the silence and tg

No film review this week as I couldn't be arsed to watch my rental DVD, so I'm going to talk about some telly stuff instead.

A few weeks ago, the BBC showed one of those episode-a-day dramas.

They seem to have become a bit of a regular thing, and it can add quite a bit to the viewing experience. The most recent one was 'the silence' which was a reference to the main character, Amelia, who is deaf.

However, Amelia had recently got a cochlea implant. These are basically outside microphones that pick up sound and then transmit it to an implant that's buried inside your head and that effectively stimulates your hearing directly. You can read more about them on wikipedia of course.

Anyway, the point is that this deaf teenage girl ends up witnessing a murder. Her uncle is the detective that's running the investigation of that murder and of course he finds out she saw it, but his wife convinces him to "protect" her by not revealing she's a witness.

Now the above paragraph should clue you in on two of the things I didn't like about this series. First off it's almost totally reliant on co-incidences. Now co-incidence is okay, but this just seems to stumble from one co-incidence to another that it ended up feeling contrived.

The second thing is that you have a detective bowing to his wife's pressure not to reveal Amelia because she'll be put at risk. What the nature of the risk is we're never quite told, but also, is it me or is that damning indictment of the British Justice system? So this detective won't take Amelia in because she might be at risk? And he hardly takes a lot of convincing - what kind of statement is that?

Unfortunately, what makes this worse is when you add into it the fact that the detective is supposedly a workaholic who loves his job! To me that's just horribly inconsistent.

Then there are two more problems. I should also note I'm about to let rip with the spoilers.

First off, I didn't like anyone in the entire series. Amelia comes across as a petulant, whiny teenager, her dad started off okay, but then had this weird over-reaction that just smacked of cutting your nose off to spite your face and her mum had basically forced her to get the implant because she'd never accepted Amelia's deafness.

Her uncle is this work-obsessed, mr angry who's basically been an absent father and although we're supposed to believe he's a good copper, he makes a right hash of this case, her aunt is overly reactionary, unreasonable and utterly fails to own responsibility for the fact that she's basically caused the entire mess. Then there are their children - the older son has major daddy issues and acts like a twat, the younger son needs a damn good slap and the daughter's not really even in it.

Then there's the police - they're all either corrupt, a bunch of back-stabbers or wimps. After a while it just got silly - all of these people were basically unpleasant and I ended up not caring about any of them.

The second problem was that the thing didn't have an ending. Surely the whole point of these short-burst dramas is that you tell a complete story across the length of the drama. But this ended with loads of loose ends.

I mean, the whole thing was about a couple of murders, right? Well, nobody was brought to justice for them, but equally it wasn't about the fact that the baddies got away with it. Instead, it just felt like they'd forgotten to make episode 5 where all the loose ends were actually tied up.

The only good thing about it was that the depiction of deaf people felt more realistic. As I say, I didn't really like her, but then in a way that's something of a good thing. There's a tendency to portray people with disabilities as victims or as saints, but here she was basically just a regular teenager.

I've prattled on a lot there, so I'll just leave the TG thing to a basic summary - the episode last Sunday was one of the best in a while.

I always enjoy TG, but in recent series there's been a tendency to make the show just plain silly. Previously, I think TG used to really hit the nail on the head of being silly with/in/about cars and then occasionally being a bit serious as well. In recent series it's become more like the presenters just being silly all the time and not always about cars.

The news has become a classic example of this - previously it would at least focus on cars, but recently you can't even call it a news section. I mean, how is it car news if no cars are mentioned at all?