TV reviews

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

Today's Joanna Page

Today’s Joanna Page: Love Soup

9 May 2008 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Today’s Joanna Page, despite the best efforts of the BBC, is Love Soup, David Renwick’s slightly odd look at love that stars Tamsin Greig, Sheridan Smith and the superfluous one from Ashes to Ashes.

I caught an episode of it once to see what Sheridan Smith was up to in her time off from Two Pints and wasn’t desperately impressed. This time round was better, notably because of Joanna Page who got to exercise her acting muscles in a surprisingly subtle way. More on that later.

Strangely, Love Soup seems to have more in common with Jonathan Creek than Renwick’s One Foot in the Grave, with bizarre love mysteries to be solved in outlandish ways. It’s not great, but it’s okay: as much as I love Tamsin Greig – and indeed Sheridan Smith – Greig’s character, Alice, is just dull (although that’s probably the point) and Smith’s doesn’t really have a lot of depth. Still, it’s only half an hour long and nearly at the end of series two, so I’ve probably missed out on a lot.

Anyway, more pics of JP after the jump, including a great big spoiler. If you haven’t seen the episode yet and intend to, don’t go any further.

Incidentally, I do warn you that if you have still to see it, do not watch it where anyone can see you: it is definitely Not Suitable For The Office. Or indeed public transport. 

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UK TV

Review: Doctor Who – 4×5 – The Poison Sky

6 May 2008 Rob Buckley 7 Comments

Ah. Now that’s better. Finally, a decent two-parter and – miraculous though it might seem – one written by Helen Raynor at that.

After last week’s poorly paced but still reasonably good first part, I was expecting a lump of old rubbish for the second part, since that’s how it usually pans out. But hurroo, hurray, bar the occasional bit of dodgy dialogue, direction and acting, it was good.

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UK TV

Review: The Invisibles 1×1

2 May 2008 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

In the UK: Thursdays, 9pm, BBC1 

Clearly, with all the kids off watching their XBoxes instead of TVs now, commissioners at the mainstream channels are looking at tired, worn out, older viewers who remember a better time to bolster their audience figures.

Look at New Tricks, in which a bunch of old blokes from better TV shows that we all remember from the 70s and 80s get together to fight crimes and show us how it was done in the good old days.

Now here’s the flipside of that coin, in which two actors we remember from shows (and adverts) of the 80s and 90s get together to commit crimes. Course, back in those days, the gangsters were proper gentlemen weren’t they. Not like the scum these days. They won’t even tell proper jokes while they’re breaking into your safe.

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Review: The Sinister Folk

2 May 2008 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Went to the NFT’s showing of Murrain, an episode of the old play strand Against The Crowd* written by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale, and Robin Redbreast, from the BBC’s Play for Today written by British arch-surrealist John Bowen.

Robin Redbreast

Surprisingly, Robin Redbreast was the stronger of the two: think a cross between Rosemary’s Baby, The Wicker Man and The Aphrodite Inheritance, all set in the Cotswalds, in which a newly single TV script editor finds that country folk have their own strange ways. Absolutely off its head, with bizarre naked karate in the woods, appearances by Herne the Hunter and Wayland the Smithy, and some of the weirdest dialogue you’d ever hear, it was just endlessly entertaining.

Murrain

Murrain was relatively normal by comparison, a standard piece of Kneale fare in which superstition meets science – in the form of a pig farmer who thinks a local woman is really a witch and a vet who wants to protect the little old lady from those nasty bumpkins. If anything, it proved that DoPs in the 70s shouldn’t have got ambitions above their stations so many years before the invention of the Steadicam. Not really worth looking out for unless you’re a big fan of Bernard Lee (the original M in the Bond movies) or the scary dad in Sapphire and Steel – Assignment 1.

The audience: As always, it’s worth reviewing the audience:

  • An above average beardy weirdy count this time, with a folk music DJ playing in the bar afterwards
  • Two audible uses of ‘the voice’
  • On my left, a young posh girl out with a ridiculously older man who clearly wasn’t a relative (shudder) and who insisted on narrating the plays to each other when they weren’t making out
  • On my right, a man with little understanding of personal boundaries and an incredible sinus problem: so bad was it, that the man to his right had to squeeze his way past Kim Newman at the end of Murrain to escape the torture in time for Robin Redbreast. I could not escape past ‘the lovers’
  • The man behind me started snoring 10 minutes before the end.

I’ve had better nights out

* My, didn’t they think they were being subversive?