Gransnet forums

Chat

Ignorant script writers - and producers?

(47 Posts)
Greatnan Sat 08-Jun-13 06:00:27

I was watching Emmerdale and found myself shouting at the TV set when Eric suggested that Portugal was on the Mediterranean!

MiceElf Sat 08-Jun-13 06:39:23

Well, I suppose Emmerdale is in La la land.....

Greatnan Sat 08-Jun-13 07:58:38

I know - I should just accept all the glaring errors - such as people making an offer to buy a house and moving in the next day. I wish my conveyancing had been so quick and easy. And the same doctor/lawyer/policeman dealing with every problem. The doctor in Coronation Street is a one-man practice in an inner city area, apparently.
The other thing I find infuriating is the way that doctors and nurses, even porters and receptionists, in the medical dramas take a personal interest in the problems of every patient. House calls seem to be the norm - my family in the UK tell me that it is virtually impossible to get one.

petallus Sat 08-Jun-13 08:02:50

Every now and then I come across people being described as identical twins when one is male and the other female!

glammanana Sat 08-Jun-13 08:17:44

petallus I for one certainly don't want to be mistaken for my twin brother,he has lost most of his hair and about 4st heavier than me,he would look stupid in my high heel's grin.
I do though tend to take the dialogue from some of the Soaps with the pinch of salt that they deserve sometime.

feetlebaum Sat 08-Jun-13 08:59:52

@petallus "Every now and then I come across people being described as identical twins when one is male and the other female!"

Well - it worked for Eric Sykes and Hattie Jaques!

glammanana Sat 08-Jun-13 09:08:43

feetlebaum so so glad I don't look like Hattie Jaques !! grin

Movedalot Sat 08-Jun-13 10:05:57

Ummm, it is fiction smile

petallus Sat 08-Jun-13 10:12:47

I used to watch that. An early example of a common mistake then [ smile]

mollie Sat 08-Jun-13 10:43:42

People make mistakes in real life - was this med. one appropriate to the character? What was that famous gaff that Jade Goody made about Essex?

feetlebaum Sat 08-Jun-13 10:59:57

@glammanana So... do you look like Eric Sykes, then?

kittylester Sat 08-Jun-13 14:03:43

Having spent yesterday supporting witnesses in a very nasty trial, I get really cross when programmes show people sitting next to the perpetrator of the crime and with, apparently, no emotional or practical support available to them. NO Courts are like that now! angry

Sorry, off hobby horse now blush

KatyK Sat 08-Jun-13 14:21:17

Obviously it is not real but I think some of the scripts need a bit more care too. On Coronation Street recently a character referred to someone in their past who had 'a wandering eye and it took you (however long) to work out who he was looking at', implying that this person was some sort of simpleton. I know someone who has suffered terribly with a so called 'wandering eye'. She has just had her fourth operation to try to correct this. She watches Coronation Street and this remark upset her greatly.

MargaretX Sat 08-Jun-13 15:08:52

I was a teenager in the 50s and no one ever kissed in public. In most films about the good old days passengers on train stations indulge in open mouth kissing and even talk aloud about loving someone.

That annoys me. Why dont they do bit of real research and ask older people how it was.

A&E on casualty can not be like real life. Doctors have time to conduct their love lives and follow erring patients into the hospital grounds, they have so much time.

I ususally catch up with Casualty, while waiting for the 10 pm news to begin on Saturday night and forget that it is often late. I can't imagine anyone watching such a fairy tale on a regular basis.

annodomini Sat 08-Jun-13 15:42:57

Casualty is just another soap with very little relationship to life in the real world of A&E. I sometimes worry that people go to A&E expecting it to be like the tele. Same goes for Holby City, though some patients in that establishment are sometimes sent home with their surgery postponed.

Greatnan Sat 08-Jun-13 15:56:37

I have just watched Rosemary and Thyme, whilst surfing. What a load of rubbish. They find a murder or two on every job, and run round investigating without ever telling the police of their suspicions. In nearly every programme, one or other of them comes close to getting killed. I watch it because I like the gardens, even though I am no gardener.

merlotgran Sat 08-Jun-13 16:14:30

I met Lucy Gannon in the late nineties when I was invited to watch the filming of one of her dramas in our old farmhouse about two years after we left. She was very interesting and told me they often get inspiration and ideas from trawling websites. I didn't have a computer in those days so didn't think anything of it.

A few years later a friend of mine wrote some 'fan-fic' stories for a TV website. I think the programme was Dangerfield but I'm not sure. One of the plots was about a retired policewoman and her best friend who was a plant pathologist. They solved a crime of child abduction. A couple of years later, Rosemary and Thyme appeared. hmm

merlotgran Sat 08-Jun-13 16:19:31

I'm sure Lucy Gannon wouldn't put her name to anything as trashy as Rosemary and Thyme though.

feetlebaum Mon 17-Jun-13 18:27:02

MargaretX

"I was a teenager in the 50s and no one ever kissed in public."

So was I -- and we did! I have a - for me - romantic memory of standing in the rain, kissing my lovely girlfriend in the street - we just didn't care. In East Finchley, near the old Rex Cinema (Now the Phoenix)... Next time we talk I shall have to remind her of that!

janthea Tue 18-Jun-13 11:09:28

I get cross watching American series when they are supposed to be in England. The scenes are clearly NOT England. I suppose this is to save money filming scenes over here.

Greatnan Tue 18-Jun-13 11:25:50

I get cross when young script writers can't be bothered to research the vocabulary appropriate for the time in which their series is set.

BAnanas Tue 18-Jun-13 12:20:01

I remember an old remake of 1001 Dalmations starring Glen Close as Cruella Deville, the setting was England but clearly with an American audience in mind, as part of our wildlife included raccoons!

Following on from your comment Greatnan about modern vocabulary in the wrong time setting, it's very annoying, agree with your thoughts and wonder why script writer don't do their research more thoroughly. Watched something recently that was set in the 1940s, where a piece of dialogue was all wrong for that era.

numberplease Tue 18-Jun-13 16:09:30

What about Prince of Thieves, with a very American Kevin Costner as Robin Hood?
I also remember, on the opening credits of the Richard Greene series of Robin Hood, back in the 50s, there was an arrow being shot through the trees, and as it whizzed by, there was something that looked suspiciously like a telegraph pole right there mid screen!

BAnanas Tue 18-Jun-13 17:35:00

Way way back, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Roman centurion played by John Wayne at the foot of the cross drawling in his very American accent "he truly was the son of god" naaah didn't sound right!. Come to think of it, as good as he was in Gladiator, very slight Aussie accent could be detected at times from Maximus Decimus Crowe. Somehow an accent from the new world doesn't sound right on a character from the old world.

Wheniwasyourage Tue 18-Jun-13 17:50:30

The one which annoys me is "Mary Poppins", not for Dick van Dyke's accent, but for the peculiarly-shaped robin. I used to think it was just a bad model until I realised that it was a good model of an American robin. shock