Religion and drama

I know it's been a wee while since I last graced the interweb but, hey, breaking into the most lucrative tv market there is has taken all my time up.

Religious tv.

I'm not going to tempt fate and/or any gods by talking about that much here. Just to say that, as ever, tellydom is so random that a rabid non-believer like me can be in charge of a show about Jeebers (as Homer Simpson once referred to Him). I've done three things:-

• Made sure one of the characters is aetheist (yes, I know - "is there an agnostic?" - no there's not and that's fine, OK);
• Got a proper religious expert to check things (actually the channel did... very wise of them, even if one of my staff nearly finished one term of a course on, as he put it, "Islamism and them others"). He's now a Pastafarian. Don't google it. It'll just encourage him;
• Spent rather too long debating with said Pastafarian about religious-themed hats. Veils, skullcaps, turbans...

Mmy reason for blogging today is drama on BBC Four. I watched one last night and it... well, it was just as I expected. Marie Lloyd, the musical hall lady out of the early nineteen hundreds, featuring Kat Slater off of EastEnders and lots of top hats.

Entertaining though it was, this was exactly like that Kenneth Williams thing from last year (who's next I wonder, Bob Monkhouse?). They simply don't have enough money. Now I'm an expert in making stuff on the cheap - hell I did a sitcom-gameshow-factual-yoof thing for Sky for £10K an episode - but with period drama you kinda expect something more than covering the set in tinfoil to pretend it's the future. (That didn't happen on the Marie Lloyd thing. I did that on the Xmas special of the Sky thing. Christmas past, future etc. etc.)

Back to the drama. Tight shots of a music hall audience consisting of five people. One horse and cart. Bits skipped over and not shown as they'd cost too much. Patchy acting from the (probably) cheap cast. Lots of backstage scenes. Oh, and a guy wandering around singing old songs to camera at certain points. Odd.

Anyway, Kat Slater was fine - apart from when she was pretending to be a teenage girl. I mean, come on... was it an ego thing or a we-can't-afford-another-actress thing?

Now back to religion. I need to find out at what age lady-woman-Muslims start to wear a full burka/hijab/whatever. Joy...