telly 2

And here's the second part.


You Have Been Watching

Clearly, you have to like Charlie Brooker before you even consider watching this. Especially since, although it's presented as a panel show, it's a bit of half-arsed version. I mean, there are normally very few actual questions asked of the guests and more time is spent giving what are more like mini-reviews.

It works, but they appear to have tweaked the format a little from the first series, and I'm not sure I like the tweaks. In the first season the guests watched episodes of the shows being discussed, but I think they've scaled that back a bit this year - perhaps only showing them 1 episode and asking questions about the whole series.

This okay, but Brooker watches them all (he's a TV critic after all) so the balance has shifted more towards him talking, where the guests said more in the first series.

Also, they had something called TV club last year where they told you what to watch and you could put your opinions and stuff. This has basically been dumped, although to be fair, it wasn't a crucial bit of the show.


The Big Bang Theory s3

The Big Bang Theory is consistently the funniest show on TV. I'd say its only real rival is 30Rock, and that's not shown on a channel I can watch easily.

Oh, Channel 4 are always up to their usual scheduling shenanigans of course, but the mighty power of schedule searching that my PVR enables, combined with my already exhaustive scouring of Radio Times each week ensures I don't miss any episodes.

I think one of the things I like most about the show is that for once it actually manages to depict scientists and nerds in an unapologetic and non-fanciful way. I've ranted many times before about Hollywood depictions of scientists and nerds, but Big Bang Theory doesn't do that - it's got a proper understanding geekiness and geekdom.


The Mentalist s2

The mentalist is a bit of an odd beast.

Basically, it's a crime mystery job (I love a good crime mystery) and generally speaking, each episode is self contained. There's a murder or two and the main guy, Jane, solves it, often engaging his mentalist abilities - think Derren Brown.

Anyway, these are all fine and good, but then there's also supposed to be a couple of plot threads that work across the episodes. For Jane, this is basically to do with a serial killer called Red John who killed his wife and child.

Now this is clearly quite a dark thread, but the individual episodes are often jolly and light-hearted. It's like there's an intention for them to be entirely stand alone, but then every so often you get a full Red John episode or a small arc. If this were an anime, I'd probably end up thinking of the normal episodes as filler, because tonally they just don't match with the Red John ones.

But in a way it still works - the reason for Jane being there and how he behaves is actually explained by the Red John stuff.

I dunno, it's difficult to explain in a short space, but basically the show works. The stand-alone episodes work as crime mystery stories and the Red John episodes work as a long-running plot. My only thing is I wish the two were a bit better integrated - it's like they completely forget about Red John while they work on the individual cases.


Doctor Who

The Steven Moffat run Doctor Who continues to be enjoyable.

If I'm totally honest, I have had a few niggles. The biggest one was probably the Rory character. Rory was engaged to Amy, the Doctor's new assistant, indeed, the Doctor actually took her away on the very night before her wedding.

He even went and picked up Rory, who was in a few episodes and was heavily involved in the plots - not just a bystander. And then a few weeks back they killed him off.

Well, actually they didn't just kill him off, he was touched by some sort of time rift thing and completely 'disappeared' from all-time. He not only died, but he ceased to ever have existed.

If they'd simply killed him that would have created paradoxes - there was some stuff of him in the future - but to cause him to cease to exist is the mother of all paradoxes. He was about to marry Amy and has been her friend since childhood - how does that all now work?

Hopefully, the overarching plot to the series will sort it all out. Certainly the overall series plot has been better integrated into the series than back in the RTD days.

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.

face slicer

I cut myself shaving on Saturday. I've not done that in years. It was above my top lip and it bled like a bugger - cuts on your face often do, for some reason.

It wasn't a big cut and because razors are obviously sharp, it was a clean cut and it didn't really hurt. I saw a few people noticing it, though. I guess it's just in that sort of position where you tend to look more - I think eyes and mouth tend to be where you look more closely.

It was a surprisingly successful weekend. Surprising and successful, because although I didn't do quite what I'd planned, I did achieve a lot. Basically, I'd thought the best plan was to get some scanning done, but in the end I did a big chunk of the sorting out I've got left to do.

I'm not really sure what started me off, but after I'd done my cleaning on Saturday I just sort of rolled on and started going through some of the boxes I've got left. I even started to move some of the furniture around, although given how hot and muggy it was on Saturday I kinda abandoned that.

I think because I've got this Thursday and Friday off and my plan is to have it all essentially finished this next weekend I just sort of wanted to get a head start on it.

What also helped is that I reviewed the telly for the upcoming week and there is almost nothing on. I think there are a total of 7 things I want to watch/record across the entirety of this next week, which must be about a third of what I normally watch. And it only really ramps up at the weekend because the Canadian Grand Prix is on.

Hopefully, if this continues it should be a super productive summer . I'll get all my sorting done and then spend the summer dumping stuff on e-bay and watching the DVD backlog.

And speaking of TV stuff, I thought for tomorrow and Wednesday I'd do some summary round-up reviews of the shows I've been watching.