeping
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I am trying to raise the money to extend The Sunday Alternative, read about it here.
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steveEoliver@gmail.com
