Monday, March 17, 2008
Cooking up a storm
FOOD! Great British Menu, BBC Two, 6.30pm Labels: BBC Two, BBC2, Channel 4, food, Great British Menu, Hollyoaks, TV
Well, about bloody time. After all that schedule mucking about with Come Dine With Me and Masterchef, cookery finally returns to its rightful home of 6.30pm, with series three of Great British Menu. Whilst this series will never top the highlight of being a competition to prepare a feast for the Queen (and later being pwned by Her Maj on Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work), it is usually entertaining nonetheless.
The saga of Jake's descent continues tonight (remember when he was merely a loveable mother killer?) after Friday's suicide/child murder attempt. Is he dead, or like all bad horror movie villains, will he live to see another day? The horror movie angle Hollyoaks has adopted with this story has actually been quite effective, with several jumps and jolts along the way. What it has utterly failed to do, however, is treat mental illness or bereavement with any sympathy whatsoever. But this IS Hollyoaks so we don't know why we'd expect anything different.
By Rad :: Post link
:: 
::
0 pop-up comments
:: Discuss on messageboard
Friday, March 14, 2008
Good Sports
CHARITY! Sport Relief, BBC One, 7.00pm & 10.45pm and BBC Two, 10.00pm Labels: BBC One, BBC Two, BBC1, BBC2, charity, Jonathan Ross, Michael Parkinson, Sport Relief, Sport Relief Does The Apprentice, Strictly Come Dancing, top gear
What are your favourite TV charity marathon moments? This correspondent is torn. Would it be Comic Relief 1987 where she got to go to school dressed as a clown, which somehow meant being able to wear pyjamas, which was absolutely ace? Or ITV Telethon 1990 where Grimsby theatre group Stage One released a dreadful single, 'Power to the Pupils' in league with Jive Bunny that sold so badly every household in Grimsby ended up with at least three free copies? Or could it be Children in Need 1993 with the Doctor Who and EastEnders er, classic, crossover, Dimensions in Time? Or, you know, that time when Dawn French songged Hugh Grant? One thing it's not likely to be, though, is any Sport Relief moment.
We are veterans of the charity telly marathon here, and yet we cannot remember a single moment of any previous Sport Relief event. Other than David Walliams swimming the channel, which we are assuming was for Sport Relief. That doesn't mean we are against the idea of sport and charity collaborating. After all, we totally remember Sport Aid with its 'Everybody Wants to Run the World' theme tune. It just means this event has been less than memorable in the past.
Still, this year it seems they are pulling the stops out a bit with the telly extravaganza. Highlights include Jonathan Ross v Parky in a 'battle of the chat shows' (Wossy, obviously), Jimmy Carr hosting A Question of Sport Relief, the unlikely collaboration between Top Gear and the long dead Ground Force (that's the bit on BBC Two when the 'main' channel goes to the news), and, best of all, the climax of Sports Relief Does the Apprentice when one of the hapless men gets fired (our money is on Kelvin MacKenzie - Sralan doesn't seem so keen on former tabloid editors) and Sport Relief Does Strictly Come Dancing which includes Gemma Bissix (Dame Clare Devine/Bates) and Elaine Paige, although given that they would be in our dream line-up for Strictly proper, we have mixed feelings about them being here.
Anyway, lest we forget, this is all for a good cause - supporting a variety of projects in the UK and overseas. So don't forget to go and donate.
By Rad :: Post link
:: ::
1 pop-up comments
:: Discuss on messageboard
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
It's a nice day for a Welsh wedding
NUPTIALS! Torchwood, BBC Two, 9.00pm
We've got to hand it to Torchwood - they've set the bar sky-high this series in terms of the guest stars they can attract. We had James Marsters in the series opener, stealing the episode right out from underneath the main cast, Alan Dale a few weeks back, Richard Briers last week, but this week we think they've hit the jackpot - Nerys Hughes as Rhys's mum. Nerys Hughes! Awesome.
