TV stuff

This blog is like the no. 68 bus. You wait ages for an update, then two come along in quick succession.

Ever since the last episode of Heroes, I've been unable to commit to any other series. I know it's silly, but I'm in mourning for SpongePete and his permanently furrowed brow. Actually Flying Man was more my type...

We decided that Ceej was old enough to start hiding behind the sofa, so family sat down for Dr Who on Saturday. This marks Ceej's first steps into the world of geekdom, and I'm proud to say that she enjoyed every minute. Actually, so did I. I worried about Catherine Tate, but I enjoyed her performance, and she made David Tennant work harder, which is always a good thing. Though I do wish they'd stop him changing suddenly from cute jokey Doctor to Serious Godlike Being about 40 minutes in. You can almost put a timer on it. I also liked this week's cute alien babies made out of HUMAN LARD.

BBC4 also showed the first ever Daleks episode, which had First Doctor William Hartnell playing a grumpy old man in a cardboard set. It also featured his granddaughter Susan, who I still want Russell Davies to resurrect as a bitter abandoned woman in her late forties.

I've been dipping into Mad Men, and it's a bit too glossy for me. Producers seem to be indulging in a bit of nostalgia for a time when men were men and women wore teeny skirts and giggled when they got their bottoms pinched. Nowadays when we get our bottoms pinched, we're empowered by our sexuality or something. But apparently it's different from then.

So Mad Men pre-dates The Feminine Mystique. Men wear suits and smoke and indulge in casual anti-semitism. And they sleep with their secretaries/bohemian divorced artist types. Women sit at home and bake cakes, looking desperate. Everything is very shiny and new, and even the nervous breakdowns are beautifully rendered. I know it was written by an ex Sopranos bod, but what I loved about The Sopranos was its tawdriness. Carmela's awful living room, the stupidly upholstered cars, or Paulie Walnuts' sweaters... Mad Men is a bit too artfully rendered for my liking.

One last thing. BBC4 is re-running original Batman shows on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Last week Vincent Price cracked some awful gags as Egghead; the week before Shelley Winters was Ma Baker...and was Adam West really taking it that seriously? Tune in tomorrow...

NEW TV SHOW ROUND UP

Lots of new US shows have been popping up on UK TV lately, and I’ve been trying to watch them all!

DEXTER
This is one about serial killers chasing each other round Miami. One of the serial killers is actually our protagonist and works as a forensics officer with the cops, but he was trained by his dad to only torture and dismember people, who “deserve it”, like other murderers, so that’s alright then. Also he is played by Michael C Hall (aka gay David from Six Feet Under) who is a great actor and can make himself look as creepy as hell just be lowering his eyebrows slightly, which is more than alright.

After a few weeks of perseverance, my doubts about this program (slow start, over explanatory voice over, boring subplots re other cops, over-used post Silence of the Lambs nonsense about serial killers who do incredibly complicated and contrived murders without leaving any forensic evidence to “send a message” to cops on their trail, etc etc) have been dispelled – the cat and mouse plot about Dexter and a rival serial killer is really beginning to grip, and we are frequently reminded how evil and brutal Dexter is, so we don’t get too cosy about him. As well as Hall, there are good performances from Darla-from-Angel, as his wimpy girlfriend; the nice doctor lady from Oz as a bitchy police Lieutenant; and whoever it is plays Dexter’s coltish sister.

They definitely need to cut back on the voiceover though (yes, I can tell what’s happening, thanks, I am actually watching the TV program), and also reduce the number of scenes where Dexter looks at a corpse and says “He’s sending us a message”. Gah!

