Posted by Bonnie on 30 July 2009 at
12:00
The set-up behind this British comedy is far from new: a freak lightning strike results in conspiracy theorist and slacker Danny Reed (Martin Freeman, the long-suffering Tim from The Office), switching lives with a glamour-puss journalist Veronica Burton (Rachael Stirling).
The details may have been made more contemporary but the device is as old as storytelling itself. Yet despite the odds, this manages to breathe some life into what could have been a tired pastiche.
When we meet Danny, he's ear-bashing an unfortunate supermarket customer about the environmental damage she is likely to trigger by buying a particular product. He lives in a shabby bedsit and, apart from one co-worker, has few friends prepared to put up with his incessant raves against the military industrial complex.
The "switcheroo" is functional rather than dramatic and introduces Veronica emerging from a coma in hospital and realising some significant differences in her physical make-up.
Wisely, writer David Allison sidesteps some of the more predictable gags about Veronica behaving like a slovenly, belching man, the challenges of walking in heels and the new-found thrill of feeling herself up, focusing instead on how the rejuvenated Veronica negotiates the trials of a woman's world.
With the help of the new voice inside her head, she begins to see things differently. She realises her doting boyfriend, Jay (Paterson Joseph), seems even more solicitous when she's compliant and vulnerable than when she's lashing out or not behaving according to his expectations. While some gags don't know where they're going — the scene where Veronica finds her vibrator, for example — it manages to hit the occasional observational bull's-eye.
When Veronica turns up at work with lofty expectations of her job — her byline is at least as large as the headlines of the articles she writes — she discovers that her round consists of writing horoscopes and reviews of lipstick.
Freeman and Stirling (she's the daughter of actress Diana Rigg) are comfortable in their credibility-stretched roles. The ending suggests that the remaining three episodes may indeed blossom into an unlikely love story.
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Posted by Bonnie on 23 July 2009 at
11:33
All I seem to be doing at the moment is adding Boy Meets Girl reviews to the site! After this, I'll have some interviews and interesting bits and pieces of news, plus some photos to put up. Anyway, here are the rest of the reviews, from the following publications:
More tomorrow…
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Posted by Bonnie on 22 July 2009 at
11:19
Just a small update this evening. I'm hoping to do a little bit of an update every evening until the site is completely updated, as I won't have the chance to do a mammoth update all in one go!
We have one new interview… well, from May:
We also have a few new reviews of Boy Meets Girl from some of the major publications:
I'll be back tomorrow, probably with more articles, and will be adding some new pics towards the end of the week or over the weekend. 
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Posted by Bonnie on 21 July 2009 at
08:36
I have just upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, the content management system we use here on the site. You may notice a few minor changes if you're a regular visitor, but on the whole, everything should work as it did before.
Please comment if you spot any errors or have trouble accessing anything.
I'm planning some updates for the coming week, so stay tuned, and thank you for your patience.
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Posted by Bonnie on 18 July 2009 at
12:00
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's Apollo and the Continents is probably a sketch for a large fresco ceiling at the Palazzo Clerici in Milan; the ceiling was commissioned by Antonio Giorgio Clerici to celebrate his impending marriage.
In the most elaborate and technically challenging of his installations, Haas combines filmed images projected on both walls and ceiling with real architectural elements, responding in his own terms to the spectacular, playful illusionism of a Tiepolo ceiling: "My intention has been to create the film installation as if it were designed and directed by Tiepolo himself, translating painterly trompe-l'oeil into cinematic visual effect."
On one of the walls we see Tiepolo with a young assistant in the studio. Occasionally he looks across to other walls, where models are posing for him. The models are played by the actresses Anna Walton — as a reclining Venus — and Rachael Stirling. Above, we see classical figure groups come to life as Tiepolo has visions, piece by piece, of a grand ceiling decoration in splendidly theatrical style. It is an assembly of the divinely beautiful, the strong, and the statuesque: Venus and Mars, Jupiter and Hebe, Juno, Ceres, river gods, and a host of numerous personages from classical myth and allegory.
Finally Apollo the sun god appears, hovering in the center of the whole, breathtaking ensemble that has come together over our heads. Meanwhile Tiepolo has been working on a portrait of a betrothed couple. The climax of the piece is an apotheosis in which, through the power of the artist's imagination, the couple become classical figures themselves and ascend into the heavens.
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