Also awesome: this week's episode. It's Gwen and Rhys's wedding, and it should come as no surprise to anyone who's been following their somewhat bumpy relationship that it doesn't exactly go smoothly. In any normal TV show this might mean someone marching in to stop the wedding, or the revelation of a massive ungodly secret in the middle of the ceremony, and...well, we do get both of those, pretty much, but since this is Torchwood, there's also the small matter of Gwen being inseminated with alien spawn. Cue a very knowing scene in which Gwen protests that the alien only bit her, and Owen and Jack exchange disbelieving looks, since they know only too well Gwen's habit of banging anything with a pulse, alien or otherwise. Possibly.
In a pleasant change of pace from the dark, brooding, hanging-around-on-rooftops tone of the past couple of episodes, this one's played for laughs for the most part, and it gives Eve Myles a chance to display some impressive comic chops (her reaction when Rhys reveals that Owen's been showing him how to use Torchwood's alien artifacts is priceless), as well as Nerys Hughes referring to Jack as "an American with no sense of timing or fashion" (she's clearly been following the show very closely), Tosh being cocooned with a horny best man, and Rhys punching Jack in the face. It reminds us of Buffy's better comedy episodes (interestingly, the one it reminded us of the most was season four's 'Something Blue', and this episode is called 'Something Borrowed'. Coincidence?) - for our money, it's the most entertaining episode they've done since 'They Keep Killing Suzie', and given how much we loved that episode, that's a very hearty recommendation indeed.
By Steve :: Post link
:: ::
0 pop-up comments
:: Discuss on messageboard
Friday, March 07, 2008
All white now
CONTROVERSY! Last Orders, BBC Two, 9.00pm Labels: BBC Two, BBC2, Last Orders, White Girl, White Season
Last Orders is the first in BBC Two's White Season, a series of drama
s and documentaries over the next week that look at aspects of being white and working class in Britain. This topic could well prove controversial, and there has already been a lot of heated discussion about the season ahead of anything being shown. However, with it being the Beeb and all, we expect most of the programmes will be fairly sensitive and thoughtful rather than just inflammatory. (This correspondent is also very chuffed that it is scheduled the exact week her students are looking at race in the media. Result!)
This opener, directed by the man behind September 11 documentary The Falling Man, visits the members of a working men's club in Bradford, and the image of working men's clubs always conjures up memories of Phoenix Nights for us. Any mentions of black bin bags, garlic bread or Japanese alcohol free beer will thus require a DRINK!
The remainder of the season carries on most days this week, with programmes looking at Polish immigrants, a multiracial school in Birmingham, an exploration of Enoch Powell's controversial 'Rivers of Blood' speech, a visit to multicultural Barking and, perhaps the most intriguing, White Girl, a drama about a white girl in a mostly Muslim school, which is on Monday at 9.00pm.
We know it might all be a bit heavy going when you could just watch American Idol or Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach instead, but never let it be said we don't offer you a diverse range of viewing options.
By Rad :: Post link
:: ::
0 pop-up comments
:: Discuss on messageboard
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Rimmer's Dinners
Labels: BBC Two, BBC2, Breaking into Tesco, Five, Five Life, food, Recipe for success, Simon Rimmer
CONTESCO! Breaking Into Tesco, Five Life, 9.00pm
So last week saw the finale of Masterchef (About which: Ha! Johnny made a chocolate fondant! Fool!) and new series of Celebrity Masterchef and Great British Menu are yet to begin. What, then, is telly doing to fill the foodie gap in our lives?
Well, apparently it is turning to one man, 'celebrity' (us neither) chef Simon Rimmer, who looks like the bizarre mutant lovechild of Richard O'Brien and Dominic Littlewood. This man is at the helm, of not, one, but two-count-em brand new foodie shows.
We know both of these series technically began last night (Breaking Into Tesco was on normal Five, as opposed to tonight's Five Life repeat), but as we didn't have much clue what they were about, we thought we'd wait till tonight to preview them.
