TV reviews

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

UK TV

Review: The Dark Angel

27 May 2011 Rob Buckley Post a comment

A painting of Peter O'Toole in The Dark Angel

Starring: Peter O’Toole, Beatie Edney, Jane Lapotaire, Charlotte Coleman and Barbara Shelley
Writers: Don MacPherson (based on Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu)
Director: Peter Hammond
Price: £14.99 (Amazon price: £11.20)
Released: May 30th 2011

Sheridan Le Fanu is something of a neglected author. Although influential in his day with classics of the horror and gothic genres, such as Through a Glass Darkly, Carmilla and Uncle Silas, he’s now overshadowed by the likes of Poe, Collins and Stoker. Movie and TV adaptations of his work are few and far between.

Back in 1987, the BBC adapted Uncle Silas as the three-part mini-series, The Dark Angel. Directed by Peter Hammond (who directed many of Granada’s Sherlock Holmes episodes as well as 18 episodes of The Avengers and a whole lot more), it faithfully sticks to the book in seeing young Maud Ruthyn (Beatie Edney) having to live with her uncle Silas (Peter O’Toole), a noted wastrel and alleged murderer, even though if she should die, he would inherit from her one of the largest fortunes in England.

Cue the trailer:

Continue reading “Review: The Dark Angel”

US TV

What have you been watching this week (w/e May 27)?

27 May 2011 Rob Buckley 10 Comments

The Crimson Petal and the White

Time for “What have you been watching this week?”, my chance to tell you what I’ve been watching this week and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case we’ve missed them.

My usual recommendations for maximum viewing pleasure this week: Cougar Town, Endgame, Happy Endings, House, Modern Family, The Shadow Line and Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. Watch them (and keep an eye on The Stage‘s TV Today Square Eyes feature as well) or you’ll be missing out on the good stuff. Of course, it being May/June, most of them are ending, so I’ll have to come up with a new set of recommendations next week.

Now to the irregulars and new things, as well as a few thoughts on some of those regulars:

  • All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace: Adam Curtis’s latest documentary series, examining how technology has come to – quite literally – rule our lives. One of those documentaries designed more to make you think and examine broad trends rather than create a watertight argument. Well worth watching.
  • The Apprentice: Very creepy.
  • The Crimson Petal and the White: Obviously was on tele a while back now, but we put off watching it while lovely wife was still reading the original book. Very faithful to the book, says lovely wife, and quite disturbing in its visual style, like being on an acid trip for an hour while trapped in a documentary about poverty in Victorian London. I’m not sure I actually like it though, since it’s one of those ones where you can see doom spiralling down on characters right from the beginning because they behave incredibly stupidly. Also, I find it hard to imagine Chris O’Dowd as anything except Roy from The IT Crowd. He just doesn’t seem plausible as anything else.
  • Happy Endings: Not quite as funny as in previous weeks but still good. Just ambiguous enough that you know they weren’t sure they were going to get renewed or not.
  • House: Oops. Last week’s wasn’t the finale after all. Still, what a weird way to end the series. Feels almost like it should have been the last House ever, since it’ll be interesting to see how they come back from this. Not a great episode though.
  • Running Wilde: Not a great way to end the series – felt a bit like they’d given up at this point.

And since people have been mentioning movies they’ve been watching as well, which seems like a sterling idea to me, this week I saw:

  • Tangled: Animated Disney musical version of Rapunzel, with Mandy Moore and Zachary Levi (Chuck from Chuck). Actually quite nice, decent animation, nothing too offend, with a few good comedic touches. But nothing outstanding and a few major plot holes.
  • The Ward: Amnesiac Amber Heard runs around and tries to escape a lot from a mental asylum when it becomes clear that a ghost is trying to kill off everyone in her ward. A return in style by John Carpenter to Halloween/The Thing, with very little gore and a few solid shocks, but a bit loose in the middle and suffers from the usual Carpenter trope of the third and fourth acts turning into lots of running. But the ending’s really good, Heard does well, even if the other girls in the ward are beyond irritating, and Jared Harris from Mad Men excels as the psychiatrist who runs it all.

But what have you been watching?

“What have you been watching this week?” 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 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?

Classic TV

Lost Gems: Children of the Dog Star (1984)

26 May 2011 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

Did you know there’s this tribe in Africa called the Dogon? There really is – this is true. What’s particularly interesting about the Dogon is that they have this weird relationship with the star, Sirius – aka the Dog Star – which is the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere. Exciting astronomy fact of the day: Sirius is actually a binary star – there’s a great big star and around it orbits a tiny white dwarf star that’s impossible for the naked eye (and even most telescopes) to detect: its presence was only inferred mathematically in 1844.

