I’ve been duped by ITV4

13 November 2005 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Fooled by all that pre-launch guff, I naively believed that ITV4 was in fact going to have the programmes and American imports it claimed. I’ve just checked the listings and discovered something incredible. None of that is true. In fact…
ITV4 is exactly the same as Bravo. But more than that, it’s Bravo circa 1996.
Here’s what I mean:

  1. Sunday: 3.15am UFO; 6pm Strange Report; 7pm Space 1999
  2. Monday: 6pm Man in a Suitcase; 7pm Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)
  3. Tuesday: 6pm Return of the Saint; 7pm The Champions
  4. Wednesday: 6pm Department S; 7pm The Saint
  5. Thursday: 6pm The Adventurer; 7pm The Persuaders
  6. Friday: 6.30pm The Protectors; 7pm Jason King

That’s practically the entire ITC output of the 60s and 70s there. They’re short of Danger Man, The Avengers and The Prisoner, but hell, they’ve got The Champions so I don’t care. I’d watch The Persuaders for the theme tune, but it’s never been the same since I stopped watching the dubbed French version: Tony Curtis sounded so much better en fran?ɬ�ais.
To cap it all, they have First Wave, Andromeda and Alien Nation, as well as Alex Cox of Sid and Nancy and Repo Man fame essentially repeating his Moviedrome gig from the late 80s.
ITV4? Why not just call it “The Cult TV channel” and get it over with? If they ever broke Street Hawk out of the mothballs, I’d watch nothing else.

Review: CSI: Miami/CSI: New York crossover

11 November 2005 Rob Buckley Post a comment

It’s been CSI sweeps week in the US and we’ve been treated (?) to a Miami/NY crossover double-bill. I was both impressed and disappointed.

CSI: Miami was entirely predictable: all gloss, no logic, David Caruso strutting around like he owns the place, giving everyone else about three seconds of screen time. You’d have thought, given Republican-man’s perfect on-screen manners, he’d have let guest-star Gary Sinise get more than five minutes of screen time. But ‘Mac’ Taylor gets very little to do, most of it badly written, generic and designed to turn him into David Caruso’s sidekick for the episode. Other than Caruso, he only got to interact with Emily Proctor, making this a wasted opportunity.

CSI: NY was a different story though. This harked back to the early episodes of the show and even to the original CSI: Miami episode that acted as its pilot. It was gritty, bleak and once more, New York was grey and rain-swept. The stylings of Se7en were back and the show was the better for it. It’s been so dull of late, I didn’t even watch the last episode.

In contrast to the churlishness of Miami, NY was generous with the time and importance it gave its guest star, almost to the extent of excluding the regulars. Once again, Caruso was centre-stage with Stella and the others support to the Horatio Caine ego. Despite this, Caruso managed to fit into CSI: NY well, reminding you just how good he used to be in NYPD: Blue. It’s something the Miami producers have realised for some time: they’ve made sure that Caruso looks like his NYPD: Blue character in all the flashbacks to New York this year – quite an achievement after all this time – so that we get the hint that maybe Caine and John Kelly are one and the same.

Evil baddie of the the two-parter was Henry Darius. Serial killers may be so 1990s and exceedingly rare in real life, but they’ll always be good in TV shows when you need a ratings-winning body count. It was an excellent performance by James Badge Dale (who was the squeaky clean Chase in 24), although his motivation – I’m going to kill everyone because my dad wouldn’t admit to being my father – was somewhat short of the diagnostic criteria listed in the DSM IV.

I’ll tune into both next week, just to see if Miami gets any better and NY gets any worse.

ITV3: the network that doesn’t like to advertise

10 November 2005 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

ITV3 has been around for some time, mainly in the guise of Granada Plus before it got rebranded. It now has another relative, ITV4, which is supposed to be a “man’s channel”, showing American imports among other things.

Good theory. So why is it that all the good American imports are on ITV3? You wouldn’t know they were there because there’s no advertising. Yet, Numb3rs debuted on there a few weeks ago, as did Touching Evil (the US version). What does ITV4 have? The re-make of Kojak, which was so bad I stopped watching after ten minutes.

Sure ITV3 is essentially still the home of Poirot repeats, but they should think about moving over the new US imports to ITV4 if they’re not going to waste them.

Fox now has a battle of the preposterous on its hands

10 November 2005 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Prison Break turned out to be better than expected, much to Fox’s surprise. Yet, with the juggernaut that is 24 returning in January, it looks like Prison Break is going to be pre-empted from November to May. Quite a wait, one that could get the show cancelled.

Fox isn’t exactly packed with quality programming. While Prison Break isn’t Shakespeare, it does have some nice touches. Joining the honourable ranks of Monk and Touching Evil in pointing out the flipside of mental illness, Prison Break‘s hero turns out to have both low self-esteem and “low latent inhibition” – a disorder that makes him see objects as the sums of their parts, rather than just objects. It’s a handy, escape-plan compatible condition that works well in conjunction with another that lets you get sent to prison so you can rescue your brother. Yes, the mentally ill can be heros and their disorders can be advantages.

So Fox is clearly a little loopy to think that 24 is just so great that everything else should be cleared to make room for it. At the very least, moving Prison Break to one of the prime-time slots used by the deadwood that fills most days except Monday wouldn’t be a bad idea, particularly since it is doing well in the ratings despite baseball, etc.

£120m for Friends Reunited

8 November 2005 Rob Buckley Post a comment

ITV, apparently having decided its output is so high quality it can waste money on dotcom acquisitions, has decided to spend £120 million on Friends Reunited. Nutters.
Does anyone really bother with Friends Reunited any more? I haven’t updated my entry in a year. Neither has anyone else at any of the schools, clubs, workplaces, etc that I went to. The bulletin boards aren’t clogged up with people chatting. None of the people who failed to sign up when it was at its peak have had a change of heart recently.
It’s dead. It’s so 2001-2003.
If ITV really has that much money to throw around, perhaps it might like to spend more on decent programming and its ITN contract so that the latter’s journalists can afford to eat food for a change.