Filling the gap left by The Weakest Link, which in turn is filling the gap left by Neighbours, we have Recipe for Success (and can we just remind the Beeb here that the proper allotted time for food shows is 6.30pm, not 5.15pm, or 8.30pm or anything else). This show is a bit like a low-budget version of LC-fave The Restaurant (so sadly no Maman Blanc here). Each night we see a couple trying to run a restaurant type affair and they get marked by the audience. The winning couple at the end of the week presumably go into some later stage (we kind of missed the details of the rules and the prize and all that gubbins). Anyway, it's not as classy as it's BBC stablemates (except Kitchen Criminals, it's probably a bit classier than that. Sorry Angela) but it's a bit of fun and worth tuning into if you watch Neighbours at lunchtime. Or in the evening. Or the middle of the night. Or the omnibus.
The other new show, Breaking into Tesco is actually the more exciting prospect of the two. If you can try to stomach the elements of it that feel like an extended advert for our supermarket overlords, it's actually a warm, interesting and quirky little show. The premise is that four contestants each week design a dish that they hope to get on the shelves of THAT shop. They go through various rounds, including an audience taste test, a supermarket tasting panel and a pitch to the store's product team. Along the way some of them get elimated until the last one standing goes through to a final where the winner will get their product made.
It sounds a little dull, but it genuinely isn't. It combines the competitive elements of The Apprentice with the crazy contestants of Come Dine With Me, the wacky innovations of Dragon's Den, and a little bit of Schools-programme style education. In other words, it's proper lowculture fare.
Tonight's contestants are Jolly Jenny, with her Lancashire foot (a hot pot in a pasty, basically), desperate Danni with her gluten-free-egg-free-sugar-free muffins, Jovial Jenny (#2) with her Malaysian noodle soup and Passionate Paul with his, er, cherry ravioli.
We know who wins, obviously, but they are all television gold. The only problem is that the trailer for next week basically gives away who gets to which stage of the contest, which is blatantly rubbish. Sort it out, Five. You don't get that sort of behaviour on Masterchef.
By Rad :: Post link
:: ::
0 pop-up comments
:: Discuss on messageboard
Monday, March 03, 2008
Textual identity
WORD! Murder Most Famous, BBC Two, 1.30pm Labels: BBC Three, BBC Two, Mrs In-Betweeny, murder, Murder Most Famous, transsexuals, TV
BIRD! Mrs In-Betweeny, BBC Three, 9.00pm
'They' say that everyone has a book inside them, and celebrities are apparently no exception. BBC Two gives its daytime schedule a bit of a shake every day this week with Murder Most Famous, in which "queen of the psychological thriller" (thanks Wikipedia, and wherever you got it from!) Minette Walters tutors six celebrities in the art of writing a crime fiction novel. The celebs complete daily writing assignments, research the police procedures (paperwork) behind the investigations and meet with "real criminals and victims" (presumably, if we're talking about murder, they mean the victims' families) along the way, and Minette uses her expert knowledge of the methods of murder to quite literally (not literally!) "bump off" the most mediocre writer at the end of each show.
As a species, it's fair to say that celebrities know as much about the tormented psyche and complicated psychological states of a potential murderer as anyone, so it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. How many of them will create heroes with exactly the same personality traits, haunted by the memories of the same adolescent traumas, and of exactly the same physical type (or basically the same but two inches taller) as themselves? And how many of these heroes will have names just two vowels and a consonant away from their own? The hopeful-writer roster includes Sherrie 'Soap and chat' Hewson, Angela 'Soap and Postman Pat' Griffin, Matt 'Rogue Traders and leather' Allwright, Brendan 'Strictly Come Dancing' Cole, Diarmuid 'Gardens!' Gavin and Kelvin 'Twat, former Sun editor and no stranger to creating fiction' MacKenzie, with the most promising writer at the end of the week having the opportunity for their crime novel to be published by PanMacmillan as a 'Quick Read' (don't pull that face, they're busy people) for World Book Day. Authorly good!
Over on BBC Three (future! modern!) there's another one of those hour-long drama pilots that may or may not spawn a series - we simply DO NOT KNOW - with ridiculously talented TV goddess Amelia 'Coronation Street, Brass Eye, Big Train, Jam, I'm Alan Partridge and State of Play, amongst many others, and currently doing a very good job as Alex Drake's mother in Ashes to Ashes as well, thank you very much for asking' Bullmore starring as the uncle-turned-aunt-turned-saviour of the recently-orphaned Winslow children as they struggle to cope with the remnants of their embarrassing family in the aftermath of their parents' deaths.
