TV reviews

A complete archive of The Medium is Not Enough’s reviews of TV programmes since 2005

Nostalgia Corner: Big Deal (1984)

30 August 2012 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Big Deal

Gambling addiction is a terrible thing. It destroys lives, ruins relationships and is the cause of a whole lot of crime.

So what better subject for a comedy drama, hey? That, at least, was the thinking behind Big Deal, which starred Ray Brooks (Cathy Come Home, Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150AD, Mr Benn, King Rollo) as poker addict Robby Box and Sharon Duce (99-1, Drowning Not Waving, Natural Lies) as his long-suffering girlfriend. Created by Geoff McQueen (Give Us A Break, Stay Lucky, The Bill), the show followed Box from poker game to poker game, in between which he did whatever he could to make ends meet so that he could play poker – although he’d pretty much gamble on anything. If things went badly, he’d bounce back and if things went well… well, that didn’t last for long, despite his best intentions. All the while, he’d be promising Duce that he’d quit just as soon as he’d made enough money, something that usually resulted in a break up followed by reconciliation.

The show lasted for three series, during which Box won and lost a club (in a card game) and Duce and family left for Australia, only to come back again. Over time, it built up a large supporting cast of gamblers down at the betting shop, and its theme tune, by Bobby Gubby of Bucks Fizz, hit number one, making it probably the thing most people remember about the show:

Despite its popularity at the time and a repeat on UK Gold, it’s faded into obscurity and only the first series has been released on DVD. But there are a couple of clips on YouTube for you to enjoy. The first should give you an idea of what the constant gambling was like.

Trivia lovers should note that Brooks and Duce were later reunited on the BBC’s Growing Pains (1992), a continuation of a BBC radio series they’d also starred in, where they played middle aged foster parents.

Classic TV

Nostalgia corner: Mulberry (1992)

23 August 2012 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

Mulberry

Sitcoms, as a whole, don’t do science-fiction. Fewer still do fantasy. You get the occasional one, such as Kröd Mändoon, but you’d be hard-pressed to come up with even 10 fantasy sitcoms once your initial flurry of 1950s/1960s sitcoms The Munsters, The Addams Family, Mr Ed and My Mother The Car was out the way, I reckon (challenge: extended).

1992’s Mulberry, created by UK sitcom stalwarts John Esmonde and Bob Larbey (The Good Life, Please Sir!, Ever Decreasing Circles), is one of these unicorn-tears rare few: a primetime fantasy sitcom. Intriguingly, for a whole series, it wasn’t even obviously a fantasy sitcom.

It starred Karl Howman (Jacko from Esmonde and Larbey’s womanising painter sitcom Brush Strokes) as the eponymous Mulberry, who appears at the country house of a crotchety spinster, Miss Farnaby (Geraldine McEwan of Marple), wanting to become her servant – a position which hasn’t yet been advertised. Over the course of the first series, it becomes clear that the mischievous Mulberry may not have Miss Farnaby’s best interests at heart: he’s in cahoots with a mysterious man in black (John Bennett of Saracen), who appears to want Miss Farnaby killed, even if Mulberry appears to be having second thoughts.

But all becomes clear by the end of the sixth episode: Mulberry has come to kill Miss Farnaby… because the mysterious man in black is Death, Mulberry is his son and Miss Farnaby is his test job for the ‘family business’. Here’s the title sequence and you can watch the whole thing after the jump.

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What did you watch last fortnight? Including Maison close, Wallander, Dogtooth and The Hurt Locker

27 July 2012 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

It’s “What did you watch last fortnight?”, my chance to tell you what I watched in the last fortnight that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case I’ve missed them.

The usual recommendations from the first-run shows are: Continuum, The Daily Show, The Newsroom and Suits. Hunt them down.

Here’s a few thoughts on those and what else I’ve been watching:

  • Burn Notice: A shocking death… that everyone predicted and almost certainly not the end of the ‘Burn Notice’ plot. Interesting to note that there was more emotion in the last minute or two as the impact of the death sank in than there has been in the last three episodes of Covert Affairs with a similar situation, which tells you a lot about that show. And as for last week’s episode, John C McGinley is now stuck being Dr Cox from Scrubs forever.
  • Continuum: Actually quite a creepy and nasty episode this week, with more sci-fi twists and a very decent couple of cliffhangers. Good to see some bad guys who aren’t idiots for a change.
  • Covert Affairs: Largely forgettable, except when Richard Coyle is in it. Comes across essentially as a set of stage directions for a spy show, lacking in any real passion or excitement, no matter what happens. Nice location shooting though.
  • Maison close: Canal+ drama set in an early 20th century brothel. Lavishly shot, but inherently silly and exploitative, and absolutely nothing to surprise you.
  • Mesrine: Vincent Cassel as the real-life crook, depicting his life from a solider in Algiers through to his death. But I gave up after about half an hour, since although it was a decent enough story and Cassel was fabulous, it was a pretty ordinary story really, and there was enough misogyny to put me off from watching too much of it.
  • The Newsroom: Well, after an excellent fourth episode, we once again plummeted the depths of the Sorkin style for the fifth episode, making this the most inconsistent of his shows in terms of quality. About the only good thing about it was Olivia Munn being deadpan and snarky, as usual.
  • Prisoners of War: In retrospect, this is a show I wish I’d seen before Homeland, since so many of the revelations, although in a different context from Homeland‘s, were the same. No secret terrorist to worry about, but the final frames and much of the final episode were clearly setting the show up for a second series – which is coming in October.
  • Royal Pains: Reshma Shetty acted! Amazing
  • Sinbad: Basically Sky doing a Merlin, but better. Great to see a show with a principally black and Asian cast that isn’t set on a sinkhole estate somewhere, as well. But fundamentally not that great unless you’re a teenager, I suspect.
  • Suits: The ballet side of things in last night’s episode is pushing Louis over the edge of plausibility, but still a reasonable episode, uplifted by the final poker scene.
  • Wallander: After the dreadful second episode, it was a relief to see the third and final episode of the show return to the quality of the first episode of this series. A proper crime that needed investigating, Wallander doing proper police work and occasional breaks from absolute misery, making the episode potentially a good final one for the show. Worth mentioning that it was possibly one of the most beautifully shot programmes on TV recently and Ken was of course was magnificent.

And in movies:

  • Princess Diaries 2: Don’t ask. But one of those minor movies you watch 10 years after it was made and go “Oh my gods, it’s them! They’re famous now! And so are they! And them!” Here, we have Anne “Catwoman” Hathaway, Callum “Kneel before Zod” Blue from Smallville and Chris Pine from Star Trek, with a script written by Grey’s Anatomy/Private Practice/Scandal showrunner Shonda Rhimes. Probably great if you’re an 11-year-old American girl who knows nothing about Europe, royalty, etc, since it takes every stereotype about royalty you’ll ever come across and marries it with American idealism (“Everyone can be a princess and if you just care enough, you can rule a country wisely, too!”). The problem is it’s nearly two hours long and takes out about 20 minutes for a sleepover and karoake session. But okay.

  • Dogtooth: Probably not a movie I would have watched, had it not been to brush up my Greek for holidays next month. Very weird film about a pair of protective parents who keep their grown-up children in an almost childlike state, confined in their home, teaching them the wrong words for things (‘sea’ means ‘chair’ and ‘zombie’ means ‘a small yellow flower’) and that planes in the sky are just toys. The only visitor is a female security guard whom the dad pays to come and have very mechanical sex with the son. And then things go pear-shaped. Some very odd acting and a very odd script and central idea, but a very interesting movie. Worth watching.

  • The Hurt Locker: the movie for which Kathryn Bigelow won the best director Oscar, it’s a much-deserved win, even if the script itself is a little lacking. Jeremy Renner is a adrenaline-addicted bomb-disposal guy in Iraq who puts his comrades’ lives in danger. Interesting as much for its cameos – Ralph Fiennes (who starred in Bigelow’s Strange Days) as a British mercenary, Guy Pierce as another bomb disposal guy, David Morse as another soldier, Evangeline Lilly as Renner’s girlfriend – who disappear as quickly as they arrive. Visually magnificent and extremely tense, the film really only falters when it moves away from action and tries to deal with character and emotion.

“What did you watch last fortnight?” is your chance to recommend to friends and fellow blog readers the TV and films that they might be missing or should avoid – and for me to do mini-reviews of everything I’ve watched. 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?

The CarusometerA Carusometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: Perception (TNT)

24 July 2012 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

In the US: Mondays, 10/9c, TNT
In the UK: Not yet acquired, but you can bet Alibi will pick it up

Formats are funny things. They’re what enable a show to run a long time, and they give viewers an understanding of what they can expect. Sometimes the format is almost incidental to what the story is really about, particularly if it’s a cop show. Wallender is a cop show, but it’s essentially an excuse to look at the misery of existence. CSI is actually a science show (or it used to be, anyway), set within the format of a crime show, with scientists performing experiments and using science to solve problems.

