What have you been watching this week (w/e 10 July)?

This television thing. In your home. What’s been on it this week that you’ve been liking or hating?

Torchwood started off not bad, went a bit pants and went to downright excellent last night, so heavens knows what it’s going to be like tonight – I might be too stunned by the fact it’s not been awful to even tune in. I eventually managed to catch Top Gear, despite the Beeb’s efforts to mess up the Sky+ EPG, which was reasonably entertaining, but no classic, particularly since it had that *expletive deleted* Michael McIntyre on it.

Valentine‘s returned to The CW for no readily explored reason, other than they paid for it so they might as well show it while people still remember it. It’s a very odd show. On the one hand, it has the world’s worst opening title narration, narrated by the world’s least convincing actress, Jaime Murray. Every single aspect of the “Greek love gods matchmaking mortals” storylines makes you want to tear your face off to make it all end, even if you have Joshua Malina as one of the mortals, as happened this week. But the arcing storyline involving the gods themselves and their mysterious nemesis is really excellent, dark, gripping and surprisingly true to the myths. If they’d just had that as the show and hired an actress to play Aphrodite instead of Murray, maybe we’d have had a classic fantasy series on our hands.

Except they didn’t, so it’s been cancelled already. Who knows if we’ll ever find out how it was supposed to end.

Otherwise, apart from what I’ve already reviewed, it’s just been Tim Gunn’s Guide To Style on Sky3, which for the uninitiated is like Trinny and Suzannah’s What Not To Wear but done by someone with taste, style, charm and intelligence. Series first: no keepers in the 10 items!

As always, no spoilers unless you’re going to use the <spoiler> </spoiler> tags, please

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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