Day 6202: DOCTOR WHO: Steven Moffat’s The Abominable Bride

Christmas


Last Christmas… was the Doctor Who Christmas Special from two years ago, but last Christmas we got “The Husbands of River Snog”, and this year – to save you from tears – I’m going to review the Special from last Christmas. Which isn’t “Last Christmas”. Are you with me so far?

Time can be rewritten. And so can Doctor Who Christmas Specials. The human colony of Mendorax Dellora, as charming and Christmassy a redressing of the sets from “Face the Raven” as you could ask for, feels a lot like a return to earlier Moffat Christmases, whether Sardiktown in “A Christmas Carol” or the town of Christmas in (shudders) “The Time of the Doctor”; the crashing spaceship is reminiscent of the also-meteor-struck Titanic in “Voyage of the Damned” or more apropos the crash of the Byzantium in “The Time of Angels” or Amy and Rory’s honeymoon liner in (again!) “A Christmas Carol”. Crashing spaceships are the new “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day”. You start to get the feeling Mr Moffat’s doing this deliberately.


Steven Moffat, the Grand Moff, has always treated the story of Doctor Who as a palimpsest, even his own works, going back again and again to re-write and over-write what has been before. And always, it seems, to reject closure. He’s never happy to just live with things that end. Even his most famous killer monsters, the Weeping Angels don’t kill – they send you back in time for more life. He’s going to be inconsolable when he has to finally hand over to Chibnall. He’s forever reaching for that get-out clause, to – as the Eighth Doctor might put it – hold back death. Whether it’s rewriting the end of the Time War to save Gallifrey, or going literally to the end of all the Worlds to snatch an endlessly extended extra moment from Clara’s death.

This time he even has his own creation, River Song, accuse him of doing it:

“There’s always a loophole. You wait until the last minute and then you spring it on me. […]
But you will. You'll wait until I've given up hope. All will be lost, and you'll do that smug little smile and then you'll save the day. You always do.”

The life of River Song was always bounded by the fact that it ended where it began back at the Library. Even then, he wouldn’t let her go, giving her a cyber-heaven to inhabit. OR even come back from, in “The Name of the Doctor”.

And he does the same thing again here, giving River and the Doctor one last night together, at the Singing Towers on Darillium… and then teasing it out to twenty-four years. Eventually we’ll have to stop renewing and just return!

In a way, though, it is very Doctor-ish, to keep cheating death, tricking his way out of death.

But you only get a commendation for reprogramming the Kobayahi Maru the first time.


Having said all that, the opportunity to do a screwball comedy across time and space with two of the finest actors working today, written by an author with genuine talent for farce, does kind of make the exercise worthwhile.

All the time they are on the screen together is delightful. Their timing, their chemistry, their obvious enjoyment of the fun they are having.

The supporting cast – makes shrugging gesture – mm, less so.

I’ve never been that taken with Greg Davies, nor the brand of shouty acting that he’s been asked to deliver for the role of King Hydroflax here. Like someone who’s seen Brian Blessed but not understood the subtlety of menace that he can bring to, say, Caesar Augustus, a role that Hydroflax ought to resemble. But, he’s actually there as a slapstick prop, a head-in-a-bag to be tossed about like the quips that Capaldi and Kingston exchange, so I was still laughing out loud at pretty much every scene he was in.

More distressingly, Matt Lucas’s as Nardole was quickly quite irritating: whiny and snivelling and just not given very funny things to do or say. Which is a shame as he’s the one returning this year, though thankfully he appears to have – somehow – got his body back.

I did, however, enjoy the outrageously oleaginous Maître D’, Flemming, played by Rowan Polonski. It’s through his delicious banality of evil that we understand that the passengers of the starship Harmony and Redemption – arrived at in a sudden plot swerve halfway through – don’t believe in harmony and don’t deserve redemption.

And Mr Scratch, River Song’s buyer – not quite Doctor Who versus Scratchman, but whose flip-top head seems very lifted from the New Adventure “All-Consuming Fire” – was very nicely sinister, in a Colony Sarf sort of a way.

But Kingston and Capaldi make a glorious double act. For him, it’s a joy to see the Doctor laughing and grinning his way through the adventure, getting to be the companion, enjoy doing the “bigger on the inside” right, and be the one who knows more than River, just this once. For her, there’s such a range of new and different facets of the character to portray: the lies within lies, or perhaps it’s not lies, it’s acting. When we first meet her, she’s playing Darth Vader, sweeping down the boarding ramp in flowing cloak; then she’s role-playing devoted wife – and so over the top we’re sure she’s not very good at it; then it’s the cold assassin, plotting a decapitation with whom she assumes is a pliantly complicit barber-surgeon; then she’s heroically angry with Hydroflax the butcher for his theft from the Halassi of the diamond that’s stuck in his cranium… and that’s all in the five minutes on board the joyfully retro flying saucer (nice that King Hydroflax can accessorise his spaceship and his robot body, by the way – though I suppose he does have plenty of cash…)

What River’s acting does – and the Doctor notes this when he asks “Is this what you’re like when I’m not about?” – is to flag up the way this story is about different perspectives.

Hydroflax, for example, on the one hand he’s worshipped by millions; on the other he’s loathed as a monster; or the Doctor just thinks he’s a moron; and in the end his own robot body decides he’s just rotting meat.

The passengers on the Harmony and Redemption: are they innocent travellers, as we at first assume? Or are they killers and planet burners, as River tells us? Or are they a cult of Hydroflax followers as they reveal themselves to be?

Even the diamond, the Halassi Androvar, the McGuffin that drives the plot, to the Doctor it’s just downpayment on a dinner date.

And so River herself. Which perspective of her do we take away? Hero or villain? Archaeologist or thief? Righteous or rogue? Warrior or wife? As many faces as, well, as she has husbands.

And what about Moffat? Does he keep coming back and rewriting or is he still trying to capture different perspectives on the same ideas? When – like Big Finish – he inserts more and more stories into tinier and tinier gaps, when he gives Clara immortality in her last heartbeat, is he fishing from an infinitely tiny well or like a fractal unfolding discovering infinite regress within the snowflakes?

Does it even matter so long as it’s fun?


“Happy ever after” doesn’t mean forever, River tells us, just for some time. Perhaps it would be better put as “they lived ever happy after”. But some things even Moffat cannot rewrite.

Merry Christmas.

Day 4276: DOCTOR WHO: A Town Called THIS IS A METAPHOR

Saturday:

Jokes we wish we'd thought of a fortnight ago: a PARLIAMENT of the Daleks could also be a DIET of the Daleks, and THAT is why those New Paradigm bottoms have gotten smaller!

Oh, never mind.

Here's Daddy Richard's review of Doctor Woo and the Gunfighter. Note: Singular.

There will be spoilers.

If you'd stopped me halfway through watching this episode and asked me what I thought of it... I'd have refused to answer. But what I'd have been thinking was that it was good. Really good. Sadly, for me, the ending rather let it down with pat cliché.

There are two scenes in particular which are absolutely electric: the first where the Doctor loses it, tosses Kahler-Jex over the town boundary, leaving him at the mercy of the cyborg Gunslinger, and pulls a gun on him to keep him there, where Amy gets to deliver the possibly-series-defining line "This is what happens when you travel alone too long"; and the second was the "look me in the eye; end my life" talking down of bravo Dockery (Sean Benedict) by the Doctor, using only his words to persuade the young man that violence was never the way.

It's just a shame that the two scenes were so closely juxtaposed because they were completely at odds with each other. In the former, the Doctor is at his most wrathful, furious at what Jex has made him confront about himself and the consequences of his actions; in the second he's at his most Doctor-ish, doing the right thing even though it's the hard thing, determined to make people better. It's not that both of these personae are not contained within the Doctor's complex character. What was missing was a sense of why the Doctor has performed this emotional volte face.

It isn't what Amy says to him that turns him around. It ought to be, but – and actually I think it's a nice touch – his response is much more "Yeah, yeah, okay mom". It could have been the death of the Marshal, Isaac (Ben Browder, excellent but underused), but that comes across more as him being dumbfounded, lost for once for words. It could even have been one of those so-interesting conversations between Jex and the Doctor where the clever Kahler forces the Doctor to consider himself and his own questionable moral statue.

There needed to be a transformative moment when the Doctor admits, if only to himself, that Amy is right this time. And it's missing.

In a similar way, there seemed to be a missing scene where the Doctor explained why painting Jex's facemark on other people was a good idea. Bearing in mind, at this point the Gunslinger has declared his intention to come into the town and slaughter everyone until he gets Jex, why then provide him with plenty of potentially valid targets? Isn't this asking him to shoot first and not care that he's killed the wrong person again later? Of course, we later discover that the Gunslinger's compassion actually won't let him kill innocent people even to get his revenge. But at the point he's doling out the facepaint, the Doctor can't know that.

Like on several occasions this season, it seems that something has survived from an earlier draft when the necessary exposition has been pruned to fit the blockbuster to the forty-five minute slot.

But, to return to the point, there are, of course, three wars we are talking about here, and they're all metaphors for each other: the American Civil War; the Kahler Civil War; and the Time War.

Superficially, you can see why Dr Kahler-Jex, an affecting multi-faceted performance from Adrian Scarborough, would get the Doctor's back up: he's a scientist who has experimented on his own kind to create cyborg war machines with the aim of bringing a terrible war to an end. If that's not screaming Davros at you then you need to review your "Genesis of the Daleks". But, of course, he also gets under the Doctor's skin by being a (another) dark reflection of the Doctor himself – he ended the war but at terrible cost, and is now "the only survivor" trying to make a difference to the lives of others.

It's an ambiguity that the episode dances down nicely for a long time, but it falls off with the conclusion where Jex does "the only honourable thing" and blows himself up. As with the Doctor's moral handbrake turn, this isn't so much out of character as a reversal missing a necessary explanation. And if you're going to paint a character so closely as an analogue of the Doctor, do you really want to suggest that the only moral action he can take is suicide? Even if you do believe that some crimes are too big to be forgiven, where does that leave the Doctor after double-genocide?

And there's actually a better answer to be found in the episode.

Jex recounts the Kahler belief that the afterlife is a Sisyphean climb bearing the burden of the souls you've harmed.

