OnandOn

Maybe it's budget cutbacks, or the shortening days, or maybe we're just getting old(er) but the schedules seem suddenly tired.  The shows that looked vaguely interesting aren't delivering in subsequent episodes:


The Body Farm - from the ridiculous to the slightly less ridiculous.  The characters haven't the flashpoint chemistry of the 'parent' Waking the Dead and Keith Allen is frankly bizarre casting.  He'll be turning up as a nice gentle hero next.  And why did the woman exit her own vehicle and walk home rather than turfing out her prisoner sister?


DCI Banks - bright policewoman is stupid enough to start an affair with an expert witness... who then turns out to be *Tah Dah!* the killer.  The only other possibility for the seasoned viewer was that he'd die.  Plus, suspect says he followed the victim into the alley because he wanted to see who she was dating, then in next breath says he'd seen her kissing her boyfriend the previous week.


Spooks - one big, fun TWNH.


Downton Abbey - see above.  Mr Fellowes is very defensive about anachronisms, but his toffs are extraordinarily fond of breaking the house rules and slumming below stairs, while his lower orders don't bat an eyelid about airing their opinions to the toffs.  It remains glorious froth in glamorous frocks while, as David Hare said of an Oscar-winning Bertolucci film, nobody says a single interesting thing from start to finish.

The Body Farm

And the prize for the daftest programme currently on British television goes to...!

The premise: four scientists led by Eve Lockhart (Tara Fitzgerald) from ‘Waking the Dead’ are such über-geeks that they share a remote farmhouse–cum-high-security-lab where they, umm, do their stuff.  Judging from the first episode, that stuff seems to be responding to calls from DI Hale (Keith Allen) involving particularly gruesome organic matter.

The plot: a bathroom in a derelict tower block has been turned into a charnel house, with the floor, walls and ceiling covered with exploded flesh and feeding flies.  What happened?  Enter the above Fantastic Four to find out.  They’re not cops, you understand, they’re just the cheaper alternative to sending samples to Germany, now that swingeing cuts have closed the official UK labs.

The characters: sensible, moral, sultry-voiced lead who narrates an introduction about making a promise to the murderers to find them, and the victims to find out what happened; sensible, moral man who cooks and is in love with above; rash young crusader; mentally disordered agoraphobic with a thing for flies; grumpy cop.

The verdict: this first episode revolved around three teenagers in a sex triangle, a deaf man who used to work for the MoD and... not much else.  In tone it appears to be striving for something dark and offbeat, but the bookending narration – the closing voice-over was a preachy line about revenge not equalling justice and justice not always being what you expect – made it feel like ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’ with a large dose of ‘Midsomer Murders’.  Only the seediness was all its own.