GLOOMINARIES15
‘Awful lighting’ in BBC new historical drama leaves some ‘clueless’ Coq au manual.. DIY chickens guide is Covid best-seller
A MANUAL on how to rear chickens has become one of the best-selling DIY guides during the Covid crisis.
The Complete Step-by-step Guide to Keeping Chickens is now the most popular of the iconic Haynes Manuals, as the demand for live chickens has soared during the pandemic. Many households are keen to source their own eggs as they fall fowl of patchy shop stocks.
Sales of the Chicken Manual increased by 1,600% in 12 weeks over lockdown. Haynes’ legendary
VIEWERS have been left in the dark about new big-budget BBC drama The Luminaries.
Many slammed the show saying some scenes were so gloomy and poorly lit they could not see anything.
The series – adapted from Eleanor Catton’s 2013 Booker-winning historical epic – is airing on BBC1.
It was watched by an average live audience of 5.3 million – the second highest launch for a BBC drama so far this year after The Salisbury Poisonings.
Bond actress Eva Green, Eve Hewson and Himesh Patel star in the adventure mystery set during New Zealand’s gold rush period in the 1860s.
Viewer Anna Chen said: “Ironic that a telly show called The Luminaries starts off so dark and shadowy that you can’t make out what’s happening.”
Jil Fairclough said: “It is muffled, dark and... don’t have a clue what’s going on.”
Veronica Kelly said: “I’ll stick with it but getting bored with muddled timelines (can’t we just have a beginning, middle and end) and awful lighting.”
Rakshita Patel said she would have “appreciated better lighting throughout so you could actually SEE what was going on in key scenes”.
The issue of lighting is not new for the BBC. In 2015, it came under fire for their adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.
Director Peter Kosminksy used lowlight cameras, with Mantel saying the candlelight helped put actors into the “Tudor frame of mind”.
The Luminaries director has previously said the lighting is deliberate and adds a “sense of mystery”.
Claire Mccarthy explained: “We wanted a kind of burnished golden world.
“Not only did we have to research how gold could be filmed... but also just the way we would light largely through flame, candlelight and natural light.” workshop manuals offer detailed instructions on things such as car and motorcycle repairs. The firm’s second best-selling guide is now the Haynes Bike Book, as commuters try to avoid public transport.
Guides for vans are also popular, as home deliveries are on the rise. Jeremy Yates-round, of Haynes, said: “We expect interest in our manuals to continue to rise as people start to seek ways to become more self-sufficient or learn something new at home.”