Articles by Rob Buckley

About 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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US TV

Review: The Tudors

9 April 2007 Rob Buckley 10 Comments

The Tudors

In the US: Showtime, Sundays, 10pm ET/PT

In the UK: Not yet acquired for some reason

There are all sorts of debates in historical circles about what constitutes history. While most historical education dwells on dates of battles, treaties, coronations and so on, is that really what history is about? Does that undervalue women’s contributions, for instance? What about the history of small things like the food we eat or how we actually lived?

TV networks such as BBC, HBO and Showtime have all decided that a very important part of history is being overlooked. With shows such as Rome and now The Tudors, they’ve attempted to redress the balance. They want us to remember the history of shagging.

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The importance of mood in analogies: The Matrix

9 April 2007 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

When Se7en scriptwriter Andrew Kevin Walker picked up his Empire award for best screenwriter (or something similar), his acceptance speech mentioned how he’d been aiming to win the vote of manic depressed students with his script and this was proof he’d succeeded.

I think the Warshawski brothers were aiming for the same thing with The Matrix. As you might recall, Agent Smith takes Morpheus to one side and says that he’s worked out that humans are viruses, because we grow without limit, etc. This was his rationale for wanting to wipe us out.

Surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly), this chimed with a load of teenagers, who thought they’d been given some higher truth. Pseudo-intellectual sci-fi movies will do that to you.

However, I do feel that Agent Smith drew an incorrect conclusion. All he correctly determined was that a species of animal will expand without limits if there aren’t checks on it from natural predators, etc.

We aren’t viruses, my friends. We’re bunnies.

I can’t help but feel that would have ruined the mood, having a psychotic bunny-hater as an enemy. I’m sure you could argue about Smith’s mindset leaping to the best analogy his computer-generated mind could hit. But all the same, I think it would have been fun.

Audio and radio play reviews

Review: Sapphire and Steel – Cruel Immortality

9 April 2007 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Cruel Immortality Try and imagine you or your lifetime as approximately one inch in length. Then compare it to the first CD of Cruel Immortality, which is a thousand million miles long. One inch, you. CD one of Cruel Immortality a thousand million miles. Just compare them. It’s very, very long. And it’s very, very boring.

Those were more or less the thoughts that passed through my mind as I tried to get through the first half of Cruel Immortality. Each track was like having teeth drilled. Every single thing that was wrong with the Big Finish series of Sapphire and Steel audio plays was here and taken to the Max. Trite characterisation, poor acting, a Sapphire and a Steel completely unrecognisable and way too human in comparison to their on-screen selves. Listening to David Caruso sing the works of Marilyn Manson would have been preferable.

But, suddenly, come the end of CD one, it all changes. It becomes interesting. All the pain, all the hurt dissolves away and suddenly, you don’t want to use the second CD as a hat, garden ornament or eccentric clothing decoration. Instead, you want to listen to it.

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UK TV

Primeval: The limitations of The Carusometer

9 April 2007 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Primeval Final Carusometer

If you cast your minds back a while to when I was debating whether to introduce a “fifth episode verdict” to supplement my existing third-episode verdict system, I made the point that such a verdict was going to be next to useless for British shows. What, after all, is the point of saying “This show is great. You should watch it” or “This show is rubbish. Don’t bother tuning in” when there’s only one episode to go?

All the same, not getting a full sample size of episodes can affect the accuracy of the delicately tuned Carusometer, the most powerful measure of television quality in the universe. Case in point is Primeval.

Last week, I finally got through episodes five and six, thanks to my handy new video iPod and I have to say I actually thought they were quite good. Episode four was as bad as The Carusometer had predicted it would be, but five and six were scary and intriguing. True, I’d rather be attacked by llamas than have to endure Hannah Spearritt and the “young adult” sub-plots again. But Dougie Henshall and the more clearly grown-up members of the cast were doing their best and I really rather enjoyed it.

So in the vain hope I can help those in the rest of the world who haven’t yet been granted a Primeval viewing licence (eg the US) or who were waiting for its release on DVD, use episodes three and four as coffee mug coasters or to have some much-needed family time, but stick around for the rest of Primeval, since it was actually a reasonably enjoyable series overall.

Technology

Gadget reviews anyone?

8 April 2007 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

TVMax+You may have noticed the stealthy new arrival of a “Technology” category on the blog. I do get some whizzy gadgets to review every so often so I figured some of you might be interested in whether to hand over hard-earned dollars, pounds sterling, etc on these shiny things.

The latest I’ve got is the Miglia TVMax+, which lets you record video on your Mac. Anyone interested in my well-thought-out opinion on it?