So, here’s the deal: Part of me always wanted to save the best Cookson for last. However, the moment comes in your life when you realize you are just never going to make it through A Dinner of Herbs, and if I waited for that to happen before I did The Moth, this entry would […]
Welcome to another edition of the infrequent and grainy Catherine Cookson Experience, in which I try to explain why, in the mid-1990s, the BBC lost its marbles and decided to film as many of these low-budget potboilers as they possibly could before some enormous sky-clock ran out (which is as good an explanation as any […]
I fell off the wagon about these in a major way, didn’t I? And in the home stretch! Shame on me. For those who are new since my last one (welcome!), a bit about the Catherine Cookson Experience. Catherine Cookson, author of historical potboilers, enjoyed a magnificent heyday between about 1995 and 1997, in which […]
Wow, that was kind of a long hiatus! (I made the last one in 1996, it looks like.) But I have my act together now, and the time has come for another Catherine Cookson Experience! Today’s is different from most of the others, because I genuinely love this one. It is a pulpy mess, and […]
Briefly, for newcomers: Catherine Cookson wrote some hysterically funny romance-y novels back in the day. For some reason, from about 1994 through 1998, the BBC went CRAZY for them and adapted about a hundred and eighty of them into miniseries. From time to time, I like to recap them, because they’re hilarious. You can find […]
Welcome back to the Catherine Cookson Experience! This week we get to Tilly Trotter, in which the lead actress can actually act, the lead actor can actually act, and they have chemistry, which automatically makes this better than most Cooksons. Unfortunately, the entire first half is “Some guy assaults Tilly,” which is tedious and gets […]