"On the other side of the screen, it all looks so easy." -- Kevin Flynn, 'Tron'

TV I don't much like Messian then. Huh. Last night's Prom 5 brought his L'Ascension and Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (which sounds like the spell Harry Potter uses to summon Voldemort). We've spoken before about how my tin ears can't work their drums around atonality, and here again though I could intellectually understand what the composer was attempting and I especially liked the specification that there had to be two minutes between movements allowing plenty of time for people to clear their throats, it was mostly a trial. Saint-Saens Symphony No 3 was predictably my musical highlight for the evening, with the organ and pianos dueling like the two banjos in the film Deliverance.

The camera work was pretty impressive during the BBC Four broadcast of L'Ascension, which has to be the longest live continual broadcast of an organ solo outside of Christmas. It began with a long, slow zoom in from the outer edge of the hall to the organist's box which actually must be the longest shot that has appeared on television in quite some time. A man sitting at an organ is it seems even less televisual than a piano solo, but this still managed to be a visual feast due to the director's willingness to show off the architecture of the pipes, organist Olivier Latry's fingering and the acoustic adjusters in the ceiling.

Back on the balcony (the studio's only to be utilised on BBC Two, thank goodness) Charles Hazlewood was refereeing a passive aggressive battle to be heard between his experts, composer Stevie Wishart and Gillian Moore (from the South Bank Art Centre). The routine would go something like this: Hazlewood asked Moore a question about Messian or whoever, which Moore answered in detail and at great depth, then Hazlewood turned to Wishart who attempted to offer more background but somewhere in the middle of sentence would be interrupted by Moore who then talked in some more in detail and at great depth. Wishart would be suitably perturbed and take to looking into the auditorium, at the sky, everywhere in fact but Hazlewood or Moore. This happened a few times, and throughout I was willing Wishart to interrupt back but to no avail. And the one moment when Wishart was allowed to get into a flow -- on Saint-Saens, Moore continued by repeating almost everything she'd already said. They did seem to be getting on by the climax though.

During the interval: Zeb Soames completed the introduction to an interview with conductor Myung-Whun Chung and Latry only to turn and discover them in heated conversation in French. Just at it seemed that Soames had attracted their attention, Chung began to sing. Soames allowed this to carry on for what seemed like an eternity (but was in truth probably only seconds) before stepping forward and interrupting. Chung and Latry looked at him in much the same way as two businessman striking a deal at a lunch meeting in a restaurant might after a waiter's approached them mid flow to ask them if they'd like to order desert. Soames well redeemed himself later though by offering a useful potted history of the Royal Albert's organ and working in a Tron reference -- the instrument appears on the cult film's soundtrack.

"I stooped to pick a buttercup. Why people leave buttocks lying around, I've no idea." -- Steven, "A Bit of Fry & Laurie"

TV “I’ve been watching the first series of A Bit of Fry & Laurie.”
“Have you. Have you indeed. Indeedy.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“It’s very funny.”
“And?”
”They look very young. Very young. Indeed.”
“Well it was the late eighties.”
“Ah, the Eighties. Do you know I used to have a pink shirt.”
“Did you, Jeremy.”
“My name’s not Jeremy.”
“James?”
“No.”
“Geoff?”
“No.”
“Andrew?”
“Warmer. No, but it is hilarious and hasn’t date. At all.”
”How tall?”
”What?”
”How tall?”
”No. At all.”
”Oh ha ha ha ha.”
”(?)”
”Why hasn’t it dated, Alan?”
”No, still wrong. Well it’s because they use very few contemporary references and hardly ever as the crux of the joke.”
”Like Ricky Gervais?”
”No.”
”Harry Hill?”
”No. Often they also seem rather prescient.”
”Prescient?”
”Well, at one point, Fry gives a satirical piece to camera as a politician which could as well be a speech from last week in which Gordon Brown or some other minister outline the current ills of the world.”
”Could that just be the comedian’s touching on perennial social problems and inadequacies of a government state?”
”Possibly, possibly.”
”Look, is this review going to carry on like this. I mean it’s a half decent idea to use this dialogue instead of proper paragraphs, but if the intention is for you to sound like Mr. Fry and myself as Mr. Laurie, it’s clearly failing because this bit sounds like it should be spoken like you, though less erudite.”
”True. But what you’ve touched upon is the other innovation – the generally fractured nature of their sketch comedy.”
“Go on.”
”It isn’t often that their material reaches a purposefully satisfactory conclusion. Like the Pythons they’re experimenting with the format, often interrupting a sketch before the end, either themselves in order to criticise their own words to camera or each other or through some outside influence. In one episode, an audience member starts threatening them with legal action for plagiarising his writing and it’s done well enough, at least at first, that you’re not sure if its something which actually happened on the day. Is that a long enough paragraph for you?”
”Better. Much better, Nigel.”
”It doesn’t all work. The Control and Tony spy characters haven’t quite warmed up yet and the vox pops which appear between sketch don’t go anywhere after the initial flurry and end up only being fitfully funny. But it’s just particularly refreshing to see comedy that doesn’t talk down to the viewer and assumes a certain level of intelligence.”
”So you’d recommend it then would you?”
”Yes.”
”Douglas?”
”No.”
”Arthur?”
”No.”
”Norris?”
”No.”
”Horris?”
”No.”
”Boris?”
”No.”
”Well that is your name then?”
”Rosemary.”
”That’s not very funny.”
”Well we’re not real comedians, and neither is the person typing this into his computer. Depending upon your point of view…”

"I get angry when I go without sleep." -- Christina Yang, "Grey’s Anatomy"

TV I should really hate Grey’s Anatomy, the first season of which I’ve finally managed to watch on DVD. It’s not like it’s doing new things with the medical genre, rerunning most aspects of St Elsewhere and Cardiac Arrest under private medical care, not entirely sure how much ever whether it wants to be an ensemble drama about trainee surgeons or a standard complication discovery series. For the uninitiated, it’s the story of a group of trainee surgeons in a Seattle hospital, essentially e.r. Carter’s storyline for the first five or six seasons repeated four or five times with an injection of estrogen.

