MovieChat Forums > Lark Rise to Candleford (2008) Discussion > So many mistakes!

So many mistakes!

posted 11 years ago by cpbanning
18 replies | jump to latest

My goodness, I've never seen a television show with so many director and editing goofs! Share your observations, please.

1) When Edmund was supposedly poaching, he stabbed himself around the appendix region. In a scene where he was running toward a barn he was holding his left side.

2) Thomas wants to form a band to march through Candleford. He was in Lark Rise teaching the children, casually dressed. Then they show him in Candleford in his uniform. The very next scene shows him in Lark Rise dressed casually again.

3) For being eight miles apart in the late 1800's, they sure spend a lot of time in each other's towns. It takes about two hours to walk eight miles and time lines do not coincide.

4) There has been some discussion on the bicycle but I noticed the difference too.

[–] 11 years ago

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[–] cpbanning 11 years ago

Geez. . .meow!! Kitty has claws! I never said I didn't like it, but the mistakes are so obvious it's very distracting.

[–] MrHogs2001 11 years ago

That's a perfectly ridiculous response. The OP didn't say he/she didn't like the show and didn't ask for your permission to keep watching it. We are all allowed to find faults in tv shows we otherwise enjoy - indeed, when we start thinking that all tv shows are perfect, it's probably then time to turn the television off!

[–] maincoonmommy 11 years ago

Exactly. I was smart enought to notice Uncle Jesse on Full House went from Jesse Cochran to Katsopolis between one episode. It was still my favorite show as a kid.

[–] pillowblue 11 years ago

This may not be really a mistake, but I thought the distance between the two towns, eight miles, should have been less. everyone is hopping back and forth in no time. I realize that these were past times, but a sixteen mile journey even then would be some serious travel.

[–] kristoffer-holmquist 11 years ago

Agreed! People seem able to walk from A to B and back in no time at all.

[–] 11 years ago

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[–] monica-den-hartog-122-551118 11 years ago

What bothers me more is s02ep01. If you shoot Christmas in the middle of summer, DON'T GO OUTSIDE SO OFTEN. Althought I do like the series, I've never seen an episode as ridiculous as this one. Why go in to the woods, time and time again, where there are all these trees with heavy voliage. And to rap things up, at the end, start the shot, straight up into those lovely green trees! Someone should have a serious talk with that director!

[–] beardouk 10 years ago

The thing that got me were Julia Sawalha's botoxed lips.

[–] Helena727 9 years ago

I doubt that she's had plastic surgery. For one thing, her lips have always been full -- look at pix of her in Press Gang. Also, there are plenty of daylight closeups in LRTC in which you can see lines in her face and the gentle overall slackening that's consistent with her age -- and no one is going to get her lips plumped but leave lines around her eyes or on her forehead. Finally, she has a New Age (for lack of a better term) outlook, and that's incompatible with having plastic surgery.

She's a beautiful woman, and it's wonderful to see a beautiful actress who isn't petrified of looking like an adult, lines and all.

And FTR, Botox is not used to plump up lips. It paralyzes muscles, so it's injected into the forehead to minimize muscle movement and thus prevent the worsening (or start) of wrinkles. People who want fuller lips get plumping agents injected, not Botox. (It's sometimes injected into the muscles around the mouth, but it isn't a lip plumper.)

"All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people."

[–] Helena727 9 years ago

... If you shoot Christmas in the middle of summer, DON'T GO OUTSIDE SO OFTEN. ... Why go in to the woods, time and time again, where there are all these trees with heavy voliage. And to rap things up, at the end, start the shot, straight up into those lovely green trees!

Many parts of England are warmish, with lots of green foliage, in December. I lived in London for a year and was surprised by this. For ex., right now it's 31 degrees in the US city where I live (and I'm in the temperate zone) but 47 degrees in Bicester, a city near where Lark Rise was set.

"All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people."

[–] calmeilles 10 years ago

There is a fundamental flaw running right through this and that is precisely what time it is supposed to be set in.

First Flora Thomspson wrote around 1900 of a time 40 years before. So that should be 1860.

