James Michael Aloysius Bradford – not a name you might recognise. Stage name Jimmy Nail – best known as Oz in Auf Wiedersehen Pet. It has been repeated on Saturdays recently. The final Cuban episode was shown this weekend.
One scene shows Oz ending a relationship with the woman he loves to help his friend. The editing was really good – particularly the audio. A mixture of Swan Lake, a Man U match and a guinea pig race and probably a couple of other things I couldn’t separate out. I like the deeper comedies like this where it isn’t just all laughs. I think it is partly because of the valleys that you appreciate the mountains.
I watched all of the re-runs so far. I often get surprised by it – something about one of the actors looked familiar the other week and I was amazed to read his bio – including things like A clockwork orange and Conan.
One of the things that I picked up on was the intro every week “contains outdated attitudes and language”. I always wonder about that – was there a message before “Killing Eve” that warns us about unacceptable behaviours?
One part of the last series of AWP involved a homophobic Oz meeting up with his son that turned out to be gay. Some of the language was choice. But it was a valley/mountain moment in the series. Oz struggles to deal with the internal conflict between his prejudice and his love for his son. Sadly they even cut some of the scenes, the most non-PC language was cut out. They filled in the valley, so the mountain didn’t stand out as much.
Sometimes people seem to be very superficial in their approach – focusing on acceptability individual words rather than the message behind them.