Festival

There is something indefinably honest about this DVD package. It's neither slick, nor portentous. It is ITSELF.

The Making Of featurette actually gives you what you want. Often, as aficionados of The Extras Thing will tell you, Behind The Scenes mini-docs are a pain in the pumpkin, because all you ever see are bored actors hanging about, while badly dressed crew people do jobs you don't understand. It's not like that here. You have genuine rehearsal scenes, where the actors screw up, or get the giggles, and you wonder how director Annie Griffin, who is American and quite serious, is going to knock them into shape. It has the feel of good-humoured chaos and that's so encouraging.

There are five deleted scenes, all of which are excellent. Actors have a terrible life. They give their all in scenes that are chopped out for reasons that have nothing to do with the brilliance of their performances and no one knows how good they were. Well, now they have a second chance and the verdict is yes, yes and yes!

Bloopers are not funny ha ha. In fact, they reinforce a fear non-actors have about acting. What happens when you are playing a scene and every time you come to THAT WORD, you get the giggles? How do you ever get past it? There are incidents of exactly that here. Again and again the actors fall apart and they have to repeat, laugh, repeat, laugh, repeat. It's wonderful!

The Development Work featurette is a mixture between the Making Of rehearsal sequence and the Deleteds (only longer). There are two scenes, one of which is the interview for Radio Scotland between Daniella Nardini and Stephen Mangan, where Stephen's character is being foul and obnoxious. It looks like a dry run, not the real thing, ad libbing.

Bagpipes and Cornetas proves to be the longest of the Extras and, despite a prejudice against How The Music Was Won items on DVDs, it is great. Griffin and producer Chris Young and composer Jim Sutherland go to Spain to work with the amateur Tres Caidas Band that play squashed trumpets (cornetas?) and, at their peak, are 100 strong. They are going to play with The Drambuie Band from Pitlochery, who arrive a day later, wearing kilts and being stubbornly Scottish. How these two bands are forced to fit together, even play together, is quite a feat and if Sutherland wasn't such a big bloke and bossy (in a nice way), there might have been a bit of bargy, if not multilingual argy.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable, what-you-see-is-what-you-get DVD goody bundle. You come out at the end liking Nardini even more than you did before and wondering whether it was a good thing, or SO annoying, that Mangan said he found it "liberating to be rude to people."