Beyond the Roundels

Another crosspost for my Fave Eps of Old Telly tumblr sets, and one this time that is part of the reason I started making it, because sometimes you get something like this.

Original tumblr post.

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Favourite Episodes of Old Telly: The Shadow of the Tower Episode 5 “The Serpent and the Comforter” (BBC 1972. Written by Hugh Whitemore; dir. Moira Armstrong.)
( What more unanswerable question is there than death? )

The Serpent and the Comforter (YouTube) | and on Daily Motion

I'm not sure what else to add here, but it does seem to be the one that everybody else who watches it really likes as well, so clearly this is not just about me and my weirdness or my James Maxwell fixation. (This is what gave me my JM fixation.)

I've been doing this series of gifsets on tumblr for a very long time now. I've been meaning to crosspost them ever since. I'd (ironically) just drafted up one such post shortly before I accidentally deleted my whole tumblr that time in 2018 or whenever it was, and if I'd been faster about it, I wouldn't have completely lost some of them. Anyway, I've been meaning to finally get around to it, and today I went out so am ill and was thinking that I want to magically have a post to post and it should be about James Maxwell in some way and also probably this episode because it is a go to tired-episode. And then, I realised, that that was entirely doable for once.

[These are no longer in the original order, because the whole deletion thing wrecked that anyway. Format = tumblr gifset + original blurb. This, as you can probably tell from the gifs, was one of the earlier ones - originally no. 5/?]

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Original post here on tumblr.


Favourite Episodes of old telly: Enemy at the Door 1.10 "Treason" (London Weekend Television, 1978). (Written by Kenneth Clark; dir. Jonathan Alwyn.)

( We fought, he said, and you were not there; cut for gifs )

Perhaps more a favourite episode rather than best (but then ‘best’ in Enemy at the Door would include all the spoilery, continuity-heavy episodes, so let’s go with my odd choice here, why not). I just appreciate hugely an episode of TV that’s all about people feeling sidelined, bored, trapped, frustrated and despairing to varying degrees. Chiefly, it focuses on Major General Laidlaw (Joss Ackland), his spirit being slowly eaten away by inactivity and small humiliations and the visiting grandee, Generalmajor von Wittke (James Maxwell) - Laidlaw’s brother-in-law - who is, as it turns out, just as trapped as everyone else.

Enemy at the Door s1 on the Internet Archive | Treason at YouTube.

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(I still love this episode. It is a strange one, and the writer's style is circular and repetetive, which I can see would not be everyone else's cup of tea, but it works for me. Jonathan Alwyn's direction is reliably great, and I like the constant understated background sound of the storm that underpins most of the episode. I still appreciate so much an episode of TV which explores the inability to do things, and revolves around something that doesn't and can't happen, and the unspoken implications of what consequences will follow. I wrote fic for this, and there is so much detail in the stated backstories of the two main guest characters that make them inverted mirrors of each other in ways that are fascinating and muddy the morality even further than is immediately apparent in the episode. Also James Maxwell wants to kill Hitler and Richter and Freidel finish up with a knowing Julius Caesar reference. ("He is an honourable man. They are both honourable men!") EatD knows how to make me happy, or certainly cathartically sad in all the right ways.)

(This is not the best one of these sets to begin with, because it's an episode that probably nobody but me would list as a favourite. Except maybe hyarrowen, but idk if that was just because I went on and on about and then wrote fic. But when I'm ill, I just want to talk online about "Treason" and this once, I actually can!)