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So yesterday was of course the day when thanks to Top Gear, British men en masse discovered there exists a woman called Amber Heard and that not knowing this fact had substantially impoverished their lives. Now our Amber didn’t come ex nihilo and had British men decided to watch Hidden Palms all of five years ago (despite – oh dear – my recommendations), they’d have known all about her. Here are a couple of her finest moments – she/Greta being easily the best thing in it – from the otherwise not that great pilot.
But they didn’t so have lived in terrible ignorance for five years. You could tell this because at 11am yesterday, a Twitter search for Amber Heard would have got you about one Tweet an hour of something like “Amber Heard is the SITRPC on Top Gear? Who’s she? I thought they were getting someone exciting.”
By about 8.35pm, Amber Heard had become the number one Google image search and first a UK then a global Twitter trending topic. And let’s just say The Informers was starting to get an awful lot of illegal downloads. If you thought Top Gear‘s ratings were sagging and it’s been losing its influence this series, turns out you were wrong.
Here’s the interview in case you missed it and want to know why British men went Amber-mad yesterday. Forgive Jeremy Clarkson – he’s Jeremy Clarkson.
Moving on, another of last week’s Random Acts participants, Serene Branson, who we all thought had a stroke live on air, fortunately only turned out to have a complex migraine.
And since this is TMINE, let’s let Joanna Page get in on the randomness this week by designing a Welsh bra. It’s for charity.
It’s “What have you been watching this week?”, your chance to recommend to friends and fellow blog readers the TV that they might be missing or should avoid – and for me to do mini-reviews of everything I’ve watched this week. Since we live in the fabulous world of Internet catch-up services like the iPlayer and Hulu, why not tell your fellow readers what you’ve seen so they can see the good stuff they might have missed?
My regular recommendations for maximum viewing pleasure: Archer, Being Human, Being Human (US), Cougar Town, House, Modern Family, Royal Pains, Shameless (US), Southland, 30 Rock and Top Gear.
This week’s review backlog: Bedlam; Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior; Episodes; Mad Dogs; this week’s Spartacus: Gods of the Arena; and a hell of a lot of episodes of The Killing.
Which leaves, after the jump, mini-reviews of Community, Mr Sunshine, Portlandia, Royal Navy Caribbean Patrol, Smallville and Traffic Light as well as last week’s Spartacus: Gods of the Arena.
Incidentally, in case you haven’t noticed, “What have you been watching this week?” only covers stuff that’s already aired, so an invaluable source of recommendations for things that are coming up in the UK is provided by Scott Matthewman and The Stage‘s TV Today Square Eyes feature. It’s helped me spot a number of things I would have otherwise missed.
Although for some reason, he’s not flagging up tonight’s Top Gear. I’ll be watching, mainly to see how Jeremy Clarkson of all people deals with interviewing a very attractive, openly gay actress who likes to drive muscle cars, that’s all I’m saying…
Continue reading “What have you been watching this week (w/e February 18)?”
Glynis Barber may best be known now as a star of soap operas such as Emmerdale and EastEnders but back in the 80s, she was something of a small screen pin-up. After a brief appearance in The Sandbaggers as a Russian spy so beautiful “you’d crawl a thousand miles over broken glass” for her, her big break came as Soolin on Blake’s 7, a role about which I’ve already written. After Blake’s 7 finished, she went on to much greater fame and pin-up-dom as Makepeace in fondly remembered Dempsey & Makepeace:
But in between those two series, she starred in a much more poorly remembered show on BBC2 about a literal pin-up: Jane.
Yes, we’re about to get a little bit racey after the jump…
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