Mother Russia

To all the many Russian bots and readers out there, I know you're up to something but I'll let that pass. It was a slog at times but we made it through series one of Ekaterina, a clunky Russian biopic of Catherine the Great's rise and rise (I presume). With stilted dialogue, odd production values, feeble sub titles and strange transitional scenes (to move the story along I guess, hand written notes were also a favourite device to progress the tedium). It was a guilty pleasure of an experience. In dramatic terms it could have been covered easily in two one hour episodes, Russia managed to stretch it out to ten. But in those ten there was little or no sex and violence (only by implication) and no dramatic battle footage, it was a 50s BBC drama but shot in colour and with a 50s budget. It's there, residing in Amazon Prime like a strange Soviet ruin, a relic of a golden age that never existed and you can explore it at your leisure, don't blame me.