Hawkmoor 1978

Hawkmoor was a 1978 BBC television series created by Lynn Hughes and based on the activities of Twm Siôn Cati, a 16th-century Welsh folk hero.

The 5-part series starred John Ogwen as Twm and Jane Asher as Lady Johane Williams, and also featured Godfrey James as Twm's right-hand man Shanco, Jack May as the English-born Sheriff John Stedman, Tom Owen as the sheriff's son John, Philip Madoc as Vicar Davyd, Meredith Edwards as Sir Tom Williams and Rachel Thomas as Agnes. The series depicted Twm as a Welsh Robin Hood/freedom fighter protecting the Welsh people from the repression of Sheriff Stedman and the cruel (Catholic) Vicar Davyd during the reign of Queen Mary I of England.

A Penguin paperback (ISBN 0-14-004501-5) relating some of the television adventures (and containing a ballad actually written by Twm) was written by Lynn Hughes and published in 1978.

The Scandalous Lady W (2015)

An 18th-century drama detailing the scandalous life of Lady Seymour Worsley. Starring: Natalie Dormer, Jessica Gunning, Aneurin Barnard.

Lady Worsley was rumoured to have had 27 lovers. In November 1781 she ran off with Bisset, a captain in the South Hampshire militia, who had been Worsley's close friend and neighbour at Knighton Gorges on the Isle of Wight. In February 1782 Worsley brought a criminal conversation case against Bisset for £20,000 (equivalent to £2,918,500 in 2025). Lady Worsley turned the suit in her favour with scandalous revelations and the aid of past and present lovers; and questioned the legal status of her husband. She included a number of testimonies from her lovers and her doctor, William Osborn, who related that she had suffered from a venereal disease which she had contracted from the Marquess of Graham. It was alleged that Worsley had displayed his wife naked to Bisset at the bath house in Maidstone. This testimony destroyed Worsley's suit and the jury awarded him only one shilling (2015: £5.28) in damages.

Bisset eventually left Lady Worsley when it became apparent that Worsley was seeking separation rather than divorce, meaning Seymour could not remarry until Worsley's death. Seymour was forced to become a professional mistress or demimondaine and live off the donations of rich men in order to survive, joining other upper-class women in a similar position in the New Female Coterie. She had two more children: another by Bisset after he left her in 1783, whose fate is unknown; and a fourth, Charlotte Dorothy Hammond (née Cochard), who she sent to be raised by a family in the Ardennes.

Lady Worsley later left for Paris in order to avoid her debts. In 1788, she and her new lover, the biracial composer, conductor and champion fencer Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, returned to England, and her estranged husband entered into articles of separation, on the condition she spend four years in exile in France. Eight months before the expiration of this exile, she was unable to leave France because of the events of the French Revolution and she was probably imprisoned during the Reign of Terror, meaning she was abroad on the death of her and Worsley's son in 1795. In early 1797, she returned to England, and she then suffered a severe two-month illness. Owing to the forgiveness of her mother, her sister and her sister's husband, the Earl of Harrington, she was then able to move into Brompton Park, her previous home, but which the laws on property prevented her from officially holding.

On Worsley's death in 1805, her £70,000 jointure reverted to her and just over a month later, on 12 September, at the age of 47 she married 26-year-old newfound lover John Lewis Cuchet (d. 1836) at Farnham. Also that month, by royal licence, she officially resumed her maiden name of Fleming, and her new husband also took it. After the armistice of 1814 ended the War of the Sixth Coalition, the couple moved to a villa at Passy, Paris where she died in 1818, aged 59. She is buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Count Dracula (1977)

Count Dracula is a British television adaptation of the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. Produced by the BBC (in the then standard video/film hybrid format), it first aired on BBC 2 on 22 December 1977. It is among the more faithful of the many adaptations of the original book.