I’ve never been one for guilty pleasures and I usually have zero tolerance for duff shows and this has all the hallmarks; stock characters such as the kindly department chief mixing with the nerdy intern sparring with a lathario; lapses into montage sequences sutured together with rubbish MOR, tonal collapses left right and centre as the piano swells in as a patient it told they’ll die, usually with characters acting entirely out of character in an attempt to give a scene some substance. It’s gob smacking actually that any series in the naughties can be as popular as this is supposed to be and still spend so much time delivering such predictable storylining in such a bald way, the end of season cliffhanger guessable from about two episodes in.

At the epicentre of its problems is titular character Meredith Grey, an often whiney Ally McBeal wannabe whose oh so nineties voiceovers signpost the themes of the episode in a way in much the same way as My So-Called Life but without the wit. Some of the problem is Carla Bruni-a-like Ellen Pompeo’s performance, all sighs and whispers and bizarre facial ticks but the design of the character’s on shaky ground – though her mother’s incapacity is meant to create some sympathy, she’s clearly from a privileged background and already well aware of life’s pitfalls and more importantly, despite a lapse in judgement in relation to her sexual partner, basically has her life together.

Yet, I sat through all nine episode and I can’t wait for series two. Because no matter how godawful it is in some respects, every now and then there’ll be something, a moment, a performance, a storyline such as forcing Grey to carry a penis around all shift, which makes rest worth dragging myself through. Pompeo's fellow trainees are far more interesting – Katherine Heigl’s trailer park graduate who took to underwear modeling to pay for her tuition in particular seems more like the kind of person who should be dispensing life lessons. Every time I was about to give up, an episode would open with a Nellie McKay track, or there’d be a storyline in which everyone in the hospital had to be tested for VD or a really interesting guest actor such as Dead Like Me’s Callum Blue would show up, say little but add a lot.

But more often then not, when the show’s not trying so desperately to be just another medical drama, the script can be very smart and there’s a real sense of friendship amongst the trainee doctors and some spot on performances particularly from the Heigel and the brilliant Sandra Oh who usually gets the most acerbic lines. It can be deadly funny when it wants to be, as in the final episode when the aforementioned decide to carry out an autopsy, which neither of them have really admitted to not having done before and then Oh pulls out a text book so that they can do it right. The series just needs to be careful (and you’ll know whether it managed this having probably watched more seasons than me) that as happens in a couple of later episodes in this first nine that it doesn’t highlight the patient’s records at the expense of the far more interesting regular characters. If I want that, I’ll rewatch old episodes of Casualty, especially the one about the almonds.

Elsewhere Ssshhh .... And yes, I know it was a cheap trick.

TV You might have heard the news today and oh boy it’s good. We (meaning us Doctor Who fans) knew Russell T Davies wouldn’t be around in perpetuity and although Steven Moffat taking his place as show runner and head writer was a possibility, no one was confirming anything and there was always the chance that a bean counter or someone with only a passing interest in the franchise could take over (I even feared it might be Chris Chibnell, the Fred Freiberger of this franchise until he sodded off to run Law & Order: London). That’s exactly the kind of thing that has hurt the show in the past but now we have someone who’s genuinely one of us, someone who even posts regularly to the main Doctor Who discussion board, and more importantly can write (with Bafta and Hugo awards to prove it).

There’s not one thing that Moffat’s written that I haven’t loved. Both of his main sitcoms Joking Apart and Coupling took great pleasure in subverting the format showing that even if you’re studio bound it’s no reason not to deconstruct your storytelling style and editing. In the UK at least I don’t think there’s been anything more innovative than the episode of Coupling in which the same chat up conversation was played from two different language perspectives and funny both ways around. Joking Apart managed to be tragic fantastic mixing elements of farce with a genuinely touching portrayal of a break up. But Jekyll’s recently proved he has the drama chops too but again he turned would could have been a run of the mill, murder of the week premise into something far crazier and intriguing.

His writing of Doctor Who for television also pre-dates Davies in that he scripted the Comic Relief spoof, The Curse of the Fatal Death in the late nineties. For some that was the final nail in the coffin of the franchise, at least on television but for me it was a genuinely affectionate love letter to the series that included plenty of references only us fans would get and in Hugh Grant the best Doctor we never had (and in Richard E Grant the worst Doctor we ended up with during another false dawn). But even if that didn't prove even then that he would be a worthy man to carry the torch, he also managed to name one of the characters in Coupling, Steven Taylor after an early companion from 60s during the Hartnell era.

Every episode he's written for Doctor Who has won or been nominated for the prestigious Nebula award, for a Bafta Craft or Welsh Bafta Award. That's no mean feat, and neither is the fact that Blink has been adjudged the best episode of the last series, even though it's the one that hardly features the main character who's main contribution was via a tv screen, the actor reading his part from an autocue. All of his episodes have been special, from the uplifting ending to the The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances in which the Doctor, still experiencing guilt from the destruction of his guilt finally managed to save the day ("Just this once, Rose, everybody lives!") or The Girl In The Fireplace in which he convincingly showed the Doctor falling in love with a courtesan over forty-five minutes. And all have been properly scary turning gas masks, the tick of a clock and statues into points of fear for children and adults everywhere.

None of which should draw away from what Russell’s achieved with the show. Naysayers with fandom always forget that the series wouldn’t be back and as successful as it is without his interest in it. The oft told story is that the BBC were desperate to have him working for them and when asked what would make him move to the corporation, he said ‘Doctor Who’ and that got the ball rolling. The series might have returned without him, but there can’t have been many others who would be brave enough to see how you could do it as both a re-imagining and a continuation of what’s gone before rather than a simple remake, who would notice that the best fantasy dramas often have a rich pre-existing mythological background. He's also been clever enough to know that you don't mess about with Moffat's scripts and the new showrunner's words are the only ones which Russell doesn't do a final polish on.

It might have seemed left of field for some that the writer of Queer as Folk and The Second Coming would want to try his hand at this, but on reflection he was the perfect man for the job. Without him it's doubtful that we would have had such a solid base in the first season’s lead as Chris Eccleston and the multi-tonal David Tennant following on both showing that the timelord is best portrayed in three dimensions and not the reputed one note character of the past. He somehow also noticed that it is possible to write the series with an eye to both the child and adult audiences, for the most part not alienating either demographics, and also mostly treating them as an intelligent species able to cope with quite complex storytelling imported from film.

He’s been criticised mostly for his writing and although even I can’t deny that just sometimes he lets the excessive parts of his imagination get the better of him, his love for the character and the franchise is always apparent and that he always has their best interests at heart. There’s genuine glee from Russell during some of those dvd and podcast commentaries at the ideas he’s had and the thoughts of the reaction from both the hardcore fanbase and the casuals. Last year’s return of The Master (in the episode Utopia) which managed to draw together seemingly disparate elements from throughout the series, was an amazing piece of structuring which even if you had already had the re-emergence spoiled by a tabloid was still gripping for it's sheer audacity.

So I do hope that Davies stays on-board the Tardis to pen at least one episode a year under Moffat in much the same way that Terrance Dicks kept his toe in when Robert Holmes followed him his job as script editor in the 70s. For my money, his best episodes have been the near stand alones, such as Boomtown which featured a battle between the Doctor and an alien at a dinner table and Tooth & Claw which had Queen Victoria fighting a werewolf. Both of those were apparently written in a hurry but perhaps without the mechanics of a whole season to worry about he’d be happy just to have to keep an eye on successive drafts of the one story rather than trying to deliver two or three interconnected episodes in time for the close of seasons. There’s more Doctor Who as well as other things in that imagination of his and I for one can’t wait to see if and what he writes next.

Elsewhere Ripping. Toppo. Supar.

Elsewhere Tonight's Doctor Who is posted. I can't imagine there are many other series that could rationize the hero killing twenty thousand people on purpose.

Elsewhere Torchwood gave us its best episode ever on Friday night.

“Become a fixer, not just a fixture.” -- Anthony J. D'Angelo

TV The Fixer made a promising start on ITV1 tonight. Written and directed by Ben Richards who brought us the underrated Party Animals from last year and starring Andrew Buchan from that series as a con turned hitman working apparently for the state. Also featuring Peter Mullen as his suitably reptilian boss and Tamsin Outhwaite as a kind of honey-trap whose role has entirely been defined yet, this was what tv reviews tend to describe as slip, pacey and exciting but not I'd say brilliant quite yet.

Certainly the opening shots of Buchan murdering his aunt and uncle for past indiscretions was a good start and the opening near montage set up the premise pretty well. But Buchan's flat mate and colleague Calum, played by Shameless's Jody Latham, whilst usefully set up as the most irritating bastard you're likely to meet inevitably translated into the most irritating of characters, and not in the funny way Richards has presumably intended. You have to be careful with slappable screen presences that they don't detract from everything else and my heart sunk when I realised he was going to be in every other bloody scene.

It also just lacked a gapeable moment in which everything you thought you knew was wrong. They're playing the slow burn game, the one familiar to Spooks fans in which the first episode is pleasant enough to make the viewer want to watch the following week and then to throw in the turn, a punch in the face or in that case a head in a deep fat fryer. Perhaps that's what Calum's heading for. But I hope The Fixer doesn't become too generic, simply working through a different 'hit' each week in the same way that Primeval just keeps dealing with dinosaurs.

Unaccustomed as I am to watching ITV1 though it could be just that I'm not used to the rhythms of their commercial breaks. For me they diffused the drama, adverts for car and shampoos jarring against the rather subtle character moments thrown in with the action. It is interesting though that despite being written by Richards and produced independently by Kudos I think I would still be able to tell it was an ITV show. Like the old Hollywood studio system, dramas from each of the main channels seems to have a similar 'feel' -- or am I imagining it?

Elsewhere All together now ... my surprisingly angry review of Wednesday's brilliant Torchwood.

"That's not how you pronounce my name, Adrian, " -- Christine Bleakley

TV I stopped being able to watch the mainstream of BBC Breakfast months ago. Once I've watched the 8am news headlines it's off to the 8:10 shouting match, sorry interview on Radio 4's Today. It's simply because with the exception of the sadly rarely appearing Kate Silverton, the standard of presentation is appaulling, I mean just awful. A typical example is offered by Suw who gives a blow by blow on a particularly poor interview with Dr Brian Cox on the occasion of his Horizon programme in which they completely fail to ask a single intelligent question and manage to spend much of the time off topic.

It used to be that even in this Breakfast slot there would be an attempt to entertain and educate but apparently thats no longer the imperative, and in cases such as this it doesn't seem as though a researcher has been anywhere near the presenters before the slot leaving Bill and Sian to proceed on their wits with predictable results. The contrast is pretty clear when one of the correspondents, be it weather, sport or business take over with Declan Curry in particular not afraid to ask difficult questions of whichever poor business spokesman has been sent to excuse their company's massive profits. His only missteps have been in relation to internet related companies, but then the whole of the mainstream media is still having difficult catching up to that.

A fair contrast can be found at the other end of the day. The One Show's content isn't all that different and yet Adrian and Christine manage to carry it off proceeding with wit and always seem engaged with the subject, treating it with the requisite seriousness when required. The other night when Beadle's death broke during the programme they were able to break off briefly from script to discuss the subject intelligently something BBC Breakfast always seem to find difficult, even though they're supposed to be amongst other things a news programme. Why should it be up to radio to provide intelligent discussion in the morning or should I just give it all up and listen to Chris Moyles like the rest of the country?

"It's not Mars .... or Venus....' -- the man in the video below speaking in French.

Science Watch this You Tube video and I'll see you afterwards.



Clearly I'm not going to agree with the somewhat xenophobic headline which accompanies the video, since in fact all it proves is that 58% of the people in that studio didn't know the answer to that question. Did you like me expect that the bar graph during the phone a friend would offer a hundred percent in the moon column though? It does seem extraordinary that so many people would not know the answer to what you would have thought was such an elementary science question. If I do have a theory it's that the subject wasn't covered in school because the educators assumed that the students, no matter how old they were, would already be aware. Clearly they're not and so they're happy to pass through their lives in blissful ignorance.

