Anyone watching Home Fires on PBS?

Yes I'm watching and waiting for that one woman to kill her abusive husband. The doctor was hotter when he was on the new Upstairs Downstairs. The farmer in the tub takes the prize so far for hottest although the airman who got married is pretty cute too.

Yes, OP. Ed Stoppard is lovely. Thanks for the link.

I missed part of it. What did the blonde bookkeeper do for 10 guineas? And why did she do it? Was she embezzling?

The farmer in the tub is scorching. And even though he's a total dick, the abusive husband is handsome, too.

Ed Stoppard is very attractive in the English way. I've followed his career for a while.

R3 the bookkeeper stole the 10 guineas from the WI to pay her vet bill. An audit was coming up so she is cooking the books for some shady guy who paid her 10 guineas which she put back in the WI lock box. Now she is stuck doing it for somebody else too.

The abusive husband looks like Scott Thompson.

Thanks, R5.

I hope Spebcer gets shipped off soon. I don't like having to look at his strange James McCartney-like face.

Funny to see Louis from Happy Valley playing an upstanding RAF guy. I was shocked when he married that girl. I thought sure he'd take off after he shagged her in the barn.

Hope they take advantage of how many types of stories they can bring into the show. Downton Abbey was sort of closed off and stultifying. The characters grew tiresome. In this show, they can bring in soldiers, airmen, Americans, German POWs, the battlefield, spies, land girls, evacuees, new factories ... WWII gives them lots more scope. I also hope it's more realistic than Downton.

Thank god that horrible Widower show is over. PBS showed it in my market after Home Fires. If any man had looked and behaved the way the actor portrayed Malcolm Webster, women would've run a mile to get away from him. The actor was fug, dour, creepy, humorless -- the women said the real Malcolm was fun, adventurous, charming -- that's how he hooked them. They never suspected him. Even his first wife's family didn't suspect him.

Talk about bad direction. Besides, it was a bore. We knew from the minute we saw him he was a creepy killer. There wasn't any suspense.

So lets guess how she kills the abuser. She already cooked rotten fish for him that got him sick. So poison is probably out.

R9, and the character seemed like the biggest closet case in the world. One person described him as "twee." I couldn't imagine anyone being attracted to him, either. The real person was bigger, more masculine, bearded.

Just about every guy on the show is man candy, except maybe for the postman. The RAF guy hanging with the "padre" is drop dead gorgeous, and Padre isn't so bad himself. A very striking silver fox.

Jason Thompson to play Adam Newman!

Oh crap. Posted wrong place.

The Widower was miscast. Those women on the show were out of that actors league. In real life I doubt they would have looked twice at him. That role called for someone like Dylan McDermott.

The Widower needed someone like Cary Grant in Suspicion, someone who would sweep those women off their feet the way Cary swept Joan Fontaine off her feet. Cary blithely called Joan "monkey face." When frowny, creepy little pasty-faced Malcolm called tall, beautiful, well-spoken Archie Panjabi "munchkin," it was just bizarre.

"Home Fires" is a lot more interesting that "Indian Summers," where the lead Indian guy (who I don't find attractive at all and who has a weird voice) gawps at the lead Englishwoman, Alice. The two of them look mentally retarded and Alice, always drawing in her breath when she sees Aafrin, seems asthmatic. The hideous Olivia Grant makes my skin crawl. She looks like an albino octopus -- all skinny arms and legs-- who's been dipped in olive oil.

The actor who plays Ralphie is handsome, but his character is just too creepy to lust after. And since when did everybody, including Indians, call a high ranking British official "Ralphie"? (The guy who shoots at him even says "Ralphie-sa" before calling him a devil and firing a gun). I do like the actress who plays Sarah, though. She's very good.

I'm sure Home Fires has its mistakes of history, but they don't seem blatant and so far, nobody seems miscast. I notice they are loosening up the severe late 1930s hairstyles on some of the characters as they go along. That's understandable. It makes the characters a little less formidable. I like seeing familiar faces -- Aunt Rosamund, Lillie Langtry, the younger female detective from Vera who lists after the coroner, Lewis from Happy Valley.

It's a good Sunday night show.

What I don't understand about Indian Summers is why Ralph feels compelled to choose Madeline as a wife. Are there no other white women in India? I get it that he feels pressure at his age to marry, but don't understand why she is being pushed at him so hard. Really dislike the Julie Walters character. Someone needs to tell her to fuck the hell off and mind her own business.

