Now I’m about to do something that I don’t normally do: I’m going to tell you not to watch a show that’s actually quite good. Pretty Little Liars was the summer’s surprise success story for The CW, a kind of blending of Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries in which a group of four friends with lots of deep dark secrets are reunited and think they’re been stalked by a former friend who they all think is dead. It’s not my cup of tea, but it’s surprisingly good for what it is.
Now it’s been acquired by Viva, which is one of those odd Freeview channels (it’s also on Sky and Virgin) in the UK that no one in the UK has heard of that mysteriously acquires decent US programming (cf Community), the result of which is that no one gets to see the decent programmes, because no one knows they’re on. Viva seems to be aware of this problem since it recently ran a stunt to promote Pretty Little Liars: they blocked off traffic and sent four weeping girls around the streets of central London in a mock funeral procession. I can see from the photos that Regent’s Street, Oxford Street, Panton Street and Great Marlborough Street at the very least all got snarled up by this, which means all the roads in between them did, too.
So I’m saying this now: central London’s traffic is messed up enough already without stupid PR companies running stupid stunts like this. So don’t encourage Viva to do it again. Don’t watch Pretty Little Liars, even though it’s quite good.
HG Wells’ The First Men in the Moon is one of Wells’ lesser known sci-fi books. While The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and even The Island of Dr Moreau get remade all the time, The First Men In the Moon had a rather lovely 1964 film adaptation starring Lionel Jeffries and co-written by Nigel Kneale, but that’s been it.
Now, there are few UK TV writers today who are bigger sci-fi fanboys than Mark Gatiss. If he’s not writingDoctor Who, starring inDoctor Who, appearing in documentaries about Doctor Who, presenting documentaries about horror movies, appearing in documentaries about Nigel Kneale, writing Lucifer Box stories that pastiche 19th century fiction, updating Sherlock Holmes, et al, he’s thinking about it. I know he is. I can sense it.
So leave it to Gatiss to not only realise there’s this gap in the HG Wells adaptation record but to fix it by writing a 90 minute TV movie based on the book – and, naturally enough, starring in it.
Now, BBC4 isn’t exactly big budget, so you might be expecting something put together with some local theatre stars, a couple of pieces of string and a bit of papier mache. But The First Men in the Moon follows on from previous low budget, high gloss sci-fi productions, such as The Quatermass Experiment (which also starred Gatiss), A for Andromeda and Parallel Quest, by being very good looking, having a great cast (Rory Kinnear) and some quite extensive CGI, all while staying reasonably faithful to the source material – both the book, and because this is Gatiss, the movie.
It’s just a pity everything was done with such a knowing wink in its eye. Here’s a trailer:
