TMINE

Welcome to blog entry 3,000. Make yourself at home. Try not to eat all the Black Forest Gateau or drink all the Tia Maria.

I’m not sure if this merits a party or something. Probably not.

Fess up. With so much rain pouring down, you must have been watching TV at some point. But what did you watch and was it any good?

I’ve a bit of a backlog, but I’ve been watching a few things, some of which I’ve now reviewed. I’ve yet to watch Jerry Bruckheimer’s Dark Blue but I’m sure I’ll get round to it later today – ditto Burn Notice and episode two of 10 Things I Hate About You. I’ve also got the start of the fourth season of LA Ink in the queue for lovely wife, since she loves Kat von D, but I’ll probably skip that.

Royal Pains from last night was pretty good – good development for all the characters and some good interplay between them. Episode 2 of Warehouse 13 was a lot better than episode one, but still left a few things to be desired. Hung seemed to jump off into pastures new, away from gender politics per se, in favour of general economic issues. I have a suspicion it’s going to end up unclassifiable at this rate.

Dragons’ Den was back on top form, and surprisingly funny and laid back. And Top Gear wasn’t bad at all, as per usual.

What about yourselves?

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

Quite an easy meme after last week’s brain-twister, I hope:

What book would you like to see adapted into a TV series or movie?

TV series is obviously harder, since it needs to be ongoing, rather than simply a straight adaption of the book. But I’m sure you guys are up to it. You can also include books that have already been adapted, but whose adaptation was rubbish.

Do I need to add that authors can’t recommend their own books? Without making a generous donation to the blog first, anyway?

As always, leave a comment with your answer or a link to your answer on your own blog.

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