Pat Stacey

5 days ago | independent.ie | Pat Stacey

Ciaran Cassidy’s excellent Housewife of the Year (RTÉ1, Monday, June 2) did the festival circuit last year, winning a prize at Galway Film Fleadh, and enjoying a limited run in cinemas. And yet television, where it will reach a much larger audience, feels like its natural home. After all, television was the home of the bizarre spectacle that was the Housewife of the Year competition. It started in 1967, was televised live by RTÉ from 1982 and lasted – astonishingly – until 1995.

5 days ago | independent.ie | Pat Stacey

The two most famous big-screen versions are the 1940 film with Greer Garson as Elizabeth Bennet and Laurence Olivier as Fitzwilliam Darcy, and the 2005 one with Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen. But when it comes to bringing Austen’s most popular novel to television, the BBC just can’t keep its hands off it. It was first adapted in 1938, and again in 1949, 1952 and 1958. These four versions are considered lost productions. The BBC had another shot at it in 1967, and yet another in 1980.

1 week ago | independent.ie | Pat Stacey

It’s a shallow, lazy comparison, seemingly based on nothing more than the fact that both series feature a spiky, disagreeable lead character with a habit of getting on people’s wick, in charge of a group of rejects and screw-ups. It also does a great disservice to The Queen’s Gambit creator Scott Frank’s excellent series, which transplants Jussi Henry Adler-Olsen’s Denmark-set book series to Edinburgh. The switch works a treat.

1 week ago | independent.ie | Pat Stacey

Strangely, the factual story of Germany’s five-year occupation of the Channel Islands has been, if not exactly ignored, notably under-exploited by fiction writers, historians and even documentarians. The superb two-part documentary Britain Under the Nazis: The Forgotten Occupation (Channel 4, Thursday, May 29, 8pm) should go some way towards rectifying the imbalance.

1 week ago | belfasttelegraph.co.uk | Pat Stacey

Review: BBC programme exposes the many red flags inventor Stockton Rush ignored ahead of the deep-sea tragedyFor the late Stockton Rush, the inventor and pilot of Titan, the submersible that imploded during a dive to view the wreck of the Titanic on June 18, 2023, killing him and the four others on board, failure was not an option.