DIRTY SEXY MONEY
This features the other Six Feet Under brother, sexy Peter Kraus, as a lawyer who starts work for NYC’s richestest ever family. Donald Sutherland camps it up as the patriach, and Jill Clayburgh battles botox to move her face as the matriarch. They have lots of kids too:

1)A Baldwin plays one son who wants to be a senator, but is having a secret affair with a transsexual. Props to the producers for getting what looks like an actual tranny to play the girlfriend!
2)Some other dude plays another son who is a priest with an illegitimate child. The priest is hilariously callous and evil, more of him please!
3)There is a daughter who keeps getting divorced. She used to fancy/poss slept with Peter Kraus, and who can blame her? She is quite boring though
4)There is another daughter played by Anna off the OC, who is basically a watered down version of Paris Hilton
5)There is a young son who is a party animal and wants to be a pop star. He looks a bit like a TV actor version of Jack White Stripes White. Also quite boring.

All the family have hilarious wealth related shenanigans every week, which Peter must solve, whilst also trying to work out which one of them murdered his father! Gasp! It is OK so far. Not really camp and Dynasty-esque enough yet for my liking. They need a scheming bitch character, but Jill Clayburgh is playing more of a Krystal Karrington type and the callous priest does not quite cut it. Also they need to cut cut cut the scenes with Peter’s perky 50’s housewife type wife, who has nothing to do but wrinkle her nose at Peter’s amusing ways and ask him to explain the plot to her.

MAD MEN
This one has an excuse to have vacuous 50’s housewives, as it’s set in the 50’s (Ok, 1960, which is basically the 50s anyway) and they all have inner lives and secret angst etc. It’s set in an advertising office where heavy drinking and smoking, and hair-raising racism, sexism and anti-Semitism are the order of the day. Our anti hero Don Draper is one of the ad execs, (played by Jon Hamm) but he is very repressed and secretive, never talks to his wife, and apparently faked his own death and took on a new identity at some point in his life. He doesn’t even get a voice over or scenes with a shrink a la the Sopranos, to explain himself, and it rather odd watching a series with a black hole of an unknowable character at the centre of it. (Hamm does the best he can with his acting skillz though, to let us know what he’s thinking)

Other main characters include his frustrated wife, his secretary Peggy, and Pete Campbell, the smarmy young rival for his job. All the period detail is fantastic and the characters spend a lot of time drinking mixed drinks in glamorous bars that I wish existed in real life so I could go to them. It is very much character driven rather than plot driven, and some episodes work better than others, I liked the ones about Peggy, Don, the arrival of the divorcee, and Pete Campbell, not so much the one with Don’s wife – I can’t wait til they get round to the bitchy red headed office manager and the art director who just HAS to be gay.

GOSSIP GIRL
I watched the first episode and am not yet sure whether to continue. It’s also about uber rich New Yorkers, but this time they all go to high school and like totally hate each other. There is a blonde one who used to be a drunken party girl and is now reformed, there is an evil brunette who has an excellent bitch face and used to be the blonde one’s best friend, there is her pretty boy boyfriend, who is the reason the two main ones hate each other, his rapey sarcastic friend, then there are two boring ones who go to the same school that we are probably supposed to identify with. Again, it is not as much fun as something like this ought to be, but I was amused that one girl could compose two detailed txt messages whilst simultaneously fighting off the rapey one. A la Dexter, this also has an overly intrusive voice over (supposedly from the Gossip Girl website which sends out live txt alerts about the two main girl’s sex lives and what they wear etc – oh, as if), by a girl so smug and treacly that she makes Mary Alice off Desperate Housewives sound like Moira Stewart in comparison.

TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES
More tosh! Hurrah! This one features Claire-bear’s non-gay friend from Heroes as John Connor, the slightly sulky pretty boy last hope for mankind; Lena Heady as a kinder, gentler, less stringy version of Linda Hamilton; and a cute girl with a nice line in expresionless fighting and ambivalent side long glances as their pet terminator. They have cunningly forgotten about the rubbish 3rd film and carried on straight from the second one, only now someone else is going to invent Skynet so they have to search for all these computer boffins (who all live conveniently in southern California) and kill them. Meanwhile, both the goodies and baddies have been going crazy sending troops back in time to lay plans for the war, so there are terminators and freedom fighters running round all over the place. One of them turns out to be Kyle Reese’s brother, and therefore John’s uncle – he is played by the annoying one with the earring off 90210, so I hope it is only a matter of time before Shannen Doherty and Tori Spelling appear as evil killer fembots.