The shape of the solar system was covered for me in infants school, along with a round Earth and the change of the seasons. It's in English Literature lessons that I was presented with the more interesting material - that this view of our corner of the universe was not the prevailing impression for thousands of years. Pre-Gallileo, people generally followed Ptolemy in putting the Earth at the centre of the existence with the sun and moon and planets and stars revolving around us, God having placed us there to emphasis our importance. That's the view of the universe Milton used in constructing Paradise Lost (hence the teaching context). In other words not too long ago in the grand sphere of things, the man at the centre of this clip would have been considered a genius, or at least the follower of one.

What is in fact more troubling about the clip is the placement of the question. At the end, he walks away with a grand and a half's worth of Euros which means this poser wasn't dropped in the selection of warm up questions but instead after some money is safe, in other words the producers who set the questions themselves believed it to be slightly tricky, that it is the kind of thing which might stump some people. The presenter doesn't know quite what to say, since he's apparently in the minority of people in the audience who knew the right answer (unless that's just because it appeared on his screen). It's hard to imagine that happening in the UK, although it would be an interesting experiment if this same question was placed in the same position on one of our Saturday night spots just to see the reaction, a kind of cross-cultural quizzical social experiment. [clip via]

"Bloody Torchwood" -- Pensioner, 'Torchwood: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang'

Elsewhere My review of last night's Torchwood has been posted here. I won't spoil the surprise ...

Not Review 2007: Television

TV I was pleased as gluvine to able to contribute to Off The Telly's 2007 in review round-up. As usual I wrote far more text than could possibly be used, so here are the deleted scenes/unexpurgated notions:

Party Animals and the two new episodes of The Thick of It offered somewhat differing interpretations of Westminster politics, the impression being that the reality was somewhere in between. The pre-publicity for the former suggested nothing less than a bonkfest between the Houses but instead delivered a West Wing-style romantic yet intelligent drama with real heart that potentially failed to find an audience because it tried to convince the viewer that someone in the opposing party is a real human being. The latter lacked that problem by portraying everyone as equally cretinous, blissfully funny, with a career best performance from Peter Capaldi, providing some of the most quotable lines of the year – “You were like a sweaty octopus trying to unhook a bra.”. It might well have been the best comedy and it would be a tragedy if writer Armando Ianucci decides to call it a day after the conviction of first series stalwart Chris Langan.

The Peter Serafinovich Show was the little sketch comedy that could. Not quite as polished as Look Around You, Serafinovich still managed to include enough spot-on parodies of everything from Television Shopping to E! News to suggest that a magnum opus is still in the offering. Predictably, given that he was the voice of Darth Maul, the sketch of the series featured Darth Vader falling in love; but it pleasingly expected its audience to remember an Acting Masterclass with Michael Caine from the late nineties and to be a aware of the moustached shouter from daytime insurance commercials. About the only niggle was that with the repeat uncanny impressions of the unpredictable likes of Alan Alda and the nailing into the ground of jokes about various types of chatlines (‘Would you like a one-to-one with a caveman?’) you weren’t entirely sure if the whole thing was a gentle evisceration of the sketch show format as a whole, viciously pointing out its weaknesses.

Heroes was the best new genre series of the year despite the often meandering narrative and the constant drift into thudding portentousness, typified by the poetic voiceover that topped and tailed many episodes which I don’t think I ever paid attention to. If nothing was ever quite as exciting as the opening episode, with time-travelling Hiro’s exuberant scream in Time Square before discovering an upcoming apocalypse, by episode nine and the introduction of Zachary Quinto’s charismatic Sylar you were hooked by the twists, turns and surprises. Crucially unlike the increasingly stodgy Lost, creator Tim Kring was careful to provide the audience with enough answers to keep them interested and a definite impression that a masterplan is in place. Only now and then were the characters seemingly struck dumb by the needs of the plot – why wouldn’t invincible cheerleader Claire, having discovered that her biological mother is in contact with her biological father, ask what his name is !?!

Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip in contrast could never quite decide what it wanted to be, at times as political as The West Wing at others a full blooded romantic comedy which its rumoured was down to studio interference. This lack of clear tone potentially led to its downfall as did the fact that this was a sometimes drama about the making of a comedy show that wasn’t at all funny except when someone was doing an impression of Nicholas Cage or Holly Hunter because it featured topic jokes about news in a fictional universe. It was never less than thoroughly entertaining though with Matthew Perry proving that there was more to him than Chandler Bing and Sarah Poulson who’s impressed in a range of co-starring roles for years and really deserves to be in a hit one of these days. One of the best drama scenes of the year was between these two as their character’s eight year on-off romance was rolled out in mere minutes, linked by a perpetual discussion over the validity of the Bible, demonstrating that religion really shouldn’t come between two people who are in love.

The Secret Life of the Motorway was another example of what BBC Four do so well – taking a potentially uninteresting subject and rendering it fascinating. In this case it was by highlighting the human element to these otherwise grey necessities. In the first episode it was revealed that there were so many Irish immigrants working on the M1 that four priests were employed to minister to them and their families. The second offered one of the great documentary interviews of the year as two pensioners sat eating breakfast in a service station. He waxed lyrical about how much he loved going there because the staff were so friendly and all the interesting people he’d met (listing most of them) and then when she was asked what she liked about the place, his wife said sharply ‘I hate coming here’. The third introduced the political dimension, outline the bizarre plan of running motorways directly through Central London and the protest pressure which led to their cancellation.

I also have as soft spot for the latest National Lottery gameshow, Who Dares Wins. These things tend to be far too talky and a bit pants but on this occasion they’ve struck upon a brilliant premise. Carried genially by unlikely host Nick Knowles, this reverse engineers Name That Tune in a general knowledge environment with two sets of total strangers (matched at the beginning) betting on how many examples of a particular subject they or their opposition can guess. Early in the series a couple of women who looked like shopping channel survivors flummoxed a pair of cocky bespeckled students by being able to name fifteen Carry One films and to add insult to injury, mostly the obscure ones. Much of the time its impossible not to be shouting answers at the screen as you attempt to name thirteen George Clooney movies or in the case of the champions board (with fifty grand at stake) twenty-five daily newspapers, kicking yourself when they reveal the full list and you’d forgotten about Intolerable Cruelty or The Scotsman. If this was the 1980s, Addictive Games would already have brought out a version for the ZX Spectrum.

