Oh, I know that the word ‘fuck’ and its variants goes back centuries; it’s just that it’s usually not included in period TV dramas (even though people in the mid-19th century undoubtedly said it). So it was somewhat novel to hear it in The Terror last night, and on AMC to boot, which will gleefully show any amount of…

I think was the first episode that had a warning about coarse language at the beginning, and then in the last ad break; all because Blanky said ‘What in the name of God took you so fucking long?’ With no one on Walking Dead able to say anything stronger than ‘shit’ or some variant thereof, it was kind of weird to hear…

It’s hard (for me, anyway) not to read into Crozier’s anguished ‘Jesus Christ!’ when he sees Blanky’s leg the realisation that if he (Crozier) hadn’t, in a drunken fit of anger, ordered Blanky up on deck to perform a largely useless task (surveying the ice: they’re frozen in, fer Chrissake), Blanky wouldn’t have lost…

It’s also probably due to Dickens (and Lady Jane) publicly disbelieving Rae when he returned with the news of cannibalism, and turning against him (Rae had to fight to get the reward promised to the person who brought news of Franklin and his men), that Rae is the only Arctic explorer of note who never got a…

All the stunningly bleak vistas of the gray-white sky, snow, and stone make me never want to watch a traditionally murky prestige-palette TV show again.

Goodsir’s last word or phrase - repeated twice - to Lady Silence wasn’t subtitled. Does anyone know what he said, or have any guesses? I’m going with ‘I’m sorry.’

I was a server for a few years at our local mom-and-pop restaurant, and since the customers were mostly locals who knew me and knew I was married I never had a problem with unwanted flirtation (except the 80+ guys, who loved that I called them ‘sir’ and joked with them). But on once occasion I was wearing a lower-cut…

On our fairly regular shopping trips to our nearest big city in the British Columbia interior years ago, my husband and I would take our young son, and usually go for a late lunch at the Earl’s restaurant there (casual fine dining). It was always during the lull between lunch and dinner and so pretty quiet, and the…

My maternal grandparents were Red Rose tea drinkers, and when we stayed with them over the summer at their lakeside property in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley my brother and I would play with the little figurines (mostly animals in those days; I’m talking late 1960s), which Grandma saved for us. Every now and…

Thank you - and I mean this sincerely - for reassuring me that the show sticks the landing, without giving anything away. I’m stuck with watching it weekly as it airs (how hopelessly 20th century that sounds!), and was worried, after the first three or four episodes, that something was going to wrong and the show…

Good call. If, when Hickey turned around, his mouth had been stuffed with lichen or moss, or even rocks, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised. ‘Oh, my burning feet of flame . . .’

I want to give a shout-out to whoever wrote the titles for the episodes. They’re absolutely brilliant. I was trying to figure out what ‘Horrible from Supper’ could mean, and when the phrase was used it was like a gut-punch. And Paul Ready as Goodsir in that scene was brilliant, conveying so much - understanding,…

Oh, the huge manatee!

A standout scene for me was Blanky telling FitzJames about his experience with John Ross and Fury Beach. Ian Hart is such a superb actor, and he excelled here, his quiet, steady, almost conversational tone a stark contrast to the story he’s telling. And that long pause after FitzJames asks him if he would have stove…

Aged 72 at the time, Lightfoot was certainly well-seasoned, so I guess the mistake was easily made.

Gordon Lightfoot heard on the radio as he was driving to his office one day in 2010 that he’d died, which was news to him. “Everything is good,” he told CP24. “I don’t know where it come from, it seems like a bit of a hoax. I was quite surprised to hear it myself... I feel fine.”

I was in a production of Anne of Green Gables: The Musical late last year, and half the cast came down with a horrible hacking chesty cough; the green room sounded like a tubercular ward. People were passing around anything they thought would help with the sore throats and coughs, but Fisherman’s Friend originals were…

I knew the real-life Sgt. Stadanko; my dad worked with him when they were both RCMP undercover drug cops in Vancouver in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Here Tommy Chong reminisces about Abe Snidanko, who died last August:

It’s been a long time since I read the book, so I don’t recall how heavily Simmons went on the ‘lead poisoning from the soldered food tins’ theory about what caused so many deaths among the enlisted men (who ate much of their food from the tins) but not the officers (who by and large didn’t) prior to the last known…

During the editing of the final two Panther films with Niven, the studio decided that the voice of the seriously-ill Niven was unusable, so they contacted impressionist Rich Little to study Niven’s voice and then dub him. Little recalled that he was never told that Niven was ill, just that he had a problem with his…