I like effort, I like clever, and clever effort is on full display in the brilliant on-air promo of M-Net for the "Best of British cinema" festival on M-Net Movies.
Because the promo relies on characters with British accents speaking, and talking about tea, the wonderful promo hides the fact that somebody - or possibly a few people - had to sit and watch and watch and watch possibly countless hours of movies to "scan" for quotes, sentences, visual gestures and appropriate thematic elements all related to tea.
Where you can fast forward through a movie to scan for visual clips, you can't fast forward when you have to hear and listen for actual words. You have to sit and watch it in real-time to hear it - and that's where the amazing hard work came in to have produced this terrific piece of television promotion work.
The "Best of British cinema" promo is funny, inventive and sheer genius. This wonderful bit of television I'm told by M-Net Movies when I enquired about it, was made by Clearwater.
I absolutely love it that somebody thought it worth the trouble. I love the painstaking work that went into it. I love the superbly clever editing, the flow, the structure, the quotey Brit titbits and the promo title card it ends with (above) (look - it's the queen right at the top!)
It's astounding, amazing and very hard work which few casual viewers of the promo would realize. And of course it follows after the clever conceptualisation someone had to come up with in the first place.
"Each of the Sunday night blockbuster movies have a British element," M-Net Movies tells me - Contraband, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Total Recall. "However, primarily the festival loves on M-Net Movies Showcase (DStv 108) and includes the following movies:
Franklyn, Einstein and Eddington, Layer Cake, Age of Heroes, Eliminate Archie Cookson, United, Attack the Block, Tinker Taylor, Soldier Spy, Ripper Street (the BBC mini-series), The Reckoning, Anonymous, Kisses, Big Fish, My Life So Far, Snatch, The Life of David Gale, I am Slave, Closer, The English Patient, Tamara Drewe, Hemingway & Gelhorn, A Good Woman, The Iron Lady, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, London Boulevard, The Debt, Never Let Me Go, Teaching Mrs. Tingle, Killer Elite, The Young Americans, Arthur (2011), The Reader and The Tailor of Panama.
