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My only foreknowledge of this big budget musical adaptation is that I've seen "The Wizard of Oz"! I've not seen the stage musical on which it was based or even heard any of the songs so viewing it was, I suppose, like setting out on my own yellow brick road of discovery, although rather like Dorothy in the original movie, I too was disappointed with the outcome.

The premise of the film is that Elphaba (crazy name!),The Wicked Witch of the West who we remember Dorothy evaporating to death in the original movie, wasn't as black (or green, I suppose), as she was painted and also that Glinda the uber-unctuous Good Witch of the North was in fact too good to be true.

Over two and a half overlong hours we're subjected to a familiar tale of a young person's "otherness" setting her apart and making her a bullying target at school, her struggle for acceptance and love, even with her own disabled half-sister who you think would be more understanding and supportive of her and finally her teaming up with Miss Goody Two Shoes, Glinda to thwart a nefarious plan concocted by that old charlatan Wizard of Oz himself, to disappear talking animals by force-mutating monkeys into having wings to turn them into some kind of living drones.

This is all interspersed with a soundtrack of modern-day songs, often set to mass-populated dance routines none of which lived long in the memory. It's an obvious remark to make but over-contrived rhymes and AI-type melodies which sounded reconfigured from the likes of "Frozen" and "The World's Greatest Showman" will not produce another "Over the Rainbow" or "We're Off to See the Wizard". It all ends with a CGI -infested chase and escape sequence which wouldn't have been out of place in a Marvel super-hero movie just when I thought they were now considered passé.

I don't want to appear an old churl but really this empty, overblown feature just didn't move me at all. I failed to see how the acting of the principals was considered worthy of Oscar nominations. It's bright and colourful, yes, but in the end none of the characters are nice, the humour is very much at teen sit-com level and the soundtrack didn't produce a single song that stayed in my head after the interminable end-titles rolled.

In short the movie just didn't fly for me and I truly hope that the "To be continued" legend at the end was an in-,joke dedication to the wonderful original movie and not, Oz-forbid, a planned sequel to what was seen here.

I've just recently read the text of Arthur Miller's "A View From The Bridge", both the one-act and two-act versions and couldn't think of a better director than Sydney Lumet to direct this movie adaptation of what is clearly the accepted two-act version. A work very much of its time, written by Miller in response to his one-time friend Elia Kazan's self-justifying, Oscar-laden "On the Waterfront", I'm reminded of the story of Miller sending a copy of the finished play to Kazan. The director presumably, feeling vindicated and forgiven by Miller for his "naming names" testimony to the HUAC, which ruined the careers and lives of a number of creative friends and associates, reputedly wired Miller back that he'd be honoured to direct it, only for Miller to have the last word by telling him he never wanted him to direct it, only for him to know what he thought of stool pigeons.

A twisted tale of toxic masculinity, it centres on New York's docklands just after the end of the war, where respected, established dock-worker Eddie Carbone lives with his wife Beatrice and pretty 17-going-on-18-year-old niece Catherine. He agrees to take into his house and find work on the docks for two Italian brothers, Marco and Rodolpho, relatives of his wife, effectively smuggling in and hiding illegal aliens who would otherwise be turned back at the border. The two men are in America to earn money to send back to their families as there's no way for them to provide for them in war-ravaged Italy. Marco is the older of the two, thick-set and dark in appearance, a solid family man who one day wants to return home, while Rodolpho is unattached, younger, fair-haired and much more open to the possibilities of putting down roots and becoming an American.

What neither of them knows is that there are underlying tensions in Eddie's household which their presence will, in the end, violently disrupt and bring to the surface resulting in a violent conclusion and tragic outcome we see in other Miller works.

We learn that Eddie hasn't had conjugal relations with his wife for some time who suspects that Catherine's flowering into womanhood may have something to do with it and when Rodolpho and Katherine start dating, Eddie's jealousy manifests itself in his ugly, prejudicial assertion that this interloper, because of his fair hair and singing and dancing somehow isn't man enough to take Katherine away from him. He insults Rodolpho by kissing him on the mouth in front of everyone and broods sullenly when he learns the couple are to marry.

Eddie's suppressed incestuous feelings for Catherine are less pronounced in the film than in the play, where at one point he passionately kisses the girl and the ending, where Marco confronts Eddie for ratting them out to the Immigration Services, plays out differently too, but in the main Lumet stays true to the text. He keeps his camera close in front of the characters, emphasising the simmering, claustrophobic atmosphere in the apartment and doesn't open the film out too much from its theatrical origins but does so just enough, especially in the climactic fish-hook fight between Eddie and Marco in the cold, rubbish-strewn street outside Eddie's apartment.

