November 2011
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| We start November off gently with the delicious Laurence Piquet who presents Un soir avec .., France 5's weekly culturfest. Here she interviews a writer on the subject of the excellent Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. | When American series are good they're very good. I hadn't seen Desperate Housewives before (the French version keeps the American title) but as soon as the music starts you know you're in Six Feet Under territory. Funny, inventive, and proof that one should not be at all snobby about American series. | |
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| Eric Antoine, eccentric comic and magician, evidently does not believe in the old music-hall adage that you should never work with animals or children. He just about manages to stay ahead of this small boy who must be a great trial to his teachers | . | |
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| Plus si affinités is a two-man theatre show starring Pascal Legitimus and Mathilda May. Here they give us a rather sad sketch. Two people who had a romance when very young meet in a supermarket after many years. They exchange the ordinary banalities of conversation which serve to disguise failure and desperation. But it's funny and intelligent. .. and not easy to follow | I don't know why so many American police series these days have horrifying corpses in them and even more frightening women policeman. The male lead in Castle is a novelist who for some obscure reason is helping the police by proposing absurd ideas. Never mind, it's well done and good listening practice | |
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| In France 5's popular science programme On n'est pas que des cobayes, there has to be a mad scientist. For us he would be German. But the French have chosen David Lowe, an English journalist with a scientific background who here learns the difference between an allumeur and an allumeuse | Here's a classic of French cinema, Vivement Dimanche ! by François Truffaut. We have Fanny Ardant and Jean-Louis Trintignant, both of whom speak relatively clearly, and it's a good, tightly written police story. Well worth watching the whole thing | |
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| This month Com' en politique, the programme which deals with what we call spin-doctors, started with a section on the non-verbal communication which we have inherited from our animal ancestors .. and gave us this lovely image of Bernard Tapis with one of his ancestors. A big thank you to France 5 for trying to make politics fun | Thursday evening is the delicious Laurence Piquet and the culture magazine Un soir... This time it was the acquisition by the Bibliothèque Nationale of the manuscript of the autobiography of Casanova, Histoire de ma vie. Good documentary, but full of talking heads as always, so I cut most of that out and selected four readings from the book. Casanova, an Italian, chose to write his autobiography in French. | |
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| Saturday night, and Michel Drucker presents another in the series Champs Elysées, a revival of the famous variety show of 25 years ago. And here is Dany Boon, a clown who is now so famous in France that he can make people laugh with really very little material ... but a lot of professionalism | Twilight is yet another American film about a mysterious young girl arriving at a mysterious new school inhabited by some very strange students. But so what ? It's well done, and I enjoyed it. An easy listen. | |
