Eat Your Carrots

Strictly Come Dancing

Yay, Kate's gone at last. Not before time too. Much as I like the girl (which is more than wife does) she's been a hopeless dancer and the sympathy vote she's been getting has been spoiling the contest. Maybe common sense will resume now.

No More TV

So Lost, 24 and Heroes have all ended. What's left to watch on TV. I suppose I could watch Big Brother - well only if I tire of sticking pins in my eyes.
So what actually happened in Lost? Have they been rescued? Certainly Jack & Kate appear to be off the island - the usual flash-backs being replaced now by flash-forwards and perhaps just a jump to present day.  But surely they can't have been rescued? What's the next season about if they're off the island? And anyway, in the "future" Jack mentioned his dad as though he's alive, but he's not. So that must actually have been the past? Did he know Kate in the past? Is the future the new past? And who's funeral was it?
As always more questions than answers.
Lost begins again in February 2008.

Jack's Back

Jack Bauer is back; that is to say 24 is back. We've watched it up to episode 5 and it looks to be "typical 24". Always just one step behind the bad guy but always with another lead to follow, and ultimately Jack saves the world. Or at least the USA. As usual it's full of very implausible scenarios;

• Jack's been in a Chinese jail, tortured almost daily, for two years, but is he malnourished or out of shape? Not a bit of it.
• Jack has a knife pushed through his shoulder and a length of rod pushed into a place that I can only imagine - it looked like it hurt a lot. Does any of it hinder his movements half and hour later?
• Jack (while handcuffed to a torture chair) overcomes his guard, gets the cuff's key from his pocket (how did he know that guy had the key in that pocket) and (thankfully his chains aren't too short) manages to reach across to his other hand to undo the lock.

It's all in the style of Penelope Pitstop; you half expect that every time they go back to the ticking countdown on the Nuke (oops, was that a spoiler) it counts down over the same sequence again and again. Well, it's not quite that bad. It's also very bloodthirsty, and Jack is even more of an evil bas*ard than he was before. Two years in a Chinese jail will do that to a man. That bit with the guard that I mentioned earlier; and what he did to his own brother! I hope I never come up against Jack.
Despite these criticisms it's as compulsive viewing as ever, we watched all five episodes in two days and it's torture having to wait a week for the next one.

Lost is Back

The new (third) series of Lost begins tomorrow on ABC in the USA. I can't wait! I find it strange that the series in the USA always begins just as the previous series ends here in the UK. Why don't C4 show the series at the same time, or at least only a couple of weeks behind? That would save impatient people from having to download it!

Just The Two Of Us

So Just The Two Of Us has finished. Strangely we actually watched this show - usually that sort of thing is not for us at all. We caught part of the first show by accident and it managed to get us hooked. Initially it  was just morbid fascination to see how bad Penny Smith was show after show (and boy was she bad), but we got totally hooked on the show. Some of the celebrities were dire (Penny, Gabby, Fiona and eventual winner Sian) whilst others were really quite good (Chris and eventual runner up Mark). These shows where the public vote are really peculiar because they don't seem to actually vote on what the show is about - i.e. singing ability - but rather on just who they like, or feel sorry for. I know it's just a bit of fun, but in the end it makes a mockery of it. If I was Mark & Natasha I'd be seriously gutted at losing out to Sian, who sounded for the most time like a wailing cat (and even Charley sounds better than she did).
I was impressed by the professional singers though - a quite impressive collection really. OK, Jo O'Meara and Natasha Hamilton are from now defunct groups, but they were the best singers from those groups, while Russel Watson, Curtis Stigers, Alexander O'Neal and Jocelyn Brown are very well respected international artists. They put on a good and thoroughly professional performance and I think they all emerged with much credit. I was most impressed by Russel Watson, who could turn his hand to every genre that he sang with equal aplomb. He's possessed of a great voice and no small amount of talent. He's not my cup of tea, but credit where it's due.
I doubt there'll be a second series of this, apparently it performed poorly in the ratings. At least it was over and done in little more than a week. How long has the current "Dancing On Ice" been running? Is it two years or only the one? (well, that's how it feels anyway) I really couldn't be bothered to watch a show like that for that length of time.

UFO

I watched an episode of UFO tonight. When I was a kid I loved this, along with most other Gerry Anderson stuff (Thunderbirds, Stingray, Captain Scarlet). UFO was different from those others because it was live action - well, there were still models for the spaceships etc., but the people were real.
The show starred some surprisingly high-profile actors, Gabrielle Drake, George Cole, Stephanie Beacham, Philip Madoc, Barry Stokes... I guess it showed the regard in which Anderson was held.
Like a lot of Anderson productions this one spawned a whole host of merchandising in the form of the various vehicles etc. from the show. I had an Interceptor (pictured) as well as the kind of half-track rocket firing all-terrain vehicle thingy. I would have liked a SkyDiver too, but I'm not even sure they made one of those.
I love too the strange silver sparkly catsuits and purple wigs that the women wear, and the very comfortable-looking but unflattering outfits of the men. Kind of like a shellsuit in a way. The hardware up in space, especially on the moon, looks very much like the stuff from Space 1999. I guess it helped cut costs that they could reuse some set, models and ideas.
I'll watch more of this (it's on ITV4 on Saturday night) but I've no idea where they're up to. The listing said episode 15, though according to the episode guide at the show's own site, what I saw was actually episode 3.
A tad confusing. I'll watch on regardless.

Jack's Back

We watched the first episode of the new series of 24 tonight. If you saw the last series you'll know that Jack disappeared at the end (and if you didn't see it, well you still know that Jack vanished at the end now) so the first thing they had to do was engineer a reappearance for him. All of which means it's still early days regarding the plot in general, so I don't know if it's going to be great, good, mediocre or terrible. I'd guess at one of the first two options. This first episode made us jump twice, and the series now comes with a "contains scenes of graphic violence - exercise discretion" warning, so that's two good signs.

Bring on episode 2...

Rome

So Rome has ended. I've stuck with it through the whole series and rather enjoyed it. The final episode saw our hero Pullo sentenced to death in the arena for murdering someone. He accepts his fate and tells the gladiators "I won't fight you - just kill me". But they're not happy with that, they want a fight (to their cost as it transpires) and goad him. The goading fails until they insult his legion - the 13th. That does the trick and Pullo fights, quite easily dispatching all of the gladiators and the reinforcements they send in. Finally, exhausted and wounded they send in a giant of a man to finish him off. And he's just about to succeed when our other hero Vorenus leaps from the crowd shouting "13th, 13th" and sees to the giant. If there's one thing that gets me, it's when a hero comes to the rescue when you're not expecting it. I came over all emotional. Pullo and Vorenus were really the stars of the series, the other stuff going on around them being almost "incidental". I don't think Pullo was much different to (especially) US Marines of today - not too bright but fiercly loyal, and the kind of people you'd rather have with you than against you.
They didn't all live happily ever after, but at least they did live, unlike Caesar. He met his end at the hands of the conspirators ("et tu Brute") at the climax of an episode that was bloody &violent almost from start to finish. I said "well, they can't really make a sequel to this" but I was wrong.
Rome returns in the summer.

Where's Erica?

We're big fans of Beverly Hills 90210 and watch it every day. It's series 5 that's on at the moment, and it's a series that we somehow missed in the past.
In one of the plot lines Dylan discovers he has a young half sister, Erica. Having no other family except his estranged mother he takes to her immediately, and she to him. However, Erica's mum and step-dad are shysters who rip Dylan off leaving him almost destitute and flee taking Erica with them. She leaves a note pinned to a toilet door at LAX saying "Dylan, they're taking me to Mexico, please save me" (or words to that effect).
Months later a stranger shows at Dylan's door with the note - it's taken here a while to get round to delivering it. Dylan and Valerie and an ex CIA man named "Jonesy" head off to Mexico where they execute a scam of their own to recover Dylan's fortune and rescue Erica.
It all ends very happily. Except what happens to Erica? She's never seen nor mentioned again. Was Dylan really only after his cash, and now he's got it he's stuck Erica in a home or something? He's planning a round-the-world trip with Kelly Taylor now. What about Erica? I'm seriously worried about the girl - hell, she's only a kid, she can't fend for herself!

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Footnote: Apparently Erica reappears in series 8 as a teenage prostitute and is rescued from her pimp by Brandon & Kelly. So it seems Dylan just sent her off into a life on the streets! Nice.
(For which I'm indebted to this site)

Lost

Anyone else hooked on Lost? We love it, so much so that we can't wait for the week-by-week episodes on Channel 4/E4 and have taken to getting them online. We've seen up to episode 9 now, and have 10, 11 & 12 to see when we get back from Rhodes.
Once you get over the fact that no one would have survived such a plane crash (and ignoring the fact that at the start there was still even a jet engine running on the beach), the series is quite intriguing. Where are they? How did they survive? What are the mysteries of the island (how did the Polar Bear get there, and what is it that knocks down the trees)? What happened to the people from the last crash there?
Week by week each of the 14 main characters is explored in a little more depth, and there's more to all of them than meets the eye. Some turn out to be real heroes, some villains and some downright strange & mysterious. I'm talking Mr Locke here, our favourite character of them all so far (well, along with Sun who is just toe curlingly gorgeous).
Lost is on Channel 4 & E4 every Wednesday until February. Or on a BitTorrent near you.