Perception is actually quite an interesting psychology show, trapped in a very pedestrian cop show. Perception‘s format is over a century old: the consulting detective (Sherlock Holmes originally, but Will & Grace‘s Eric McCormack as a university professor here) who helps out the stupid old police with their inquiries. It’s so cliched and inherently boring now that it’s hard not to fall asleep at the mere thought of the format. It doesn’t help that FBI agent Rachael Leigh Cook has the gravitas of Barney the dinosaur and that no one else except McCormack gets any worthwhile characterisation, despite the best efforts in episode three by the producers to give Cook a background and someone to talk to who isn’t McCormack.

But throwing that format to one side, just as we do with Sherlock Holmes, we can look at Perception‘s real asset: the psychology side of things. Here we have the fact that McCormack is a paranoid schizophrenic who hallucinates, sometimes helpfully, sometimes unhelpfully, sometimes tragically in the case of (spoiler alert)his best friend and former girlfriend, who doesn’t actually exist, or may do but isn’t the person he actually talks to. Now in the first episode, this was played for laughs and revelations, but subsequent episodes have done a pretty good job of conveying at least some of the difficulties and sadness of McCormack’s situation.

Then there’s the guest condition of the week. Now, just as CSI does with its relentless use of scientists as detectives rather than as laboratory workers, Perception does take liberties. McCormack gets called in on cases that shouldn’t initially need him, since the FBI does have very talented group of psychologists working for it. But the show usually then moves on to reveal conditions in witnesses and perpetrators that are unusual and might not be within the usual range of the FBI’s expertise – something where you might actually call in a consultant for. Here things become interesting, because we’re now solving different kinds of crime from the usual suspects – we actually have things going on you don’t normally see in cop shows.

Now how long this can carry on before it gets ridiculous remains to be seen. Are we going to have an unusual condition of the week in every episode? Well, if CSI can have a new science thing every week for 12 seasons, I guess we can have at least a season or two of interesting psychological problems here.

Despite the show’s obvious flaws – Cook, the format, etc – Perception is still shaping up as a surprisingly interesting weekly viewing. Jamie Bamber as a rival lecturer might make the format a little more interesting, judging by his one appearance so far, although he’s coming across as a grade A tool at the same time. There’s actual pathos and novel problems to solve. The producers are dialling down the wackiness and making it slightly more thoughtful, so that’s McCormack’s neverending array of ticks are more obviously coping mechanisms for dealing with his disability, rather than gimmicks. It still feels very formulaic, but if you can look passed all these problems and don’t mind cop shows, it’s certainly worth repeated viewing.

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: Artemis 81 (1981)

18 July 2012 Rob Buckley 9 Comments

Well, in our Wednesday Play slot, we’ve featured plays that have changed attitudes, plays that have entertained, adaptations of classic works of fiction, the gritty, the funny, the meta and more. But plays can also be experimental.

Generally, television dramas tend to aim for ‘mimesis’, to be as close to reality as they can. There’s a lot that goes into that: characters that seem like real people, dialogue that sounds like something you’d hear in conversation, logical plotting with effect following cause, and so on.

But art doesn’t have to have mimesis, as many a surrealist or Brechtian will tell you. Theatre and to a lesser extent film can try not to mimic reality, but instead to challenge conventions and impose its own.

Television finds this much harder to do, thanks to audience expectations. But sometimes it tries.

All of which is a very pretentious, convoluted and somewhat sophistic build-up to my trying to defend the almost indefensible: Artemis 81.

Originally intended as a mini-series, co-funded by Danish TV, this 1981 TV production by noted scriptwriter David Rudkin (as well as several individual plays for television, he also adapted MR James’ The Ash Tree for the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas, and contributed to the screenplay for François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451) saw paranormal novelist Gideon Harlax (Shelley‘s Hywel Bennett) involved in an epic battle to save the earth from the Angel of Death (Eldorado‘s Roland Curram) and Danish organist Dr Albrecht Von Drachenfels (Dan O’Herlihy), aided and abetted by his wife, Gwen (Dinah Stabb), an Oxford student (Daniel Day-Lewis, but unrecognisable) and the Angel of Love and Light Helith (Sting, in his first proper acting role).

Now if you’ve made it through that paragraph without inadvertently sniggering once, you’re a stronger and more serious person than I. And if you can make it through the first four minutes of Artemis 81, let alone the whole thing, without doing the same, your Herculian strength of will will become a thing of legend. Follow me after the jump where you can find out more about it and even watch it. All three hours of it. Is that a challenge or what?

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