Worth it for the infuriated letters to the Radio Times, Joe’s Palace was another triumph from tv’s current best auteur Stephen Poliakoff. Always surprising – the Antique’s Roadshow interlude a particular treat – the writer/director has never been interested in giving the audience the complete story and this time it was the turn of simple Joe (a winning performance from newcomer Danny Lee Wynter) to be our eyes and ears, simplifying quite complex relationships and happenings. Some criticised for the apparent sudden injection of Holocaust fear in what was otherwise a gentle mystery, but that misunderstands the real point of the piece which like the earlier Perfect Strangers revealed that every family has its darker secrets which can inform or infuriate later generations. If Michael Gambon was predictably good, Kelly Reilly was perhaps most memorable, the sad figure in Rupert Penry-Jones’s cabinet minister’s thrall unable to find any satisfaction with life.

This was a vintage year too for Doctor Who, over the vague jitters of its second series with only the Dalek story betraying a lack of confidence. If the finale disappointed some because Tennant’s timelord was reduced to a CG character leaving little time for sparring with the newly resurrected Master (deliciously delivered by John Simm) it was the two part story Human Nature/The Family of Blood and Doctor-lite double banker Blink which both deserved instant classic status and ironically both stories were about a lack of the timelord. In the first the lonely God became a human in order to hide from the aliens of the week – not because he was scared of them, but frightened of what he himself was capable of in dealing with their threat. In the second, it was up to a contemporary girl to follow the convoluted plan of a trapped in the 60s Doctor.

Both works illustrated just how multifarious the franchise has become, with shocking enough monsters for the kids and weighty themes for adults and in the midst of that some shattering performances from the likes of Jessica Hynes and Carey Mulligan, whose Sally Sparrow is surely the best companion we might never had. Blink in particular featured some amazing dialogue (‘I have until the rain stops’ ‘I'm clever, and I'm listening. Now don't patronise me, 'cause people have died and I'm not happy. Tell me.’ ‘Gotta dash, things happening. Well, four things. Well, four things and a lizard.’ Etc.) which along with his Children In Need special confirmed that writer Steven Moffat would be a perfect show-runner should Russell T Davies decide to leave after the show’s gap year.

The second and final series of Life on Mars disappointed after embracing a formula, much of the time treading water until the fate of Sam Tyler was revealed. All of the performers did their best with the material, but all too often it would find itself in a quagmire of issues of the week (this is the one about institutional racism, about immigration, about drugs) and Tyler related tomfoolery that confused more than intrigued. The downbeat ending was still exhilarating though, riskily providing closure whilst suggesting the death of its lead character. It’ll be interesting to see how the sequel, Ashes-To-Ashes, deals with that.

What frustrated most about the Blue Peter scandals was the lack of imagination at their heart. As Mark Curry explained during a particularly heated discussion on the BBC Breakfast couch the morning after the phone-in subterfuge broke, in days gone by instead of simply wheeling in a child to pretend to be a competition winner, they would have spun it into an item, explaining how and why the phones went down. That said there have been a range of other mishaps in the show’s history including having to replace Petra and the odd tortoise, but the difference is that those didn’t come to light until years later whereas lately its been impossible to obscure anything from anyone.

"Every Christmas it's the same. I always end up playing a shepherd." - Shermy, 'A Charlie Brown Christmas'

TV Every year the Christmas Radio Times is last to appear on the news stands. This year it was published on Saturday but didn't make its way up north until at least Wednesday, which in its own way added to the excitement of discovering whether the networks had got their act together this year. There is still some very good stuff on but really I've no idea what ITV1 are thinking and overall it just seems a little bit less exciting year on year, a downward trend which can only continue. But with all the various digital stations and the extra movie reviews, the RT this year is so fat there's no way the staples are going to be able to hold the cover in place so it's bound, as usual, to fall off before new year. In the absence a new Review 2007 post (more promised soon), I thought I'd offer some recommendations -- one per day -- based on what I've seen so far (with apologies to the far more brilliant TV Cream Digest emails ...):

Saturday 22nd December, Channel 4, 16:35.
A Christmas Carol (2001)
The RT grants this a single star which may well be fair -- I haven't seen it -- but I do wish it was live action what with Nic Cage playing Jacob Marley opposite Simon Callow's Scrooge ('No, nah look Ebenasaa, hn, you reaaally need to listen to what aaahm saying now...focusss'). No the reason it's on this list is for the theme song, What If, given by one Kate Winslet who plays Belle in the movie. Frankly, I should hate every second of this, what with it being a ballad and having been written by Julian Knott and produced by Steve Mac who usually spend their time giving the likes of Westlife something to sing about from their stools. But Kate can really carry a tune and she looks absolutely yummy in the video. So actually you could bypass the film altogether and see if you can spot the promo on Freeview music channel TMF's Christmas Turkeys compilation show (which has been on twice already).

Sunday 23rd December, BBC Four, 23:20
Trade Secrets
For much of the late nineties this was a useful BBC Two schedule standby in the days when dramas used to run fifty minutes and weren't uselessly padded out to an hour. Experts in a given domestic subject (who generally looked like your auntie or uncle) would give useful hints as to how to do things around the house, what we younglings (?) tend to be called life hacks. It's great to see its return if only late on a BBC Four, which over the Christmas period, is becoming interestingly mainstream, tonight with a range of cookery programmes featuring the Two Fat Ladies and Nigella.

Christmas Eve, BBC Radio 3, 22:20
BBC Proms 2007
Radio 3 are rerunning many of this year's Proms on a nightly bases and hooray, here's the one that really sent me over the edge and made me want to listen to all of them. It's Prom 6, the one in which the BBC Singers and Tallis Scholars along with conductor Davitt Moroney reintroduced a Striggio choral work which hadn't been heard by the world for four hundred years. You can read me waxing lyrical about it here and noting my disappointment at not having recorded it but in short it’s amazing, as perfect example of polyphony as you’re likely to hear.

