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icepixieI've hit the glut of Ballykissangel DVDs in my Netflix queue. Eeee! I've been waiting for this to come out on DVD, and me to be in a position to rent it, for probably five years or so. It's quirky and funny and utterly charming, as I knew it would be. (Hi, I was a bit fannish about this show before I ever saw it. It's Northern Exposure in Ireland, how could I not be? [1])
For example, something that had me on the floor:
(In Assumpta's pub; she's stopped stocking Guinness because only one person in town drinks it.)
Brendan: I want my usual, I want my cultural inheritance, I want the drink that defines my country!
Siobhan: Give him a pot of tea, then.
Any show that includes jokes about tea is excellent in my book. (Particularly since, in the course of doing my tea paper last year, I found that, per capita, the Irish drink more tea per year than the English. For true! My cultural stereotypes were turned upon their ears.)
In that same episode (which was titled "Live in My Heart and Pay No Rent," which I desperately wish I'd thought of, because it's awesome) there was also a poor hill shepherd who, upon hearing that the EU agency which gave him a subsidy for each sheep he had was going to start counting them by satellite rather than sending an agent out to do it by hand, made approximately a hundred wooden sheep and scattered them across the mountainsides. Possibly you have to see the whole set-up, but I was cracking up.
Also, the first episode featured the installation of a state-of-the-art confessional with sliding doors and air conditioning. (The main character is a priest, BTW.) People got stuck in it at the end when the doors malfunctioned, and the whole thing had to be lifted out via the pre-existing hole int he roof by crane. Hahahaha.
The town they shot the series in, in County Wicklow, is gorgeous. And apparently it lives in an unusually sunny patch of the country. ;) Dervla Kirwan is ethereally beautiful, although she has a less-than-flattering haircut in this season. Stephen Tompkins's voice, which always sounds like he has a cold, is driving me a bit crazy. (He also looks a bit like Major Nelson from I Dream of Jeannie, which is a bit weird.)
Oh, and there will be defrocking by Season Three. Heh. Peter and Assumpta are cute when they spar, possibly helped by the fact that the actors were engaged for a while during the filming. Aw.
[1] And by "Northern Exposure in Ireland," I mean I think I remember reading something about how the creators had been in contact with each other before this one was made, and they worked out some deal that meant BallyK could proceed with essentially the same exact premise as NX. To say that the parallels are striking would be understating things (young city man comes to a small, quirky town, tries to fit in and doesn't entirely succeed while having UST with the local spitfire woman; cast of quirky characters, including a shady businessmen and hapless henchmen, look on), although the characters are actually quite different despite starting from the same archetypes. Actually, it would be really, really cool to do a paper on how that premise was treated in different cultures. Oh, to be a grad student in something like Media Studies or Sociology or Anthropology or some other -pology...
For example, something that had me on the floor:
(In Assumpta's pub; she's stopped stocking Guinness because only one person in town drinks it.)
Brendan: I want my usual, I want my cultural inheritance, I want the drink that defines my country!
Siobhan: Give him a pot of tea, then.
Any show that includes jokes about tea is excellent in my book. (Particularly since, in the course of doing my tea paper last year, I found that, per capita, the Irish drink more tea per year than the English. For true! My cultural stereotypes were turned upon their ears.)
In that same episode (which was titled "Live in My Heart and Pay No Rent," which I desperately wish I'd thought of, because it's awesome) there was also a poor hill shepherd who, upon hearing that the EU agency which gave him a subsidy for each sheep he had was going to start counting them by satellite rather than sending an agent out to do it by hand, made approximately a hundred wooden sheep and scattered them across the mountainsides. Possibly you have to see the whole set-up, but I was cracking up.
Also, the first episode featured the installation of a state-of-the-art confessional with sliding doors and air conditioning. (The main character is a priest, BTW.) People got stuck in it at the end when the doors malfunctioned, and the whole thing had to be lifted out via the pre-existing hole int he roof by crane. Hahahaha.
The town they shot the series in, in County Wicklow, is gorgeous. And apparently it lives in an unusually sunny patch of the country. ;) Dervla Kirwan is ethereally beautiful, although she has a less-than-flattering haircut in this season. Stephen Tompkins's voice, which always sounds like he has a cold, is driving me a bit crazy. (He also looks a bit like Major Nelson from I Dream of Jeannie, which is a bit weird.)
Oh, and there will be defrocking by Season Three. Heh. Peter and Assumpta are cute when they spar, possibly helped by the fact that the actors were engaged for a while during the filming. Aw.
[1] And by "Northern Exposure in Ireland," I mean I think I remember reading something about how the creators had been in contact with each other before this one was made, and they worked out some deal that meant BallyK could proceed with essentially the same exact premise as NX. To say that the parallels are striking would be understating things (young city man comes to a small, quirky town, tries to fit in and doesn't entirely succeed while having UST with the local spitfire woman; cast of quirky characters, including a shady businessmen and hapless henchmen, look on), although the characters are actually quite different despite starting from the same archetypes. Actually, it would be really, really cool to do a paper on how that premise was treated in different cultures. Oh, to be a grad student in something like Media Studies or Sociology or Anthropology or some other -pology...
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Date: 2006-08-18 06:42 am (UTC)