Marat/Sade (1967)

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat ... Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade

English Subtitles

Cast:

         Ian Richardson as Jean-Paul Marat

         Patrick Magee as Marquis de Sade

         Glenda Jackson as Charlotte Corday

         Susan Williamson as Marat's mistress

         Clifford Rose as Asylum director

production:

         Royal Shakespeare Company

Directed by:

        Peter Brook

Based on the play by:

         Peter Weiss

The Marquis de Sade is locked in the Charenton mental hospital and decides to put on a play. His overseers agree as long as he follows certain conditions. He writes and directs the other mental patients in a play based on the life of the Jean-Paul Marat. As the play progresses, the inmates become more and more possessed by the violence of the play and become extremely difficult to control. Finally, all chaos breaks loose.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1965 Full Film)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a black and white drama movie released in 1965, directed by Mike Nichols, Ernest Lehman, writer, from Edward Albee's play. the film features four main actors, including two great actors who deliver a magnificent performance: Richard Burton (George, Professor of History) and Elizabeth Taylor (Martha, daughter of the university's dean). The other two actors were: George Segal (Nick, professor of biology) and his wife Sandy Dennis (Honey).

Martha and her husband George turn slightly drunk from a reception at the university where George is a Professor humming the rhyme "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" At the request of her father, Martha was forced to invite a young couple, recently moved, to join them for a drink. Just arrived, Nick and his wife, Honey, attend a memorable household scene of their hosts. Since they were drunk, the tone does not take long to rise. Martha et George, a couple in their fifties, come to unpack their grudges, without the least modesty, in front of their uncomfortable guests. As the evening progress, Nick and Honey become more drunk and embark on the games of George and Martha on the need to hurt themselves and hurt everyone, each couple has a secret. Nick and Honey end up gradually revealing the dark, pathetic and even shameful dimension of their own relationship. The ultimate abuse takes the form of a conversation with the invisible son of George and Martha, sixteen, whose birthday is the next day. After the departure of their guests, the film ends with the couple, Martha seated holding George’s hand who stands behind her, both look tired from this long evening.

The movie’s title does not say anything about what the audience should expect as a movie. The first scene, when George and Martha were walking coming from the reception, gives me the impression of a couple that was slightly drunk from a reception that they had fun. When Martha was insisting asking about who said that is a dump, I figured there was an issue in the couple, she was talking more than George and they were drinking none stop. She looks like she always has to have the last word. I was surprised to see how a married couple was hurting each other in front of strangers. In the beginning, the movie was not easy to follow, a woman who controls her husband, it was difficult to understand what is the real issue. The moral violence exerted between spouses, a heavy and suffocating atmosphere, pettiness and the cruelty of relations between the generations reach here their culminating point. The scenes leave the impression that the life of a couple comes down to permanent war. The talented actors, Martha and Georges, could sow doubt on the reality of their story. The audience believes in the scenes to realize at the end of the film that Marta’s and George's stories were fiction.

To conclude, this is a well-written film by Mike Nichols. Aside from the constant insults of the alcoholic couple, Martha and George who thirsts at the audience to ask what is next, I think that summarizes the story, a couple that has a lot of hates between them. In my opinion, the film a bit too long despite the ingenious performance of the actors.

Brideshead Revisited - Et in Arcadia Ego

Episode One of the 1981 Granada Television series Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn Waugh said his novel was written at a time of great stress and deprivation, so it was a lot about longing and times of plenty, of baroque styles and rarified emotions. The TV series is a triumph of the medium. It is a sensual, passionate and sorrowful account of youth, emotions and the class world that was destroyed by the Second World War.

Brideshead Revisited is a 1981 British television serial starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews. It was produced by Granada Television for broadcast by the ITV network. Most of the serial was directed by Charles Sturridge; a few sequences were directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg.

The serial is an adaptation of the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) by Evelyn Waugh. It follows, from the 1920s to the early 1940s, the life and romances of the protagonist Charles Ryder—including his friendship with the Flytes, a family of wealthy English Catholics who live in a palatial mansion called Brideshead Castle.