The initial signs for Mrs In-Betweeny look promising, with other welcome and female names in the cast list including Rebekah 'Pulling' Staton, Adjoa 'Oooh, lots of things, but mainly Casualty and Doctor Who' Andoh and Lisa 'We still haven't forgotten she was in Grange Hill' Hammond. Most thrillingly of all, it's written by Caleb Ranson, creator of ITV's wonderful, hugely-underrated and ill-fated soaptacular gem Night and Day. Obviously by those standards this would appear to be pretty normal fare, but when you've had a lengthy spell working with ghosts, Geishas, time-stopping strangers and virginity fairies, sometimes gender realignment, cosmetically-enhanced grannies and death by falling frozen urine are as good as a rest.
By Nick :: Post link
:: ::
0 pop-up comments
:: Discuss on messageboard
Thursday, February 28, 2008
It doesn't get any tougher than this...
POSSIBLE SWIZZ! Masterchef Final, BBC Two, 8.00pm Labels: BBC Two, BBC2, food, Masterchef, TV
Oh Masterchef, we love you very much. We love the calamitous chocolate fondants. We love the wacky chefs who combine turnips with popping candy (we may exaggerate, but only a touch). We love the way Gregg makes that 'oooarrrgh' noise when he tastes a good pudding. We don't love the voiceover, but we'll let that pass for now. However, we have a very rocky relationship with your finals. We don't like to criticise; after all, you provide us with eight weeks of quality lead-up every year. But the climax of these eight weeks is, shall we say, a little less than satisfying.
Basically, John and Gregg always pick the WRONG PERSON, leaving such worthy contenders such as The Lovely Dean and The Lovely Hannah by the wayside in favour of the 'least likely to' out of the three finalists. Don't believe us? Check out the amount of complaints there were to the BBC (well, a few people wrote to Points of View, anyway) after the travesty of the 2006 final. And don't get us started on Matt Dawson smugging his way to winning Celebrity Masterchef that year. We don't forgive easily, so we approach tonight's final with a great deal of trepidation.
After a week of watching them mostly be a bit rubbish and occasionally be a bit awesome at various catering tasks, tonight our three finalists will be going to France in the first half, to work in 'some of the best restaurants in the world', then no doubt retuning to the Masterchef kitchen 'for one final challenge'. The decision, we can be sure John and Gregg will tell us, will be tougher than ever.
So who will win? For the uninitiated, Emily (aka 'Mud Pie Girl') is clearly the star of the show. She is cute, bubbly and creates all kinds of mad but tasty food. Gregg and John think she is awesome. She won't win. We like her, she is young, she is a woman and she has been fairly competent throughout. This will all count against her. (We know a woman allegedly won in 2005, but we didn't see that series, so we refuse to believe it).
Then we have James (aka 'Sideshow Bob'). We took an instant dislike to him in the first two rounds he was in, because he was so smug and smarmy (In later rounds he has actually proved to be quite a nice bloke but let's not let that get in the way of our initial snap judgements, eh?). We predicted from the start he'd probably win, but will he? We doubt it. He has been mostly competent and capable all the way through, and as we all know, it's the people that mess up all the way through and have a good final that win.
Our final, er, finalist is Johnny (aka 'Johnny'). A nice bloke, who has had the odd flash of genius, Johnny has still managed to make more mistakes than the others, receive less praise from Gregg and John in the early rounds than the others, but he is a bit older, he is a bloke and he has no doubt been on a 'journey'. Therefore, we predict Johnny will win.
Unless he attempts a chocolate fondant.
By Rad :: Post link
:: ::
0 pop-up comments
:: Discuss on messageboard
Thursday, February 21, 2008
The Man-Machines
SKETCHY! That Mitchell and Webb Look, BBC Two, 9.00pm Labels: BBC Two, comedy, Mac, PC, That Mitchell and Webb Look, TV
And they're back! Home computers Rob'n'Dave return for a second series of their much-loved TV sketch show, except of course it's the third Mitchell and Webb TV sketch show really, and the fourth if you count the Mitchell and Webb-heavy Bruiser, and actually their seventh sketch show overall if you throw Radio 4's That Mitchell and Webb Sound into the mix as well. Obviously that's quite a lot of PC-level heavy-duty mathematics to wrap our heads around (not sure the Mac could cope with it, to be honest, though it could probably turn it into a pretty pie chart or something), but that's Mitchell and Webb all over, you see: very funny and very intelligent men who also make you THINK (a little bit, even if it's just about how ridiculous numbers sound out of sequence or which computer you'd rather buy).
In a refreshing move that's almost unheard of in the sketch show world, they've defragmented their hard drives, restored their factory settings and chucked out pretty much every single character and concept from the first series (bar one or two, including the natural next step in the Numberwang! story), thus creating a blank comedy slate on which to start doodling with their hilarity chalk pencils all over again.
The previews we've seen so far have been excellent, including the bawdy Carry On-style hospital where one inadvertently-offensive doctor can't quite get the hang of innuendo, the over-excited TV sports announcer, and a lovely sketch where Rob persuades Dave to pretend to be gay for entirely selfish reasons. Rebooterrific!
By Nick :: Post link
:: ::
0 pop-up comments
:: Discuss on messageboard
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Doctorin' the Hub
MARTH! Torchwood, BBC Two, 9.00pm
MIRTH? Freezing, BBC Two, 10.00pm
Exciting times for viewers in the 'worthless' demographic tonight, as iPlayerphobes and those outside the 25- to 34-year-old age bracket (now banned from watching future modern modern! BBC Three) finally get a look at [officially a] Doctor Martha Jones' first crossover appearance in this week's Torchwood - a typically snappy tale of pharmaceutical research, eyeball injections, alien surgical implements, shocks, surprises, sexual tension, low-wattage light bulbs and, as ever, the Welsh.
And what a crossover appearance! Martha's beatific presence shines light into every corner and crevice of the dingy Torchwood Hub: Owen 'warms up' towards Tosh, Ianto lets slip a few details about his off-duty moments with Jack (incidentally, initial concerns about having two unrelated characters in the same programme with the same surname proved unfounded, as Martha and Ianto are easily distinguishable from one another when sharing screen time), and even Gwen cracks a smile once or twice.
Such is the extent of Martha's divine ethereality, in fact, that her super-refined immune system turns out to be just the incubator Jim Robinson needs to boost his sinister experiments into the development of an all-purpose remedy for human illness, and, yes, that may sound rather a lot like a straightforward lift from a couple of old Neighbours episodes, but it's actually very different. There's also another joyful reunion as Jim catches up with his always-amazing former neighbour Dorothy Burke, now working as a parasitic alien mayfly in deepest Cardiff. Reuniorrific! 
BBC Two follows an established series about a bunch of people who are supposed to be doing secret stuff without anybody really noticing despite everyone apparently knowing all about them with a new series about a couple of people who really want people to notice them but in whom nobody seems very interested any more. (Seamless!) 'Urban comedy' Freezing (they're not 'hot' any more, do you see?) follows the disappointments and frustrations of a decreasingly successful fortysomething publisher (Hugh 'Bumbles' Bonneville) and his decreasingly successful fortysomething American actress wife (Elizabeth McGovern) as they attempt to cling to celebrity and garner recognition at an age where new opportunities, credibility and glamour elude them and watching BBC Three carries a mandatory prison sentence.
With a supporting cast of people who seem to be doing rather well for themselves despite being on the verge of, around, or beyond that very age, including Tom 'Bumbles' Hollander, Tim 'Bumbles' McInnerny, Anthony 'Bumbles' Head, Ben 'Trainee Bumbles' Miles, Joely Richardson, Fenella Woolgar, James Woods and Alex 'Bumbles' Kingston, Freezing certainly sounds as if it should be alright, but you might want to ask yourself why it's being rushed out on three consecutive evenings if it's actually that special. There could be a very good reason. We don't know. And THAT'S the magic and mystery of television, RIGHT THERE.
By Nick :: Post link
:: ::
1 pop-up comments
:: Discuss on messageboard
