Fuddland

Entries concerning the world of television.

I’m a big fan of the original CSI TV series. I like the fact that its full title is CSI: Crime Scene Investigation; I wish more TV shows would specify what their abbreviations stand for up-front — before there was such a thing as Google it took me ages to remember that CHiPs stood for California Highway Patrol, the crowbarring-in of the lowercase i to turn the abbreviation into an acronym threw me. I thought it stood for a minor word such as is or I. But that’s all in the past now.

I’ve tried to like the spin-off CSIs [Miami and New York], but their inconsistency with the titling compared with the original model irks me — they should be called something like “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation [But This One Takes Place in Miami]” — and some of the characters are just that little bit too laughable to be taken seriously. Every now and then I watch some episodes of the spin-offs to see if things have improved, but there’s always a moment where I feel like punching Horatio on the nose and breaking those stupid shades he insists on taking off in slow motion whenever he’s about to expound a theory or give an order. Last week I was treated to a double whammy of a crossover Miami-New York episode, leaving me reeling from trying to figure out which line I hated more of the following exchange:

Stella

Are you this hot on every case case?

Horatio

Well I made a promise to an eight-year-old boy, and I’m not going to let him down.

Stella

Say no more.

Yuk! Thankfully the original CSI avoids such schmaltz and always comes up with original ideas to keep the shows fresh and original. For example, after six seasons and not much main-character progression, the writers decided to give one of the characters a more interesting back-story — something not directly related to a case they were working on, but enough to make us viewers sit up and take a special interest. So did they kill the character’s wife? Kidnap their mother? Tell them they had six months to live? No.

Nick Stokes grew a moustache. And only for two episodes.

For two weeks it was there. Warrick called him “Moustache Boy” once. No one else mentioned it. And then it was gone. With no explanation. And I want to know why, so I’ll have to keep watching, waiting for the future episode when Gill finally confronts Nick on his bizarre facial hair habits. Clever writers, they know how to keep their audience hooked.

This evening a group of chums and I will be gathered round the TV [post-barbecue if the weather holds] cheering on my ex-housemate Lisa as she adds to the collective intellect of the fifty-strong “Rocket Scientists” team on Test the Nation, pitting her wits against teams of other professions and trying hard not to whither under the glare of Anne Robinson. In a fit of stereotyping, the BBC have decreed that the scientists must all wear lab coats, completely ruining any opportunity to show that not all physicists are geeks. [Just most of them.] I just hope this policy doesn’t also mean that the team of plumbers will have to sit with their cracks showing…

There were no great revelations about Eric Morecambe in tonight’s documentary, and that’s really a relief; even though we all love a good gossip and learning tasty little tidbits that no-one knew before, it’d be a pity to chip away at the comedy pedestal that Morecambe & Wise occupy for people of a certain generation [which I think people around my age are the last to know of]. In fact, it demonstrated that he was a very loyal man who would not let down his comedy partner even when his health and other interests were dictating that his attention should be elsewhere.

I have an absolutely vivid memory of when he died — I was at my grandparents’ house in Bournemouth, lying on the floor watching the television with my sister; my mother and grandparents were next door in the dining room engaging in post-pudding chat around the table that now lives in London. The news was on, and when the newsreader announced that Eric Morecambe had suffered a fatal heart attack, I got up, walked into the dining room, and told everyone the news. I’m pretty sure that was the first time I saw — or perhaps understood what it meant to see — people I knew saddened by someone’s death, which is probably why I remember it so well.

I’ve been following with — well, not exactly “interest” … let’s just say I’ve noticed the progress of the “…and” person in the credits of E.R.

Do you know who I mean? The member of the cast whose name appears last in the opening title sequence, with an “and” before their name. It’s used a great deal in television and films to indicate that this member of the cast is somehow significant — more important than those cast members who preceded the “and”. But what I’m not sure about is if we are being told that the “…and” person is more important than the actor whose name appears first [or possibly the second person billed].

Read the rest of “Is it “Punch … and Judy”?”…

“Voyager 1 just crossed the termination shock eight billion miles away, the first human object to leave the solar system.

“Voyager, in case it’s ever encountered by extra-terrestrials, carries photos of life on Earth, greetings in fifty-five languages, and a collection of music from Gregorian chants to Chuck Berry — including Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground by ’20s bluesman Blind Willie Johnson, whose stepmother blinded him at 7 by throwing lye in his eyes after his father beat her for being with another man.

“He died, penniless, of pneumonia, after sleeping bundled in wet newspaper in the ruins of his house that burned down, but his music just left the Solar System.”

[Dialogue from a recent episode of The West Wing, factually correct.]

here’s something i never thought i’d have: respect for michael portillo [although it suffered something of a blow when i just looked as his official site — how many politicians have photo galleries of themselves and biographical timelines with classical background music on their websites? no, wait, i fear it’s a larger number than i hope it is]. yes, we all laughed when he lost his seat, but i’ve just spent the last hour being entertained at his attempt to spend a week in the role of a single mum, coping with four young children, two part-time jobs and a budget way below what he’s accustomed to [tricky for someone who’s “never had to think about it before”].

portillo came off very well i think: from what we were shown [and i’m assuming he didn’t have a say in it], he didn’t raise his voice at the children, he didn’t shirk his responsibilities when things weren’t going well or he was feeling ill. he tried to do the best he could, as he saw it, and when things didn’t go quite as he’d like it, he reflected on what went wrong and honestly looked as though he was learning from every experience. as often happens when posh people are thrown into unfamiliar surroundings, they have an air of comic bemusement at how the other side live, but he didn’t come over as patronising or superior, which he so easily could have done. considering he’s childless and employs a cleaner to tend to his own chores, i think he coped admirably — i certainly wouldn’t have volunteered to take on what he did.

my two favourite, laugh-out-loud moments were:

• when portillo emerged from the lavatory the morning of his saturday job as a shelf-filler\general assistant at asda, wearing the full, junior employee uniform of lime-green t-shirt, baseball cap and name badge [‘mike’ — not ‘michael’] — some people were born wearing suits and do not look comfortable in any other attire;

• during the eldest girl’s karaoke party, whilst she, her sister and their friends were jumping around the room to aqua’s dr. jones, there was a fleeting cut to one of the brothers standing at the end of the room with an absolute picture of a face: ‘what are they doing?’.

it looks like there are more programmes in this vein planned for the new year; i hope — because i think it would be fabulous, whatever he ends up doing — that one of them features the living legend that is boris johnson.

i admit it: i watched derren brown play russian roulette live on television and i spent the last ten minutes of the show standing up because i was too nervous to sit down.

as our man at the beeb notes, the first part of the show — the whittling down of 12,000 applicants to be the one person who puts the bullet in the gun — was quite fascinating; the games brown had devised were simple but [thankfully, in the end] effective.

did he always know it was chamber number one, and pretend he messed up by firing chamber five into the air, for added tension? it certainly looked like he was nervous after his apparent misjudgment, but who knows?

i’m not the first to say it, i won’t be the last, but here it is anyway: derren brown’s just pissed all over blaine’s strawberries.

oh, and it’s always good to have an excuse to remind people of the darwin award winner who played russian roulette with a semi-automatic pistol.

you’d not think that the best laugh i’ve had in ages would come from the hands-on science programme science shack, but today’s edition gave me just that.

the premise was to devise a method to break the human high jump record; they were allowed to use mechanical aides, but the rule was: all devices must travel with the person as they jumped — nothing could remain behind [so ruling out trampolines and catapults, for example]. after a few false starts, interspersed with little sections about kangaroos, crickets and the fosbury flop, they settled on using a glorified pogo-stick.

a long metal pole was attached atop a large number of glass fibre rods, bent so they were storing a tremendous amount of potential energy; the hapless volunteer stood on the contraption, held onto the metal pole and pulled the catch to release the rods’ energy.

the moment he did this, he flew up in the air with an almighty yell — the angle of metal pole was just a smidge too far back, and as he was thrown up and started to somersault backwards, the pole collided — violently and at high speed — with his nutsack.

[pause for the men reading to go ‘ooooooooohhhhhhhh’]

men experience very mixed emotions when witnessing some poor chap getting hit in the knackers: it’s incredibly funny, but there is a huge element of sympathy and empathy rolled into the laughter. i can’t even begin to describe what it actually feels like [and won’t labour the point too much for fear of the women playing their ‘childbirth’ card].

needless to say, javier sotomayor’s high jump record of 2.45 metres remains intact.

classic answer on tonight’s ‘university challenge’:

the real answer was ‘tribology’, but we all knew that didn’t we?

i’m also grateful to tonight’s show for teaching me that ‘aibohphobia’ is the irrational fear of palindromes [obvious really, when you look at the word carefully].

i find watching quiz shows is one of the best ways to increase my general knowledge, and given my quiz show pedigree [my mother and my grandfather have both appeared on ‘fifteen-to-one’, and my grandparents had a series of wins on ‘three little words’ during the eighties], it’s probably only a matter of time before i make an embarrassingly brief appearance on some show or other.

checking out the channel 4 website to see what’s on this evening, i noticed this:

is this channel 4’s attempt to cram as much into the schedule as possible, by broadcasting the premiere and the repeat simultaneously?

Read the rest of “i’m a bit of a thicko, kill me now”…

Read the rest of “good knight”…