Offer of the week from the always-interesting DVD firm Network is One Summer, a series from 1983 which was written by Willy Russell and stars – as you can see from the picture – a young David Morrissey.

I’ll be honest : I don’t know anything at all about the series (though it’s clearly got a pretty good pedigree) – what really caught my attention was the quote from the Daily Mirror which is reproduced at the bottom of the DVD cover:

“David Morrissey and Spencer Leigh are most beguiling.”

I’m more than willing to believe this is the case, but it’s almost impossible to imagine this sort of turn of phrase appearing in a TV review in the Mirror nowadays, isn’t it ?

Assuming that quote’s contemporaneous with the series’s original broadcast date, I find myself somewhat amazed that in 26 years, the Mirror‘s writing style has changed from sounding like a character from one of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories to… well, sounding how I suspect characters will sound in Guy Ritchie’s forthcoming Sherlock Holmes film*.

*This comment is, I realise, the very embodiment of prejudice; however, the idea of a re-imagining of the Holmes canon really does smack of a paucity of originality. Intead of ‘re-imagining’ or otherwise riding the creative coat-tails, how about ‘creating’, or even plain old ‘imagining’ new characters?