The Life & Times Of… Foster & Allen
Picture: C
Sound: C+ Extras: D Main Program: C-
One of the most bizarre music shows we have seen in a
while is a strange public television co-production called The Life &
Times Of… Foster & Allen, which tries to match a strange hybrid of
Irish and Country music with some of the strangest taped footage meant to match
music since the Scopatones of the 1950s and 1960s, early pre-Music Videos that
were as natural as vinyl.
The location shooting is just so fake looking, and this is
of Ireland!!! Something is wrong with
that, and it has to do more with the problem of the analog PAL converting badly
to NTSC. The people in each “music”
segment is so badly staged that you wonder if the producers had ever seen a Video. Had they ever seen a Musical? Do they watch TV? Is this the first time they handled a camera?
To make matters worse, the songs are often a wreck and the
few known ones are done very flatly and badly.
The “chestnuts” include:
1) Everything
Is Beautiful
2)
Sweet Forget Me Not
3)
Don’t Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes
4)
Among The Wicklow Hills
5)
The Gypsy Rover
6)
A Mothers Way
7)
Born To Be With You
8)
Galway Bay
9)
Mursheen Durkin
10)
Lonely But
Only For You
11)
Lord Of The
Dance
12)
If I Had My
Life To Live Over
13)
You Stand
Alone
14)
Cottage In
The Country
15)
Jigs: The
Knights Of St. Patrick; The Irish Washer Woman
16)
Still
17)
Wabash
Cannonball
18)
Danny Boy
19)
One Hundred
Children
20)
Partners In
Rhyme
The acting is really bad where is surfaces. The music is ultimately worse, with the
songs sounding phony and overproduced, which have nothing to do with the simple
stereo of the Dolby Digital 2.0 encoding for a change. Track 16 is not The Commodores classic, but
that would have been a riot if it were.
If you must hear Irish music at any cost, just grab some Riverdance, or
really do it right and buy a DVD of The Chieftains. There are no extras here, because let’s face it, enough is
enough!
- Nicholas Sheffo