But in the episode where the woven panel of Adam and Eve is discovered a paper dated 1843 is said to be 40 years before which would make it 1883.

Then there is an election for the "Parish" council... which would not have happened before 1894. Yet the Act that introduced elections also allowed all women to vote yet in the program it is claimed that only property owning, rate paying women were to vote.

Then there is the matter of wages which are all far too low even for the earliest of those dates. Lilly says that as a field hand she can earn 5 shillings a weekly yet by 1850 she should have been earning double that and the men half again as much. Further some good are clearly undervalued; a pair of wrought iron for £20 would have been rough work indeed. The finished items, with gilding no less, might more reasonably have been charged at ten times the sum.

Finally there is Dorcas Lane persuading the parish council (that would not have existed before 1894) to set rent for any houses built on their land at a shilling a month when the meanest one up, one down back to back would at minimum be five shillings a week.

It's all over the place and entirely without excuse because Thompson does not get these sorts of details wrong in her text. This is down to the incompetence of the script writers.

[–] Helena727 9 years ago

You're right that it's all over the place. Ep 1-9, with the Adam and Eve tapestry wrapped in an 1843 newspaper, refers to the paper being "more than 40 years" old.

Ep 2-11 is "dated" 1895. (When repairing a wall, Robert finds a slip of paper, dated 1795, and coin from a previous stone mason; when he inserts his paper and coin for the next mason, his is dated 1895.) That might address your concern about the parish council, but I agree that it's all over the place and that the writers should have had dates nailed down when they were sketching out the seasons, bc even 10 years (1885? 1895?) makes a difference in fashion, laws, politics, attitudes.

About this:

Yet the Act that introduced elections also allowed all women to vote yet in the program it is claimed that only property owning, rate paying women were to vote.

Are you sure? Downton makes the point that Lady Edith can't vote because she's not a property-owner, and I'm pretty sure that ep is set in 1920 (I think a news item about Tennessee's ratification of the XIXth Amendment sparked her comment). No disrespect intended in asking.

The rent: I was very puzzled about rent being only 1 shilling/month for those particular houses; it seemed unbelievably low, even as a version of subsidized housing for the poor, considering that the Timmons family's windfall of 7 pounds covered a few months' rent on their extremely modest home. Seemed to me that the writers slipped up with the former.

So, yes, many problems. Really sloppy/lazy writing, which is unacceptable when people are paid as well as these writers and producers are.

"All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people."

[–] GladtobeGrey 9 years ago

Flora Thompson, born 1876, wrote the first Lark Rise book in the 1930s and it was published in 1938 not 1900 (althouh she did published short stories prior to this). The period of the series is therefore correct being the 1890s which is when the real Flora was a young woman working in the post office.

[–] Helena727 9 years ago

1) When Edmund was supposedly poaching, he stabbed himself around the appendix region. In a scene where he was running toward a barn he was holding his left side.

Yes -- and then he's IN the barn, clutching his right side, with the bloody stain on the right side, whereas it was on the left when he was walking toward the barn. Insane that nobody was careful about this.

Same ep: In Dorcas's kitchen, people are talking about the tapestry, and Laura pronounces "seamstresses" as "seemstresses" (with a long E, as we say it today), but Zillah refers to "semstresses" (short E), which is also how the word is pronounced in The House of Eliott (set in the 1920s). You'd think the director would have noticed this during rehearsal!

"All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people."

[–] Ms_Q 9 years ago

Zillah was a much older country woman; I believe that it is implied at one point that she is illiterate. Laura is a much younger and more educated woman. They could have pronounced it differently.

[–] SnapCrackledThePop 8 years ago

The 8 miles difference annoyed me to no end. They walked back in forth like it was nothing, but if Caroline truly made this journey as much as shown shed not be so overweight.

[–] jarrodmcdonald-1 7 years ago

They walked back in forth like it was nothing, but if Caroline truly made this journey as much as shown shed not be so overweight.

In one episode, she says she can walk back to Lark Rise or catch another ride with a milk wagon. So they didn't always walk the entire way.