gadge

So a new series of the gadget show started the other week.

It's good to have the show back and it's a really long run - they're going to be going right up until Christmas time, which is around 20-odd weeks. They've even got a new presented - Pollyanna Woodward. She's very pretty, but she at this early stage she also seems quite bright and a good presenter as well - I find it a bit cringeworthy when presenters are just a pretty face.

I must say it's quite interesting that they're adding another presenter. By my reckoning that makes 5 on the TV show itself and then I believe there's a web episode presenter person too. I've never really had much joy out of 5's online thing, so I've never watched any other webisodes.

Anyway - 6 presenters and a 20-odd episode run suggests the show is going from strength to strength. Given the recent take-over of five and the resultant proclamations that they would slash-and-burn a lot of staff in order to make the station profitable I hope that means the gadget show is safe.

It'd be a real shame if it gets axed as there aren't really any other shows that do what it does. Plus less Suzy Perry on the telly would be a bad thing.

I ended up recording the last episode of Sherlock, because as mentioned yesterday I was more than a little tired this last the weekend. However, I have been doing some googling on it and there's been a lot of praise, which I would wholeheartedly back.

Hopefully that means there'll be a new series commissioned soon. And hopefully it won't just be three episodes. I can kinda appreciate that they didn't want to take the risk of having a longer run, especially with them each being an hour-and-a-half each, but the next lot needs to have more episodes in it - three's just not enough.

They could achieve that partly by making them each an hour long - not that the extra half hour is wasted, but hour long episodes (with maybe just the first and last being feature length?) would work just as well, I think.

I think what makes the show work is that it's got a really good grounding in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes but with just enough bringing it up-to-date to make it feel fresh at the same time. Plus the performances have been great too and the writing is pretty good - Moffat's first episode was particularly good, but then I've known he was an excellent writer for ages, so that wasn't much of surprise.

I also watched the first episode of "The Deep" over the weekend. It's taken an absolute hammering by the critics and I can kinda understand why. When I watched it I think I had my usual reactionary thing of "well, this isn't as bad as everyone says" but that doesn't mean I thought it was good.

I had a few problems with it. First off, the sub they're in is way too high-tech and looks more like a spaceship than a research submarine. Second, the crew doesn't feel realistic - they didn't really strike me as scientists, engineers or submariners. Certainly they don't seem to act in a professional way or to even use common sense or to think about things in a logical way. They also seemed to have found themselves in a bit of an over-wrought soap opera.

The only thing that makes it interesting is the science fiction elements and I've a horrible suspicion that these are only interesting because they're unexplained. When they are explained I wouldn't be surprised if those explanations are more than a little daft.