Television Can Blow Me Page 7
The verdict on Luther Series One finale: They said he was nitroglycerine but I wasn’t listening.
Marks out of 10: 7.5
1 May not resemble actual scene.
Sherlock
Culture being the omnivorous regurgitating shitbird it is, certain motifs recur with alarming frequency. Rogue cop (blates), vampire lust (again and again); and then there’s The Sherlock, that guy who just knows. It might be Gregory House, Patrick Jane, Cracker or it could be the original Sherlock Holmes of Baker St, That London. Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss have alchemized a very modern Holmes here but one who doesn’t really seem attached to any time or place. Benedict Cumberbatch plays our hero, looking like a twitchy, caffeine-starved Ron Mael. Holmes has an ill-defined role as consultant to the police, much like The Mentalist and just like every tragic Sherlock since Conan Doyle first penned A Study in Scarlet he’s doomed to walk the earth bereft of women like an Aerial Telly reader or Guardian blog commentscum. Not that there isn’t a love of his life. There’s always his Watson (Martin Freeman).
Darling Watson! Yin to his yang, Tina to his Ike, Constance to his Mellors. Did two men ever love each other more? These guys need to get a room. 221b Baker Street to be exact. Few platonic male friendships have been subject to as much speculative homoerotic fan fiction as Holmes and Watson and Sherlock makes no great effort to distance itself from that. Introduced by a mutual friend as potential flatmates, they spend much of the first episode being mistaken as a gay couple then mistakenly thinking the other is hitting on them. It’s a fairly cheap way to get your giggles but no less funny.
And this is a funny Holmes, wisecracking and sussed, as bold and contemporary as the technology he surrounds himself with. Does text messaging seem like some canonical heresy, Holmes lover? Well, you’re shit out of luck if so because this Holmes texts more than a tweener with a Justin Bieber jones. One-word round robins to crime hacks, teasing come-hithers to Watson and shameless flirting with this week’s murderer - the one causing all those suicides.
Yeah, because those identical suicides the (naturally useless) police can’t make head nor tail of are being facilitated by one Fred Houseblow, psycho cabbie to conflicted salt-of-the-earths across the capital. Holmes gets to the bottom of this after a series of patented Sherlock Scans (he intuits a victim was unhappily married and took a string of lovers from a cursory once over) and is soon throwing himself in danger’s path because, man alive, it’s dull when you’re this brilliant in a world this boring.
Thankfully, being brilliant comes easily to the show and Sherlock is everything it should be. Witty, compelling and literate; respectful of the source material without slavishly replicating it, all the while adding its own cinnamon twists. Moffat doesn’t get much wrong and, slightly clinky pantomime-esque turn from Gatiss as Mycroft Holmes aside, he knocks this out of the park. Beenadick Cumdumpsnatch is charismatic and eerily focused, getting that 'moving through the earth without being part of it' air just right.
Also just right is the chemistry between Freeman and Cumdumpsnatch. Freeman is often impressed, frequently baffled but never overawed. He loves him too much for tawdry fanboy antics. And John really does <3 Sherlock. When Holmes wins, he wins. His triumph splashed over him, like love forty-nine times magnified.1
The verdict on Sherlock: I can’t really do the lemon entry one again, can I?
Marks out of 10: 8
1 Apologies to Ted Hughes (and Sylvia Plath)
Sherlock finale: The Great Game
What, in the name of the crucified Christ, was all that Hong Kong phooey shit about? Sherlock’s second episode, the ching-chong themed The Blind Banker was eye-wateringly poor and bafflingly so after such a great first episode. It looked like the show had been hijacked by Bonekickers, may as well have had Mister Wu from Deadwood narrating for all the sense it made and don’t get me started on the Inspector Clouseau vs Cato style kung poo. Sherlock had 90 minutes to redeem itself Sunday night and The Great Game not only matched the opener but surpassed it with a taut, chilling and exhilarating climax that secured it a slam-dunk second season, universal acclaim and the slutty boho underwear model of Beenadick Cumdumpsnatch’s choice whenever he decides to take advantage of the nationwide oestrogen-fuelled gal boner all but poking his eye out as we speak.
It all starts with that pious square Mycroft trying to get bruv to investigate the death of MI5 lollygagger Andrew “Westie” West, found with his skull caved in and a top-secret defence data flash drive missing. Take a hike, Myc - brother Sherlock has other things on his mind. Baker Street is hit by a huge explosion which 221b survives while sustaining a fair few broken windows. It looks like a gas leak but a strong box containing a package for Sherlock suggests this was no accident. Game on, Detective.
Said package contains a mobile phone with a picture of 221c Baker Street, Holmes’s basement (coincidentally, Watson’s name for his arse). Upon speeding to the basement Holmes discovers a pair of trainers neatly arranged for his inspection. His mobile rings. A terrified woman with a shitload of Semtex strapped to her tits reads out a message from a mystery tormenturd. Solve the riddle of the trainers or the skank is wormfood, being the upshot. You’ve got 12 hours old boy and Holmes is all “No problem at all - should be time for a spot of billiards after that, what-what?” as Watson sweats like Jonathan King at a Menudo gig.
Still, work to be done and quick-as-a-fish Holmes is dipping up the block to St. Bart’s laboratory to run some tests on the Trainers of Doom. In an entirely unrelated and random happenstance lab bod Molly, who wants Holmes to put his cock in her, introduces her new borefriend Jim the lab technician who Holmes quickly surmises is a flaming gay because of his immaculate grooming and visible underwear. “Good golly” says Molly “He sure likes to ball” but deep down she knows there’s about as much chance of Sherlock being wrong about this as Peaches Geldof being right about anything.
After ruining her day Sherlock deduces that the trainers belong to Carl Powers, a schoolkid from 1989 whose death Sherlock always thought was suspicious. He puts it to mystery turdmentor that Powers was poisoned by his asthma medication and turdmentor rewards him by setting the exploding skank free but he’s far from finished with Holmes. Three more riddles quickly follow and the same format applies. Innocent salt strapped with TNT gets blown to a million tiny pieces if Sherlock doesn’t solve the case before the deadline. Some geniuses would wilt under this pressure but Sherlock? Can’t get enough of it.
That’s right folks. He loves them all. The broker who faked his own death to collect life insurance; the celebrity makeup artist Botoxed to death by her gay brother’s shagsack housekeeper and most of all the art gallery security guard murdered for rumbling a £30 million new Vermeer as a fake.
Securitard had his ticket punched by an assassin called The Golem (played by 7 foot 3 acturd John Lebar) and Watson and Holmes track him down just as he murders a professor who had also twigged the £30 million forgery - nice timing fuckheads. They tussle with the gigantic goon in an icy set-to before the freak makes his escape.
After that it’s back to the gallery where Holmes collars the curator on the fraud and gets Hostage of the Day (some infant fuck) off the hook with some lightning art criticism. Unlike Holmes, the curator cracks under the pressure and gives them the name of a mysterious benefactor behind the forgery: Moriarty. Make a note of it, tell your friends etc
But by Holmes’s reckoning (five pips message on the mobile phone in the strong box package indicating five cases) there is still one case for him to solve. He laterally intuits it is the MI5 lollygagger with the cracked skull and the missing flash drive his pain in the balls brother has been pissing in his ear about the entire episode. Imagine!
Turns out Pestie ran his mouth in the pub, had his flash drive nicked by his girlfriend’s brother then got accidentally killed in confronting said brother. Ah well. One oblique post to his website later and Holmes sets up a rendezvous with his mysterious nemesis in the swimming pool where Carl Powe
rs died.
Greeting him there is Watson with a load of Semtex strapped to his tits, talking like a fag, with his shit all retarded1. For Watson has been got to by evil Professor Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott) and get this: it’s only gay Jim from the laboratory! Who saw that coming? (Unusually for him, Aerial Telly did).
It turns out gay Jim not only isn’t a lab technician but isn’t gay and has been playing the mindfuck game with Sherlock to show him exactly how badass he is and to back the hell off all his future criminal spectaculars. Yeah, like that’s gonna happen. Moriarty monologues about his own brilliance, the nature of good and evil and Sherlock’s lovely, lovely hair and it all ends with an intriguing cliffhanger with Sherlock and John about to be snipered out of existence and Sherlock about to shoot the explosives vest right into Moriarty. How you like them apples?
What a fantastic triumph for Gatiss after what many considered a below par Doctor Who Daleks episode. Perhaps more impressively, he has been named the 38th most influential homosexual in Britain, though, if all the gay premiership footballers came out he would be relegated to around 538. Still, with him and Steven Moffat running the show you feel the franchise is in safe hands.
The verdict on Sherlock finale: The Great Game: Excellent finish after the mid-season lull.
Marks out of 10: 9
1 cf. Idiocracy
EastEnders
Man, were they ever pleased with themselves? Like a child cleaning up its mess then looking to mommy for congratulations, the BBC conveniently forgot that if they hadn’t screwed things up by inviting Leslie Grantham back into EastEnders in the first place they wouldn’t be tying themselves in knots finding ways to get rid of him.
So his exit had an even bigger fanfare than his re-entry. The twice-nightly trailers featured the three wronged women of Albert Square - dopey Zoe, Sam “dumb even by Mitchell standards” Mitchell and the brains of the outfit Chrissie, every inch the black widow with her corkscrew curls and smacked-arse face.
In black cocktail dresses under moody lighting, striking Greta Garbo poses, the clueless trio addressed the camera “For every scam he’s pulled... for every time he’s lied, twisted and manipulated... It’s payback.”
Right. Thanks for that. I’d hate to think I’d missed something.
The whole ‘Den returns’ project was based on a myth anyway. The myth that EastEnders was better in the old days under our Tony and Julia. Series creators Tony Holland and Julia Smith, the story went, treated the show like their own child.
Indeed they did - and what a flabby, spoilt, over-indulged brat early EastEnders was. Social issues crowbarred in with no regard for plot, character or viewer sanity, all set against a rotten combination of cloying sentimentality and unremitting misery.
So back Den came and now he had to go and it was The Witches of Eastwick who would do for him. It all started out promisingly enough. There was genuine tension created as the storyline unfolded but it kept on being undermined by the colossal stupidity of Sam Mitchell and behaviour from Zoe so out of character she was turned into a walking plot device for the writers. An attractive young woman sleeps with a 70 year-old internet pervert she despises. Yeah cool story, broseph.
Meanwhile, The Andy Hunter/Moon family feud concluded with Andy doing a back-flip off a motorway bridge helped by Don Beech from The Bill. I thought everyone knew not to fuck with Don Beech? Never mind, this is Albert Square after all.
The root of the feud was the love triangle between Alfie, Andy and Fat Kat Slater, Albert Square’s finest beauty - a cross between Foghorn Leghorn and Tubbs from the League of Gentlemen.
Den’s sticky end finally came with getting his cranium cracked by a dog-shaped doorstop owned by Pauline Fowler, a nice touch of pathos slightly spoiled by the ham-fisted foreshadowing. Not since Pete Beale has an inanimate object received so much attention - they may as well have written “I Kill Den, Me” in metallic marker on the dog’s forehead and have done with it.
Now that this sorry episode is over, can EastEnders recover? They will come up with something - they always do. When not getting bogged down in such stupidity EastEnders produces some priceless soap moments. The problem is that after such a balls up, the public will be slow to trust them again. And do you blame them?
For all the wack plots, bum lines and blank stares. For every time the scriptwriter has gone off message and on the pipe.... it’s payback.
The verdict on EastEnders: You’re having a larf intcha? You’re NUFFING you muppet!
Marks out of 10: 5
Skins Season 2
So what’s new in season two? Tony is out of his coma, Maxxie has a stalker, the boring one gets pregnant and Sid and Cassie split up causing Cassie to tailspin into a dark night of drugs and casual sex. Illustrating this on the E4 Skins site there is a video entitled “Cassie swaps sides”. Click on it and you see “Warning! This clip contains strong language and adult themes”. No it doesn’t, fucknut. It contains two pretty girls kissing which is the only reason anybody will be watching. Naturally, this was written because the script writers wanted to see Hannah Murray, the actress who plays Cassie, walking around in her underwear, kissing girls and having casual sex so they can put it on the E4 microsite. And who can blame them? Why, Aerial Telly of course. You’re scriptwriters not pornographers you filthy fuckers.
Skins has, of course, prided itself on introducing young scriptwriters into the mix. One of these bum fluff cultivating chodes Max Gogarty recently took a prolonged ass fucking from the Guardian blog pod people after his hastily written “Max, 19, hits the road” blog went live. Accusations of nepotism abounded when someone pointed out that Paul Gogarty, Max’s father, also wrote for the Guardian from time to time. Aerial Telly felt a little sorry for Max. He was once 19 himself and he was a stupid bastard then as well. Much of the venom came from wannabe writers whose dream job is publishing their god-awful dribblings on the Guardian website. Nonetheless, the blog did suck quite a lot of cock and reflected badly on Skins.
But Skins has to have young scriptwriters, right? Because they know what’s relevant to the kids. So you sacrifice good drama for that abysmal tyrant ‘relevance’. A lot of the show’s problems stem from this. Skins tries way too hard to be cool and ends up looking ridiculous in the process. It doesn’t know what it wants to be. Season 2 kicks off with a contemporary dance set piece in a church. Then it spends much of its time thinking it’s a farce yet it still wants to deal seriously with issues like bulimia, bereavement and pupil-teacher relationships.
Its complete inability to portray a grown-up who is not a grotesque caricature of everything vile about humanity is just laughable. No wonder Harry Enfield is so comfortable in his role as Tony’s dad. Loadsamoney was an understated study of the nouveau riche in comparison. This approach is patronising to its younger audience and sick-making to its older audience. It can’t help feeling like The Young Ones’ young adult show - Nozin Around. “Hey man, grownups are squares yeah?” Did you ever see that in the great American teen dramas Buffy, My So-Called Life, Veronica Mars? The fuck you did.
I’m not really sure what Skins is for. It’s not like it's bad most of the time but when it is bad, it’s practically unwatchable.
The verdict on Skins Season 2: Needs work. And to grow up a little bit.
Marks out of 10: 6
Gong intermission
Aerial Telly Awards 2007
In a year that saw him further consolidate his grip on the worlds of gambling, writing and poon hounding Aerial Telly is proud to roll out his awards ceremony for the year of 2007. Stars from the world of showbiz throw themselves out of limousines in the hope of gaining validation from the world’s premiere authority on the vision that is telly. Most will never receive it - he is notoriously hard to please. But for those lucky chosen few their lives are changed forever - you really can’t buy this kind of career tonic. So let’s get things underway and talk about what you should have been watching when you were going through your girl’s mobile for ev
idence of infidelity.
Best show: 30 Rock, NBC
You thought the show within a show had been done to death and 30 Rock showed you exactly how dead wrong you were. An object lesson in how sitcom should be conceptualised, scripted and performed, Tina Fey’s brilliant creation showcased a previously unexplored comic talent in daughter baiting Alec Baldwin as deranged studio boss Jack Donaghy.
Worst show: The Peter Serafinowicz Show, BBC2
He had talent and BBC threw money at it like it was a Vegas lap dancer - so why did it suck so very hard? Well Watson, it must always come down to the writing. Ideas so old they needed carbon dating, feeble running gags and, yes, Cillit Bang parodies meant that the show was on to a loser from the start. Even the glorious pie of Belinda Stewart-Wilson couldn’t mask the fact that the BBC were wasting more energy than Freddie Ljungberg’s girlfriend.
Best performance by a male: Michael K. Williams as Omar Little - The Wire
The Wire achieved what many thought impossible this year and made the fourth season the best yet and at the heart of it was Michael K. Williams’s turn as Omar Little, the gay stick-up kid who never swears, shoots citizens or gets caught slipping. In a jail full of guys who want him dead, Omar stabs the first guy who tries to kill him in the rectum for everyone to see. As statements of intent go, that’s as pointed as they come and Williams’s understated presence and charisma give an already strong character mythic status.
Best performance by a female: Tina Fey as Liz Lemon, 30 Rock
Not only did she create the year’s best show, Tina Fey also put in the best performance by a dame as socially inept comic writer Liz Lemon. Fey bases Liz largely on herself and her unflinching portrayal of the “New York third-wave feminist, college-educated, single-and-pretending-to-be-happy-about-it, overscheduled, undersexed, you buy any magazine that says ‘healthy body image’ on the cover and every two years you take up knitting for...a week.” type. The Lemon Pie is brave, engaging and most of all very funny.