As the wise sage Yazz once said, the only way is up. So it was with the latest episode of Doctor Who, The Lazarus Experiment. After the dismal piece of genetic mutation that was Evolution of the Daleks, we have a hybrid we can all be pretty proud of, a nearly 100% successful amalgam of old Who, new Who, The Quatermass Experiment and – ooh – MacGyver.
Many people will only know of the late Tom Bell as the sexist DS Otley in Prime Suspect. But his acting career was wide and varied. Perhaps Bell’s finest hour was in Out in his BAFTA-winning lead role of Frank Ross, a former bank robber who tears up his old manor after eight years inside, trying to find out who put him behind bars.
Written by Trevor Preston, a contributor to Callan and previous Euston Films productions such as Special Branch, Out is firmly rooted in the revenge thriller genre, as well as the general Euston Films milieu. Like Walker in Point Blank (1967) and Carter in Get Carter (1971), Ross is an iconic figure, a sharply dressed gangster who’s prepared to go to almost any lengths to find out who informed on him.
While the grittiness of those films lives on in these six episodes, it would be wrong to think of Out as simply a standard crime thriller. Taking the Krays and other real-life criminals as guidance, it explores the relationships that a career criminal might make with others, including his family, his friends, other criminals and the police, as well as the rules that bound societies like that together during the 60s and 70s.
Ha ha! That was a load of old bollocks, wasn’t it? Admit it, all of you who sat around saying “I’ll reserve judgement until part two”: you now wish you’d got in last week and said it was bollocks then, just so you don’t look like a bunch of “Me, too!”-ers, don’t you?
Oh the pain. If only there were some way to end it! Fortunately, there is. It’s called the off switch.
After three not terribly good episodes of Painkiller Jane, I’m throwing in the towel. It’s not without its charms: at its heart are some intriguing ideas; it feels at times like a 21st Century version of the rather good 80s show Max Headroom (the US sci-fi version, not the UK chat show); Kristanna Loken is?��Ǩ�� pretty; and it does look good.
But style can overcome only so much lack of substance. It’s appalling in execution. The writing is leaden and cliché d, with dialogue that makes you feel like you’ve got Ebola; there’s no real sense of place or time, so allusions to “Brad and Angelina” make absolutely no sense whatsoever in context; there’s no characterisation and even Jane only gets to be something more than a cipher because she does the ridiculous voiceovers; the plots are bizarre mishmashs of effortlessly poor detective investigations, action thrillers and homely moralising (the bad guys turn out to be lonely teenagers or well meaning little old men); and the actors are blessed with less talent than a computer-generated console game interstitial.
So The Medium Is Not Enough has great pleasure in declaring Painkiller Jane has scored a five or ‘Full Caruso’ on The Carusometer quality scale. A Full Caruso corresponds to “a show in which David Caruso might be responsible for every aspect of production. In an attempt to make the show futuristic, he will force the cast to wear sunglasses, even when it means they’ll fall over in the poorly lit sets he will insist on. He will also insist they end every sentence with the word ‘hip!’ because ‘People will talk different in the future’. All their shirts will be made from PVC.”
Drive is proving somewhat erratic. After a not terribly great start, it perked right up with a cracking second episode that completely flipped Nathan Fillion’s character. It’s third episode, though, was pretty rubbish, despite a couple of interesting moments. The poor old Carusometer doesn’t know which way to look (does it ever?), so we’re going to hold out for a fifth-episode verdict this time.
The theme tune, incidentally, is growing on me. I’m not sure it’s a great choice for the show itself – I’m petitioning Fox to acquire the rights to ‘Drive!‘, the theme tune to 80s tatt Hardcastle and McCormick – but it’s quite nice in itself.
