...and I'll actually be able to get through an episode.
I don't agree with everything he says, but that doesn't bother me -- he's taking us on his journey, after all -- but my blood pressure won't allow me to sit through more than 10 minutes of that grating, ever-upticking narration.
BTW, have we settled on a word to describe the "questioning" aspect of his phrasing? I said upticking, but there must be a better word.
Upticking is perfect!
With this series, subtitles are our friend. If you can get them (thankfully on Turner Classic Movies, I recorded it and it had large subtitles, so I could turn off the sound of the narration and just read it.)
Otherwise, I'd not have gotten through more than 15 minutes of it. It was like fingernails on blackboard offputting.
When something is annoying sometimes you can just stick with it and become acclimatized. But for some reason, this was impossible with this guy. I found myself unable to concentrate on the content of the words because I kept waiting for that "uptick" at the end of each phrase and lost the meanings!
Reading the subtitles saved it.
With this series, subtitles are our friend. If you can get them (thankfully on Turner Classic Movies, I recorded it and it had large subtitles, so I could turn off the sound of the narration and just read it.)
Just buy the book and read it yourself then. Much easier and less trouble. I actually prefer the book to the documentary since the book is much more of a story and reading it you appreciate why only Cousins could have narrated it. It really is a personal journey through this history of film - one story in this on-going dialogue - so the author as narrator really captures the intimacy of the observations, the eccentricities and peculiarities that make it so rich and fascinating.
In fact I always read it with a mock Cousins brogue just to give it that distance; like a storybook.
It's known in linguistics as upspeak, and the narrator has one of the worst cases around. Totally annoying: pretty much spoils whatever is good about the series, rendering it unwatchable.
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