The ensemble acting was strong throughout but I was especially impressed by Maureen Stapleton as the conflicted wife and Carol Lawrence playing a character ten years younger than her actual age. One can only speculate however if Brandon had played the Eddie role although Raf Vallone nevertheless turns in a strong performance.

Less well-known and less celebrated than Kazan's Oscar winner, one suspects from this that Lumet would have stood with Ed Begley, Nick Nolte and Ian McKellen when a fawning Scorsese and De Niro presented Kazan with his Lifetime Achievement award many years later...

They say that the British national pastime, particularly amongst the media, is to build someone up and then knock them down again. The latest in that long line of crash-and-burners and subject of this hour-long investigative Channel 5 documentary, is Scots-born lingerie-tycoon Baroness Michelle Mone. She came into fortune and fame through the successful promotion of her Ultimo bra range in the early 2000's, then later married a billionaire Scottish businessman and ultimately ended up being ennobled by Prime Minister David Cameron in the UK House of Lords. Living the luxury life on her country estate and shown on the super-yacht bearing her name, she seemed to have it all, but as we've seen many times before, sometimes everything isn't enough for these people and still they want more.

The claims in this programme are that with her husband Doug Barrowman they personally benefitted to the extent of some £60 million from a hastily-arranged connection to a new-start company which was set up to provide the UK NHS service with Personal Protective Equipment at the height of the COVID Crisis in 2020 at a time when such material was in extremely short supply. Although, as the programme makes clear, this is only part of a much wider scandal, she has become the face-of-shame for the blatant profiteering practices carried out by a number of unscrupulous people who sought to take financial advantage from the pandemic which never forget killed over 100,000 people in the UK but also saw the emergency services in this country, particularly in the health service, stretched beyond their limits, putting their own health at risk trying to save lives. In the light of how they appear to have lined their own pockets, the video of them both on the steps of their mansion clapping the NHS workers for their efforts seems especially hypocritical.

Mone has now gone into hiding, absenting herself from the Lords to try to clear her name and we learn that an ongoing full government enquiry will decide if she has a case to answer but in the meantime this programme pulls no punches in its allegations of financial impropriety on her part.

Before it gets to that, it presents her almost literal rags-to-riches rise from being born in the part of Glasgow where I grew up, a district called Dennistoun, to becoming a model before having her Eureka moment over the manufacture and marketing of silicon-enhanced bras. Never shy of publicity, she used a variety of eye-catching if sometimes questionable stunts to get her brand noticed. It certainly worked for her but not at some personal cost as her first marriage broke up and whilst other ventures proved less successful, including her personal advocacy of an early bitcoin scheme, it seems that by joining her fortune to that of new husband Barrowman, her position as a member of the Conservative gentry was secure.

Of course she hasn't always enjoyed universal acclaim, particularly in her own country where support for the Conservative Party continues to lag in the doldrums, but with her title and fantastic lifestyle, her position of wealth and influence seemed untouchable. Then came the Med-Pro scandal which she's been trying to push back ever since it broke, although it has to be said, with very little apparent success. Rather like (Sir) Fred Goodwin over the 2008 global credit crunch, when he became the personification to the public of rapacious greed, plus in his case financial incompetence at the head of one of the UK's biggest banks, Mone and Barrowman now seem to personify the unacceptable face of capitalism, especially at a time of national crisis.

This programme used documentary footage documenting Mone's story, interspersed with comments by a number of talking heads passing their own judgement and comments on her actions. They only appear to have found one staunch defender for her, her life-coach, whatever that means, who seems to enjoy the same mega-rich lifestyle as his client, while lined up against her are a whole host of past insiders and outsiders in business, the media and parliament, the latter of which included former Tory minister Nadine Dorries. Arguably her biggest misstep in her own defence was her joint participation with Barrowman in a planned clear-the-air interview with the BBC's new grand inquisitor, Laura Kuenssberg which is now recognised for the car-crash it undoubtedly was. I know this, because I watched it in full when it was broadcast.

Time and that keenly anticipated government enquiry will I guess tell us just how culpable she was. At the very least, on the strength of what was shown here, she definitely seems to have a case to answer.