THE APPRENTICE

(by Mark, with interjections by Sarah)

Hurray, another 12 weeks of toe curlingly hilarious TV to make you feel annoyed and resentful about the brightest young business branes of the day! There are the usual shots of people riding up escalators, doing their best Blue Steel looks, and clips of them saying toolish things about how ace they are at selling and stuff while the nation wonders what an International Car Trader does. Does that mean she has ads in Loot in 15 countries? One of them even uses the word “tool” in his clip, which is just asking for it, in my opinion. Another says that he can't say the word loser in case he...umm...melts or something.

We learn that Siralan has sold Amstrad (wot, no emailerphones???) but is still super rich – he is mates with Gordon Brown, woo hoo. In the intro he says that he isn’t Mary Poppins. Damn, my hopes of seeing him dance around with chimney sweeps are dashed FOREVER!!! Margaret and Nick are introduced. Margaret's hair has got whiter and her left eyebrow seems to have been paralysed in the "Oh Reaally?" position. Nick's puzzled fish pout is primed and ready to go.

It is Girls Vs Boys again. The boys are called Renaissance, after the popular historical period, and the girls are called Alpha, after the popular evangelical Christian thingy. The girls’ project leader is a plump lady with pencilled on eyebrows and a Croydon facelift called Claire, and the boys’ is a catalogue-modelesque pretty-boy called Alex, with rather 4-year-ago touselly hair and disturbingly pink lips.

For the first task, they are given £600 of wet fish and told to identify, price, and sell it at a market. They all flap about uselessly and don’t really know what they are doing, but the girls start doing it quicker than the boys and get the best pitch at Chapel Market in Islington (which, verily, is my manor). All the locals spot a bunch of numpties when they see one, and clamour round to buy underpriced fish, without giving anyone any time to price anything.

Vague impressions of the candidates:

Girls: there is a very tall ginger one! There is one who wears a weird fuschia twin set and beret ensemble all day (quirk alert!), there is another sensible Irish one (Kristina mk 2)! There is a bubbly black one! There is a pushy asian one with mad staring eyes! Um, that’s all I can remember.

Boys: there is a tall sexy rough one who looks like someone off a shaving advert, there is a really posh effete one who looks like an evil ventriloquist’s doll (Nick), there is another posh one who looks v smarmy and has weird wiggy hair (Rafe (!)), there is one with very blue eyes, there is a salt of the earth type one, there is a Greek looking one who keeps nearly crying, there is one who looks like Matt Lucas in a wig!

Highlights of the tasks:

• Nick pricing lobsters at £5 each, instead of per kilo. One nice lady even apologised for ripping them off as she ran away with her ¼ price lobsters.
• Rafe's little face when the boys went for a Ruff boy's suggested name of Renaissance instead of Rafe's, which was...ummm...I can't remember. That's how good it was
• Rafe identifying all the fish wrong
• Nick crying over his B in GCSE French.
• The boys splitting into Posh Numpties vs Barrow Boyz.
• The girls shouting at everyone who they want to help them, like a bunch of maniacs. The fishmonger ended up pointing randomly at Chapel Market just to get these screaming harpies out of his shop.
• The girls starting to sell without knowing what anything is and how much it costs.
• The girls realising they have sold ¾ of their stock, without making a profit yet.
• Greek boy selling £130 of fish in a solicitor’s office for £50

The boys make a profit of £20 on their £600 (LOL) and the girls are slightly less crap and make £120. They get to go back to their fancy factory conversion and have a nice tea cooked by a famous chef. Siralan says that in his day factories made stuff, but now they're being converted into homes for poncey Apprentice types. Go Siralan!

