The new reviews A-Z

3 March 2008 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Well, the blog’s been going for a few years (two and a half) now and since a good proportion of it has been reviews, I’ve built up a fair old count: about 500, give or take, including third-episode verdicts, et al.

This can make it a little harder for y’all to find things than I’d like. After all, I do preview and review many new US shows quite some time before they make it across the pond: Dexter, season one, started last Wednesday on ITV1 (it’s already been on FX), a bit over a year after it aired in the US; and Mad Men started on BBC4 last night, six months after it first aired overseas.

There’s the complete archive, the search engine and tagging here, of course. But even if the show’s virile enough to have merited a tag, quite a few articles can get tagged relatively quickly (Dexter‘s chalked up 30 so far, while Mad Men’s chalked up 13), which makes finding the review a bit of a chore.

There have been complaints.

So, after building a rudimentary lathe and after an hour or so of clanging round the back, I’ve put together the Reviews A-Z, a simple index of all the reviews and (almost) nothing but reviews, sorted by title in alphabetical order.

It seems to work all right, although it does make me wish I’d been a bit more rigourous in my naming conventions, a whole lot sooner, but it should be of help. You can always find it at the bottom of the reviews list in the ‘Reviews’ tab to the right – yes, the grey bit under the “Featured Articles” bit and above the “Recent Videos”.

Let me know if you find any problems, or if you hate it. Or if you can’t find it. Oops.

Monday’s Kung Fu master news

3 March 2008 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Film

British TV

US TV

Arcadia: from the makers of The IT Crowd

2 March 2008 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Sounds a bit sh*t, but you never can tell with SRO’s marketing evil. Plus it has a good pedigree (‘from the makers of The IT Crowd,’ they say. Who’s that? The writers? The cameramen? The people who press the DVDs?)

ARCADIA

Arcadia is a youthful sitcom set in the real world around Clacton’s finest computer games shop Games 4 U with a cast of characters whose minds are somewhere else entirely…

The shop is in financial trouble and ever-so-slightly neurotic manager Tony (Edinburgh Fringe Award winner Nick Mohammed) is doing his best to keep things afloat, ably assisted by Mr Sci-Fi convention himself, Jeremy Stokes (Matt Green), and the attractive, though unobtainable, Bella.

Tony believes he can design games better than the ones he sells; the problem is all his ideas are rubbish. Jeremy has played and completed every computer game ever released while still managing to have a surprising amount of luck with the ladies. This is all the more remarkable considering Jeremy regularly arrives for work dressed as gaming characters no one else has heard of. Bella is the gorgeous level-headed young assistant and the apple of Tony’s eye but unfortunately she is more interested in the mysterious hacker Clint who masquerades as an asexual-cyber-terrorist but is in fact a nice middle-class boy who still lives at home with his mum.

If you would like to join us for a night of comedy for ONE NIGHT ONLY on Saturday 8th March at 7.00pm then apply now! The minimum age for audience members is 16 years.

You can apply online at www.sroaudiences.com. Filming’s at the BBC TV studios in White City.

GF Newman’s Law and Order at the BFI

29 February 2008 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Just been looking through my BFI catalogue for April. There’s the usual dearth of decent TV stuff, but on April 12th, they’re showing four episodes of GF Newman’s classic Law and Order from 1978.

Not to be confused with the long-running US show from Dick Wolf, Law and Order was the first British drama series to take a serious look at our legal system, police brutality and corruption. Newman, of course, was the guy who turned up at the Z-Cars writers’ meeting, suggested that one of the detectives should take a bribe and was told that “maybe he was on the wrong show”.

The BFI is screening all four episodes of the show, each of which looked at a different aspect of the legal system (The Detective’s Tale, The Villain’s Tale, The Brief’s Tale, The Prisoner’s Tale), starting at 2pm, with an introduction by GF Newman himself.

But there’s also good news: the show’s about to be released on DVD, and there’s a follow-up series on the way. I hasten you all to watch it if you can. Good luck finding the DVD on Amazon when it’s released – it’s going to be somewhat swamped by the US shows, by the looks of it….

UK TV

Review: Ashes to Ashes 1×4

29 February 2008 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

 

How’d that happen? I wasn’t intending to do episode by episode reviews of Ashes to Ashes, but here I am, reviewing it. Probably won’t happen next week, but who knows?

New theory, boys and girls. Forget Life on Mars. This isn’t Life on Mars in the 80s. This isn’t an attempt to look at changes in policing over the last couple of decades as I thought yesterday – or if it is, it’s a bad one. This is an attempt to do an episode by episode pastiche of individual crime shows of the 80s.

Life on Mars only had The Sweeney (and maybe Special Branch) to have a go at, and was all about changes in procedure and attitude. Ashes to Ashes is all about a TV-addicted woman who wants to be in an 80s detective show, probably Moonlighting. 

Help me with this theory since it’s on slightly shaky ground. These are the shows I think Ashes to Ashes has been sending up so far

Episode 1: The A-Team, Miami Vice or at the outside Riptide
Episode 2: Anyone?
Episode 3: Prime Suspect I (which was 1991 admittedly)
Episode 4: Edge of Darkness

I’ve come to this conclusion because last night’s episode was the biggest homage to Edge of Darkness that the world has yet seen.

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