What the Chuck?

Sorry I've not updated in forever. I can't say I'm too bothered however as I'm almost certain only 5 people have ever read this.

Aaaanyway. I want to talk a bit about a show that I desperately tried to avoid. Being as, a lot of my generation are, big fans of Whedon, I have often followed members of his creative team and casts in their other projects. Sometimes the payoff is magnificent: Wonderfalls, Battlestar Galactica, Greg the Bunny, hell even that one episode of Glee where Artie does some pretzel-fuelled dream dance.

Sometimes though, the connection is so tenuous or the show so rubbish (Point Pleasant... most of Tru Calling) one feels to go down that rabbit hole a step too far. So the notion 'Hey Alex! Have you seen that comedy drama where a nerd becomes a spy featuring the guy who was Jayne on Firefly being all surly and right wing?' was not of vast appeal. I was off on holiday to Egypt, needed some entertainment for the flight and decided to treat myself to season one of Chuck.

I should be clear, Chuck is not life changing. I don't feel the need to get a 'WWCD' bracelet or to allow the show's lexicon to infiltrate my idiolect. No-one is going to jump off a tower to save the world, there will be no serial killers in a hospital and (I would be stunned if) the cast running into the battlefields of WWI to turn into a field of poppies. What Chuck is, is soup. Cholent. Stew. Tagine, if you're a bit foreign. Its warm, cosy and well written enough to be 'non-trash' but really doesn't scale the heights of genre and wit that it could if paired with a slightly more creative team. But the constant callbacks to classic Bond films and video games are just delightful. There is, however, a problem.

This woman.
Yes, you might ask 'As a gay Jewish man, what problems might you have with this almost offensively Aryan woman?'. And I would respond by calling you racist. You would say it was just a joke. I would say that was uncool. You would learn something. We would hug. The world would move on a braver and fairer place.

The woman pictured is Chuck's love interest and mentor in the ways of the CIA, 'Sarah Walker'. Or Sam. Or whatever the hell her name turns out to be really. The thing with Sarah is, she is simply too perfect to both men and women at once. She exists on a level of impossible that I find excruciatingly annoying. Let's use 'gender stereotypes' to help us examine this:

Woman: Wow. Although she's tough, clever and independent, she has opened herself up to love. I know she's had issues with her parents so it makes me glad to see her in a healthy relationship and realising that her career choices, although important, don't always need to be the main focus of her life.

Man: She is blonde and has breasts.

Still like Chuck, but four seasons in and I wonder if I will ever like Sarah.

The great X-Factor auditions controversy

Waa-waa-waa boo-bloody-hoo. Look, I love a good bit of social networking to comment on TV. Twitter and facebook are half the bloody reasons to watch stuff like Apprentice, Question Time and the X Factor live as they air rather than recording them for later. It's fun to have causal banter about who should win (OMFG, DIversity 4EVA!!) and who should not (Ruth Lorenzo is ttl shte haha blaad :D) or make irreverent comments about politicians (Why does Margaret Beckett look like she's been drawn by Quentin Blake?). BUT all of this pales into comparison with what happened last Saturday. Last Saturday the X-Factor auditions moved from a dingy room and just the judges to a full blown arena, with the contestants given backing tracks. A bit cheesy, a bit naff but not that big a deal.

But oh, no. Not for my mates. It ruined it all. A nameless Scottish acquaintance said that the transition from small room, to boot camp to TV studio showed the journey of the performer. But, but said I in an incredulous manner... this is exactly how Britain's Got Talent works and nobody cared then. They moan, they howl, it's just different they say. And I do not care one fucking jot. Get over it, it's still trash, you still love it and you'll gossip about it til January.

PS - Next week in the biggest telly shocker of all time, instead of the most attractive female judge sitting on his right (once Dannii, now Cheryl) Louis shall take this role instead. Why I hear you ask. Are they having an illicit affair? Did Cheryl finally get so thin she's starting to decompose and smell bad? I invite you to speculate.

Rosh Bakir

The Israeli version of the popular 'Brain Wall' franchise (Hole in the Wall in the UK) is utterly sodding mental. Bearing in mind that the version we know and tolerate is doolally enough you may ask how this is possible.

In the UK version a wall comes towards you with a hole in it and you have to make the shape or else be slammed into a cold pool just behind you. In Israel, 'Rosh Bakir' aka Head in the Wall, the wall stays stationary (I am trying so hard not to make separation wall/fence comments at this point as to be absurd) and there is a BACKWARDS TRAVELLATOR contestants must battle to JUMP THROUGH a hole quite high up the wall. Were this not bad enough in a retro Mario Bros sort of way obstacles travel down the travellator at the poor bastards, knocking them off their lycra clad feet and giving them little chance of regaining composure before being sped to a splashy end.


awesome

I hate Valentine Warner

I hate this man. Here is why.

1. His stupid alpaca like face. He constantly seems as if he's just coming round from the anesthetic or as if he has suffered a blunt head trauma.

2. The way he describes food is really annoying. His mint tea with sugar was 'sweet and minty'. For fucks sake.

3. I (allegedly) saw him molesting an otter

4. He seems to be almost sexually interested in pulses, beans, grains etc. and in forcing them on the public. Try my fresh peas? Nibble my broad beans? How is this not a form of grooming?