The interesting point of this philosophy, of course, is that it directly refutes what the Doctor says about victims – the Daleks' victims, the Master's victims, all the rest. The burden of all the people who died because of the Doctor's mercy is not the Doctor's to bear; that weight falls upon the perpetrators of those actions, on the Daleks, on the Master, on Jex himself. What the Doctor is actually doing is trying to lay off his true burden, which is the weight of all those Daleks that he did kill.

But surely the opportunity was there for the Doctor to reply to Jex that after you're dead is no good; no, justice demands that you bear those souls while you are still alive.

Assuming that there can even be justice after war.

In a subtle and world-weary performance from Ben Browder, he manages to suggest that the Marshal has a secret past of his own, and that he's putting everyone's past behind them because it is charity not justice which is necessary if you're going to reconstruct after a war like the US Civil War.

I suppose it's inevitable that a Western would be another episode to laud the "noble warrior".

Jex, you'll notice, is a doctor, a healer, and so he perverted his gifts by using them to create the cyborg warriors. Obviously he has to die.

(And look! He keeps recordings of his victims screaming as he operates – because clearly he knows how to cure cholera but hasn't heard of anaesthesia. Really, that's a cheap trick to make him look "evil".)

Kahler-Tek of course was a soldier (and presumably made the choice to kill people before becoming a controlled cyborg, as well as doing so again after breaking his control programming). As a cyborg his "gifts" are "greater powers to kill". But since that's what he uses his powers for, that means his killing spree should be measured against "honour".

This can't be right, and even the gunslinger himself admits at the end that he's probably been a bit of a dick about this whole revenge thing.

It's supposed to be a "twist" that it's the naughty doctor who's the monster and the cyborg is the victim. But you know what, that guy who's a murderous vigilante – actually, he is a monster too.

The "cyborg as victim" trope has a long history as a metaphor for "war changes you". Everyone who comes back from war bears the scars, on the inside, if not the outside, and the cyborg externalises that in a very literal way, saying "look, they turned me into a weapon". It preys on our ancient fears of bodily violation while at the same time being a walking symbol of mutilation. (Doctor Who has a long and ignoble tradition of equating bodily imperfection with moral evil, from Magnus Greel to Sharaz Jek, and starting with the Daleks themselves, of course – coming so soon after the Paralympics this all might be in slightly poor taste.)

Oh, and if we're in the business of saying that it's wrong, evil even, taking away someone's self-will, turning them into a weapon, sending them out to destroy the enemy (even if it's to save your friends)... didn't the Doctor do that to a Dalek two weeks ago? The difference being, of course, the Dalek didn't volunteer. And the Dalek died. Er...

To me, the differences between Jex and the gunslinger are ones of scale, not of kind. But no one even suggests this, that going round killing people for the personal pleasure of revenge might be a bad thing to do, and the episode presents his fate as reward rather than penance.

Basically, he's got what he wanted – Jex and all the others dead – and it's left him unsatisfied. For which the Doctor gives him a pat on the head and a shiny star.

Really, the ending of this story should not have allowed the Gunslinger to get away with it. If Jex had to die, it would have been more honest for the story to have let Kahler-Tek take his final revenge, and then for the Doctor to have told him: "All those souls that Jex had to bear... they're you're burden now. See if you can figure out a way to earn their forgiveness. "

The biggest crime of disconnection, though, is that "A Town Called Mercy" does not feel as though it resolves the situation regarding the murder of Solomon that occurred in the previous episode (whether or not caused by the Dalek nanoswarm in the episode before that). Without actually alluding to it, it makes the series appear to say "Putting someone in the path of missiles is fine, but putting them in the path of a vigilante cyborg is a bit off". That's contradictory at best.

(Not that that's really writer Toby Whitehouse's fault, and on the whole I find his take on Doctor Who vastly more acceptable than the "Carry On Assassinating" version we got from School of Saward last week. No, the flaw is that we have to put the pieces together ourselves because the script editor, sorry "head writer", has chosen to make everything stand alone. I have to say, Chibnall may have an alarmingly different ethical stance, but at least he appear to have one; Moffat seems not to have even noticed that this episode needs to be stood up as a rebuke to the preceding one.)

Alex, insightfully, spots another, more worrying parallel: with the West's current preference for peppering enemy states with indiscriminate drone missiles rather than risking the lives of our soldiers. An old-fashioned kind of morality would see the Gunslinger as more noble because he can at least look his victims in the eyes before killing them. In a reversal of this, the difference between "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" and "A Town Called Mercy" is that that while the latter sees the Doctor getting his hands dirty and so raises its moral outrage, the former doesn't even notice that a crime has occurred. Blowing someone up with missiles "doesn't count"; it's the video-game-isation of death.

Visually, "A Town Called Mercy" had a near dream-like quality. Westerns have almost always existed on the fringes of reality anyway, but somehow the bright sunlight – more alien to Doctor Who than any Dalek – gave this a feeling of the unreal. With the town boundary marked by a literal line in the sand, a line that the Doctor steps over – something he'll do so many more ways this episode – it was a surprise that this didn't turn out to be a realm of the Dream Lord, out to teach the Doctor a lesson about going too far.

(It would even have been a creditable excuse for the presence yet again of Amy and Rory, if they're "just a dream" too. Especially with them "on the way to the Day of the Dead" foreshadow, foreshadow!)

The Guardian seems thoroughly delighted that this was all really, really real, but to me naming the town "Mercy" for a story about the quality of mercy was a bit on the sledgehammer side.

The Gunslinger was an okay piece of design, possibly a little familiar to anyone whose seen any Red Dwarf or The Terminator or read any Judge Dredd, though his teleporting walk was inspired, not so much jumping from place to place as carrying his own heat haze with him to walk out of.

The direction, all Spaghetti Western by way of Back to the Future Three – yes, we saw that lightning bolt strike the clock tower, although the over-keen undertaker measuring Matt up for a pinewood suit made me think "Carry on Cowboy" instead – made excellent use of the location, and made Matt look great in all the clichés of the genre. And though they might be clichés, they're good clichés.

Nice use of the running joke about the Doctor speaking every language in the Universe, with his temporary equine companion. And isn't "A Horse Called Susan" good enough to be an episode title on its own?

Oh, and can anyone explain why an episode that otherwise looks this good appears to open with the world's clunkiest robot? (Yes, we're later told the Kahler are ingenious and can cobble together anything from anything, and that is clearly what has happened, but...) Is it just so we can have the Gunslinger hunting down and killing the BBC One ident?

Next Time...The World's been invaded by little black boxes. Rory's in his pants and Chibnall is back in the driving seat. Anticipate the villain to be Dusty Bin in "The Power of Three, Two, One". Or, you know, not.

Day 4183: Sallad Dressing

Wednesday:

It's like the Eighties never went away.

Oh, just shoot us now!

Day 3653: The SKY's the Limit

New Year's Day:

Today is my BIRTHDAY and…

HOLY FLUFF! Daddy Richard's on the telly box!

Run VT!



Well, at least he didn't accidentally go to war with any media barons or make up coalition policy on the spot!

Happy Birthday Me!
.

Day 3493: Sherlock aka Elephentry, Dear Watson

Sunday:


"Sherlock" is a new series from the BBC based on the famous novels of Mr Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: "The Adventures of Professor Doctor Who, er, Challenger, er, What?"

It's a really classy looking production, sharply directed and edited, beautiful and clever to watch, and with an excellent cast: Mr Benedict Cucumberpatch emptying the cabinet of quirks as the original maverick detective and Tim from the Office stoically baffled as Dr definitely-not-his-boyfriend Watson.

But the trouble with writing for a genius is that you don't get any excuses.

So it's inexcusable when Mr Sherlock is slower than the audience.

He really SHOULDN'T fail to deduce that the killer is a cabbie at the point where he's extemporising about "being invisible in a crowd" and "hunting in the city streets". After all, his Eighteen-eighty incarnation worked it out! And so did Daddy. Mind you, it was probably the director's fault that the moment was intercut with enough TAXICABS to make it so BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS!

Nor should Mr Sherlock be so STUPID as to start deducing OUT LOUD who's just shot the killer dead, and then have to say "oh just ignore me"; not after all the trouble you've gone to to establish his internal monologue by clever means of on-screen text: surely, Mr Sherlock should SILENTLY deduce that it must be Watters and THEN say to Lestrade "I have absolutely no idea"!

And, of course, you really SHOULDN'T have the "master of observation" repeatedly overlook the obvious when Mrs Hudson is trying to tell him about the taxi that is waiting for him, and the killer is standing RIGHT THERE. Yes, yes, it's very funny, just like all those times Dr Woo ignores K-9 when he has a vital warning or clue, but Mr Sherlock is NOT Dr Woo… oh.

You could really tell that this was a realisation by the Mister Moffster, the man who is currently behind Dr Woo. A lot of the great detectives mannerisms were VERY Dr Woo, although actually rather more Mr Dr David than Mr Dr Matt – particularly the "wooo, she was sooo brilliant" bit, but also a lot of the "I don't mean to be rude but I'm more intelligent than your entire species put together" was doing the "rude and still not ginger" Doctor. Mr Sherlock describes his rudeness as being a sociopath not a psychopath – though in fact the words have the same meaning, and "sociopath" is just what you call a "psychopath" when you don't want to annoy them – but really, his obsessive observation, high-functioning intellect, and lack of social awareness rather place him somewhere on the autistic spectrum but I guess that doesn't sound sexy enough for television.

The brilliantly clever direction is, I had to admit, clearly school of "Hollyoaks". No, I'm talking about the use of onscreen text for text-messaging and visualising train of thought, not the "oh she's a sister"/"oh you're his brother" school of… hang on, they did those too.

Thankfully we guessed that Mr Mark Gatiss was laying it on so thick was because he was going to turn out to be brother Mycroft and not Mr Professor Moriarty. Because casting yourself as brother Mycroft would self-indulgent enough, Mr Executive Producer, but the thought – that you were CLEARLY trying to double-bluff us into thinking – that you could be Mr Professor Moriarty sends shudders up the spine. And not in the GOOD way!

As it happens, we'd just found ourselves wondering how Mr Martin Freeman could actually DO acting, when he is blessed or cursed with such a totally "everyman" face, only then we saw him in a scene with Mr Mark Gatiss and thought: oh yes, he IS doing proper acting, and doing it brilliantly; you can see it compared to "that thing that Mr Mark Gatiss does".

Tell me this: how is it possible for Mr Mark Gatiss to do "that thing that Mr Mark Gatiss does" when he's just STANDING THERE? I don't know, but he did it and booted all sense of naturalism right out of the window for a good few minutes.

It isn't as though he can't DO acting: there are LOTS of other characters from "The League of Gentlemen" that he can do, to start with, and they managed to wring a decent performance out of him in "Poirot", but most of the time he just wants to do "comedy sinister toff". Well I say "sinister"; he's about as threatening as air. And I say "comedy"; it's just not funny…

But that visual "trick" of placing "post-it notes" of Mr Sherlock's thought processes over the "real" picture is reminiscent of the "the Doctor working it out" sequence from Dr Woo's "The Eleventh Hour" (where a rapid sequence of stills tracks the Doctor's mind's eye as he goes back over what he's seen). Although it's also reminiscent of Mr Guy Ritchie's technique of having HIS Mr Holmes play out a fight-scene in his head to work it all out before implementing it in a flash.


A lot of this episode, "A Study in Pink", comes direct from the original "Holmes meets Watson" story: "A Study in Scarlet", including the horrible history repeating itself of Mr Watson being returned from the war in Afghanistan; occasionally inverting it as with the "Rache/Rachel" clue – in the Conan Doyle version: Lestrade wants to look for a Rachel, but Holmes identifies the word as German for revenge; this time around Holmes identifies and rejects the German possibility and reverts to the incomplete name.

The Mister Moffster is QUITE RIGHT to bring Mr Sherlock right up to date. The Holmes adventures were never written as a period piece, but were always "cutting edge". The character is genuinely timeless, as Mr Basil Rathbone demonstrated by bringing him forwards to fight Nazis in the Nineteen Forties. Indeed most Holmes adaptations up to that point WERE contemporary rather than historical; it's only later that the whole Victorian setting became a part of the fixtures.

And most of the updating works. Daddy laughed out loud at the self-aware silliness of "the three patch problem". But not all.

When it comes to the KILLER, Mr Jeffthecabbie, the fatal aneurism and the belief that Mr God loves him and his helping him beat the odds both come from the original Conan Doyle; but by getting rid of the "Study in Scarlet" backstory – and, to be fair, all that stuff about MORMONS that is probably racist or something – it turns the character into that most TAWDRY of modern TV TROPES: the motiveless serial killer. Who then sort of has a motive that he's taking revenge (even though "rache" was a red herring) for being dying by "outliving" the people he kills. And sort of has another motive that he's being paid to bump off people at random to give his sponsor a cheap thrill (or was there some connection between them after all, that Moriarty wanted them all dead?).

Anyway, Mr Jeffthecabbie's modus operandi is to point a (fake) gun at his taxi passengers and make them chose one of two pills, one of which is poison.

It's been widely suggested, by everyone from Daddy Alex onwards, that BOTH pills are poison and Mr Jeffthecabbie has taken an antidote or built up an immunity over many years, what you might call the "Princess Bride" solution.

Others have taken the analysis of language used by Mr Jeffthecabbie – make the RIGHT choice, get the RIGHT pill and you live, did you get it RIGHT – to infer that our cheeky killer is trying to Derren Brown his victims into picking the poison pill. (It's almost impossible to see how this could have been done WELL – it certainly wasn't done by the banal conversation between killer and detective that we saw. Perhaps a direct to camera monologue by Mr Jeffthecabbie, perhaps scripted by the REAL Derren Brown, making the viewer take the Mr Sherlock role, and leave you with a lingering shot of the two pills and deciding for yourself which you would chose…)

Or possibly he was genuinely just NUTS. And LUCKY.

Irritatingly, the play doesn't bother to give us an answer.

And it would have been so easy: it would have been nice to have Mr Sherlock SAY that "obviously" both pills were poisoned.

Or, uncomfortable as it might be to see Mr Sherlock using TORTURE – crude infliction of pain; it OUGHT to be beneath him – you could definitely see him ruthlessly saying: "well, you're dying anyway and I've got to know if I'm right…" and forcing the pill into Mr Jeffthecabbie's shocked mouth. Which would be a "modern updating" of the "he tries the pills on a dog" of the original.

When he gets up and walks away from the poison pill game it's BRILLIANT. But then Mr Jeffthecabbie tries to talk him into taking the pill anyway: "because he's got to know if he was right", which is a dreadful misreading of the character of Mr Sherlock.

I mean, if he genuinely WAS a sociopath (which he isn't!) then "playing the game" is exactly what he WOULDN'T do, anyway.

But at this point Mr Sherlock is ABSOLUTELY NOT going to risk his life on a game of "who's got the biggest swinging BRAIN" by taking the poison pill for one very good reason: Mr Jeffthecabbie has just giving him a MUCH MORE INTERESTING PUZZLE.

Now it COULD be a mistake on the part of the crazy killer.

Seriously, if Mr Sherlock's only reason for playing the game is that he's BORED, then saying to him "there's a name but I'm not going to tell you" is EXACTLY the wrong thing to say! Woo, look, great big mystery. But still, life's so dull isn't it. I mean REALLY???

But then Mr Sherlock goes and gets TEMPTED so it's clearly a mistake on the part of the WRITER.

So let's address the writing.

One hugely significant thing missing from the show – one that might, ironically, have helped the writer avoid his usual habit of making the male lead a gawky self-parody and the female lead into a Sue Virtue analogue – is the almost complete lack of WOMEN. Or "women who aren't dead" anyway. Yes, there's a token lady police officer, who is mean to "our hero" when he outs her liaison (wrong in SO many ways) with the police pathologist. But she's not really an IMPORTANT character, is she. And brother Mycroft's airhead assistant barely counts as a character at all. And all the other women are DEAD.

Yes, of course, the ORIGINAL Holmes adventures tend to be a little, you might say, "female-lite"; but THEY were written a hundred and twenty years ago by someone who had never seen Sarah Jane Smith. What is Mr Moffat's excuse?

But there is, if possible, an even BIGGER absence. By throwing away the backstory, that tedious second half of the novel, you are also throwing away Mr Sherlock's METHOD.

Detection by logical deduction depends on pattern-spotting. Holmes EXCELS at this because he has trained himself to the peak of observation (except where Mrs Hudson is concerned, clearly) and is a genius at making connections.

It's a "unique selling point" that hasn't really been matched since: Poirot uses his "psychology"; Colombo a sort of dogged determination; Morse seems to wait until all the other suspects have been killed off and whoever's left is the killer; Wallander may or may not solve the crime, I'm just too depressed to find out… but Holmes's one-man CSI trick of spotting the tiny but significant details and extrapolating meaning from them is unbeatable because it's basically REAL police work but with a superpower that lets him do all the hard dogsbodying of real police work in an instant.

In "A Study in Scarlet" he solves the case by working out what the connection IS between the two dead men and the killer; that's the whole point of the second half of the book. By getting rid of that connection you lose the heart of the story. It's not just BORING that Mr Jeffthecabbie is a serial killer; it misses the whole POINT.

Which is why the ending suddenly becomes rather contrived, relying as it does on the so-called genius serial killer NOT turning off the mobile phone that he knows can (and indeed DOES) lead his pursuers right to him but instead deciding that the most larks would be to abduct the person who's close to catching him from under the noses of the police. Like you do.


Don't get me wrong. "Sherlock" is a work of GENIUS. But that genius was Mr Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Holmes and Watson are brilliant characters in their own right, and they are brilliantly realised by two hugely talented and charismatic actors. Holmes method of deduction is a brilliant hook to hang the detective stories on, and the story is vividly brought to life by clearly extraordinary and inventive creative people.

And so much of the writing, the characterisation, the nods to the source material, is spot on. There is a sense of humour and friendship and even reality to the proceedings that leavens some much-needed light through the darkness of a very dark story, in a way that, for example, the recent troubled "Luther" did not. (Yes, I said some nice thinks about "Luther" and the very next week they LITERALLY had a woman in a fridge. Sigh. Sorry.)

It's clearly a huge hit with the viewers and the critics and Twitter seemed alive with positive responses last night. And we'll definitely be watching again.

We'd just rather there were fewer of the, er, elementary mistakes.

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Day 3417: Luthor

Tuesday:


With its mournful soul/country ballad theme, not to mention its star, it's clear that Auntie Beeb were hoping that this might be a British "Wire". But it doesn't have the sprawling character set, slow-moving-yet-gripping intertwined plots or documentary filming style to do that.

Rather, as psychodrama dressed up as police procedural, and with an anti-heroic lead – Mr Idris Elba: subtle and awesome – whose brilliance and insight are set off against his self-destructive personality, its true ancestor is ITV's acclaimed "Cracker".

But watching last night, we realised what this REALLY is: it is BATMAN without the dressing up!

John Luthor: brooding, brilliant, powerful but "captured by the dead" – remind you of anyone? And we have NEVER seen a better performance as the Joker than Ms Ruth Wilson's crazy/scary Alice.

There are three world class actors on show: the lead, of course, and Ms Ruth – also on the tellybox as the OTHER one worth watching in ITV's rehash of "The Prisoner" (more on that story later, as they say) – and also the other lady in Mr Luthor's life: Ms Indira Varma – formerly of "Torchwood" and "Rome" and, ahem, lots of proper acting – as his separated wife, Ms Zoe.

Oh, and Mr Dr Paul McGann is quite good too.

It is a BIT scary for some viewers – and you might get upset with the first episode when a DOGGIE gets murdered (also some people), but it looks like it might be quite GRIPPING viewing.

After all, what else could keep you glued to your tellybox on a Tuesday after the election is over?

Oh… that…

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Day 3328: Marginalising the BBC (that's: Bible-Bashing Christians)

Wednesday:


Today the top men-in-frocks of the Church of England voted to express their "deep concern" that the national broadcaster isn't carrying enough ADVERTS.

…What?

Oh all right: their worry that the BBC isn't pushing THEIR AGENDA hard enough.

…No, seriously, what?

OK: as a body with a symbiotic relationship with the nation, it is TRUE that there ought to be representation for all and a variety of views presented to satisfy all the deeply spiritual people of this great country. But enough about women bishops.

The BBC absolutely should not have to broadcast any more FRIGHTENINGLY DULL FAIRY STORIES!

As usual, the religions ALREADY HAVE extra privileges that ordinary groups don't get. And, in a very DUDLEY DURSLEY fashion, they are now wailing that they don't have more presents than last year.

On the radio they've got "Fart for the Day" every single day; that's a LOT of farts.

On the telly they've got "Snogs of Praise" to kiss bottom with Mr God every week. Not to mention that ghastly Sunday morning punch-up hosted by Nicky Campbell. (This week's questions: Since Mr God says Lord Blairimort was okay to invade Iraq is that all right then? Do paedophiles have the right to privacy or should they be burned at the stake in public? And is paganism more relevant than Christianity – we ask Lord Summerisle and a representative of the Scottish Constabulary…)

And that's without counting the times Dr Sentimoo or the Beardy Weirdy of Canterbury get to turn up at random as a talking head as though a lifetime of manoeuvring your way up the CofE's gilded pole makes you some kind of EXPERT rather than just a different form of POLITICIAN.

(e.g. suddenly the Beardy Weirdy pops up on the otherwise excellent "A History of the World in A Hundred Objects" to talk about an Ice Age carving of swimming reindeer… "primitive art… that's a bit like Jesus…")

Remember boys and girls, OTHER political parties have to make their OWN political broadcasts!

And they ARE really like politicians: they are a group who hold certain philosophical views and hope to convince people that they should be allowed to exercise control over everybody's lives.

Except that normal political parties get their views ROBUSTLY challenged on a daily basis. When was the last time you heard Mr Paxo scoffing at the promises that Mr Jesus is said to offer?

"Nnnnyeaaas, Messiah Secretary, but did you threaten to overrule Mr Bealzebub?"

It's also a bit rich to complain that the programmes aren't "innovative" enough. From the theatrical company who've been putting on the same three shows every Sunday since practically the Dawn of Creation! Oh no, sorry, that's the other lot – this show's just been running since the First Coming.



And while I'm on the subject, it's not just the Christians who are at it: there's a former High Court judge who's been doing some special pleading this week too: Sikh-ing Special Privileges, you might say. (Oooh, I AM sorry!)

It isn't PREJUDICE when you are expected to follow the same rules as EVERYBODY ELSE.

It's not impossible that saying you can't carry a dagger around IS breaking your human right to religious expression. On the other fluffy foot, we don't say that, for example, Aztec Priests are exempt from the laws about Class A drugs just because peyote is an important part of their religious ceremonies. So why should "religious expression" give you the "right" to ignore the knife laws?

(Are the knife laws too draconian? Well, probably, but at least there you can justify your case on the grounds of wanting to reduce the number of stabbings, compared to "we have to wear a knife because we always have".)

But to say that you have a "right" to attend any school you like whether or not you are willing to abide by that school's (entirely sensible) rules is just SILLY. Not least because lots of people CAN'T get to go to whichever school they like because of league-tables and oversubscribing and so on.

And it's just not on to keep complaining that you are hard done by because you don't get special treatment compared to everybody else.


And no, I'm not going to bring the Hindu who wants the special right to be incinerated into this as it turns out they've found a way for him to go up in smoke that's within the rules.


A spokesperson for the BBC ought to have but didn't say:

"It's a crying shame how the so-called British Church has marginalised television. If only they'd stop banging on about gay daddies and give us some proper coverage!"


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Day 2789: Bottomkickers – Series Two

Wednesday:


Fear not fans of POTTY Dr Gillian Magwilde and her gorgeous and demographically-balanced team of I hesitate to describe them as archaeologists…

First with the BREAKING NEWS, BBC One's national laughingstock groundbreaking… literally groundbreaking as in they break the ground… drama "Bottomkickers" is to return and the first episode of the new series will see them in AMERICA uncovering the mystery of the BIGFOOT!

"As the ice melted, the exposed head was found to be 'unusually hollow'."

"As the process continued the feet …were found to be rubber."

…it's a GORILLA SUIT in a block of ICE, isn't it.

Never mind, I'm sure Dr Silly Gilly will find a way to prove that Roddy McDowell was using Excalibur as a walking stick while filming Planet of the Apes.

This may turn out to be a hoax…

Day 2781: Bottomkickers – less of a review; more of a burial

Tuesday (again):


You just KNOW that something has gone horribly HORRIBLY wrong when the Metro's sixty second interview is asking questions like:

"Are you worried about how the programme will be received? Recent BBC 'drama' Bottomkickers is a national laughing stock."

Which is exactly what they DID ask… on the very day of the series finale.

So, only a brand-new, giant-sized, high-definition, Freesat-ready, flat-screen tellybox could have induced my Daddies to watch the last ludicrous episode of Life-on-Mars-creators Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharoah's unintentionally appalling, reputation-wrecking "Bottomkickers" this week.

Tragically, that is exactly what arrived in the post that morning…


The series was billed as "Indiana Jones meets CSI", which was always GOING to be a big ask, but it turned out to be rather more "The Antiques Roadshow meets Wallace and Gromit".

You just KNOW that "Indiana Jones meets CSI" was the pitch when they sold the show to the BBC. (And allegedly "Make us 'Ashes to Ashes' and we'll grudgingly let you" was the reply). But you also might want to ask if "Indiana Jones meets CSI" is ACTUALLY the sort of thing that it is possible to DO.


The thing about Indiana Jones is that first it is displaced in GEOGRAPHY to "exotic" locations like lost temples in the middle of the jungle or cities swallowed by the desert. In these sorts of places it seems ALMOST reasonable that someone might have built a ludicrous, sand and clockwork powered death-trap-cum-treasure-chamber. Not that it's REALLY reasonable, but that generations of Hollywood EPICS have prepared us for that sort of imagery.

And second it is displaced in TIME, to circa nineteen-thirty-swashbuckle so that it is superficially reasonable to have Nazis running around with Lugers shooting up the place 'cos they're like so evil. With a big enough budget you can crank out enough chases, shoot-outs and perils that no one's brain has time to stop and go, ooh hang on a tick.

And third, the big big thing about Indiana Jones is that however ludicrous the plot McGuffin appears to be, however magical and completely unbelievable, whether it is a telephone for talking to Mr God, or fist-sized glowy rocks that make the crops work, whether it is a cup of water that cures everything up to and including death (though probably not being-a-glamorous-but-treacherous-lady-Nazi) to aliens having parked a big shiny flying saucer under the conclusion of the Mummy Returns, at the end of the movie it turns out to be COMPLETELY TRUE. The supernatural powers get released at the end of the movie, conveniently sorting out the obviously evil bad guys and leaving Doctor Jones (who is obviously good-hearted even if he like the baddies shoots people, steals things and tells fibs) and his lady-friend of choice not dead. (Subject to her not being a glamorous-but-treacherous-lady-Nazi).


Television simply does not HAVE that sort of budget. Not to do the locations; not to do the non-stop chase, fight, perils; not to do the super-special effects climax. Certainly not to do all of them at once. They may do SOME of these things, but not all of them and never ever ever on the sheer SCALE of a Spielberg popcorn-flick.

Where CSI (and indeed Spooks and Hustle) get away with this is by focusing intensely on minutiae and dazzling you with loads of seemingly-realistic technical guffery so that you don't notice that it is PADDING. Essentially, they are trying to sell you the idea that what you see is really, really real, as though the makers have done proper research and not just made up something based on a DNA test that they Googled.

So Dr Jones's "magic works, gasp!" conclusions are never going to fit with these sort of shows.

They may use a "heightened reality" – or Hustle's justifiably stylish "Jedi powers" moments – but you would never see Mr Dr Grissom save the girl from the serial killer by suddenly blurting "expelliarmus".


This leaves "Bottomkickers" STUFFED from the word go. Promising both popcorn levels of rollicking adventure AND intense realistic seeming archaeology, which particular stool do you choose to topple off?

And they never quite knew how to treat their artefacts – whether they were supposed to be genuine historical objects to be examined scientifically, or genuine quasi-mystical objects with fully operational magical powers.

So what was on the "Bottomkickers" conveyor belt this time?

• The Cross of Jesus (brought to England by the Knights of Ni who, coincidentally, were lugging Excalibur around with them);

• The remains of the black man who fought alongside George Washington (who, as it happens, happened to be wielding Excalibur on behalf of the American Revolution);

• The secret grave of Boudicca and evidence of her Roman boyfriend (who, would you believe, brought Excalibur to England – or rather Britannica – from the Middle East where he picked it up from Gordium… as in Knot, Cutting Of);

• The prophecy that would reunite Iraq (written by some blokes wot also, get this, made Excalibur out of magic meteorite iron);

• The bones of St Joan of Arc (that was no letter opener she was waving around);

• And, in a shock twist, Excalibur.

The power of these objects – with one obvious exception – lies in their MAGIC. This is where Indiana Jones does not disappoint: if HE were to find Excalibur it really would be a magical object that both inspires and makes the bearer invincible.

Now, the exception is the black escaped slave who fought with Washington, a plausible-seeming story that requires no supernatural element to give it mythic power. That is probably why the second episode was both interesting and timely and probably worked best, being troubled only by the intrusive plot-arc and one whacked-out conspiracy-theory. (Seriously, if the black candidate for the Presidency is going to get shot, it's going to be because HE'S THE BLACK CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY, and not because he might reveal some slightly interesting historical nugget.)

The Boudicca story was mainly a gratuitous excuse for unrequited SQUISHINESS between hero-figure Dr Gillian “drives you” Magwilde and Mickey Bricks from 'Hustle'. And rather tasteless if you are at all familiar with WHY the lady of the Iceni went on her famous berserk killing-Romans-and-raising-Londinium-to-the-ground spree. And it's really very very very difficult to credit that the Romans might have invented the land mine and then NOT mass-produced it. Mass producing weapons (and using them on anyone and everyone) is what Ancient Rome DID!

The suggestion that modern Muslim Iraq might be saved by the intervention of Babylonian gods – apparently with fully-functional Tiamat – might also be in questionable taste. This was the one that featured the most "archaeology is like solving the cryptic crossword" guff. Though you hardly needed to puzzle out the Da Vinci Cod to guess that the saviour was going to be the little girl and not the heroic-but-troubled Silas Carson (he's Ki-Adi-Mundi – among several others – in Star Wars, you know).

The World War part One meets Joan of Arc story was in some ways the most sympathetically directed, and the use of flashbacks to Torchwood's "Weevil Boy" Mr Burn Gorman and his doomed attempt to end the War was pretty well done. In spite of all the episodes opening with a "what REALLY happened all them years ago" flashback, this was the only one where that worked. This one (apparently the only one NOT penned by Graham or Pharaoh) was written by Mr Tom McRae, which is another Doctor Who connection, since his name is on the credits of that Cybermen disaster from the 2006 season. Most of the best jokes were nicked from Doctor Who too, but none the worse for that. And there WAS something interesting to say about the English still not having got over the fact that today's Germans did NOT fight in the War. Having said that, the "nice man from the MoD" might as well have turned up waving a flag that said "I'm going to cover this up if it kills you!" And you definitely got the feeling that St Joan was only in there 'cos there had to be SOMETHING. She was certainly more important to the 1914 archaeologists than she was to the present-day plot. And surely even daytime soaps have given up using "I'm the sister you never knew you had!" as a plot device.


But where they really REALLY blew it, whether through over-ambition or some idea to give the audience a really BIG opening, was in the blindingly potty utterly wanton STUPIDITY of the opening episode.

Never mind the real life Knights of Ni wandering around with big shiny swords and dirty great tabards on. Mental illness fitted as standard. Never mind the completely gratuitous horror-shot of Mr Nice Muslim getting decapitated – like we don't all know what THAT is really about. Never mind the ultra-slimy evangelical televangelist with his TV show "I'm Evil For Christ… ask me How!" Never mind all that, we're going to go for yer very actually CROSS of Mr JESUS CHRIST himself, large as life and yer Mr God's honest truth, true as my name is Mr Phineas T. Barnum Esquire. Which it isn’t because it's Millennium Elephant.

This wasn't just jumping in at the deep end, this was Saint Marks and Spencer jumping in at the deep end, this was Tombstoning off the Rock of Gibraltar jumping-the-shark in at the deep end.

There are, rather famously, more than enough "splinters of the true Cross" in the world to make a full sized matchstick cathedral. Edmund, the Black Adder, while temporarily the Archbishop of Canterbury, discovered that Baldrick was working a lucrative sideline in such relics (along with St Paul's fingers, St Peter's noses and Mary Magdalene's… altogether in a box set if you wanted). Relics of the Cross are by now a positive byword for GULLIBILITY.

It's a sure fire way to flag up your top team of tomb-raiders as SUCKERS.

Even so, there is just possibly a way to do this, which is to make sure that the audience AND THE CHARACTERS know up front what the team are looking for. Remember, Indiana Jones knows he's after the Ark of the Covenent/Sankara Stone/Holy Grail/Von Däniken Memorial Lecture Circuit right from the word go.

But here is where the CSI/Spooks/Hustle format completely (if you'll forgive me) crucifies the plot. Because the format foisted on them by THAT PITCH demands that the team has to FIGURE OUT that this week's quest-object is THE Cross, a plot development thoroughly spelled out in the thirty-second trailers that the BBC had been showing for a month and, even if you'd managed to miss every single one of them, by the numbingly crass direction that shows the archaeologists' dig from above where the cross-trench turns the site into… gasp… a cross! The audience is so far ahead of the team that they are BORED by the time that anyone suggests that suggesting that it's the Cross they've discovered would be dumb. Even Colombo couldn't circumlocute long enough to not have solved this one by now!

So you've got a team who are TOO STUPID to work out that they're digging up something that they'd be STUPID to believe is real even if they worked out what it was.

Meanwhile, Joe from EastEnders is wandering around in a daze chopping people's heads off like they're responsible for casting him in that weary medical soap on ITV.

(And that's without mentioning the sort of dialogue that would have made even Sir Brian Blessed blush. "We're archaeologists… we DIG!" being merely the example that scars the memory first.)


And then the concluding episode was just about as bad. How you could possibly have got through the series WITHOUT expecting Ex-flaming-calibur to be in the last episode I do not know. How many swords ARE there, for fluffy's sake?

(Well, loads and loads probably, but can you NAME five?)

So how did the team manage to go so long without mentioning what Gillian's potty mum was driven round the twist by obsessing about? Or what all those pointy drawings on Dr Magwilde's wall were about?

And then, when they finally fish the thing out of its hidey-hole (and it has to be said Ms Sophie Aldred's lady-of-the-lake in 1989's Doctor Who story Battlefield is BETTER), they only go and break it!

Plus, the mysterious figure behind the conspiracy-of-the-week turned out to be… just a mysterious figure. The complete lack of a big reveal – either that he was, as thunderingly heavily hinted, Magwilde's academic nemesis, the ridiculously named Professor Mastiff OR in some kind of attempt at a dramatic twist, Doctor "Dolly" Parton (hence his "Well, I'll be off then" early in the episode, before his unconvincingly convenient "This is me turning up just in the nick" moment later) – left you wondering whether these people had ANY idea about how drama works at all! "Life on Mars" looks ever more a lucky FLUKE!

So, HURRAY for the BBC for bravely trying something NEW.

I do hope they try something new again next year… and not more of THIS total hokum!

PS:

…and we only kept watching after episode one because we thought that the photo of Dr Magwilde’s mad and wild mum was of Ms Susan Engel aka Vivian “isn’t she” Fay of Rose Cottage, Boscawen and “The Stone of Blood”. Only in the end she wasn’t. What a SWIZZ!

Day 2739: Guilty

Tuesday:


Sadly we had to give up watching the BBC's new drama CRIMINAL JUSTICE because Daddy Richard was too WUSSY to take it!

It was almost DICKENSIAN in its attack on the failings of a brutalizing system. But without the feel good factor of it being a hundred years ago and all mended now. Which, come to think of it, makes it JUST like what Mr Dickens was writing about.

We have a friend who got sent directly to JAIL, do not pass GO etc. And my Daddies are both VERY sorry that they have not done more to help.

If it is even REMOTELY like what was on the telly those first two nights, then I do not think I can understand how anyone can bear it.



To completely nobody's surprise chief barrister Mr Timothy Mutton, Chairperson of the Baa Council, has written to the Grauniad, bleating in OUTRAGE.

"It is a TRAVESTY! Barristers work jolly hard for too little money! How very dare you! Etc etc etc."

Writer Mr Peter Moffat replies in his own defense. As he used to be a lawyer himself, Mr Moffat will know the old maxim about the lawyer with himself for a client…

But, his defense is that he writes from experience as well as imagination.

With respect, both he and Mr Mutton actually miss the point. Unlike a court case, drama doesn't have to limit itself to FACTS in order to express TRUTH. At least GOOD drama doesn't… and come to think of it GOOD court cases do!

But if you want FACTS, then consider the case of Mr Majid Ahmed who wrote in the Grauniad this week about how, in spite of his A-Level success, he was turned down by Imperial College because of his criminal record.

This is shameful. How are people supposed to work their way OUT of a criminal lifestyle if the institutions just toss them back in?


"CRIMINAL JUSTICE" suggests that we have created a KAFKA-esque world where the defendant cannot tell their story to anybody: not the defense lawyers who don't want to risk being compromised; not the nice policeperson who just KNEW that the boy was guilty; not really even his parent, who wouldn't take the horror of what was happening inside the prison. A world with no place for the truth.

When the nice inspector comments on two policepeople wasting their time to guard a taped-off murder scene because "people can't be trusted to behave decently", the irony is that he doesn't realize he is commenting on himself. Because when later he goes on to talk to the defendant Ben alone without lawyers or other witnesses present trying to convince him to confess, that is HIM stepping over the "police tape" of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. Everything is written to suggest that he is a good person, a dedicated officer who wants only to catch the killer of an innocent victim. He could be Morse, or Taggart, or Tennyson. But he wants a conviction, he's already decided that Ben is guilty and so he cannot be trusted to behave DECENTLY.

And because HE can't be trusted, then Ben cannot tell him the truth – that he doesn't even KNOW if he's the killer – because it will be used against him, not in the service of finding out what did happen.

Is this what the real world is like? We are protected by walls of tissue paper and cotton wool from ever having to think about it, and perhaps our nice woolly liberal civilization just keeps on going because – like Mr Wyle E Kyote – we don't look down at the chasm beneath us.

That is why Daddy SHOULD have watched this week.

Shoving people into the Criminal Justice system just to shove them out of sight is why we fail them. It is why building more prisons is a STUPID and WILFULLY BLIND answer to the problems of crime. We want people to be better after they have been to prison than they were before, not worse!

Or are people just BETTER than this, and if ENOUGH people are better and BELIEVE in better then we DON'T have to live like tribal cavepeople.

We need a justice system that CAN care for the truth. We need a legal system that has room for the individual. We need a system that makes things BETTER.

Day 2685: Ant 'n' Dec's Award Night Takeaway

Thursday:


It's not EVERY week where the bosses of ITV find themselves in the same dock with GENERAL FRANCO, both accused of fixing the popular vote in a talent contest.

In some ways it's actually MORE shocking to deceive the public about the votes in the awarding of an award than it is to cheat people who are entering a fixed phone-in competition.

It's like HUSTLE, isn't it? There, you know that ACTUALLY it's criminal but the code of the con means that there is always an "OUT". You don't HAVE to choose to play – it's only because you think you can get something for nothing that you end up getting nothing for something.

That's not the case for all those people voting for Ms Catherine Tate (and let's be fair, those voting for Ant'n'Dec or any of the other losers either): they didn't CHOOSE to do it because they thought there was a REWARD, they were doing it to register how much they ADMIRED their chosen artists. For ITV to decide it would ignore those results and pick the winner that suited their agenda… well it means ITV counted the votes of ALL of their viewers as worthless.

I imagine that the BBC thought that this was a good week to bury the latest news of its own phone in/Eurovision financial misdoings.

We have, however, watched a rather marvellous speech by Mr Stephen Fry about all of the GOOD things that the BBC does too. Obviously my daddies were THRILLED that he should mention his earliest and most exciting TV memory as being the first episode of Doctor Who. But it was much more than that, a whole essay on why "Public Service Broadcasting" is only possible when it is in an environment like the BBC where trailers after EastEnders can prompt people to watch a programme about the Guttenberg printing press on BBC4, where there is a public service in nurturing talent, allowing it to grow (and sometimes fail – where else than the BBC would "Blackadder" have got a second series?) along the way to mega-success.

Mr Stephen's conclusion was that where some countries spend money just to put flowers on the roundabouts because it makes things just a little bit nicer, in this country we spend money on the BBC and it's flowers on the roundabouts times a million.

I agree… but in fact I would go further. The whole WORLD is better because it has the BBC in it – our news, our dramas, our nature shows, our kids' telly: they all play well above their league. The BBC is one of the few things that still make Great Britain GREAT.

Someone should give them an AWARD! Oh, they did – only ITV took it by 'mistake'.

Day 2570: The Bongs of War aka They Think It's All Over

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and indeed Thursday:


Here is the News at Ten: Bong! We're scuppered!

It seems that ITVnone's new CGI Bongs – which we've managed to miss every night this week – were beaten by the BBC Ten O'Clock News on their first night

And on their second night.

And on their third night, by which point it was getting silly.

By the fourth night, no one cares anymore*, though the new news picks up a handsome lead in from the preceding drama (which comfortably beat the BBC's Fairy Tale). But they STILL didn't beat the Beeb for the news slot.

And tonight the BBC will take a win by DEFAULT what with ITVnone not thinking Friday's deserve proper news.

*as if they cared in the first place.


More importantly, a more SIGNIFICANT format war may be finally drawing to its close, with the announcement this month that Warner Bros. are dropping their support for the HD DVD, followed by the news in Variety that the last two Hollywood studios still backing HD DVD – Universal and, perhaps more importantly, Paramount with their still hugely powerful Star Trek franchise – are now pretty much released from their exclusive contracts.

Despite support remaining from the dear old BBC (and, er, naughty things) this looks like it may mean Blu-Ray wins by a FAIT ACOMPLIS.

Obviously, this is GOOD NEWS for me but less good for Daddy Richard who was just warming up to HD DVD's region free and better menu approach. Still, at least it means we can finally think about what new TELLY to get!

Day 2566: The Mayoral Debate: Soap and Flannel

Friday:


Oh dear, a DREADFUL confession: we have been watching ITVnone, Britain's Tackiest TV channel.

It would be nice to say that it was ONLY to watch the debate between Mr Brian, our top quality candidate for Mayor of London, and that pair of ASBO-monkeys from the other parties.

But NO, we have been having a bit of a Ben Millar-fest too, with the return of schlocky Doctor Who wannabe "Primeval" and of course ITV's new Fourth Wall Bulldozer: "Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach", hilarious in the way that Mr Sorkin's "Studio 60 on Sunset Strip" was meant to be (but wasn't).

"Studio 60" took most of the first episode to TEARFULLY remove the old producer of the show and woo in the series' real stars, Josh from The West Wing and the one from Friends who can act. "Moving Wallpaper" does this in ten seconds flat, and features the defenestrated ex-producer head butting a photograph of Mr Michael Grade and calling him a bas bad word! This wins hands down. Instantly every Dr Who fan in the land loves it (and that's even before the two Doctor Who references in the second episode).

And, of course, unlike "Studio 60", "Moving Wallpaper" actually has the BOTTLE to show us what all the fuss has been about. And wisely rather than the show-within-the-show being the bestest bestest wittiest wisest comedy in the whole of cuddle town, it's a ghastly soap who plot and characters have all been entirely derailed by the producer's megalomania. Wise, and also brave!

The TRULY terrible thing – among MANY terrible things – about the 9.30 soap "Echo Beach" was the nagging worry that Mr Grade had succeeded in commissioning ANOTHER turkey of similar magnitude to the last time anyone tried to mix SUNSHINE into a British soap opera – I mean of course "Eldorado", anagrammatically if unkindly remembered as a "Real Dodo" – and the only way to save the channel from going onto the rocks was to apply heavy IRONY.

British people, famously, do not like their soaps to be "happy". EastEnders and Consternation Street vie to bring gales of misery down upon their inhabitants in between the reigns of terror of the local murderers. (At one point, I tell you, there were more SERIAL KILLERS than GAY DADDIES living in Consternation Street!) Sunshine is UNNATURAL in this context. Usually, the only way around this is by application of wall-to-wall Australian accents. And obviously – even if Jason of Jason'n'kylie wasn't in it – this is why the model for "Echo Beach" is meant to be "Neighbours" (although so far the production standards are managing to make "Home and Away" look CLASSY and "Hollyoaks in the City" look like DRAMA). With the exception of Mr Hugo Speer and (perhaps astonishingly) Mr Jason himself, no one up to and including Tiffany can actually act (though she can tremble a lower lip with the best of them). What you are left with is a load of what my disgusting daddies insist on calling "totty" in not very many clothes.

It ought to be TOTALLY UNWATCHABLE.

But you cannot escape from the awfully impressive cleverness of placing GIGANTIC AIR-QUOTES around the whole edifice through the addition of "behind the scenes" show "Echo Beach Confidential". Er, "Moving Wallpaper".

With more laugh-out-loud moments in the first ten minutes than in "Studio 60's" first ten EPISODES (literally: three!) it centres around Mr Ben as "Jonathan Pope" the "producer" of ITV's new "hit" soap. In the first episode he crushes a little girl under a stack of lobster pots, spends the design budget on his own office so announces that the surf shack will have to be derelict, and puts Tiffany in the pink dress to avoid "diva tendencies". I thought he was VERY funny. But having seen the second episode – when he beats up a CUDDLY PANDA – I now realise that he is the UTTEREST BAST BAD WORD on television! (I am sorry, Mr Charlie Brooker, your crown has been taken.)

The "clever clever" part, of course, is to spot which bits of "Moving Wallpaper" will appear in the subsequent episode of "Echo Beach". Little girl, derelict surf shack, pink dress and panda all do.

Although pitched as a "comedy drama", "Moving Wallpaper" is a SATIRE – satirising television production itself, and just as mercilessly as, for example, "The Thick of It" skewers the government. That is why it appeals to "smart alecs" like my Daddies. Then they watch "Echo Beach" to play "spot the jokes" and feel quite clever about this. People who do not like that sort of too-clever-by-halfness can skip it and watch "Echo Beach" IRONY-FREE.

This, I believe, is called a "double whammy"!

For genuinely BAD television, then, you had to wait for later in the evening.

The Mayoral "debate" on ITV's "London Talking" (presumably they couldn't afford the more iconic "London Calling") was BAD in all the ways you EXPECT ITV to be bad: cheap set, dreadful format, Blue Peter presenter being patronising to the viewers in exactly the way that she wouldn't be when playing with terrapins.

Each candidate gets to make a little speech, then they get cross-examined by the other candidates, then they take questions from the floor (where everyone wears a handy badge so you know they are all party supporters and you only get questions from the OTHER two parties).

But rather than taking turns at each stage, what they did was have Mr Brian do all three stages and then Mr Mayor Ken do all three and then Bonkers Boris do all three. It meant that it was more like watching three JOB INTERVIEWS rather than generating any sense of DEBATE between the candidates. MY suspicion is that this is because they could only afford one LECTERN!

Mr Brian was jolly good, in spite of this format not playing to his strengths. To see how good he REALLY is, you want to see him CHAIRING a meeting and fielding questions, often with a dryly WITTY response and always with the facts and policies at his fingertips. It is JOLLY IMPRESSIVE.

In the studio, he was not able to set the audience ALIGHT in the way that the two seasoned hacks were. That is his strength and his weakness – he is an ordinary person, with extraordinary talents. And not a huge gob with legs attached. (Also hair, if Boris.)

His best moments were when facing the audience, as he was able to make a real connection with them, even if they were supporters of his rivals. Possibly a note to the other parties: if you want to try and trip Mr Brian up, maybe best not to try to "surprise" him with details of his police career – he really was really, really good at that job, you know, and he WILL have answers.

The other candidates, though, were bad, and in quite different ways. The Mr Mayor started with a very GOOD pitch – no, really – "if you think I've not improved London then don't vote for me". The problem was he was REALLY cross-patchy if anyone actually referred to his record – promises that haven't been met, opinions that have been switched. At one stage he was asked why he had said a mayor should only serve two terms and was now running for a third: "this will be the last job I do in politics," he said – well yes, Mr Ken… unless you change you mind AGAIN and do another one! Also, it SERIOUSLY isn't on to say that youth crime in the city is because those kids' PARENTS grew up under the Queen Maggie government. I mean, obviously, the answer is because they have grown up under a Thatcherite government TOO: the Thatcherite governments of Lord Blairimort. But since he's broken ANOTHER promise and rejoined the Labour, Mr Ken can't seem to say THAT any more.

Boris is all FOR blaming Lord Blairimort, but doesn't really have any ANSWERS as to what to do. Bus conductors… no, maybe not bus conductors, that was Mr Ken believing his own press releases… well maybe SOME bus conductors. He didn't half old school tie himself in knots. And while it seems the Labour's record is fair game, he didn't have a lot of defence of his OWN, particularly on the subject of race ("let's just move on," hmmm) and then Mr Ken fair bludgeoned him with his voting record: number of speeches in the House about London – none; number of debates about London attended – none; number of votes cast on motions about London – none; number of MENTIONS of London – n… oh, one actually, but in passing and about something else. Oops.

More subtle were Mr Brian's quick puncturing of Boris's ego: "Boris, you need to pay attention, I've already said all that!" was one; and another was replying to the assertion that if you needed experience then no one would ever stand: "But Boris, we ARE standing and we're trying to choose the BEST candidate." Terrifyingly, though, Mr Boris still thinks that he can run London the same way that he ran the Spectator.

The only "news" coverage to come out of the debate was the somewhat unedifying SPAT between Boris and Ken over teenage murders. "What are you going to do about these 27 murders in the last year?" thundered Boris. "I'll try to get more of the buggers next year," Mr Ken IN NO WAY REPLIED!

And it is a SHAME, because the Mayoral race needs people to be serious about London.

This election is an important one, one that concerns the lives of six or more million people and the governance of the world's TOP city. It deserves better coverage than some rubbish late-night slot on ITV.

What it needs is a big advertising campaign to get people watching and a prime-time slot for a huge audience and, and, and… and a "behind-the-scenes" show to show the drama and the comedy of the teams producing the mayoral run… now, hang on: there's an IDEA there!

Day 2465: Cat-Monsters Not So Tough

Tuesday:


It turns out that the SABRE-TOOTHED CAT MONSTER – of whom I am NOT in any way afraid – may have been less of a TIGER and more of a PUSSY-CAT.

Scientists have used computers to create a model of the Cat Monster's skull and jaws and famous TEETH and deduced that its bite was only about a THIRD as powerful as a MODERN LION.

Er… hang on, that means LION MONSTERS are EVEN MORE SCARY! Where is Mr Stripy; I need a hug!


Speaking of TOOTHLESS, the Competition Commission has issued a bit of a slap to Mr Rodger Stavro Moredick's Sky Empire over their purchase of seventeen-and-a-bit percent of ITV.

You may remember that Sky snapped up a chunk of ITV in a BLOCKING MANOEUVRE to stop Virgin Media from taking over the venerable terrestrial commercial channel. Er, I mean, as A SOUND INVESTMENT in a promising industry… an investment that has so far lost them TWO-HUNDRED-MILLION pounds as ITV's share price has continued DOWNWARDS.

Virgin Media today welcomed the announcement:

"Sky should not be permitted to remain in a position where there is any question whatsoever about its ability to influence ITV," said a spokesperson.

After all, that's what Virgin wanted to do!

(Not that the Virgin Group EVER holds a grudge… those NICE people at British Airways will testify to that!)

In fact, the Commission does have a point. We benefit from a VARIETY of different providers of television in competition with each other. The BBC is funded by the Licence Fee; ITV is funded by a few pennies on everything you buy in the shops (what, you thought that the advertising money came from the companies?); Sky and Virgin are funded directly – though they take some of those advertising pennies too.

That competition OUGHT to drive them to make BETTER programmes as they try to attract a TV audience that will justify the advertisers' investment / the licence fee money / the subscriptions of their viewers.

Sky's share in ITV – the Commission said – put them in a position to take advantage of a rival. They could sabotage deals for ITV to get better television (say, by seeing a bid for sports coverage before ITV could submit it and then topping it by a pound).

Not that they ever WOULD do such a thing, but the danger would have been there!

Those IMPARTIAL people at Virgin called for "strong penalties" to put an end to the "problem".

The case, though, has been referred to Mr Frown's Secretary of State for Tripe and Infamy, Mr John Hutton (dressed as Lamb).

I am sure that Mr Moredick will want to clear up any UNCERTAINTY that this might cause – especially with the possibility of a General Election so soon! No doubt he and the government will be able to WORK SOMETHING OUT.

So long as the Competition Commission's BARK is – like the Sabre-Toothed Cat Monster's – worse than it's BITE, Mr Moredick is bound to remain the KING of the BEASTS.

Day 2428: A Timely Reminder

Saturday:


I am only A MONTH LATE with this story of SWIFT (calls for) ACTION from Mr Frown!


What with all of the SCANDALS about TELEVISION this year (from phoney phone-ins to bogus Blue Peter viewers) you would think that no one had ever distrusted a TV Quiz before.

Time then, for my Daddies to dust off their DVD of the 1994 movie "Quiz Show", which tells the story of all of the SCANDALS about TELEVISION in the year 1957. A mere half a century ago.

Concentrating on the most famous Quiz, the show "Twenty-One", and how it was rigged by its producer giving the questions and answers to popular contestants in advance. Popular contestants meant high ratings meant good publicity for the show's sponsors – in the case of "Twenty-One", the energy drink makers Geritol. When they were found out, the contestants were ruined, the producer spent a decade in the wilderness (literally – he had to go to Canada to find work), and the Quiz Shows were cancelled. The network and the sponsor were NEVER IMPLICATED. Directed and produced by Mr Robert Redford, it is basically "All the President's Men" except that this time Nixon GETS AWAY WITH IT.

IRONICALLY, the movie itself was questioned because although it CLAIMED to be a TRUE STORY it altered some of the facts in order to make a more DRAMATIC presentation of the story. So in the REAL WORLD, Mrs the Queen NEVER stormed off the set of "Twenty-One".

Day 2398: Heroes…

Thursday:


…actually turned out to be JOLLY WORTH WATCHING. Sort of like a really gory version of "The Tomorrow People". It is on again tonight, so we will be looking out for it!

Superpowers NOT seen in the show include those of the Princess of Norway who talks to angels.

(and for €3000 a year so can you!)


Unfortunately, Daddy Richard's SUPER-POWER of "Browsing the Internet at Work" has been curtailed by the new KRYPTONITE FIREWALL that his company has installed.

Now, every page on the Internet returns a message like "URL blocked. Categorization: Education or Reference, Personal Pages" (that one's the WIKIPEDIA!) "If you require access to this URL and have a valid business case e-mail the IT department".

Daddy has considered e-mailing with "I require access to Lib Dem blogs aggregated. Business Reason: I am going MAD with BOREDOM!"

But even if you get them to unblock the homepage… any links from it – yes, you guessed – come back with "URL blocked. Categorization: You are having too much fun!" Suddenly Googling goes the opposite of so much further.

I may only have a fluffy brain but this does seem to miss the POINT of the Internet!

Day 2297: Yum Yum

Monday:


We settled down with a late dinner this evening to watch "Edwardian Super Size Me", an everyday gastronomic adventure with all the trimmings and a side order of lard. And extra trimmings.

And extra lard.

It turns out that the people of the Edwardian Era, led by King Edward VII or King Tum-Tum as he was known by his loving subjects, were rather fond of their food. It would be unfair to say that they ate like pigs, mainly because "entire pig for breakfast" seems like a pretty average start to the day!

For this experiment, restraint critic Mr Giles Coren and very funny but much underused Ms Sue Perkins were asked to be Edwardians for a week – wearing all the clothes and eating all the food.

Mr Giles went to see a DOCTOR, Doctor Petty. Or Doctor Pennyfarthing as Mr Giles ended up calling him after his soon-to-be-nightly glass or two of Madeira wine.

"You're completely mad," was Dr Pennyfarthing's professional opinion, "and you'll be dead in a fortnight!"

Good job they were only doing it for a week!

Monday's menu consisted of: Porridge, Sardines on Toast, Curried Eggs, Grilled Cutlets, Coffee & Drinking Chocolate, Bread & Butter, and Honey.

And that was just breakfast!

Luncheon of sauté of kidneys on toast, mashed potatoes, macaroni au gratin and rolled ox tongue (bleurgh!) was followed by High Tea of fruit cake, Madeira cake, hot potato cakes, coconut rocks, bread, toast, and butter before settling in for Dinner of oyster patties, sirloin steak, braised celery, roast goose, potato scallops, and vanilla soufflé to finish.

Well, "finish" if you don't count the aforementioned glass of Madeira and a goose leg that poor Sue just hadn't been able to face.

But Monday was just a run-of-the-mill sort of a day. No really! That's what they ate when they WEREN'T trying to impress anyone.

Tuesday started with breakfast at Simpsons on the Strand with a light repast of smoked haddock, scrambled eggs, kippers, cold cuts, one roast pheasant, fruit, bacon, sausages, devilled kidneys, scones and kedgeree.

By this time Sue and Mr Giles were barely able to move, so they decided to try out an Edwardian diet. This turned out to be, basically, exactly the same as any other Edwardian meal, but chewed and chewed and chewed until either the food turned to liquid or you died of lockjaw.

Oysters, foie gras terrine, roast cod with asparagus, mutton hotpot, pink Yorkshire rhubarb and clotted cream were all given this treatment. Which was a shame as it probably wasn't helping them cut calories but it was killing all the flavours stone dead.

It was claimed that King Edward had tried this diet himself – but, said Mr Giles looking at a portly portrait, the evidence would appear other wise. This made both of my daddies scoff. (No NOT in the Edwardian fashion!) Surely the evidence is only against him having used the Fletcherism Diet if it ACTUALLY WORKS! said Daddy Richard; personally, I think the evidence of him shows that the diet has no effect whatsoever, said Daddy Alex.

Still, no time to worry about that as they had to hurry home in order to host a dinner party.

Melon glacé, mock turtle soup, sole au gratin, crab and asparagus mousse in aspic, boiled mutton with caper sauce, quail pudding and a rather wobbly punch romaine jelly for pud. The quail pudding, by the way, was a whole quali each, wrapped in fillet steak and sealed in a suet crust.

By this point, Daddy Richard was looking rather queasy, but Daddy Alex said his mouth was watering. I said that we could try this diet if I could have the equivalent in STICKY BUNS, and Daddy Alex AGREED!

I reckon that this must be at least ten-million-and-four sticky buns, but Daddy Richard tells me that 5000 calories a day is only about 20 sticky buns. I think he is trying to get out of it, don't you!

Meanwhile, dinner guest Mr Roy Fattersly was pointing out, while tucking into the suet pudding, that only nought-point-one per cent of the population could actually afford to live like this. The rest were on bread and dripping once a day if they were lucky. Not that this had stopped Mr Roy from turning up for the dinner, but maybe it was just so that he could make exactly that point. And at least he had the grace to depart before the food fight broke out!

In fact, Mr Giles told us that a dinner party like this one – which, if you were a society hostess, you would be expected to serve up two or three times a week – would cost £24 in old money. Which was equivalent to TWO THOUSAND POUNDS today.

Or to put it another way, you would need something like SEVEN MILLION pounds of capital just to be able to afford the DINNER PARTIES.

And that was just dinner for 8 – you might be expected to have up to 20 guests. Multiply the money appropriately.

Wednesday, and after the usual breakfast, Mr Giles was off to Simpsons Chophouse of Cornhill for the lunch of a city gent: steak and kidney pudding with a giant sausage, then a huge pork chop and then stewed cheese served with mustard on little bits of toast.

Sue unfortunately was not allowed in. Simpsons did not admit women until 1916 and that was after the Edwardian era was over – King Tum Tum passed away from (to nobody's surprise) a massive double heart attack in 1910.

So, barred from the bastion of male do-dah, she took a day-trip to Brighton instead.

The Edwardians loved to take the train down to the coast, though on the way they would take in a – you guessed it – five-course luncheon. Sue doubted that South West Trains were quite up to the silver service these days, so brought a HUGE hamper and a picnic of lobster mousse, toasted whole sardines, a rolled salmon cone (which Sue called an oily fish CORNETTO) and something in a plastic tub made of curried fish and garlic the smell of which left most of the other passengers to Brighton in a semi-comatose state. I hope that the BBC paid for their train tickets!

Daddy Alex, on the other fluffy foot – a Daddy who claims not to be as fond of fish as he is of LARD – has CONFESSED to a strange HANKERING to find out what the deadly fish-and-garlic-box contained. But not while Daddy Richard is in the same hemisphere, he promises.

(Incidentally, on the subject of the EVIL FISH COURSE, dear Mr Paul suggests I might have something to say about Scottish politics. Whatever can he mean???)

Sue was, of course, doing all this in a full-on WHALEBONE CORSET. So, she admitted, it was sometimes something of a STRAIN. (And that was BEFORE we went into the to-camera TOILET MONOLOGUES!) Despite being taught the ETIQUETTE of eating cakes at the Ritz – small bites and then make conversation about sewing, or try a little French – she had to admit that a lot of the time she was just pushing the food around the plate and leaving lots. In fact, she said, many Edwardian ladies would confine themselves to bed rather than face the horrors of the breakfast and luncheon tables!

Mr Giles was also kitted out in Edwardian garb, and that afternoon it meant big flappy shorts in order to try some Edwardian exercise: a game of five which looked like a crowded squash court where everyone had forgotten their bat. I am NOT SURE that the athletic authorities today would approve of Mr Giles use of BANNED SUBSTANCES either – namely a big cigar and a bigger glass of brandy.

Then back home for another huge dinner.

In the interest of a more feminine approach – and to try and rebalance her now desperately Atkins diet – Sue took Mr Giles to a vegetarian restaurant on Thursday. Yes, it turns out they DID have veggie restaurants in Edwardian times. About thirty of them. Not that the Edwardians really thought of vegetables as proper food.

They were also a HOTBED of the SUFFRAGETTE movement. This came about for three reasons. Firstly, because the vegetarian restaurants were also Temperance Houses and so, with only ginger beer to drink, rather than falling asleep in the afternoon they could spend it in fervent political discussion. Secondly, vegetarian food did not need as much preparation as half-a-dozen meat courses and this liberated ladies from the stove. And thirdly, anyone unlucky enough to be sent to prison for protesting the right to vote was well advised NOT to eat the meat!

The thing to go with all of this FOOD is of course something to DRINK, and the Edwardians were it turns out terribly fond of CHAMPAGNE. In fact it was usually BREAKFAST TIME when they were wiring their way into their first bottle and the rest of the day would be carried along in a fizz of bubble.

No wonder Mr Steed is always dressed as an Edwardian gent!

So, after having some pink fizz at Harrods to start them off, Saturday saw Sue and Mr Giles off to Hampstead Heath for a spot of picnicking. Of course, they didn't have the forty-odd servants to lay it all out for them, and Sue did insist on experimenting with a newfangled (invented 1892 but commercially available from 1904) Thermos flask for TEA, but good old Mr Giles stuck in to his lobster and champers.

But the climax of the week was to be an all out blow out at the Savoy, recreating an actual meal from 1906. King Tum Tum had SERIOUSLY taken to eating out – after years of having to cope with his mother's home cooking at Windsor Castle, you cannot really blame him! And apparently, a huge meal, like the one that Mr Giles and Sue were about to indulge in, would cost only £7. Obviously that is still the equivalent to £600 today. But remember how expensive the dinner parties were in comparison. Eating out quickly became VERY popular.

(Plus there was the whole "you can mix with exciting and exotic actors and dancers and opera stars without having to invite such a vulgar class of people into your own home". Which was nice.)

Of course, today in the real world, eating at the Savoy has gotten a BIT more expensive. Here is what they had to eat. And by now they were no longer having to force it down. Which was nice for tonight, but probably a bit worrying for the next week when they have to come down to today's portions.

First course: £1,000 worth of Beluga Caviar and native and rock oysters.

Second course: Pot au feu Henry IV. Mr Giles called it the shoulder, shank, rib and tail of beef braised all day and served in their broth with a blob of béarnaise, but it's basically beef soup. With the beef added back in.

Third course: A choice of sole cardinale and whitebait. Or, if you're eating the Edwardian way, both.

Fourth course: Chicken d'Albufera, i.e. a whole chicken (each, obviously) stuffed with rice, truffles and foie gras, served in a sauce of boiled cream, triply-reduced, with mushrooms and more truffles and quenelles of veal tongue and chicken.

Fifth course: saddle of lamb with spring vegetables and parsley potatoes. Not that the Edwardians really thought of vegetables as proper food.

Sixth course: pressed Rouen ducklings. This was the bit where even Daddy Alex went a bit cross-eyed. Four duckling were individually hand strangled especially for them in France. Once roasted, they were placed into a solid silver duck press so that they could be crushed before their – and our! – eyes. "Ooh, it's a duckling smoothie," said Sue. What was left of their insides was then scraped out, stuck in the liquidiser, liquidised, brought back and boilded up in a silver dish with the blood that had been squeezed out and a dash of champagne (obviously) in order to produce a sauce for the meat. "Mmmm, slightly bummy duck's blood," said Sue.

Seventh course: asparagus hollandaise, just a little something to clear the palate. Or in Sue's case, to get caught immovably between the teeth. The Edwardians apparently loved this but it's supposed to be a bit bad for the gout.

Eighth course: Peach Melba, served in a hand-carved ice-swan that was bigger than ME!. This dessert is of course named after the famous opera singer: Dame Placido Flamingo.

Ninth course: Canapés à la Diane, which looked like yet more truffles on toast.

Tenth course: call for ambulance!


The week finished with a return visit to Doctor Pennyfarthing, whose tests of Mr Giles revealed that he had increased his body fat by 10%, increased his cholesterol by 15% and increased the gout-causing urea in his blood by a third! And he was now clinically dead.

The Edwardians, you see, had a life expectancy of 42. Yes, 42. Oddly enough, something about eating the equivalent of an entire family of hippopotami every week might have had some deleterious effect on their health. Either that or they just EXPLODED.

So presumably they didn't live long enough to learn that all that bacon was good for the latest health scare very bad for you.

Sadly, this whole way of life was killed off by World War part one and an invasion of American BREAKFAST CEREALS.

Anyway, even before the ICKY SQUISHED duck, Daddy Alex had started to realise that something was MISSING from all this Edwardian excess. And then it dawned on him: the missing ingredient – CHOCOLATE.

Stuff that for a game of soldiers, then, he said. The Edwardian diet is OFF!

Day 2291: Life After Mars

Tuesday:


We are very SAD that the BBC’s OTHER Time Travelling TV series has come to an early end. Two seasons of “Life on Mars” weren’t enough. Three years would have been more satisfying: with the first about Sam’s life, a second to explore the world of 1973 before wrapping up in the third.

On the other fluffy foot, they did do that rare trick of having the ending live up to expectations.

Look away now, if you haven’t already seen it!

Because in the end, DI Sam Tyler wasn’t mad, wasn’t back in time and wasn’t in a coma.

He was dead.

Mr James has QUITE RIGHTLY criticised “Torchwood” for being Buffy Season Six. But this is what you COULD do with that concept if you turn it on its head. For Sam, HEAVEN is 1973, a golden memory of childhood before innocence was lost, when he doesn’t have all the rules that constrain him in 2007, but he can still be the good cop AND be proved right every week. And THAT’S why it can be 1973 two years running, and always summer.

1973 might be full of nasty colours – brown, bronze, brick mostly – but, in comparison, 2007 is only grey.

And rather wisely, “Life on Mars” only spent ten minutes there after dragging him back from the afterlife, before letting him return to a gloriously happy (if deceased) ending.


The OTHER good thing about the ending was that it characterised Sam’s 1973 boss DCI Gene Hunt as fundamentally HEROIC. He may break the rules but he does it to uphold the law. And he has a good heart. We were all very worried when Sam started believing that Gene was a SYMPTOM of his disease: an incarnation of brain cancer. We felt that that was just WRONG.

Of course, Sam should have been tipped off when he was getting the same message from the SINISTER Test Card Girl, who has haunted him throughout and is the only person in 1973 to try to lead him astray.

Mr Matthew Graham – writing in the RadioTimes – points out that she was really the biggest clue to what had happened to Sam: in 1973, she only appeared on television ONCE THE PROGRAMMES WERE OVER.

Then again, the Detective Inspector from Hyde, the creepy Frank Morgan, kept giving us nasty-piece-of-work vibes too. He too was trying to tempt Sam into betraying Gene and in the end even tricking him, promising to bring backup when he really intended Gene Hunt and his team to die. His excuse: we need to make an example so that we can bring in the new ways. But if the ends justify the means for Morgan, then isn’t that EXACTLY THE SAME as why he thinks Gene (beat a confession out of them) Hunt is WRONG? At least Gene was honest about his motives.

Of course, Mr Matthew reveals, “Frank Morgan” is another clue – Frank Morgan played the Wizard of Oz in the Judy Garland movie. So, in the “real world” (grey Kansas) he is a QUACK; and in Dorothy’s dreamworld he is a FAKE who FAILS to get her back home. Do you see?

Other hints include all the “Hyde” references, supposed to make us realise that Gene is Mr Hyde to Sam’s Doctor Jekyll – they are two sides of the same coin. And of course DI Morgan shows Sam his own gravestone (which appeared in all the trailers – a la Sky One’s trailing of the Buffy season five climax “The Gift” – though Daddy Alex kept Daddy Richard and me from seeing any of them. THANK YOU DADDY!)

We wish it could have carried on longer, and hope that rumours of a SEQUEL series “Ashes to Ashes” are TRUE. (In fact, we hoped that there would be a trailer after the final episode of “Life on Mars”.) There are not so many great series around that we can let one fall by the wayside.

We have to admit, though, that it was all VERY hard work for Mr John Simm who had to be in every single scene. (Except for that one clever episode where they gave him a drug overdose and the power to see what the other characters were doing dream in the third person.) He has probably had enough of Time Travelling adventure by now.

What?