Madeline is being pushed at Ralphie because she is supposedly an heiress. But my question is -- What's an American heiress doing in India? Don't they find that suspicious? Could it be she's in India because she's not rich at all and it will take months for the English in India to discover this, during which time she hopes Ralphie will marry her?

And yes, you're right, the summer capital of the Raj was awash in unmarried English daughters of the military, the civil service and the lower aristocracy looking for husbands. Yet we have seen, I think, only one of them.

Julie Walters character, IRL, would never be socializing with someone of Ralphie's rank, let alone manipulating his life the way she does. She's practically the equivalent of a Kray brother's widow.

Single women didn't sleep around the way Madeline does, nor did they scream so loud during sex that everyone in the house could hear them. Especially since she's American, she would be far more discreet, because people already think she's uncivilized. An unmarried woman had way to much to lose -- pregnancy was an inevitability unless she was barren (which she wouldn't know she was unless she was trying to conceive). They had a sort of IUD in those days, but it was not only inconsistent, it was dangerous.

Married women, on the other hand, slept around quite a bit. It didn't matter if they got pregnant, since they had a husband who could pretend to be the father. The summer capital of the Raj was a passion pit among married people. They were all screwing around.

The idea that it was so hot in an interrogation room that an officer and his assistant had to leave is ridiculous. Simla is in the foothills of the Himalayas, which is exactly why the British escaped there every summer. It has a cool climate.

And they portray the Parsi Aafrin's family as relatively poor and unconnected to the Raj until the present generation, which was virtually impossible. Parsis were very small in number and all of them pretty much worked for the British for 2 centuries as businessmen and were go-betweens for the British and the rest of India. They were unhindered by religious taboos, as the Hindus and Moslems were, and they picked up English very quickly. They were not treated like other Indians. They were more western in outlook. The Aafrin character is portrayed as some deer-in-the-headlights, babe-in-the-woods Indian who is the equal of Hindus and Muslims. That's crazy. The British treated Parsis much better than that.

Oh, come on. First -- all these tv shows which have people putting medication in food or drink and the drugged person doesn't taste anything different. Plus, there's no medication that makes a mean SOB nice. It may make him sleepy, but it won't make him nice.

M guessing Farm Lady and the schoolteacher are going to get it on at some point in the future. Schoolteacher looks a bit Black Dahlia.

Poor Lewis from Happy Valley! Hope he gets another series,; this one didn't deliver a big paycheck for him.

Ladies just went around designing their own air raid shelters? "Everybody come to my basement! Blitz party!"

Oh god, please, Spencer's the one who stays? He's the fugliest the man on the show. Thank goodness there just happens to be an airfield and what have you, with handsome men being imported to the village.

I'm guessing the humpy RAF guy makes a pass at the Vicar's wife, but she resists him.

Well, that was a short marriage.

Why is that goodlooking doctor married to that drab little woman who looks 15 years older than him?

Yeah, the doctor's wife looks like she has two grown daughters, but Tom Stoppard's son doesn't look old and tired enough to have two grown daughters.

Why did they give him lung cancer right at the beginning of the series? Does he have other work lined up! Did he want to decide whether or not to stay on? ("Darling, it was all a mistake! They've increased my pay scale, so it turns out to be a shadow from scar tissue. I'm really fine. I'm good to go for two more seasons, so long as Showtime doesn't call!")

I kind of thought the vicar might have joined up because he was tempted by that hunky RAF guy and didn't want to fall madly in love with him.

I hope they pack Bob up real soon. He's tiresome.

I wonder if the butcher's wife will go mad because her son is gone? She didn't seem too stable to begin with.

There should be some land girls arriving for the farm. They need to bring in some more good looking RAF men.

Will the doctor's unmarried daughter become pregnant by Sir and have her short-marriage sister pretend to be the baby's mother?

I wish that the battered woman would hit that asshole upside the head with a cast iron skillet already.

It's got some pretty bad reviews in the UK

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OK, it’s Sunday night. And following in the thrill-free footsteps of Downton Abbey and Mr Selfridge, no one was expecting white-knuckle ride excitement.

But with its latest attempt to anaesthetise us as the weekend fizzles out, ITV has broken new ground in box-ticking blandness.

Strikingly redoubtable women (tick), brave boys determined to fight for their country (tick), worried mothers (tick), bucolic Britain’s rural idyll under threat (tick), a wife-beating bully to hate (tick), a cartoon villain lady of the manor (tick) and – most ­importantly – jam-making (double tick).

In this tale of how the Second World War was won, they’ve ­carefully cooked up a recipe for dramatic success. And failed.

On the plus side, after the ­frighteningly feeble first ­instalment, things can only get better. They can’t get any worse.

