News

Every week day, I let you know what’s happening in the world of television from around the world

The difference between the US and UK SciFi channels

27 April 2006 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Well, there are a few differences, but the big one is the US SciFi channel actually makes new shows. Admittedly, the UK channel does, too, but they’re either video review shows or they’re “Tales from the Conventions”. Plus there’s that new one with Michael Ironside that they’re co-producing with Canadian TV. But other than that, they don’t make shows.

In the US, they make lots of shows. They make really god-awful B-movie sci-fi films, usually starring the likes of Joe Lando (remember him from Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman?) and Bruce Campbell. They make silly shows about alien abductions and psychic powers. But they also make shows like Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis.

Just to ram their American superiority in our faces just a little bit more, they’ve unveiled a new slate of programming. To really start kicking sand in our eight-stone faces, they’re launching a prequel to BSG called Caprica that focuses on the times leading up to the creation of the cylons. While the phrase “television’s first science fiction family saga” sends chills down my spine, so did “remake of Battlestar Galactica” until I actually watched the new show. So I’ll flag Caprica as ‘sounds bad, will probably be very good indeed’ for you to note in your calendars.

Then there’s Snap about ‘a Federal agent who uncovers a deep-seated and seemingly unstoppable conspiracy’. Now that does sound pants and probably will be, too. Persons Unknown (‘a surreal mind-game of a series centering on a group of strangers who awaken in a deserted town with no memory of how they arrived, only to realize that there is no escape’) could be good, although I suspect I’ll spend most of the time looking for bits they may have half-inched off The Prisoner.

The Bishop just sounds inherently amusing: ‘from executive producers and writers Freddie Prinze, Jr. and Conrad Jackson, this one-hour drama revolves around a young slacker whose charmed life is disrupted when he discovers that he has a supernatural gift’. The power to carry a crook. In fact, I could swear Monty Python did a sketch about a fake crime show called ‘The Bishop’ – so best to steer clear of that one I think unless you fancy a laugh.

Blink again sounds like a rip-off, this time of Canadian show The Collector: ‘A group of Afterlife investigators try to help those about to make the wrong choice, in the blink of an eye before destiny is sealed forever.’ Could be good, could be bad, but as if having a show exec produced by Freddie Prinze Jr weren’t enough, this one’s exec-produced by Will from Will and Grace. What next? Shows produced by the Crazy Frog?

Last show of interest is a mini-series based on classic piece of 70s cobblers, Chariots of the Gods. Since that was in some way the inspiration for the worst movie ever made, Hangar 18, I’m dead set against it from the outset.

Nevertheless, compare that with the UK’s SciFi channel and you’ll have to admit, it’s a damn sight more impressive. Curse those Americans, their advanced economy and their high production values.

Hex is hexed

26 April 2006 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

It was rubbish, so no surprises here (other than its initial commissioning), but Hex has been cancelled. No third season then for the uneasy combo of teenagers talking about sex ridiculous amounts while being plagued by poorly CGI-ed ghosts and demons.

This, incidentally, was one of the first moves by Sky One’s new director of programmes, Richard Woolfe. A man with taste. Promising.

News

Sounds, erm, magnificent?

24 April 2006 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

The new K9We’ve railed against Winnie the Pooh getting the CGI treatment. We’ve railed against a whole lot of things in fact. But now, the Independent is reporting, K9 is to make a comeback as a CGI hero of his own Fox Kids show.

Step 1: Place memories on pavement

Step 2: Stamp all over them

Step 3: Stamp over them some more.

At the very least, I hope they get John Leeson back. The question, though, is why Fox Kids instead of CBeebies or some other BBC-owned channel? Maybe it’s all been made up. Or it’s a bad dream or something.

UPDATE: The Times explains all. And there’s a picture. Sob

News

Find Doctor Who episodes and win a Dalek

20 April 2006 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

The magnificent replica Dalek

You ever made a mistake? A really, really big one? One that makes you wake up in the night, curled in the foetal position, saying to yourself “No, no, no, no! I can’t believe I did that!”

I know I have.

The BBC has lots of those, buried in their collective subconscious. Here’s one of their biggest (somewhere down the list from booting out Greg Dyke).

The Beeb, in their infinite wisdom, spent a goodly portion of the 1970s erasing their archives. Apparently, they thought it a good idea to recycle their tape and burn their film rolls in order to save space.

I can even remember watching a clip on Windmill of them proudly demonstrating the giant magnet they used for the task: “You just press here, there’s a hum, the tape rotates, and we’re done!”

Ah, if only they’d been thinking of video and DVD sales at the time.

Once the silly billies came to their senses and started going, “No, no, no, no…” etc, they tried to undo their various bodges by asking, very nicely, if please, could they have copies of all the stuff they’d wiped. In it came, from all around the world, from TV stations that had bought the rights to broadcast their programmes, from private collectors, from boot fairs, from the NFT and dozens of other obscure places. Even the censors were obliging, handing over all the bits they’d chopped out of old episodes. Suckers.

Doctor Who, being quite a long-running programme, has quite a few episodes missing, thanks to the laws of chance and vindictiveness, although über-fan Ian Levine did manage to save quite a few episodes at the critical moment. Oft has he told the tale of how he saved The Daleks from being burnt by offering to buy it from the Beeb furnace men. Then there’s all the other Beeb employees who kept episodes in their attics to show the kiddies. Ah, these Whovians loved their show.

Through various means, 39 episodes made their way back to the Beeb, leaving just 108 to find. But now the torrent has turned into a trickle. The last missing episode to be located came from The Dalek Masterplan, the 12-part Hartnell epic (those were the days, huh?), in 2004. You may think it extremely geeky of me to know that, but this interesting fact was also a major plot point in the fourth series of Coupling. Seriously.

This absence of new old episodes has set the BBC pondering. “How,” they’ve thought to themselves, “can we get back all the remaining missing episodes, so we can flog them back to the public seven different ways and boost our revenues even more?”

They have an answer though. That answer is Blue Peter.

Everyone’s favourite promotor of middle-class values to children/seething hotbed of loyalist supporters (delete as appropriate) is offering a replica Dalek to any child who can find a lost episode of Doctor Who. Just in case you haven’t yet memorised all the titles of those missing episodes, you can find them on the Blue Peter web site: print it out, take it with you, as you invade the lofts of your nearest and dearest, looking for mold-encrusted film cans. Remember, the label may lie, so always open up the cans and spool out the film until you find the episode title. You shouldn’t need to go further than 10 metres or so in, I reckon.

Hmm. Replica Dalek in exchange for episode worth thousands in DVD sales? Not exploiting kids at all then, are they? They might even give you a DVD of the episode half-price if you’re lucky.

PS Incidentally, I love the way the BBC now refuses to admit that it wiped the episodes. From the Blue Peter site: “Doctor Who needs your help. Back when the series first started, no one imagined it would become so popular and sadly, some of the old episodes have been lost.” No, you stuck them on a fire. The first step to closure, BBC, is admitting to yourself what you did.

Lost – incinerated: these are not two sides of the same coin.