The screenplay was written by Derek Granger (the film's producer) and others. Although the film credits attribute the screenplay to John Mortimer, Mortimer's script was not used.

The 11-episode serial premiered on ITV in the UK on 12 October 1981; on CBC Television in Canada on 19 October 1981; and as part of the Great Performances series on PBS in the United States on 18 January 1982.

In 2000, the serial was tenth on the list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes compiled by the British Film Institute, based on a poll of industry professionals.

Reilly: Ace of Spies

"Power is power it is the one element of the human condition you cannot fake."  - Stalin, played by David Burke in Reilly: Ace of Spies (1983)

Sidney Reilly was born Zigmund Markovich Rozenblum (Rosenblum) on 24 March 1874 in Odessa. This is not for certain. By 1903 he was working for the British Secret Service in the ferment that was Europe before the First World War.

According to reports of the Okhrana, the tsarist political police, whose archives are preserved at the Hoover Institute, the young Rosenblum was arrested in 1892 for political activities and for being a courier for a revolutionary group known as the Friends of Enlightenment. Evidence indicates that the arrival of Rosenblum in London in December 1895 was from France, and was prompted by his unscrupulous acquisition of a large sum of money in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, a residential suburb of Paris, necessitating a hasty flight. According to this account, Rosenblum and Yan Voitek, a Polish accomplice, had waylaid two Italian anarchists on 25 December 1895 and robbed them of a substantial amount of revolutionary funds. One anarchist's throat was cut; the other, Constant Della Cassa, died from knife wounds in Fontainebleau Hospital three days later.

Regardless of whether the peripatetic Rosenblum arrived in Britain via Brazil or France, he resided at the Albert Mansions, an apartment block in Rosetta Street, Waterloo, London, in early 1896. Now comfortably settled in Britain, Rosenblum created the Ozone Preparations Company, which peddled patent medicines. Because of his knowledge of languages, he had become a paid informant for the émigré intelligence network of William Melville, superintendent of Scotland Yard's Special Branch, whom official sources identify as later overseeing a Special Section of the British Secret Service Bureau founded in 1909.

In 1897 Rosenblum began a torrid affair with Margaret Thomas (née Callaghan), the youthful wife of Reverend Hugh Thomas, shortly before the latter's death. Rosenblum first met Thomas in London via his Ozone Preparations Company. Thomas had a kidney inflammation and was intrigued by the miracle cures peddled by Rosenblum. Thomas introduced Rosenblum to his young wife at his manor house, and over the next six months, they began having an affair. On 4 March 1898, Thomas altered his will and appointed Margaret as an executrix. A week after the new will was made, Thomas and his nurse arrived at Newhaven Harbour Station. On 12 March 1898, Thomas was found dead in his hotel room.[44] A mysterious Dr. T. W. Andrew, whose physical description matched that of Rosenblum, appeared to certify Thomas's death as generic influenza and after signing the relevant documents proclaimed that there was no need for an inquest.

Records indicate that there was no one by the name of Dr. T. W. Andrew in Great Britain circa 1897.Margaret insisted that her husband's body be ready for burial 36 hours after his death. She inherited roughly £800,000. The Metropolitan Police did not investigate Dr. T. W. Andrew, nor did they investigate the nurse whom Margaret had hired, who was previously linked to the arsenic poisoning of a former employer. Four months later, on 22 August 1898, Rosenblum married Margaret Thomas at the Holborn Registry Office in London. The two witnesses at the ceremony were Charles Richard Cross, a government official, and Joseph Bell, an Admiralty clerk. Both would eventually marry daughters of Henry Freeman Pannett, an associate of William Melville. The marriage not only brought the wealth which Rosenblum desired but provided a pretext to discard his identity of Sigmund Rosenblum; with Melville's assistance, he crafted a new identity: "Sidney George Reilly." This new identity was key to achieving his desire to return to the Russian Empire and voyage to the Far East. It must be noted that Reilly "obtained his new identity and nationality without taking any legal steps to change his name and without making an official application for British citizenship, all of which suggests some type of official intervention" on his behalf.