I keep getting the doctor's wife and the vicar's wife mixed up.

Frances preferred the more inspirational stuff. "We shall endure whatever the future throws at us," she told the gathered throng of dripping raddled hags, "for no-one understands the true cost of war better than women." Certainly it's a job getting a lipstick.

Still the battle of the cricket pitch raged on, to the disappointment of all concerned without a streaker. "Growing produce," argued Frances, "is a way for women to invest the skills they learnt in peacetime and take the lead." This is true - such skills are sadly lacking in the modern generation. Which is why I always get my 81-year-old mother to turn the soil on the allotment.

In the end they decided to wait until the end of the season before ploughing the pitch. Quite what they were going to grow in September wasn't explained.

With the issue resolved, and Frances voted in as president, the drama ended. I'm not saying it was slow but it made Lark Rise To Candleford look like Band Of Brothers.

Next week: A turnip goes missing

This show is way better than Indian Summers! What a snoozefest. Most all of the men in this one are pretty hot too. The farmer is fucking smoking.

Indian Summers is retarded. I mean that literally. The Englishwoman and the Indian guy look mentally retarded. They just stare at each other. The Englishwoman is supposed to be beautiful, I suppose, but she has eye bags that make her look totally baked. And I don't find the Indian guy attractive at all. It's like somebody took a bunch of cliches aboutwhat a good looking male face should consist of, put them all together in one package, but they don't fit.

Meanwhile, Ralphie looks half Indian, yet nobody notices! Here we have a racist, white supremacist society where pale skin is a requirement for success, yet not one of them notices how swarthy Ralphie is, how dark his eyes are. You bet they'd be wondering where he got his dark looks while his pale blonde sister flits about.

And those supposedly half-caste kids look 110% Indian.

And what was with the Indian woman and the party?

"I'm going in a silver tea gown"

"I'm not going because I have nothing to wear."

"Oh you children have made me an Indian-style dress to wear to an English party. How nice of you. I'm not going to wear it."

"Here I am at the party in a silver gown. I just got here. I'm leaving!"

Then there's the waxy, shiny ghostly countenance of Madeline who is so pale it seems like she has pernicious anemia. Both Madeline and Ralphie's sister were wearing shockingly cornflower blue contact lenses this past week, to make them look even less like real people of the 1930s Raj. I expect them to be tapping on their iPhones next week.

And wtf with the Scots? Army was a falling down drunk who didn't manage his tea plantation properly. His falling down drunk nephew shows up from Scotland to learn.....how to *not* run the tea plantation from his falling down drunk uncle? One minute Drunk Nephew is yelling at Mr Sood, accusing him of being a blackguard who swindled his uncle. A millisecond later Drunk Nephew pleasantly says, "Oh yeah, good point," when Sood reminds him that he, Drunk Nephew, came here to learn how to run a tea plantation. Drunk Nephew then seems totally onboard with Sood's plan to have him stay on as Drunk Tea Plantation Manager

How long is that back-and-forth mood swing going to go on?

Well, what did doc's wife give to the abused wife to dose her husband with?

Lithium

[quote] I'm guessing the humpy RAF guy makes a pass at the Vicar's wife, but she resists him.

The humpy RAF guy played a gay RAF pilot in a Foyle's War episode. He was in love with Foyle's son, Andrew, another RAF pilot. I thought it was an interesting episode.

If any of you is so disposed, it would be nice to know the names of the actors you're talking about in this thread. It's a little difficult looking up "humpy RAF guy" or "the farmer" on IMDB.

Thanks so much.

If the show was more compelling, we would know the character names. Then we'd know who the actors are.

But it isn't and we don't.

Thank you, Cuntabelle.

This show and Call the Midwife are ridiculous with their outing of lesbians. A woman loses her best friend for years and is terribly upset. A cast member immediately intuits that she's gay and had a lesbian relationship with the dead woman.

WTF?

I'd be terribly upset if my best friend in the world died. There's nothing sexual between me and my IRL bestie, but I'd be crying for days and in shock.

Besides, in olden times, English lesbians were always "cousins."

"She's my cousin, though we were brought up like sisters! We're very close.We decided to move in together after Mamá (or "after her mother, my Aunt Harriet") died. It saves on rent and allows us to run this dog breeding and boarding facility of ours."

R32, humpy RAF pilot who played a gay RAF pilot is Mark Umbers. Here is the Foyle's War episode with a gay theme. There is a link at imdb to download the episode from Amazon. If you don't spread it around it used to be on you.tube.

Never seen it.