And the Dogon knew that there was a second star there. In fact, they reckon there’s a third star there, too. And in 1995, some evidence emerged that there might well be a brown dwarf in orbit around the two main stars.

Freaky, huh?

Now there are various explanations for this that I won’t go into, but back in in 1984, enterprising New Zealand TV station TVNZ created a six-part children’s TV series, Children of the Dog Star, in which it was suggested the Dogon know all this because they were visited by an alien probe from Sirius thousands of years ago that told them all this. That wasn’t the only probe, however, and out in a New Zealand swamp, the remains of another probe might still exist, waiting to be reactivated.

Here’s the title sequence:

Continue reading “Lost Gems: Children of the Dog Star (1984)”

TV reviews

Review: Doctor Who – 6×5 – The Rebel Flesh

23 May 2011 Rob Buckley 17 Comments

The Rebel Flash

In the UK: Saturday 21st May, 6.45pm, BBC1/BBC1 HD. Available on the iPlayer
In the US: Saturday 21st May, 9pm/8c, BBC America

Erm, yes. Doctor Who. It’s running up and down corridors, while threatened by a bad special effects enemy generated through odd science and with poor motivation, isn’t it?

Sigh. I wasn’t expecting much from Matthew Graham after Fear Her, and given the last non-Moffat Moffat-years two-parter was the dreadful The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, I wasn’t expecting too much from this either. And there were some nicely creepy bits, some decent direction, some decent acting and some good ideas underneath it all. Unsurprisingly, given this was Matthew Graham (co-creator of Life On Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus So I Won’t Have Any Good Ones In My Show), Rory actually came out of this quite well and didn’t come across as a total sponge for once – he didn’t even die once – while Amy got precisely bugger all to do except scream.

But largely, this was an extremely boring episode where not much happened except people running up and down corridors in a slight homage to The Thing/The Clonus Horror. Worse still, come 20 minutes, I’m not just looking at the clock thinking "Oh, God, we’ve got another 25 minutes of this", I’m looking at it thinking "Oh, God, we’ve got another one of these next week as well."

Expectations: met.

However, your mileage may vary, so leave a comment or a link to a review on your own blog.

PS Is it just me or if you’re going to have a story arc that runs across an entire season, it doesn’t count having the same reference in every single week: yes, Amy is both pregnant and not pregnant; there’s a woman with an eye-patch behind every wall; and the Doctor’s going to die and Rory and Amy are wondering whether to tell him. We remember that from episodes 2, 3 and 4. Is anything else going to happen?

US TV

What have you been watching this week (w/e May 20)?

20 May 2011 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

Happy Endings Karate

Time for “What have you been watching this week?”, my chance to tell you what I’ve been watching this week and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case we’ve missed them.

My usual recommendations for maximum viewing pleasure this week: Cougar Town, The Daily Show, Doctor Who, Endgame, Happy Endings, House, Modern Family and Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. Watch them (and keep an eye on The Stage‘s TV Today Square Eyes feature as well) or you’ll be missing out on the good stuff.

Now to the irregulars and new things, as well as a few thoughts on some of those regulars:

  • The Apprentice: They seem to be making the tasks almost sensible this year. And they’re chucking out rubbish people early. It’s almost like a proper contest. How odd.
  • Chuck: A reasonable enough way to wrap everything up when you have no budget for anything exciting. But, the reboot of the show ready for the final season doesn’t really make me want to watch it. Sorry.
  • Happy Endings: Oh FFS. It’s one thing to show episodes out of order – it’s quite another to show episodes 2 and 3 as episodes 10 and 11 when they follow on directly from episode 1. What’s up there, ABC? All the same, really funny – funnier than the aired episodes 2 and 3 in fact – subtly tonally different from later episodes, filled in lots of details about the various friends and almost acts like a manifesto for the show. Watch it!
  • House: a whole five minutes in the middle that was just too gruesome for me to watch. Sorry. Just ugh! Bit of a limp season finale (and indeed season), but more intriguingly structured than usual, and Chase and 13’s bonding gave me hope for the show.
  • Running Wilde: Was that the finale or the penultimate episode? Almost funny, with a few Peter Serafinowicz moments to lift it, but didn’t quite make it to laugh out loud funny, apart from an Arrested Development joke.
  • The Shadow Line: the plotting was a bit off on this one, with some really horribly boring, drawn out bits, interspersed with some really very good exciting bits. The dialogue wasn’t so dreadful this week and Stephen Rea is awesome, but it also suffered quite the most moronic fight sequence since the UNIT slapping matches of the 70s, as well as a few research problems and the female cop is just horrendous. But some good twists and turns that should keep me watching next week.

But what have you been watching?

“What have you been watching this week?” is 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?