Christmas Day, BBC One, 18:50
Doctor Who: Voyage of the Damned
Well clearly. The facetious choice would have been not to add this to the list, selecting instead the rerun of Stargate Atlantis Five are putting out at midnight (as well as umpteen episodes of Everybody Hates Chris), but what would be the point? It’s Kylie in Doctor Who on a space Titanic. To set that into perspective, celebrity casting on the show when Kylie was recording with S/A/W looked like Ken Dodd and Hale and Pace and not in an ironic way. According to the cast list in the RT, Royal Correspondent Nick Witchell will be playing himself which seems like perfect casting especially if Charles Dance wasn’t available – let’s just hope he’s not saddled with the kind of script that Huw Edwards endured during Season Two’s episode Fear Hear – "It's much more than a torch now, it's a beacon. It's a beacon of hope and fortitude and courage. And it's a beacon of love. " Oh purlease.

Boxing Day, BBC Two, 19:00
The Terminal
Good lord there’s a lot of films on through Boxing Day. BBC One turns itself into a film channel from ten am through to tea time and all of the other channels average out at about five each – so although there’s the battle of the quality dramas after 8:30 – Ballet Shoes vs. The Old Curiosity Shop – it seems wrong not to pick something and this, despite the *** RT gives it, is as good as most things. It’s not classic Spielberg, but there’s something to be said for this edgy romantic comedy which takes place almost entirely in an airport between an refugee and someone in the service industries – it’s like Mannequin with air miles. Tom Hanks, is, well, Tom Hanks with a cod-East European accent (and a hint of Monsieur Hulot), but I do think it’s one of Catherine Zeta-Jones’s best performances and Stanley Tucci is at his most reptilian. If that’s not your bag, Galaxy Quest is on just before midnight – I wonder how they deal with the weird ratio thing at the beginning.

Thursday 27th December, BBC Four, 0:35
Omnibus
About the only Shakespeare on television this Christmas is a nightowl showing of Olivier’s Henry V with in-vision signing which might just be worth a punt to see how the little man or woman in the corner deals with iambic pentameter. I think the most attractive prospect for the day is probably this episode of Omnibus even though RT have declined to mention what it’s about. There used to be a useful equilibrium on BBCtv – Omnibus did the arts, Horizon did science and Arena did what it damn well felt like. Sadly, Omnibus is the one which hasn’t survived (although arguably Horizon hasn’t either after all the various rebrandings its endured) which is a shame because it was always consistently interesting in that way on BBC arts programmes used to be. One of BBC Four’s many strands throughout the period is about dance with various films and documentaries so it’ll more than likely have something to do with that and since Billy Elliot’s on before it, perhaps that means something about boys who do ballet.

Friday 28th December, BBC Three, 20:00
The Real Hustle: the 12 Scams of Christmas Special
Like Trade Secrets, The Real Hustle is shockingly addictive, perhaps because it relates to something which could realistically have some bearing on your life, unlike 99% of the rest of television. The trick is that it’s essentially a Candid Camera remade under the banner of information. Typical set-up: a bloke in a bar (the mark) will think he’s being chatted up by presenter (and former playboy model) Jess (clearly the honey trap). Whilst he’s salivating at the prospect of spending a night with her, one of the other two blokes Alex or Paul who also present the show will steal his wallet/his bag/his wife. And then we’ll see how it was accomplished and the mark will be shown looking slightly embarrassed and saying things like ‘I’ll be more careful in future’. Much of the time though it’s an evisceration of the general public as it demonstrates the raw stupidity that most of us spend our lives exhibiting, believing anything some total stranger tells us because they look alright. In a recently repeated episode, one of the blokes turned up at a car park in a florescent tabard carry some change and clip board, and after putting an out of order sign on the perfectly fine ticket machine and asks people to pay him instead which they duly do. After an hour he’d made three hundred pounds. Amazing.

Saturday 29th December, BBC Two, 21:30
The Funny Side of the News
This sounds like the kind of old fashioned talking heads show which went out in the early naughties. According the RT, we’ll see a ‘selection of bloopers demonstrating the many different ways in which news gaffes can occur and how the style of news presentation has changed’, and that’s the Reithian ethic right there – to entertain and inform. It highlights the appearance of Fiona Bruce and Angela Rippon which is odd considering they seem like the only two news readers in living memory who haven’t made any big mistakes live on air. As for everyone else – if BBC Breakfast’s Bill Turnbull or Susanna Reid could get through a link without a fumble, cracking some idiotic joke or looking smug it’d be a blessing. About the only presenter I can stand in the mornings when she’s on is Kate Silverton and now she’s been lost to us now to a ninety-minute slot in the evening. And much as I love Today on Radio 4, it’d be nice just once if John Humphries didn’t talk about the internet and blogging in particular as though someone had farted.

Sunday 30th December, BBC Radio 4, 12:04
The Best of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue
When I was younger than I am now and still at school, one of my English teachers gave an impassioned speech – as was his want – he often gave impassioned speeches that were generally off-topic – about a panel game on the radio which had been going for ever and was the funniest thing you’ll ever here. He then attempted to describe the rules of Mornington Crescent, the context of which failed to make an impression on this sixteen year old, whose brain was split between dealing with untranslated Chaucer and working out whether it was even worth working up a crush on Verity Jones since all the others had gone so well. Anyway, five or so years later I was driving somewhere with friend Chris and he put on a tape of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and I laughed like a drainpipe for two hours, so much so he actually swerved the car in surprise (I laugh loud). This is the best bits of the last year plus deleted scenes. Also, on Radio 3 at eight o’clock is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well which I would have recommended if I hadn’t already written most of this paragraph before spotting it. Emma Fielding, Sian Philips, Miriam Margolyes, Richard Griffiths, George Baker and Simon Russell Beale are in it and you don’t get much more RSC than that.