Nick and Rafe whinge to Siralan about how the ruff boys formed a clique and excluded the posh ones by talking about football and treating working class people as equals. They admit they cocked up but say it is Alex’s fault for not realising they were rubbish (It’s not as though I labelled a shark a hamster, says Rafe, surreally). Greek boy nearly cries as he whimpers that no one gave him nuff respect for his “selling stuff at half its value” skillz.

Alex picks Nick and Rafe for the boardroom. Nick puts on some hilarious fascist-Cartman-from-South-Park sunglasses. In the boardroom, the evil poshos do all the work for Alex as they smarm on about how they were too well educated and didn’t like football, so no one liked them. (Do they nothing about siralan at all? Have they never watched the show before??? Are they 12 years old?) Alex sensibly points out that he only just met them and it doesn’t matter who likes whom. Also that, although he is from oop north, he can actually read and write etc, and he has a 2:1 in Business Studies. Actually, I'm not surprised he kept quiet about that.

Nick is fired for his lobster pricing disaster, and also for being an insufferable little prig. Hurrah for Alex! Hurrah that we get to see Rafe be incredibly unctuous and hateful for another week.

I am already imaging the fun that Charlie Brooker and Harry Hill are going to have with this lot.

TV ROUNDUP

I too have been watching Project Catfight, though I spend most of the time feeling sad that Kelly and Ben etc, are not as entertaining and watchable as Heidi, Tim and Nina Garcia from the American version. This series, they even lost Evil Orange Welsh Goblin Julian MacDonald, whose hilariously evil put downs were always the highlight of the judging round.

The contestants are quite entertaining this time round: there are a couple of vaguely indistinguishable hoxtony looking boys, a burly straight boy (whose days are numbered after putting one model in egg shaped trousers) and an ubergay Chinese guy whose wardrobe includes both clip-on mickey mouse ears and hotpants. He was so taken by the male model in the mackintosh coat round, he sent him down the catwalk in a cut away coat and y-fronts, so his packet was proudly displayed to all and sundry.

I also like the no nonsense housewife (who is doing very well so far) and the scouser girl. To my delight, Stitch Bitch (we called her “Hate Face” chez mark) has been given the boot, after making cheap and dowdy looking clothes for the second week running. Somehow, her clothes always reminded me of things you find in BHS, where you know what they’re trying to do, but it never quite comes off and looks good. She made me feel bad after her eviction when she started crying and going on about her children. Stop humanising her, you dastardly producers!

Masterchef is now as formulaic as Scooby Doo. The judges and voiceover lady say the exact same things every night (“Geordy single mum Angie struggled in the pro kitchen round. Can she impress the judges with her plates of food?”), and contestants are now repeating the judges’ clichés back to them, going on about their “passion for food” etc. Still, it is always fun to see some arrogant city boy type get a slagging off for making beans on toast in the invention test, or to see some of the nasty looking bullshit the “experimental” contestants put together.

I enjoyed Season 1 of Weeds, but Season 2 was a great disappointment. Apparently it improved towards the end, but Sky 3 decided to show the entire 2nd half in one evening without bothering to tell anyone, so I’ll never know. All the regular adult male characters (apart from Conrad), are still intensely irritating. Please, for the love of god, write out Nancy’s brother-in-law! The plot with Nancy marrying Martin Donovan’s DEA agent is completely implausible and has written the show into a corner. Cynthia’s evil bitchiness has turned her into a dislikeable caricature, though they did seem to realise this and back pedalled furiously in later episodes. The two lead actresses still give it their all, and are very good, but the uneven scripts, plethora of annoying characters, and general air of trying too hard are killing the show.

