Imagine… Werner Herzog: Beyond Reason

Truly excellent documentary about the German director Werner Herzog (who looks and sounds like an older Richard E. Grant playing a quietly crazy German director) that covers his career from the epic films like Fitzcarraldo, working with the insane Klaus Kinski (think intense to the power of 100 and then triple it) through to the quieter but equally strange Grizzly Man and the more recent Rescue Dawn.

Women in Black: UK

Drum roll. This is our 100th post! Also, obviously, the 100th programme we’ve featured. So happy birthday to us! To mark the day, I’m taking the opportunity to feature a show for the second time. When I put up an earlier episode of this excellent documentary series in May it produced the largest number of comments we’ve ever had.

Most Watchification posts hardly get any comments (although we reckon this might be because you can’t comment and watch a show at the same time: that’s something we want to fix). The Yemen episode of Women in Black got loads (including one from me, which I suppose I shouldn’t count), all of which are quite passionate and apparently from knowledgeable Muslim Women. The series has obviously caught the imagination of this audience and they’ve used Watchification’s comments facility to have their say.

I mention this because, much as I like getting these comments here, Watchification is hardly the right place for this discussion. It would be in everybody’s interests for the debate to carry on at the programme’s own web page, preferably alongside the show itself so people can watch it back and arrive at their own conclusions. Sadly, none of this can happen: first, because the show itself has expired and second, because the series apparently has no web page beyond the automatically-generated one at /programmes. Pity.

And here’s an interview with presenter Amina Zain from Woman’s Hour back in May.

Britain’s Missing Top Model

The premise of Britain’s Missing Top Model is pretty simple - eight disabled women compete to win the prize of a fashion shoot with Rankin for Marie Claire. It’s twice as tough because they’re expected to be a role model for disabled people and to look amazing at the same time. The first episode quickly descends into the same shallow bitchfest as any other modelling competition (great telly!) but the points it throws up about society’s attitude to disability give a lot to consider. The exchanges between the judges (Wayne Hemingway, Marie O’Riordan, Mark Summers and Lara Masters) look like they’re going to get pretty fiery.

Quincy Jones - The Many Lives of Q

If there’s a better record than Ai No Corrida I don’t know what it is. And if there’s a more interesting, more varied, more tuneful and groovier musical career than that of Quincy Jones then it’s not been made into a BBC4 documentary. From jazz at the Apollo to producing the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, via Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones is responsible for a huge swathe of the culture that’s popular. This is Part One. This is Part Two.

Glastonbury 2008: Jay-Z

Jay-Z going down in Glastonbury history last night. The thought of it’s still making my skin tingle.

Cut to 29.25 if you want pure Jigga (although Dizzee Rascal with Calvin Harris at 13.30 is worth a look too).

Broken Flowers

Blimey. A Jim Jarmusch movie on iPlayer. I missed it when it went out so you’ve only got a couple of days to watch it. Still, it’s got to be better than Northern Irish tiger worriers. Jarmusch’s second proper movie, which was his big break, Down by Law, came out while I was (nominally) studying film and photography at Central London Poly in the mid-eighties. It made a big impact.

All my trendy friends thought it was the the best thing ever (some of them even went out and acquired elaborate quiffs) but I was suspicious. I thought it was all so much post-punk artifice. Really a phoney-baloney pseudo-existentialist non-story. I still think I’m right (tell me I’m not right). But Jarmusch has mellowed and now there’s real human stuff going on in his movies—albeit muted and kind of awkward.

I really enjoyed Broken Flowers (which came out in 2005) but I’m not 100% sure it’s not Bill Murray I’m enjoying. He’s got a real melancholy grandeur. About half-an-hour in, not long after his latest girlfriend has left him, he sits alone in his impeccably art-directed living room and tries to drink a glass of Champagne but just can’t. It’s beautiful. Anyway, I’d better shut up and save this post otherwise you’ll have no time to watch the thing. Over and out.

The Lion, the Keeper and the Dealer

I’m torn. Am I pleased that finally the people of Northern Ireland can’t just go out and buy tigers and wolves and cobras and keep them in their sheds? Or am I a bit sad that uniformity now reigns and, 30 years after the rest of Britain introduced wild animals legislation, Northern Ireland has been brought into line?

I really don’t know. But either way, here’s a show you probably wouldn’t have seen (unless you live in Northern Ireland, of course) without iPlayer. It’s a doc about the long delayed introduction to the North of the Dangerous Wild Animals Act and the tribe of borderline nutters affected by it. The narrator has plenty of deadpan lines like: “finally Wildlife Northern Ireland get a call to investigate an alleged unlicenced wolf”

This, by the way, is the charm of Watchification. I could have linked to an interview with Bill Gates or an amazing Doctor Who but no, I linked to a programme about Wildlife weirdos in Northern Ireland.

The Machine That Changed the World

I can’t believe we haven’t linked to this before. A lovely big documentary series: a fascinating 1992 BBC/WGBH co-production about the history and significance of computers. It’s a five-part series: the kind of thing they call a ‘landmark’ these days. It’s fascinating at least in part because it captures the period up to but not including the arrival of the Internet. Since anyone born after about 1980 has no idea what computers were for before they were all connected together (I can hardly remember myself), this kind of serious consideration of the period must have real historical value. The series was rescued from VHS obscurity and carefully cut up into useful chapters (using Viddler) by blogger and creator of upcoming.org Andy Baio. A public service if ever I’ve heard of one. You can watch the rest of the series here.

Summer Heights High

We don’t get much Australian TV on the beeb do we? I was pleased to bump into this ABC comedy ‘Summer Heights High‘ on iPlayer. It’s a slightly dark, slightly edgy, very funny mockumentary. Here’s episode two.

Episode one is still up, so you can start there, but you’ll have to be very quick.

Mary Queen of Shops

Mary Portas is the retail display guru credited with rescuing Harvey Nichols and she belongs to the following WIkipedia categories: 1962 births, Living people, People from Rickmansworth, Bisexual people, LGBT people from England, British businesspeople in retailing, English journalists and English non-fiction writers

Her reality TV show is great stuff: a version of Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares for boutiques (with less swearing). Like all the best reality TV it’s got all the elements of the folk tale in the right order and winds up nicely through conflict (the shopkeeper is usually a bit of a berk so there’s plenty of potential for a fight) to a narrative climax followed by a really satisfying resolution (with some learning and some tears).

Peter Bazalgette, boss of the firm that makes the British version of Big Brother and member of the following Wikipedia categories: Alumni of the University of Cambridge, British television executives, Living people, Old Alleynians, Alumni of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, Presidents of the Cambridge Union Society, Year of birth missing (living people), was on the TV the other day saying that all those people who whinge on about reality TV are just going to have to get used to it: reality is just one of the ways in which we make TV now. Mary Queen of Shops is first class entertainment and proof that he’s dead right.