Flickers

This delightful series starts slowly, but hang on--its worth the ride. When Arnie Cole first meets Maud, she seems a total snob, but then she is devastated to find herself pregnant and the father wanting nothing more to do with her. Arnie will marry her and, in exchange, she will sponsor him in his desire to enter the Flicker business, first as an exhibitor, then as a filmmaker. Other characters enter the story, but the emphasis is always on Arnie and Maud. Their relationship changes and we believe it all. We start to like Maud more and more as we watch the changes in her character. The writing is great and the performances by Bob Hoskins as Arnie and Frances de la Tour as Maude are nothing short of wonderful. I wish they'd rerun this series or release it on video. If you get a chance to see it, jump!

It's good, but it's hardly what you'd call a comedy. The plot description I read made it sound like the Keystone Cops would show up. There is a little of that on the first disc, but most of the series is high drama, shouting, and pathos. Bob Hoskins plays Arnie Cole, an ambitious film distributor who's trying to become a producer. He enters a marriage of convenience with a rich socialite who has a kid "on the wrong side of the blanket" as he puts it. Their relationship has some charm, but the rest of characters are a nightmare. The comic, Corky Brown, is an aging, paranoid alcoholic who's barely holding his career and his marriage together. The Brewers, an acting family, are right out of "A Long Day's Journey Into Night". The leading lady of their first big film is an aging, coke addicted, diva right out of "Sunset Blvd." The director is a pompous pretender. Hoskin's girlfriend is shrill tramp. Not to mention that everything that can go wrong does go wrong. I thought I was going to get an ulcer just watching Arnie Cole. There is a LOT of unpleasant shouting. Like I said, it's good, but mostly at conveying why film making can be such a high stress dog-eat-dog industry.

This 6-part series is a joyous spoof of the beginnings of the British film industry with low-born Arnie Cole (Bob Hoskins) and sidekick Llewellyn (Fraser Cains) desperate to become filmmakers. Arnie is so desperate, he even forms a loveless marriage with a well-to-do spinster Maud (Frances de la Tour) to get the money to start his film company.

Many film "types" are spoofed, including the little comedian who's quite nasty in real life, the adult woman posing as a child star, the foreign-born auteurs, the great star who deigns to be in films ... for a price, and the unsung technical genius behind the camera who makes it all work.

Plot also shows what a cutthroat business it really was in those early years with sabotage and theft as usual business practices.

Driven by catchy music by Ron Grainer and star-making performance by Hoskins and De la Tour, the six episodes whiz by, leaving the audience wishing for more.

The subplot of the loveless marriage and how it grows makes the characters human and lovable.

Besides Bob Hoskins, Frances de la Tour, and Fraser Cains, there are many familiar faces in the large cast. Sherrie Hewson plays the hapless Letty, Andy de la Tour plays Maud's brother, Dickie Arnold plays Corky Brown, Jim Hooper plays Percy, Sheila Reid plays Lily, Philip Madoc plays Jack, Granville Saxton plays Legendre, Sheri Shepstone plays Violet, Peggy Ann Wood play nanny, Teddy Turner plays Eddy Marco, Joanna Foster plays Clara, and Maxine Audley plays the imperious Gwendolyn Harper.

Great fun. Not to be missed.

I was quite surprised to find this series in IMDb - I thought it was all but forgotten. Hurrah for the internet!

This series was the first in a set of great Masterpiece Theatre presentations. This is the set in chronological order (as I remember them): Flickers, Brideshead Revisited, Love in A Cold Climate, To Serve Them All My Days.

Flickers has distinction, not just because it was the first of the set, but also because it depicted a period just outside of the decadent two decades that existed between the wars. (I am a big fan of the twenties and thirties, and also of authors such as Wodehouse, E.F. Benson and Waugh, but I will be the first to say that the whole Lovely Wonderful Tortured Decadent Lost Generation thing has been done to death.)

The world depicted in Flickers - the "movie" industry of the early 20th century - is gritty, wild, bold and fresh. The characters are not nobles leading charmed lives or la-de-da middle-class prototypes working on their intellectual integrity, but working people. All the more interesting is the fact that the characters work in the embryonic industry, before concepts such as "film", "artistes" and "auteur" had popped into anyones head.

The series exploits, and squeezes some amazing esoterica and unique humor from, the historical detail of the period. And the cast is fantastic - real characters using their craft to depict real characters, not blank and blandly-pretty Actors engaging in the Method to evoke the essence....well, you get the idea.

I first saw this series the same year I discovered the New Wave, and I think this was very fitting; in terms of spirit and style, Flickers had more in common with the punky, jagged and recklessly-original late-seventies that with the too-cool-for-school eighties.

I rented the first two episodes from Netflix and was delighted to see them again after 25 years. As others have said, the chemistry between Bob Hoskins (Arnie Cole) and Frances de la Tour (Maud) really powers the show -- some of the subplots are a tad tedious. This was the first thing I ever saw Hoskins in and I've been a fan ever since. De la Tour hasn't been all that visible over the years, though she was also great in the comedy series Rising Damp (another one worth seeing again) and she had a small role in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (where she played the giant visiting French teacher).

Also memorable are Fraser Cains as Llewelyn, Arnie's long-suffering Welsh film projectionist, and Peggy Ann Wood as Maud's feisty Nanny.