Damages is a fun new series set in the world of high powered litigation! Exciting! Glenn Close is a ruthless uber-lawyer, determined to bring down a sharky multi-squillionaire (Ted Danson, cast very much against type) who was involved in an Enron type scandal that pillaged his employee’s pension funds and left them all destitute. Glenn takes on a shiny new baby lawyer (Rose Byrne, from 28 Weeks Later and Sunshine), though we soon discover that this is only because she knows someone who might be a potential witness. Shenanigans ensue, and we know it all ends in tears, as there are frequent flash forwards to Rose in prison, accused of murdering her painfully bland boyfriend). It is all very convoluted, with everyone backstabbing and betraying each other, to the extent that whenever a new character appears, you think “OMG, do they secretly work for Ted or Glenn?”

Glenn is fantastic in the role, which is the kind of thing she can do with her eyes closed. Even then, the writing and her timing and line deliveries are excellent, with Glenn being the mistress of the innocuously barbed passing remark. Ted is pretty good too. Rose is adequate. Her boyfriend is terrible, but I like that bald shifty guy who plays Ted’s lawyer, who used to be the sketchy prison governor in Oz. I can’t wait to see how it all turns out.

TV Dinners is still alive!!

Hello,

Yes I know we've been a bit rubbish recently, but December and November are busy months for the TV Dinners writers, what with Christmas and income tax filing deadlines and Ceej's birthday preparations...

So, here's a quick summary of what I've been watching and liking

PROJECT CATWALK
It's back! And Ben de Lisi is ANGRIER than ever! He strides around the studio, tossing pattern pieces aside and growling: "No no no no no!" at hapless blondes. We're only a couple of weeks in and we've already got a hate figure.

ANGIE: Or "Stitching Bitch" in the Sladey household owing to her resemblence to a type that patronises Sarah's favourite knitting shop and scowls disapprovingly at anybody who giggles at the idea of a knitted breast. Angie is sour, dour and only happy when she's moaning about how everybody else knows NOTHING and doesn't deserve to be on the show.

I liked Debbie Debonair, and thought she had some great ideas. Pity she didn't know one end of a sewing machine from another, and probably deserved to go in the third round. The blonde scouse girl is nice as well, and we like the sewing housewife and the Hoxton shop assistant chappy.

REAPER
What's not to like? It has Kevin Smith as a consulting producer, and Leland Palmer plays the Devil! The only problem is that it's on E4, home of the eternal Friends re-run, and our E4 reception is rubbish. Sort it out, Freeview folk!

Reaper's 'hero' is one of Kevin Smith's typical slacker shopworkers, who discovers that his parents sold his soul to the Devil. The Devil is a congenial chap, who just wants our man to pick up a few escaped souls who are wreaking havoc in this particularly unlucky small town in the US, and send them back to Eternal Damnation. You have the standard Kevin Smith characters: smart-mouthed, fatbestfriend; unfeasibly hot-and-smart girl co-worker who can also hold her beer; and Leland Palmer is the Devil. I'm telling you, it rocks like Buffy in the early Spike years.

And no, I haven't seen Spike on Torchwood. I can only go about 10 minutes with Torchwood before switching channels. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's because the whole Dr Who franchise is starting to get a bit pleased with itself. I particularly don't like the slightly messianic turn that episodes seem to be taking these days. What's wrong with just blatting daleks, and leaving the whining about how lonely it is being a god in the Tardis, eh?

Last night's episode of Masterchef was a classic of lachrymosity. Maybe the producers decided to round up all the weedy blubby ones and get them out of the way. We had tears from the woman who wanted to give it all up and open a cafe in France, serving tarts made from uncooked pastry, from the looks of it. Well, given what the French think of English food, all she'd have to do is add a few chips and a Mad Cow burger and she has a whole theme on her hands. Then Charlotte, the plucky young mum of three, served a slab of black pudding apples and leeks that looked like a bad municipal art project. The Torode said: "Yuk!" and on went the waterworks. For gods sake woman! You charmed the socks off Anton Mossiman and rustled up a lovely beef dish for him! What more do you want?

Anyway, the chiselled, unemotional Scot won, with a Cullen Skink (still have no idea what this is, other than it has leeks and cream in it, and no deep-fried Mars Bars), and something that he did with a duck and some barley. And guess what? He's in publishing...