Life on Mars
TV // Steve // 9th January 2006
Hoho. The new series from the makers of - wait for it - Spooks and Hustle had it's first episode tonight, and they almost managed to keep their hand off the Impossibly Daft Slow-Mo button, right up until our time-travelling hero John Sim and his thuggish boss, played by Philip Glenister, jump over a desk.
In slo-mo.
Well at least there was no hideously embarassing musical number, like in Hustle.
And it was going quite well, too before that, with some sly Back to the Future references (asking for a Diet Coke in a pub, the silly "this flyover! coming soon!"), and his 2006 consciousness leaking through a television set in the form of a hirsute Open University lecturer.
Beyond the set-up, the detective story was dreadfully thin, with a massive leap to finding the bad guy, but it'll be worth a go next week. Mind you, I watched the entire first series of Hustle too...
Comments
Watched this the other night. Certainly better than Hustle, but then so is pushing salty butter down your knob with a red hot needle.
Definitely the cheesiest thing I have ever seen, the constant references to party 7’s made me feel ill. Plus the horrible re-treading of the “gut instinct copper vs uptight by the book copper” storyline made me want to take a bath with a hairdryer.
Appalling in nearly every single way. But like I said far better than Hustle (and that shower of shite Spooks too).
Jim : 24/01/2006 20:44:28
God, it was bad on Monday. I regretted saying it might be half decent. It was probably the sight of an old Saab that put me up to it.
It’s shaping up to be truly shit I have to admit. The WPC is a bookend. John Sim looks like he’s trying so very hard. The boss should put his fucking Curly Wurly down: yes, we get it.
It’s the Seventies as brought to you by H&M and one of those abominable I Love 1973 type programmes.
We take it that Party Seven is in fact an antique and that they couldn’t possibly have cracked it open, but never mind.
stevepaperjam : 24/01/2006 21:56:52
....and the bit where they both punched the irritating “Blakey“-type other copper made me want disguise myself as a sleeper and go and sit on a railway track.
Jim : 24/01/2006 23:31:25
... and the bit where the girl off the testcard got all spooky (woooooo) made me want to try to wax my legs with loctite.
Jim : 24/01/2006 23:34:52
…also the toe curling “You should see my Playstation scores”, which is cheap and doesn’t even sound conversational.
I think the testcard is spooky as fuck, but they mishandled it. Check the
"An announcement is being made in sound" testcard; I’m thinking, there’s a nuclear bomb just been dropped on Nuneaton (fair enough, really).
Maybe it’s a childhood thing for me. I haven’t seen it on TV for years. Something odd popped up on UKN0va the other day which reminds me of this: someone had taken a recording of various testcards shown during the BBC’s recent annual Re-Broadcast Standby tests.
Apparently this is when they switch from point to multi-point broadcasting of the television signal to peer-to-peer re-broadcasting. Presumably they wouldn’t use p2p generally because of the signal degradation, but it’s useful for keeping transmissions going when the Bad People decide to blow up the original transmitter.
So, seeing the test card on TV = preparing for major disaster = rather concerning.
But then I used to find the ATV logo and the Thames Television mirror-thing unsetting too. Particularly with the doomy Seventies synthetic backing.
stevepaperjam : 25/01/2006 10:40:59