It is from here the 1983 Thames Television series takes up the life of Reilly, Rosemblum.

In June 1899, the newly endowed Sidney Reilly and his wife Margaret traveled to Emperor Nicholas II's Russian Empire using Reilly's (forged) British passport—a travel document and a cover identity both purportedly created by William Melville. While in St. Petersburg, he was approached by Japanese General Akashi Motojiro (1864-1919) to work for the Japanese Secret Intelligence Services. A keen judge of character, Motojiro believed the most reliable spies were those who were motivated by profit instead of by feelings of sympathy towards Japan and, accordingly, he believed Reilly to be such a person. As tensions between Russia and Japan were escalating towards war, Motojiro had at his disposal a budget of one million yen provided by the Japanese Ministry of War to obtain information on the movements of Russian troops and naval developments. Motojiro instructed Reilly to offer financial aid to Russian revolutionaries in exchange for information about the Russian Intelligence Services and, more importantly, to determine the strength of the Russian armed forces particularly in the Far East. Accepting Motojiro's recruitment overtures, Reilly now became simultaneously an agent for both the British War Office and the Japanese Empire. While his wife Margaret remained in St. Petersburg, Reilly allegedly reconnoitered the Caucasus for its oil deposits and compiled a resource prospectus as part of "The Great Game." He reported his findings to the British Government which paid him for the assignment.

More on Reilly's life can be found here, or by watching the TV series, the first episode of which is above. Reilly was no doubt a thug, a liar, an egotist and opportunist. But he always dressed well and was polite to the ladies.

Being Human: Cure and Catagion (2010)

Originally broadcast in 2010, this is episode 1 of series 2 of the UK series Being Human (2008-2013). The series follows the lives and struggles of three characters, Annie, Mitchell and George. At first glance they seem to be three late maturers who share an old house in Bristol in the UK. They have lived, and loved, but now rely on each other in what first appears to be fairly average lives. But then the inner depth comes in; George is a werewolf, Mitchell a vampire and Annie is a ghost. They struggle with who they are as they put almighty effort into being human, or at least appearing to be so. But as they struggle they discover there is more to being human than wearing the right clothes and saying the right things. There are emotional currents, allegiances, ethics and morals, choices and the need for love.

This episode deals with some of the heaviest aspects of being human; love, desire, honesty, memory and purpose. It pits characters against each other in love and war as they gradually reveal and learn the truth about themselves and those around them. Consequence is also a major theme in the story, with the result of actions made in ignorance revealed and then made part of relationships. It even has a backdrop of power as a way to control people, but also being a status desired by many. In my opinion Being Human was one of the most riveting and well written series to emerge from television in the past decades. It takes up themes of Shakespearean proportions and delivers them in the language and imagery of the early 21st century. The acting is powerful and precise and characters appear as fully developed entities that draw us, the audience, into the depths of the human psyche. If you do not want to watch all 5 seasons then just watch this episode 1 of series 2, Cure and Catagion. It will change the way you understand your own life and what you do with it.

The episode begins with Mitchell and George encountering husband and wife vampires Ivan and Daisy, who warn them of the likely power struggle after chief vampire Herrick's death and their own vulnerability. Annie gets work in a pub and takes home customer Nathan, and Mitchell befriends new doctor Lucy. At the full moon, whilst the sinister Kemp destroys a captive werewolf in a pressure chamber, Nina is horrified to find that, accidentally scratched by George, she too transforms into a werewolf. George is pursued by the flirtatious Daisy who wants him to enjoy the dark side and has sex with him. Smelling Daisy's perfume on him increases Nina's anguish but they make up and the other housemates pledge to support Nina. Whilst they are all out, Kemp comes to the house with a psychic, testing for supernatural presences, and sensing triumph.

The episode ends with a sense of community, be it threatened by the selfishness of aggressive and wrathful religion.