New Year’s Eve, Film4, 23:20
Mallrats
For a brief period there was always something to watch on the Eve as Channel 4 gave a run down of the best bits of tv from over the previous year, which was a chance to see what you’d missed (in case your wondering and I’m chuckling as I say/write this – I gave up going out on New Years Eve years ago). Now there’s pretty much nothing but movies, reruns and reruns of theme nights and a bunch of prerecorded 'as live' music shows. The limit is probably ITV’s Countdown to Midnight: Take That and Guests at the O2 Arena (the guests being the Sugababes) which we’re informed ‘includes a live countdown to the arrival of 2008’ which is about as ambiguous a phrase as these things can get (do they really expect us to believe that Gary and friends at the O2 gigging and not with their families?). Taking all that into account and the fact I’ve got The Third Man and the accompanying documentary (BBC Four) on dvd already, I think I’ll be seeing in the new year with Kevin Smith’s post-Clerks studio stumble, the underrated Mallrats which is still one of his funniest films and features one of the best opening monologues of any movie ever: ‘One time my cousin Walter got this cat stuck in his ass. True story. He bought it at our local mall, so the whole fiasco wound up on the news. It was embarrassing for my relatives and all, but the next week, he did it again. Different cat, same results, complete with another trip to the emergency room. So, I run into him a week later in the mall and he's buying another cat. And I says to him, "Jesus, Walt ! You know you're gonna get this cat stuck in your ass too. Why don't you knock it off ?" And he said to me, "Brodie, how the hell else am I supposed to get the gerbil out ?" My cousin was a weird guy.’ Wouldn’t you rather see that than Katie Melua ruining What A Wonderful World at Somerset House on BBC One?

New Year’s Day, Five, 09:00
O Thou Transcendent: the Life of Ralph Vaughn Williams
You’ve got to love Five (the channel not the defunct pop group). At one end of their schedule you can still find Disorderly Conduct featuring 'real-life car accidents and drugs raids' narrated by T2’s T-1000 Robert Patrick whilst at the other they’re seeing in 2008 with a three hour documentary about Vaughn Williams. As a recent convert to classical, I’ve learnt that the director Tony Palmer has made many successful films about composers and directed a famous series with Richard Burton playing Wagner. Probably because of its length and timeslot, Palmer has been trying to drum up a bit of interest by implying that he pitched this to the BBC a few years ago who sent him back a letter which said that this isn’t the kind of thing which fits into their vision, but they would be interested when Mr. V. Williams premieres his first work. Ho ho, except the commissioning department at the beeb has no record of the approach and Palmer wasn’t prepared to produce the letter. Either way, I’ll be there – or rather my dvd recorder will be since I’ll still be sleeping off the kryptonite condom scene from the previous selection.

Wednesday 2nd January, More4, 20:30
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Because it means that the US writer’s strike has been resolved amicably and we can all get back to the job of laughing at President Bush. It’s great that RT is still optimistically listing the show in the schedule even though there hasn’t been new episodes in weeks and More4’s been showing documentaries such as Unreported World in the gap. Since The West Wing stopped, or stopped being written by Aaron Sorkin at least, this has been my primary source of information about US politics, except for the two-ways which are hardly ever funny because the timing’s usually off – not even the mighty Dave Gorman could get those things to work. But as it stands, this boy’s not going to be returning any time soon. Still whatever More4 sees fit to replace it with will probably be infinitely more interesting than most of anything else playing during the post chrimbo hangover.

Thursday 3rd January, BBC Four, from 19:30
Irwin Allen Night
Episodes of The Time Tunnel, Lost in Space and Land of the Giants all make an appearance here, besides a documentary profile of the producer of all these shows Mr. Allen and one of his big screen opuses Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (giant rubber squid included). In the good old days when I couldn’t tell the difference and Channel 4 were stacking out their schedules with the things I think I watched every episode of all of these, even though most of them were all the same. Still there wasn’t anything more exciting at the time than suddenly seeing LiS in colour at the opening of the second series, the Jupitor ship finally taking off from one planet … only to crash land on another. Despite the appearance of the at no point having starred in Charmed Lacey Chabert, the 1998 film was a crime. Matt LeBlanc seemed to play his role as though he was playing Joey from Friends playing Major Don West and the essence of the show (Space Family Robinson) was generally ignored. A later tv movie idea which would have seen the surviving members of the cast, older, finally reaching home sounds infinitely more appealing.

Friday 4th December, Channel 4, 21:00
Greatest Comedy Catchphrases
‘Is ‘e avin’ a laff? Is ‘e avin’ a laff?’ Ricky Gervais seemed to make a rod for his own back by creating an example of something in order to be satirical about it, especially since precisely the kind of viewer he was taking the piss out of has unwittingly absorbed the thing and thrown it back in his face. It’s not mentioned in the RT's synopsis of this show but things like ‘Loadsamoney’ and ‘Don’t Mention The War’ are. I haven’t really got on with this kind of comedy for over a decade – since The Fast Show ended at least – so this sounds like utter torture. But it is on for three hours so someone’s bound to say something interesting about the phenomena and I might be able to pick up a few key phrases that I may have missed which means that when something like ‘The computers says no’ in my face I might finally have a chance to work out what the hell they’re saying and not projecting my usual blank air of blankness…

And alas no sign of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Festival television really isn't as good as it used to be is it?

"Sometimes I look in the mirror and I'm not sure it's me looking back." -- Niki, 'Heroes'

Elsewhere My review of Heroes has been posted at Off The Telly. No matter what everyone else has said, despite some slightly overripe dialogue it was a perfectly satisfying conclusion to the series. I'm really going to miss my weekly effort to guess the strength of Claire's lip gloss and why Niki is spelt with one K.

“If there was a trick, there must be a trickster.” -- Dorothy Miller Richardson

Elsewhere Now that I've wigged you out a bit -- seriously I'm alright, I probably just need to get out more -- here is something you may have missed.

"During that summer the channel broadcast one of the most beautiful documentaries it has ever funded." -- Me, below.

TV I've been meaning to mention this for at least five days. Off The Telly have updated their Channel 4 at 20 article to include the next five years. It's amazing how much the channel has changed even in the past couple of years. Goodness I miss RI:SE. At least it was unpredictable and you had something to shout at for its ineptitude in the morning. I was asked to contribute and my memorial for a very odd but lovely documentary has been posted in 2003. It had to be edited for space and so just as a special treat for you loyal reader, here is the writer's cut:

Alt.TV: The Is A True Story, 2003

Channel 4 for me has always worked best at the margins. At the edges of the property shows, dating games, imports, landmark dramas, chat shows and sitcoms, those quiet moments of magic which throw light on some unheralded part of life or the world. Their Alt TV strand, broadcast in 2003, like the later Three Minute Wonder does exactly that and some time during that summer the channel broadcast one of the most beautiful documentaries it has ever funded.