5. He called his small, lavender meringues 'fairy tits'. Then he smirked a toothy smirk and a part of my soul died.

T'telly

Two shows have launched in the past fortnight about, well... telly. Similar formats aimed at totally different audiences.

In the BBC corner we have: 'As Seen On TV' a veritable smuggy chumfest hosted by rent-a-hunk celebrity-shagger Steve Jones where minor TV celebs answer TV nostalgia questions whilst making you feel old.








In the Channel 4 corner we have: 'You Have Been Watching' The Guardian and Screenwipe's razor sharp bastard Charlie Brooker's new 'mainstream' vehicle with a 'format'.












Rightio. So, which one is better?

Format:
ASOTV: Solid and dull. One imagines this was sat in some executives drawer for a rainy day. Well, it is just a classic TV quiz sort of a thing. (6/10)
YHBW: A weird hybrid between BBC4's Screenwipe and Have I Got News For You which tries to be both and manages to be neither. Confused but at least its trying (5/10)

Host:
ASOTV: Steve Jones is pretty and charismatic and just a touch too smug. But he isn't Charlie Brooker. (2/10)
YHBW: Charlie Brooker has the benefit of being Charlie Brooker. Seeing him squirm through the format and cope with an audience and guests he actually has to talk to instead of telling to fuck off is half the charm (9/10)

You know what, I could do a few more of these rounds but sod it. There's no point. YHBW is far superior to the fleck of TV dross that is ASOTV. The issue with ASOTV is, for a show about nostalgia, it's completely bloody forgettable. It only began yesterday and all I can remember is the set looked nice and the audience seemed to have been paid to laugh. Utter crap. And as for YHBW, it's nice but it just isn't Screenwipe. Sorry Charlie but you're not as funny when I'm reminded other people are in on the joke. You're much better ranting about how shitting awful the pissweasels and spunkpigeons in Brittania High are jacking off in your lounge via a webcam than being well lit on CH4 with a bunch of bohemian arseholes politely laughing at your critiques. Fix it, yeah?

A long time ago, we used to be friends

Dear UK,

If you haven't seen it before you now have no excuse. Rob Thomas' (not that one) seminal high-school noir series Veronica Mars is making its debut on Freeview channels, filling the Gilmore Girls shaped void in the E4 morning schedule from Thursday the 16th of July.

Charming, brilliantly written, cute, deep, and sharp as a hanzo sword this is one show that is well-worth getting into. Kristen Bell plays Veronica, a recently ostracized high school student by day but by night fights to save her dad's reputation by helping to solve the murder of her best friend. OK, it's Nancy Drew meets Raymond Chandler by way of Buffy.

Thank me later, in the meantime here's a cute clipreel of some of the series trademark punchy dialogue

Torch-what??!!

Something amazing happened yesterday. Whilst watching BBC1's ever-loving Angel/X-Files rip off summer thriller saga 'Torchwood: Children of Earth' I realised something. We've never had it so good. For three episodes in a row Torchwood has been consistently entertaining and not at all muddled and bollocks. The series usually finds itself as mediocre sci-fi adventures with quite good characters and rather rubbish 'Alien of the week' stories apart from a handful of episodes each season which totally justify the overall existence of the series.

For example, season one brought us the most unforgivably boring fight between a dinosaur and a robot ever in 'Cyberwoman', and an episode that was essentially Welsh, alien fight club. Still the season contained the truly heat-wrenching episode with Capt. Jack meeting the man he named himself for and a good-old romp in 'They Keep Killing Suzie' (a real contender for one of my favourite titles for anything ever)

Season two was generally of better quality but for every carnivorous shape-shifter impregnating brides before their wedding day (I don't care what you think, that was genius!) or cameo from Buffy's swaggering James Marsters, there were three episodes featuring the sullen face of Martha 'has anyone written me a personality yet?' Jones and one that revolved around harvesting Tesco value steak from a giant alien worm. Lovely.

COE may not be especially high-brow or cerebral but it is bloody good summer blockbuster entertainment. Sort of half 'State of Play' and half 'Torchwood' there's enough intrigue and involvement outside of the four main players we already know to make this miniseries work on a much more epic scale. So the twists are a bit predictable and the 456's projectile vomiting was a tad offputting but it's fun!! And I like fun? Don't you? Ah probably not you miserable bastard.


UPDATE 11/7/09

OK, I was wrong. Having seen the last two episodes this WAS clever TV, this WAS more than a summer alien thriller. This ran the gamut and went to Battle Royale, nay Warsaw ghetto levels in terms of questions of sacrifice, life and death. With that ending and such a strong appreciation for the plot (It's rare to see ratings go UP during the course of a series, usually you expect to see a slow drop especially for something requiring as much viewer attention and commitment as this) it's hard to see where the show goes next. If it's over, it left on a high and it's certainly impossible to ever go back to cheesy alien adventure romps, those days are beyond over. What we do know is that Capt. Jack will be in the Dr Who Xmas specials and maybe the good Doctor can knock some sense into him. Maybe not. Either way the third series of Torchwood was bloody exemplary. All previous mistakes forgiven.