I've just finished downloading "Soul Deep", the BBC series about the history of black popular music. No idea whether it's going to be any good or not, though. Other than that, I've been catching up on S19 of "The Simpsons". One word: ropey.

Enjoying "Mad Men", "Ashes to Ashes" and "Wainwright walks" at the moment, nearly always on the BBCI player...

I've only tried the BBC media player thing once, to watch a programme about Munich. Is it really good as everybody seems to think it is?

TV: Skins. Imaginative, unpredictable, full of terrific jokes, sexy but above all really heartfelt. Even to point out that it doesn't patronise its audience would be a bit patronising. The best UK drama of recent years. Also watching Love Soup, Gavin & Stacey (series two even better than the first, improbably), the tremendous Mad Men (which is really daringly subtle and uneventful, relying pretty much entirely on densely written two-handers that gradually unravel the characters' horrible personalities), Boston Legal which is as brilliant as ever, and Damages, which is possibly too fiendish for its own good (this week's had a "shock" that wasn't shocking at all, as it was about the only shocking possibility left that hadn't happened already) but by Christ I want to know how it turns out.

Film: the cinema is a distant memory but the last DVD was Transamerica, which I thought was flimsy and contrived.

QUOTE:
I'm watching Sky Sports News. It's OK, but the plot's a bit weak, and they keep introucing new characters every few minutes and make no attempt to connect it all together.

Stick with it, they'll repeat it all in 20 minutes.

QUOTE:
I don't want any spoilers, but can you tell me: is Neil Patrick Harris in it again? He's on one of the posters, but I just want to be sure.

Yes, rest assured, he is. I won't say any more.

Anyway last night I saw The Other Boleyn Girl. It's really quite good. For what it is, I mean, a soap opera about Mary and Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII. It had allthe necessary frocks, fab hair, gorgeous headdresses, ornaments, jewellery, bosoms, etc, and the direction and photography I liked a lot. The dialogue and theatrics were very silly, of course, but the main hook of the plot - the relationship between the sisters - worked very well.

Best line...

Mary: "But I love him."
Anne: "Well, perhaps you should stop."
We've *all* been there.

I have just downloaded the Singing Detective. It is along with Berlin Alexanderplatz among those classic European TV series that I have been plannig to watch for a long time.

Other series further down that list are Brideshead Revisited, the Danish epic Matador and the recent Russian TV dramatisation of Master and Margarita.

Dexter - The scenes with Micheal C Hall are superb and enough to keep me tuning in. It falls down when it throws in sub-plots about peripheral characters though. Last week there was a storyline about one of his colleagues wanting to buy a gift for his wife, which seemed pretty pointless. More killer, less filler please.
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That's partly cos the novel it's based on (which is entirely from the pov of Dexter) is actually quite short by modern standards, and they are filling like mad

I don't really get Dexter, but I watched them all out of sequence and it was a bit infuriating. I like Darla as his girlfriend but really I think it could have been a LOT better.

Lyra wrote:

QUOTE:

QUOTE:
I don't want any spoilers, but can you tell me: is Neil Patrick Harris in it again? He's on one of the posters, but I just want to be sure.

Yes, rest assured, he is. I won't say any more.

Sweet. I was at the theaters to see a different movie (can't remember which now), when I saw the poster last year and I've been waiting for it ever since:

Haha I hadn't seen that before. Hahaha. That's pretty good.

Does anyone know if there's a way to stream iPlayer video to an Xbox 360, with or without using Transcode 360? Does Media Center play iPlayer downloads?

Nope, sorry.

Just recently re-watched Amadeus again. cracking stuff.