This Is A True Story was seeded on an excellent premise. The filmmakers led by Paul Berczeller wanted to investigate an urban myth surrounding the death of a young Japanese woman in North Dakota. So the story went, after watching the Coen Brother’s Oscar winning film Fargo, Takako Konishi had travelled to the state capital, Bismarck, searching for the unclaimed money which had been buried by Steve Buscemi’s character in the film (which had been shot in and around the town, called Brainerd on screen).

The town police (who had been called after Takoko had been seen wondering in the snowy wilderness just outside town) said she’d even had a map pointing out the spot where the money could be found and regardless of the protestations of the town’s people that the film was a fiction, and despite what the Coens had mischievously written in the opening caption card of the film (giving this documentary its title). Sadly, she was later found dead in some woods across the state line in Minnesota.

The resulting documentary does contain all of the elements that can be found in more lurid examples; there were head and shoulder interviews and reconstructions of Takako’s movements and a voice over filling in the narrative blanks. Except that in reconstructing the final days of this mysterious girl, Berczeller was inspired by La Jetée, Chris Marker’s 1964 film about time travel (later remade by Terry Gilliam as Twelve Monkeys) which told its story entirely in still frames. He took a music promoter, Mimi, who had more than passing resemblance to the student and had her stand in the same wintry landscape as the dead girl and in photographs with the very townspeople who had originally interacted with Takoko.

This meant that the documentary was filled with a range of atmospheric and importantly memorable images, this confused girl standing in hotel lobbies and streets and eventually woods unable to communicate well with the people surrounding her and them with her. In choosing photography over film, Berczeller created an eerie sense of really being there, following the original girl on her path of uncertain doom; the music too eskewed melodrama in favour of mellow tones so that when the inevitable moment when the Takoko’s death scene was recreated it was heartbreaking but not in a cloying way.

Arguably the piece blurred the line between television documentary and video art but as this thorough article from the filmmaker written for The Guardian at the time underlines he was not interested in simply producing a representation of the original urban myth. This was an investigation into what psychologically led this girl to travel to the US chasing this money, both by Berczeller and Mimi, who empathised with Takoko’s plight. As well as providing haunting images this was as solid a piece of 'journalism' as anything you might find in primetime or with three times the duration on the big screen.

As the film revealed, in fact, sadly her interest in Fargo was just part of the miscommunication. She’d used a word similar to the indie film whilst talking to the police who’d put two and two together and made five – that version of her story had been perpetuated by the press. The truth was that she’d originally visited Minnesota with a boyfriend, an American businessman who’d later broken up with her, and unable to cope she’d revisited one of the places of their happiest times together. The final phone call she made from her hotel in Bismarck was to him, and she’d posted a suicide note to her family in those same few days. Some might say though that the truth, flying halfway across the world to die in one of the only places she was truly happy with her ex-boyfriend is the kind of grand romantic gesture you only find in myths.

But, in revealing the truth behind this urban myth, the film gave Takoko back her dignity, something which the best documentarians should be capable of. It’s a cheap shot, but recently we’ve become rather obsessed with watercooler moments, people on television becoming punch lines passed across bar room tables, on blogs or by email, and this was the antithesis of that, taking one of those kinds of stories and revealing that beneath it all there was a once happy girl who was handed one of life’s knocks, and couldn't cope. I can't imagine there are many of us who haven't felt the same way.

"No more enjoying the Doctor Who theme tune. No more '"You Have Been Watching". No more dramatic coda following the final credit." -- Charlie Brooker

TV Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe was an absolute corker tonight. The programme opened with Victoria Coren presenting what looked like a fairly traditional BBC Four documentary about corner, absolutely seriously describing to camera the (fictional) history of corner -- so she’s standing in front of some concrete and bricks and since I’m mesmerised by Vikki so much at the best of times, particular when she’s playing late night poker, I genuinely believed that this was going to be really quite interesting documentary about corners.

Until Charlie pushed her out of the way with a ‘Get lost Coren’ and a ‘Run credits’ at which point the man was squeezed in the new horrific house style that’s invaded the BBC so that he could essentially present a tv version of this rather good old column from The Guardian. He’s absolutely correct of course -- if television credits had always been like this we wouldn’t have been able to sing along to the lyrics of Rentaghost and for that matter, the death of Ronnie Hazlehurst would not have been greeted with the kinds of obituaries we’ve seen simply because we would not have been able hear his work quite so well.

Then, as Screen Wipe drew to a close (after an equally hilarious dissection of The Secret Diary of a London Call Girl which I’ve finally remembered to record tonight, y’know for later study) Brooker said that there would be a special next week about television news and that since they’d already run the credits that he would simply dump us back into BBC Four and the next thing we saw was that blanket trailer for Radio Week which seems to have been shown after every programme on the network for the past fortnight. It was just about one of the most exciting and surprising and abrupt things I've seen on television lately.

On the one hand, this is simply falling into the hands of the television net workers who frankly seem to want to abolish credits anyway; but he’s also demonstrated that actually you do need some kind of breathing space not just between programmes but also between programmes and programme trailers. There isn’t anything worse than watching a really effective piece of drama or documentary and having your attention shattered by someone shouting at you to watch something inappropriately different. But then, I’m awaiting the moment when film companies start to throw adverts for their future wares into the credits after a film. But there we have the power to walk out and here we the ability to turn off completely scuppering their whole plan, hah-hah.

"Sometimes I look in the mirror and I'm not sure it's me looking back." -- Niki Sanders, 'Heroes'

TV One of my favourite applications is Wallpaper Master, which changes your XP wallpaper every few minutes using images from a particular folder. One of my mini-collections is interesting magazine covers and this has just popped up. It's a cover for a hoax story published by Esquire Magazine commenting on the fragile nature of celebrity by making up a new starlet called Allegra Coleman (The Guardian did something similar). This old Salon story offers the full story and the confirmation of something.



Isn't that Ali Larter from Heroes?