They think it’s all over…

It is now!

Yes, Part One of  ‘The Great Summer Of Sport’ has left the building.

Problem is, Part Two is almost upon us…

The Tour De France is working its way through France at the moment with Froome getting the yellow jersey (and a fine for his troubles regarding an over-enthusiastic Colombian a day or so ago) and Mark Cavendish holding onto the green jersey for his sprint efforts and stage wins.

Are we watching it? Only when it’s meal time and there’s naff all on the other channels apart from episodes of NCIS that we’ve seen at least once!

Next up is the Olympics.

When I was doing my degree in 1996, a Media Studies lecturer asked myself and fellow students whether we’d watched any of the Olympics. It turned out that I was the only one!.

Needless to say the seminar went kind of flat at that point and our lecturer had to fill out the rest of the hour with something we could relate to given that I was the only one who had seen anything (and that was 10 minutes of mountain biking…).

Fortunately we have some DVD’s to fill in time we have when there’s so much sport on TV and so little inclination to watch it.

Mr. Holmes was Saturday night’s viewing and whilst it was slow, I found Ian McKellen to be an engaging Holmes – Caroline likes Benedict Cumberbatch’s take on the detective, but I saw the first episode and have avoided it since then.

And yes, this was shot on a Stormy Monday!

Sunday night saw us going back in time to a 1990’s series and not seen by either of us until last night. Our Friends In The North has a good ensemble cast and it’s been interesting to spot the locations used in and around Newcastle-upon-Tyne, an area I know quite well.

We’ve watched the first DVD of the three in the box and we’re going to finish it off over the next couple of nights by watching the remaining two.

As I know nothing about what’s coming in Our Friends In The North, but a little bit about what was going on in the area thanks to years of reading the papers and watching local news bulletins on either BBC Look North or Tyne Tees Television in the seventies, eighties and nineties, watching the rest of the series could be interesting.

One nice touch though was a homage to another DVD in our collection – Stormy Monday.

This was shot in familiar places on Tyneside and one scene featuring Sting and Tommy Lee Jones’ characters in Stormy Monday walking across the High Level Bridge (the middle one in the moody shot above) may have been used as a template for a scene in Our Friends In The North.

It could be that Spaced comes out during the Olympics – along with six seasons of The West Wing or the second of Young Montalbano!