lowculture.co.uk

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Prime(val) suspect

META! Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, 6.30pm

Christmas can be a traumatic time in many ways, but by far the worst experience we had to endure over the festive season was getting back to London only to find our TiFaux had steadfastly refused to record almost everything we'd asked it to - including the seasonal special of Harry Hill's TV Burp. To be looking forward to something for so long, and then to be denied, it's...well, it's not very nice, let's put it that way.

In light of which, we're extremely grateful to the sympathetic types at ITV who've seen fit to start the new series today, so at least we have new episodes to watch. Hooray! As well as all of the regular features we've come to know and love, including the pre-ad break "FIGHT!", the TV Highlight of the Week, and the random TV personality coming on at the end to sing a song, we gather we can expect a look over TV not just from the past week, but since the end of last series. Quite how they're planning to squeeze that into 30 minutes without having some kind of early-90s type moment where it's all played at lightning speed for us to rewatch later using a freeze-frame function, we're not sure. Either way, we can't wait to see what he made of The X Factor. Welcome back, Harry. Please never leave us again.

DINOSAURS! Primeval, ITV1, 7.00pm

People may be cock-a-hoop wherever you look on the internet right now over the return of Torchwood later this week, but we're just as excited about the return of slightly wonky but entirely loveable ITV sci-fi effort Primeval, which was most notable in its first series for endless gratuitous sequences of Hannah Spearritt dancing around in her underwear, and the general sense you got as a viewer that perhaps the show's "anomalies" (rips in the fabric of time) were meant to represent the gigantic plot holes that cropped up at least once per episode.

We started off sneering at it, admittedly, but we grew quite fond of it as the series went on. Sure, it had its flaws (and let's be honest, here: show us a genre series that doesn't), but it had a properly good yarn at the centre of it, which counts for more than you might think. We were left on a cliffhanger where dashing team leader Nick Cutter emerged from one of the anomalies only to discover that the world he was returning to had changed, perhaps forever. Presumably we'll be picking that thread up where it dropped off, and revisiting the time-honoured themes of dinosaurs rampaging in heavily urbanised areas, and sexy scientists toting large amounts of weaponry. Ahh, good times.

1 Comments: