telly 1

As promised, I thought I'd do a bit of rounding up of some of the telly I've been watching over the last few weeks.


Derren Brown Investigates

The name is pretty self-explanatory here - Derren Brown, who famously does a lot of mind-reading and psychic type magic, investigated several people claiming psychic powers or similar things. Brown of course, doesn't pretend it's real, but these other people do.

There were 3 episodes. In the first, he met up with a Liverpudlian psychic, in the second he went on a sort of course that purports to give you the ability to see without using your eyes (especially to allow blind people to see).

These two episodes were pretty much what you'd expect - exposures of conmen/frauds. The only thing I'd really say about this was that in a way, Derren was too nice.

I don't mean he should have been actively aggressive towards them - the main aim was to give them enough rope to hang themselves with, which they did - but he should at least have called them on things a bit more. For example, in the psychic one, he set up a reading with a woman which the psychic did really badly at. But at the beginning, Derren asked her to use a false name, which suggested at some point he was going to say to the psychic - how come none of the ghosts mentioned her real name? - but he never did.

However, in the third show this soft approach actually worked well, because this third was a ghost hunter and the guy genuinely believed in ghosts. I mean, proper conviction about the existence of spirits.

Now while this is a bonkers belief, unlike the other two, it was clear he wasn't trying to exploit people (he'd never accepted a penny from someone he'd helped) and genuinely wanted to help them. Clearly, Derren found no actual evidence, but his soft approach worked a lot better.


Luther

I was a little apprehensive about Luther, which is a new detective job.

I love a good crime thriller/mystery, but I tend to get a bit worried when words like 'dark' and 'brooding' are bandied about. It's one thing for the crimes to be dark, but things tend to get a bit messy when you start making your character dark too. Look at Waking the Dead, which does some great mysteries, but seems to have lost the plot when it comes to the main character Boyd.

And there are echoes of those sorts of problems with Luther - his home life is a bit messy and there are suggestions he's not exactly arrow straight in everything he does. However, to be fair, they brought those elements in fairly gently, and instead focused on the actual murders.

In the latter episodes they have kinda ramped these overall plot threads up and I think they might have gone a bit far, but overall the show was better than I was expecting.


Story of Science

This was an interesting documentary series.

The basic idea was to present science and scientific discovery in a more realistic 'of it's times' series of events, rather than as a kind of guided process. Essentially what it's saying is that, science if often presented as a series of logical steps that lead inevitably towards an end goal.

The reality of course is that the people themselves aren't thinking like that - they're doing experiments, coming up with ideas or whatever in the context of their time and what interests them. So someone who's trying to work out the movement of the planets in the heavens comes up with the idea of elliptical orbits around the Sun, but because it was against popular opinion, it didn't become accepted.


Dollhouse s2

I can't honestly say I was that impressed by the first series of Dollhouse, the most recent offering from Joss Whedon.

It seemed like a reasonable idea, but the main problem was a lack of any really strong arc to it. The idea seemed to be that some of the dolls - especially Echo - were beginning to, I dunno, develop proper personalities, rather than just being totally blank slates.

The I dunno is quite important - it wasn't clear quite what was happening and that was the problem, especially in the early shows, where it focused on being a very episodic format. Think "monster of the week" only "doll of the week".

Also, people said it got a lot better towards the end and while I'd say it did improve a bit, it wasn't like it suddenly took a leap up to excellent - more like a gentle incline up to okay.

There was one ray of hope. There was an 'epilogue' episode at the end, which hinted at much more story. The second season is a huge improvement, with a more consistent and flowing arc. It's even managed to throw in a few curveballs which the first season really lacked.