Last night we watched the last two episodes of The West Wing. I was streaming with tears throughout the last episode – not because anything really bad happens but just because of the moving storylines and acting.

It’s sad that it’s over because I think The West Wing is probably the most consistently best written, acted, and made TV series I’ve seen.

There’s a new series starting soon called Studio 60 that’s by the same people, and stars Matt Perry (who was brilliant in his few appearances in West Wing) and the ace Bradley Whitford. We saw a trailer for it last night and it looks like the actor who played Danny in West Wing is also in there, which is good news. So fingers-crossed that it’s as good a series.

And if you haven’t seen The West Wing, you really should. But make sure you start from the beginning and concentrate or you won’t have a clue what’s going on!

Woo-hoo! Tales of the City is back!!!

I saw on Amazon that there’s a new Armistead Maupin book called Michael Tolliver Lives. Sadly, I was a little too late to catch Maupin’s tour of the UK which finished last week. Doh!

I’ve read the Tales of the City series twice through now at least. Each time, they’ve got more and more addictive as I (laughing and crying) went, so that when I reached the end of Sure of You (the 6th and, until now, final book) I really did miss the wonderfully real characters…Michael, Mona, DeDe, Brian, et al.

I finally got to see the lauded Helen Mirren film, The Queen, tonight. To be honest, I wasn’t that impressed.

It tells the story of the week that Diana was killed and the over-the-top public reaction to it – and rather understated reaction of the Royal Family.

I’m not really sure what the purpose of the film was meant to be but I didn’t find it that interesting really. It wasn’t all bad: the aged Queen Mum was amusing, Prince Philip insensitive to the point of being objectionable, and the Blairs-at-home (Cherie cooking fish-fingers for tea) fun.

I think the main problem for me was that the film’s been made too soon. I don’t mean that in a mawkish way. I just found it a bit too much like watching an extended Rory Bremner sketch. In 10 or 20 years from now, it’ll be an historical event that I’ll be interested to look back on. At the moment, despite being 10 years old now, watching real news footage interleved with the drama just seemed to be trying too hard to evoke the emotions in the viewer. The inquest/investigations into the deaths of Diana and Dodi are hardly in the distant past, and Tony and Cherie haven’t really grown old enough yet that you don’t spend the entire film comparing whether or not the actors look like them.

I’m not sure that I learnt that much from it that I didn’t know already – afterall, I still remember where I was that week (drugged up with antibiotics off work from my summer job after a dog bit my hand), I remember the news footage at the time, and I’ve seen the news footage and speculation since.

So, not really worth the $12.99 I paid-to-view in my hotel room (more on that later). Still, it went well with my Chinese takeaway and made a fairly relaxing evening in.

I’m not sure quite how Alan Rickman and Dustin Hoffman ended up in this strange film about a young Parisian orphan, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, who was born beneath a fish stall with an incredibly enhanced sense of smell. Hoffman is reasonably good as the (dodgily accented – Italian?) perfumier who eventually buys the young man out of slavery to teach him how to formulate commercial perfumes. Rickman is better, although he doesn’t appear until about the third act of the 147-minute film.

The film’s about how Jean-Baptiste becomes obsessed with capturing and preserving scents, in particular, the scent of beautiful women. I did find it a bit odd that he was entranced only by the scent of visually beautiful women – I’m sure there are beautiful-looking women who smell bad and vice versa…

So, anyway, it’s not easy to capture a human being’s scent and, after some trial and error, he discovers a method that works. It involves killing the woman first but this doesn’t appear to put him off his quest.

About 13 murders later, he’s finally apprehended and (returning to the scene at the start of the film) is taken to be executed. And that’s where it starts to get silly.

Up until the execution scene, which is unnecessarily long, heavy-handed, and ridiculous, the film is enjoyable and probably deserving of the four stars awarded by EmpireOnline (although, the unnecessary and rather patronising narrator does bring it closer to three stars for me).

I think it’s worth seeing, although I did hear some other people expressing their disappointment in it on leaving the cinema. I thought it was an interesting approach to see the serial killer from the serial killer’s perspective. Although, while you can feel sympathy for his background, Jean-Baptiste seems to be completely without emotion or feeling for anything except smells and you never really know what he’s thinking. The film does tension well thoughout. It also manages to evoke smells with visuals, in particular when Jean-Baptiste first goes to a market as an adult and smells the foods and spices around him.

I think it must be the really mild weather but the mice seem to be active but dozy enough for our cats to capture them. To be fair, Bailey catches mice all year round and goes through phases of bringing them home for us to throw away. Gizmo, until recently, has only been caught with frogs and worms. In the last few days, they’ve gone mad and, today and yesterday alone, they’ve each brought in at least two live field mice. Plus one dead one outside the bedroom door in the middle of the night, courtesy of Gizmo and accompanied by lots of miaowing, which wasn’t popular.