Thursday, April 13, 2006

Teletubbies

T.S. Eliot said that April was the cruellest month, and while that's certainly been true in terms of the weather, I can't say the same thing about our televisual entertainment. It's been fantastic -- 2003 fantastic. First up was Season 3 of Footballers Wives, the trashiest, glitziest program ever. After Jason Turner's death at the end of Season 2, I was worried that the show wouldn't be able to maintain its momentum, but the addition of metrosexual Beckham lookey-likey Conrad Gates was inspired. My only problem with the show was that it was SO over the top that it was impossible to watch more than one episode per evening, despite my worship of Tanya Turner (sorry, Lazlitt) and Hazel Bailey.

After that bad-taste fest, we moved on to the rather more sober, yet utterly engrossing State of Play. So engrossing, in fact, that we watched the final 3 episodes last night, finishing up around midnight with an exhausting, satisfying, twist-laden finale. If I paid a license fee, I'd feel that I'd got my moneys worth from this.

But where do we go from here? PJ's working his way through Blake's Seven, something I'm never going to watch; I have The Barchester Chronicles from the 1980s, starring a very young Alan Rickman as the odiously slimy Obidiah Slope. However, we have nothing that we can watch together. Suggestions?

1 comment:

CSS said...

Might I recommend the oft overlooked, yet brilliantly observed reading of Jude The Obscure by Michael Winner. It's set in space and stars Martin Jarvis as a young cadet eager to become a top gun at the famously exclusive Deep Space 10 Academy. It's got mutant robots, illicit sex, some dead baby sealatoids and lots of explosions. Brilliant.